Like a little box of chocolates...
Cook toasts perfect home
PROFESSIONAL
cook Sarah Jane Fraser is toasting six happy years at her quaint thatched cottage in the pretty conservation hamlet of Collessie near St Andrews.
The B-listed Westend Cottage is about 250 years old and was once the village pub.
It fell into disrepair and lay empty for a time until it was sympathetically renovated in 1999.
Sarah Jane – a fan of period properties – first laid eyes on it in the summer of 2012.
She says she knew at once it had to be her home.
With Otis, her pet Jack Russell at her side, Sarah Jane tells iN10: “It was a really sunny day in July when I first went to see the house.
“It was being used as a holiday home and I was there when they were doing a changeover.
“The cottage was filled with light and I just walked in and thought, ‘This is mine’. It was lovely.
“I remember thinking that it was much more than I wanted to pay but I knew I had to live there.
“It looks like a chocolate box house, and that is exactly what it is. It is the perfect little place.”
Drawn by the thatch – which she says is cost-effective and easy to have maintained – she put in her offer and was successful.
The two-bedroom property had been beautifully renovated with many of the original beams and other period features – including fireplaces – retained.
It has mod-cons such as underfloor heating at ground level, making it a comfortable home, fit for 21st Century living.
She says: “I didn’t have much to do. I repainted the outside
walls, which were already a subtle pink, and I redid the garden – it was a wilderness.”
The enclosed, terraced garden – which has a C-listed, exposed stone bothy with a pan-tile roof that was once the pub’s cellar – is now tastefully paved for convenience and boasts a pergola.
Inside, Jane set to work on the dining kitchen replacing the old units with new Shaker-style cabinets painted in hues of grey/ green.
Jane says: “As I’m a professional cook, it needed to be a substantial kitchen, but it still has the original old stone fireplace where the range would have been.”
The modern, tiled bathroom boasts a sumptuous whirlpool bath and a walk-in shower.
There are two pretty bedrooms with exposed beams and a cosy but bright dual aspect lounge with a log burning stove.
The cook is leaving the home she has loved for new adventures farther north.
Jane, whose work takes her to the Highlands, says: “I’ve had six very happy years here and I am not desperate to sell.
“But I have itchy feet and want to move further north where there are less people and traffic.
“A lot of my work is also there. Until now I have needed to be fairly close to Edinburgh and Glasgow but as that’s no longer the case I am free to move on.”
Westend Cottage is marketed by WilliamsGrayWilliams for offers over £225,000.