THE BARN REBORN
Cassandra Ellis has breathed new life into an 18th-century flint barn, filling it with cleverly curated finds and cocooning colours from her own paint collection
Cocooning colours and cleverly curated finds have transformed a secluded home in rural Sussex
Hidden deep within the folds of Friston Forest, a few miles from the sea, Cassandra Ellis lives with her husband, Ed, in what she describes as “a magical world below the A27”. Their home – an 18th-century flint barn – is in the secluded village of West Dean. A palace (long since vanished) used by King Alfred the Great once stood here and the village still bears the marks of a noble past. Immovable flint walls, clusters of ancient barns and an intriguing cylindrical dovecote are all testament to the site’s illustrious and impressive history.
Cassandra, who was born in New Zealand, fell under the spell of this ravishing corner of England 14 years ago. “This is the first place my husband and I visited outside of London,” she recalls. “We brought our dog, and I stood on top of Firle Beacon and just cried.” Since then, the landscape has exerted a mysterious pull. “The South Downs, for me, are almost human,” she explains. “The way the hills shape and fall like a body. There’s a real human spirit here that I don’t find anywhere else in the UK. It’s a place of creativity. There’s just something about it. It enhances everything.”
It took Cassandra and Ed over a decade to find their home here and in that time only a handful of properties came up for sale. “They were either too large or too small,” explains Cassandra, who was then living in an apartment by the Thames in London, where her design studio Atelier Ellis is based. So, when they finally came across the barn just a couple of years ago, they jumped on it. “I’m not a big barn-type person,” Cassandra says. “But it’s the location, not the building, for me.”
The barn had been converted in the 1980s and only recently refurbished. Even so, “It all felt wrong – the colours, the carpet, the fake floors… so we left the structure and just took out everything that didn’t want to be there.” This is Cassandra’s fifth project in ten years, having previously renovated two houses in Peckham, an apartment in Battersea and a 15th-century cottage in West Sussex. She has, by her own admission, “always been good at taking properties that are sad and imbuing them with happiness”. Here, she “let the house be what it wanted to be: an 18th-century barn in the depths of ancient Sussex woodland.”
On the ground floor, unsealed, reclaimed pine floorboards have been laid without thresholds – the long line of the grain guiding the eye seamlessly
through the space. The kitchen units have been repainted, the handles replaced and the modern kitchen island dismantled and replaced with an aged butcher’s block. Upstairs, two of the five bedrooms have been re-designated: one as a library, the other as a study for Ed, who is a writer. In the attic room, under whitewashed eaves, they installed an extension of Atelier Ellis, the design studio Cassandra launched in 2016 with a collection of handmade furniture. The studio now specialises in producing handmade paints. Colours from Cassandra’s latest collection, Wonder, provide the backdrop to life at the barn.
Ellis grew up in a single-parent household in suburban New Zealand and her childhood – though challenging – became a source of inspiration for the collection, which includes serene shades of milky white, still green and sepia. “I’ve always made colours, ever since I was a child,” she says. “This collection was literally about me going back to my childhood.”
Warm White has been chosen as the main colour throughout. Cassandra explains: “It has an umber
“We feel connected to every piece of furniture and artwork we’ve bought”
base with yellow ochre undertones. A white with pink or blue undertones would have made our home feel cold and a bit sad.” The living room has been painted in Smoked Green-blue. “Our windows are low and the barn is surrounded by trees and sky, and the light is concentrated because of this. Again, this green/blue has yellow oxide in it, which makes it perfect for this kind of space.”
Upstairs, the library is north-facing. “It has the least light and the smallest windows, so there was no point painting it light.” Cassandra explains. Here, she has chosen Clay Slip – a brown with green undertones. “It just feels alive in this room,” she says. In the main bedroom, Cassandra wanted a colour “that felt cocooning any time of the day”. She chose her favourite neutral, Cotta, which she describes as “an incredibly human colour and very beautiful to live with”.
The rooms are thoughtfully furnished with vintage pieces and artworks that the couple have accumulated gradually over the years. “We feel connected to every piece of furniture and artwork we’ve ever bought,” Cassandra explains. Their one “extravagant” purchase for the barn was the vendange table in the entranceway, which seats 20 and is robust enough to be dragged outside whenever the English weather permits.
Assemblages of found objects are arranged throughout the house: dried seed heads, a clay pipe unearthed on a previous renovation project, a bird’s nest found at the back of a bush. “I like beautiful things, but those things don’t always have to come from a shop,” Cassandra explains.
Cassandra and Ed continue to split their lives between the barn and their London apartment in Battersea. But with each return journey to the city, the lure of West Sussex intensifies. “I know the barn is really too big for just the two of us,” Cassandra says, “so we’re keeping an eye out for something smaller.” The search is already on for the next project – another sad building she can imbue with “wonder and happiness”.
“In the bedroom, I wanted a colour that felt cocooning any time of the day”