At home with Callie Coles for Christmas in the wild Devon countryside
‘Mummy, Bridget has eaten all the mince pies!’ comes the half-amused, half-outraged voice of Callie Coles’ eight-year-old son, surveying the kitchen of their Devon house. Bridget is a saucy dachshund, one of the more mischievous of the Coles family’s menagerie – which includes nine dogs (plus three recent puppy arrivals), nine horses and a brood of chickens – and her mince pie raid is par for the course in a household where the animals are almost as much part of the family as the children. Sparky the pony has just been spending part of the morning in the kitchen, behaving extremely politely, apart from snaffling the odd parsnip from the counter, and the chickens have taken up residence atop a wicker basket in the boot room.
Callie and her husband Toby have lived their whole lives with horses. Both keen riders, they have made a home in the Devon countryside where they and their sons – Jesse, 15, Merlin, eight, and Pippin, three – can live alongside their animals, riding every day and welcoming them into the house. Their blasé approach to having ponies in the drawing room has won Callie legions of followers on Instagram – a staggering 1.1 million at the last count – with one of her most-watched videos featuring Merlin reclining on top of Sparky while watching A Knight’s Tale on the TV. ‘I guess this is basically the manifestation of all my childhood dreams,’ says Callie. ‘I always dreamed that I would get to have a pony at home, but I never thought we would actually manage to have stables and fields and space to do all the things I imagined. I never, ever take it for granted. I wake up in the morning and I’m so grateful for everything that is going on here.’
The couple came to this house in west Devon five years ago from Dorset, where Callie grew up and Toby had been working. They were searching for somewhere that came with some land, and Toby’s obsession with Rightmove eventually yielded this house with its 30 acres in a remote hamlet on the edge of Dartmoor. As Callie remembers it, ‘Toby came back to Dorset after seeing it, and said, “Well, I'm moving, does anyone want to come with me?”’ The house was ‘a real fixer-upper’, but they were both game for a challenge, and moved west to take it on, living in a converted shed on the land while Toby single-handedly took on the renovation.
‘It was a hovel,’ Toby says, succinctly, while Callie agrees: ‘The inside of the house felt like it hadn't been touched in a hundred years.’ False ceilings had been built below the beams, so low that they couldn’t change the sheets in the bedrooms without hitting the overhead lights. ‘It was very dark, and quite damp,’ she remembers, ‘as there was a big bank against the back of the house that didn’t let any light in. The stairs were so small you could hardly get an adult up and down them, and they also twisted inconveniently into the hallway.’ Despite having a broken back at the time, Toby did all the work on the house himself, with the gung-ho attitude that characterises all that the couple do. ‘I had a mini-digger in the house at one point,’ he recalls, ‘and I cleared 120 tonnes of rubble out of the interior.’ He did everything from building a new chimney stack to installing the kitchen and bathrooms – with little previous experience of renovating a house. ‘I learned a lot,’ he says. ‘YouTube is a fantastic bit of kit.’
Having spent two years living in an outhouse as a family of four, then five once Pippin was born, it was a huge relief when they could move into the main house. Not that it was immediately perfect – the decoration and furnishing of the house evolved gradually, as all good country houses should. ‘It’s a sort of jumble,’ says Callie. The rooms are filled with antiques, including some beautiful pieces inherited from old family houses – ‘anything half-decent comes from my family home in Scotland’, adds Toby – combined with chintzy fabrics and lots of cheerful prints by the couple’s friend Molly Mahon. You don’t have to look far to find horses – Molly’s ‘Marwari Horse’ print is a recurring theme, and there are statuettes of horses on the tables, horses embroidered on the cushions, pictures of horses on the walls, and books about them on the shelves. It is a bookish house in general – Callie has been working on a trilogy of novels about horsewoman Sage Deverill, the first of which will be published in summer 2026 – and loves to work in the midst of her books. Another beautiful theme is the wicker storage ottomans that the couple makes through their company Iggywick, which also produces the delightful basket saddle that Pippin rides in and the cashmere bobble hats Callie and her children sport in her Instagram reels.
When we visit the house in December, everything is ready for Christmas, with glorious garlands of foliage and berries – all gathered from the garden and surrounding countryside – sprouting from every surface. For Callie, this is a time to celebrate tradition and family, with the Christmases of her grandparents firmly in her mind. The real candles perched perilously on the Christmas tree recall her grandfather sitting by the tree with ‘a bottle of whisky in one hand and a fire extinguisher in the other’, but more importantly, her grandmother’s desire to make the season more about people than about gifts. ‘I don’t want the children to think it’s just about what they’re getting,’ she says. ‘I want them to think about having everyone together and looking after people who need looking after.’
Callie Coles: @calliecoles | lifeatwoodley.com
Mark Anthony Fox1/16The drawing room is painted in Edward Bulmer's ‘Fair Blue’, while a rug from Susie Watson Designs introduces some soft pattern, along with the chintzy sofa that the couple inherited.
Mark Anthony Fox2/16Woodwork in Edward Bulmer's ‘Fair Blue’.
Mark Anthony Fox3/16The blinds in the kitchen are in Chapman Collection's ‘In the Paddock’ print.
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Mark Anthony Fox5/16The house is entered through a boot room that has been added onto the back of the house. The settle came from Tim's Furniture in Launceston.
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Mark Anthony Fox7/16A pair of lilac brahma chickens sit under the mistletoe in the boot room.
Mark Anthony Fox8/16Vintage striped curtains frame the windows in the bathroom.
Mark Anthony Fox9/16Molly Mahon's ‘Marwari Horse’ print makes cheerful curtains in Pippin's room, while the bed canopy from Sugar Mouse continues the playful feel. The children's chair is from Pierrot Studio.
Mark Anthony Fox10/16The window frame in the upstairs hallway is painted in Edward Bulmer's ‘Invisible Green’. The wooden dog is from the Labrador Co.
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Mark Anthony Fox12/16A Neptune bed takes centre stage in Callie and Toby's bedroom, with curtains in Molly Mahon's ‘Horse Chestnut Hand Block Printed Herringbone Pink’.
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Mark Anthony Fox14/16The painted wagon features a painted goldfinch. ‘I sent Toby up to Wales to collect it,’ says Callie.
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