RINGING IN THE NEW

With a flair for inventive upcycling, Sarah Moore relished the challenge of restoring a near-derelict farmhouse. Here, she prepares to celebrate the new year in her beautifully crafted family home

Inventive upcycler Sarah Moore prepares to celebrate the new year in her beautifully crafted family farmhouse

Glassy midwinter light floods Sarah Moore’s farmhouse kitchen on this afternoon, shining through the bundle of holly lining the windowsill and onto the table where party preparations are in full swing. Tonight’s feast is for family that she and her husband Pete didn’t see at Christmas. There are presents to wrap, tables to decorate and place names to write. “I’m better at doing things like this at the last minute,” she says, with a grin.

Their 17th-century farmhouse stands in the West Sussex hamlet of Hooksway in the South Downs, halfway between Petersfield and Chichester. Originally three ‘one-up, one-down’ cottages, the white, peg-tiled house and its outbuildings are set in 30 acres of land on which a neighbouring farmer keeps his sheep. It’s a rather different outlook from the busy A-road where the couple lived previously with their children Harry, now 18, Ed, 17, and Libby, 14. “We came to view this house six years ago,” says Sarah, who is a vintage designer and television presenter. “I said to Pete, ‘It’s got three bedrooms, it’s nearly derelict and it’s in the middle of nowhere.’ And he replied, ‘Yes, but let’s buy it now.’ That was helpful. If I’d dragged him here, it would have been all my fault, but any problems now and it’s all down to him.”

Awaiting them were challenges galore. “It had a hole in the roof and a corresponding one in the bathroom ceiling. There were moths and maggots all over the house. We had a week to work on it while the children stayed with their grandparents. We stripped out every carpet, every curtain, all the horrible kitchen units, and Pete mended the ceiling with cardboard and filler.” The family and their new black Labrador Bramble lived in

“I love flowers and bringing the outside in, so there is a lot of green”

THIS PAGE, FROM BELOW LEFT A wreath by Ian Pearce at Hector and the Fox hangs on the front door; the kitchen table is made from an old oak floor taken out of the bathroom OPPOSITE Paper snowflakes and a Hector Bibendum light from BTC hang above a sofa from ebay upholstered in Acanthus fabric by William Morris