• KENT COTTAGE
Taking a hands-on approach and making everything herself, from kitchen cabinets to utensils, has given Freyja Cox Jensen a deep connection to her historic cottage
Having made so much of the interior herself, the owner has created a home unique to her
Living room
Its east-west aspect gives this space appealing natural light from windows on each side.
Walls, ceiling, woodwork
in Purbeck Stone estate emulsion and estate eggshell, Farrow & Ball. For an antique sofa in this style, try Vinterior
Freyja Cox Jensen’s Kent cottage is a holiday home with a difference. For 20 or so weeks a year, she works as a university lecturer on the other side of the country and lives in a rented place near her day job. When each term ends and the students return home, so does Freyja.
It’s a bold approach to finding a good work-life balance. Equally decisive was her intention to look for an old property in need of attention. ‘I prefer to work with a blank canvas,’ she says. ‘It’s wasteful if someone else has done work and I immediately want to undo it.’
Freyja limited her search to a tightly defined 20-mile radius and identified a house she wanted to view on a property website. ‘I’d known about this group of houses for a while because they stand out on a hill. I came to see the house on Christmas Eve and just as I’d hoped, it needed a lot of work doing to it,’ she says.
The house is one of a small row built for weaving families during the 1750s. ‘For a timber-framed house, it’s tall and thin and the ceilings are unusually high,’ says Freyja. According to hearsay, the houses were constructed by prisoners taken during the Seven Years’ War against the French and held captive at nearby Sissinghurst.
Freyja started work on the house as soon as she gained the keys – while removal men were bringing in her boxes, >
she was already at work demolishing kitchen fittings. As the house is listed, any structural changes require planning permission, but Freyja’s most pressing job was to remove a monster boiler sited in the middle of the kitchen, with an oversized asbestos flue going straight up through the ceiling. She later installed a new central heating system, with the boiler fitted externally and standard radiators replaced with more stylish traditional cast iron.
Freyja has completed a remarkable amount of the work on the house herself, particularly in the kitchen. ‘I do all I can, including constructing cupboards using doors from the local salvage yard,’ she says. ‘I don’t have a lot of cupboard space in the kitchen or gadgets to put in them and I’m happy to put up with the inconvenience of a 19thcentury stone sink for its beauty and because I love using handmade things. My cutlery, ceramics and equipment, such as the vintage colander, are all either antique or handcrafted, and the wooden spatulas I make myself.
I like to take a more mindful approach to making things and, with the old pieces, to honour the person who made them each time I use them.’
Turning her attention to the floors, Freyja began by taking up the 1960s laminate in the kitchen and instead laid sandstone, continuing it outside to the garden. She restored the mid-century parquet floor in the dining >