A LIGHT TOUCH
Old and new mix to striking effect in a 16th-century Welsh farmhouse
You need to really love a place if you’re going to spend a winter in it with no roof over your heads. That was the position Louisa Morgan and her husband Lee found themselves in when they took on their 16th-century farmhouse in the Usk Valley in Wales. They knew the property already, because Louisa kept her horses at stables there, and when the elderly owner died, his family gave them first option to buy it. Louisa and Lee jumped at the chance of a 25-acre smallholding still in one piece, but they also knew that renovating the Grade Ii-listed house – built of rubble-stone and with much of its original character knocked out in the 1960s – was going to be a massive project. So they made it habitable when they first moved here in 2008, then lived in it for six years, with their small son Henry (now seven), in order to have a clear idea of what it needed and get all the work done in one go. That meant living with the builders for more than a year, but they now have a home that inhabits its valley as naturally as when it was built nearly five centuries ago, and whose light-filled rooms flow into one another with the clean lines and uncluttered surfaces of a more modern age. “The planning people let us do what we wanted inside,” Louisa explains, “as long as we reinstated the external structural character.” So she and Lee had the rubblestone repointed with lime mortar, replaced the mullioned windows, added a green oak porch with a Welsh slate roof, and raised the chimney stacks to a height more in keeping with the building’s size and proportions. Key to the beautiful calm of the interior layout was the transformation of the leaky, flat-roofed strip that linked the main house to an old workshop and tackroom. This has become
Limestone floors provide a unifying sweep of pale grey
a wide, white-walled hallway with a pitched roof and huge windows (their aluminium frames set into natural oak surrounds) that swing right open into the garden. An exposed stone wall at one end marks the boundary of the original wall, but new limestone floors (Louisa works as marketing director for Mandarin Stone) run beyond this and throughout the ground floor to provide a unifying sweep of textured pale grey underfoot. The old tackroom – now heated by a woodburning stove whose gleaming chimney follows the line of the high ceiling – has space for a sofa and low coffee tables as well as a steel-legged dining table (from Baileys), with a set of vintage chairs in dark-grained wood that adds warm texture to the cool background colours. The new kitchen, at the other end of the hallway, has been created by knocking three small rooms into a big open-plan living space that gets the afternoon sun. Some of the original timbers here are still visible between sections of limewashed wall, and the window lintels are old gate posts from one of the fields.
All the windows have been left uncurtained – upstairs in the bedrooms and bathrooms, too. “It’s not as though we’ve got any neighbours who could see in,” points out Louisa, and besides, she adds, the new windows keep the house so warm that they don’t
need any extra insulation. So the beautiful lines of the original house acquire extra definition, and sunlight accents the roof angles and overhead beams, all painted white to lift the ceilings. A tiny bathroom was removed to open up a wide landing – big enough to have its own sofa – and a new one built under the eaves. It was important not to have water pipes running up the outside of the house, so these were installed behind a stairwell wall – and the bath had to be lifted in through the window aperture before the actual window was fitted. There’s a more traditional feel to these upstairs rooms. An antique cane-woven steamer chair sits at one end of the bathroom, and in the main bedroom’s en-suite, an old-fashioned washstand is topped by a slab of marble and an enamel basin, with an old store room (possibly a game-hanging cupboard) lined with tiles to create a wetroom.
This Welsh farmhouse is a calm, comfortable home for a family who, some days, barely have time to stop. It was Louisa’s horses that brought them here in the first place, but they now have hens, ducks and sheep (mostly Black Welsh Mountain ewes), too, as well as three cats and three dogs. Lee, from a farming background, has started keeping bees (there’s a side table in the sitting room made from a beehive he has reconstructed) and has a business as a mobile farrier. Louisa works mostly from home, in the study – the place they end up spending most time, she says. It’s lit with the subtle lamplight she prefers (“My favourite is the desk lamp that I found on German ebay – it’s incredibly elegant, and old lamps were so well made”), and she can work at her bench and keep an eye on the land and the livestock: “If I see a sheep on its back, I can run to sort it out.” And there aren’t many offices you could say that about.