COUNTRY LIFE
Dan Carter renovated his thatched house room by room to create a modern, picture-perfect weekend retreat
Dan Carter’s home may look like the quintessential Suffolk cottage now, but it was just a shell when he bought it. ‘I didn’t realise the kitchen was freestanding, and the sellers literally left me with a kitchen sink and one wall-mounted radiator,’ he says. Dan had been looking for a second home outside London and wanted a renovation project where he could do a lot of the work himself. ‘I was originally thinking about a large Georgian townhouse in Diss but it had very little outside space,’ he says. ‘Then I found the cottage. It was originally two buildings – a thatched hall house and forge – and it was love at first sight. Turning into the twisted driveway was magical, but then I walked down the long field behind the garden, looked back, and I was hooked. It was so totally chocolate box.’ The cottage also had one-and-a-half acres of flat garden where friends could pitch a tent and stay over. But before that could happen, there was a lot of work to do.
‘It needed a new kitchen, bathroom and utility room, underfloor heating and a new heating system and electrics,’ recalls Dan, who is a print and embroidery textile designer with a passion for interiors. ‘Then I had to repair and redecorate all the rooms, carpet and tile them and add shutters. ‘The garden was really overgrown so I stripped it out and had it reshaped and the drive and gates overhauled.’
Dan left skilled jobs like the kitchen refit, plumbing and electrics to the professionals but did the rest himself. ‘The
favourite room The dining space – it’s both cosy and bright’
painting was epic – I had to paint around every single beam, and when I got to the end I had to start all over again with the second coat,’ he remembers. ‘Each room took at least two to three weekends to complete, and in total the renovation took about three-and-a-half years.
The result is very different to Dan’s minimalistic, one-bedroom flat in London’s Notting Hill. Here he has indulged his passion for interiors and colours, furnishing the cottage with quirky pieces found in junk shops and antiques centres. ‘If I like something I’ll find a place for it,’ he says. ‘I never know where it’s going until I try it out.’
Muted shades were chosen for the walls. ‘I love the calmness of a dirty colour palette and I wanted them to flow from room to room,’ says Dan. The dark blue in the sitting room was the starting point and is repeated at the end of the hall, and in the dining room around the fireplace. The blue is complemented by the soft, slightly violet tones of the pink in the hall and the green in the dining room.
Dan used Farrow & Ball colours mixed into acrylic-based Eicó paint, which is washable and flexible enough to cope with any movement. ‘Eicó also has a wonderful texture – I painted every room with a brush, so you can see the slight texture of the paint strokes,’ he explains.
Dan’s next project is to replace the conservatory with a larger summer room. ‘There’s always something that needs doing,’ he says, ‘but for now it’s pretty perfect.’
lesson learned ‘Painting around all the beams was very time-consuming!’