Inside a soulful 1930s cottage nestled in London’s countryside

[soft music]

[Tamsin] I needed to be in London.

I needed to be near London for work,

but I really, really wanted to be in the countryside.

It's where I grew up, it's where my heart is,

and I have an absolute sort of fundamental need

for contact with nature.

This house was completely un-modernized,

so it still had the soul

and charm of what it had been originally,

and it was very modestly furnished.

So it was really kind of like walking into a little,

well, it wasn't really a cottage,

but it's just a very modest little house.

But it felt like a cottage in a way.

Its proportions and scale and it was really solidly built.

And then I walked out into the garden

and I just couldn't believe it

because the garden affects how the interior feels.

It has the biggest impact.

My business is called Home & Found.

What I love about my job is that you are not just,

it's not really design, it's shaping people's lives.

This is kind of where we live.

It's hidden away from the street.

It's just looking out onto the garden.

And that's what we're all our eyes are always drawn to.

I've just responded to the light really.

I mean, I did start off with the ceiling

and the walls being the same color

and then I was like, no, the, the ceiling is way too bright

and I just need to soften it a bit.

So obviously it's a sort of shade of mushy green

and the kitchen is a shade of mushy yellow,

but I'm just looking at it by eye.

Everything has a story, that's the joy.

The table, I remember Rose Hilton,

I read somewhere that she said,

Oh, you know when I'm gone, remember me,

and remember all the times we had

around our dining room table.

And I think that's absolutely key.

It's always the kitchen table, isn't it?

The painting I love it was by a Scottish artist.

A lot of the art that I'm drawn to

and the colors and things, they're very loose and undone.

I use vintage textiles in all my projects,

pretty much as much as I possibly can.

Here I've used, this is a vintage Swedish flat weave,

and I love these

because they are made with lots of different threads

and they're not one solid color.

The chair, Simon I found in the market,

it was from a little hotel in Marlow that had closed down.

The guy told me when I bought it from him,

but I'd like to know the story behind it,

'cause I'm the last chance of knowing that story.

That chair I found walking to my studio above the pub

and somebody had put it outside their house.

And so I knocked on the front door and I said,

Would you mind?

Is it available?

And they were like,

Yeah, no, we're just having a clear out.

Gorgeous.

Lucky me.

You just never know what you're gonna see?

And I think curiosity, discovery,

that's what makes life exciting, isn't it?

I wanted this area to all be connected.

So this was as far as the line

of sight basically goes from the kitchen to here.

So there was no point in it going any further.

So that gave me the opportunity

to carve off a tiny bit

and to get a study in a separate workspace.

It just really nice to have a room

that you can just shut off or be shut off

away from everybody else. And you can leave all your stuff.

You can have all your piles,

your stuff that you don't want anyone else to get into.

[soft music]

This is facing the front of the house

and it's where we come at the end of the day.

The texture is so important.

When you are designing a home,

you're thinking not just about the way things look,

but it's about how they feel

and your sense, you know, your skin,

how you're responding

to things when you're sitting down,

how the light bounces off rougher surfaces,

shiny surfaces, all of that.

And gloss paint is a wonderful way

of bringing light into a darker space,

making it feel richer.

I had this beautiful rug, which I've had for years,

and that was just a great starting point

and paneling the room

and then adding the art as and when I found it.

And the textiles, the William Morris textile above the sofa,

Simon and I found in a market.

I absolutely love the arts and craft ethos.

And I'm fully signed up to the William Morris fan club.

We're on the first floor of our home

and this is the children's zone.

This is my oldest daughter Freya's bedroom.

As you can see, she's a very talented artist.

In lockdown, she was sent home from university

where she was studying fine art and she came back

and started literally painting the walls.

And I was like, you should definitely do that on something

that you can sell and someone else can take home with them.

And I had some old lamp bases

and she was, that was,

that was the start of what she then calls

BlackLine workshops.

They're all bespoke one-offs.

And now she has her own little business doing that.

It's Josef Frank fabric.

She always wanted for her headboards.

So that was the sort of launch pad for her room.

And it's lovely talking with her about what we're gonna do.

And I love the way that she combines color.

My other daughter, Ottilie, her brief, if you like was,

and children are definitely the most demanding clients

and sometimes you know that that's going

to be an absolute nightmare

and they will hate it if you completely follow their brief.

And so my daughter's brief was that she wanted a blue room,

but her room is north facing

and I knew that that would be very cold.

And also, you know, children's tastes change

and evolve as everyone's do, but particularly children's.

So it's a much calmer space than it could have been.

She wanted a big bed.

It's quite a small room,

but we wanted a good working area, space with all her stuff.

So the third bedroom on this floor is my son Jago's.

He was the smallest, he's now the tallest.

Being the baby,

he got the smallest room,

but he is very easygoing

and let's just keep him in there.

But basically his room is small,

but it's full of all the things that he's interested in.

He loves travel and history and we've collected posters

and photographs and things as we've traveled around.

And again, a reflection of him

and his personality and his interests.

[soft guitar music]

Our bedroom is reached

by an enclosed solid staircase in the heart of our house,

and it's hidden away in the treetops

and you wouldn't really even know it's here.

I love it because all you see is the trees and the sky.

I paneled the walls

and I painted them in a very soft shade of green

and it would just really echo all the colors that you see

outside and increase that sense of openness.

Then the bed,

I waited for ages

until I found the right thing.

And it's just a beautiful,

very simple wrought iron cast iron bed.

And I didn't want anything fancy.

I think my grandfather always used to say,

why gild the lily?

And I think that's absolutely true.

Sometimes you actually,

you just need a space which is very

simple and pure and calm.

[Freya] Hello. Hello.

How's it going sweetheart?

Good, thank you.

I'm just working on these two lumps.

[Tamsin] How are you find it in here.

I'm loving it in here.

'Cause I feel like this room is really like a collaboration

between me and you.

You like to think of things as like calm and natural,

whereas I'm more bold

and a bit more in your face.

[Tamsin] I think that what we've created here is a sum

of all our pots, isn't it? At that particular point.

But everything changes

even if you don't necessarily want it to

and you evolve and you're always looking at

and responding to new things, as we always say.

But some of the things that we, you know, I found in here,

like the gorgeous cupboard that was made by the guy

that was literally sitting in a cave, that was,

I just felt when I saw that, that was absolutely perfect.

It was meant to be here.

But there are other things that we,

that you've created and added to

that have come from somewhere else

or from your experience

and from what you've been drawn to.

That's what's so magical, isn't it?

All experience is

shaping you

and moving you forward.

And that's really what a home is all about, is taking that,

those experiences and those loves and those connections

and filling your home with that,

not what you think you should be doing

or what you've seen someone else doing.

And what I really would encourage

or try and encourage my clients to do is to not worry about

what anyone else is gonna think,

but to really just trust, well, trust me, obviously,

but to trust themselves that it will work out

and to keep going with it.

[soft music]

[birds chirping]