Character BUILDING

Wonky white walls and simple rustic woodwork have restored light and charm to a 400-year-old thatched cottage in Devon

In the eyes of the locals, you’re not really a true Devonian unless you were born in the county. Not even if you’ve lived here since the age of four, like designer Samantha Greetham. Perhaps that’s why it mattered so much to her that the 400-year-old house she has renovated near Topsham blends in perfectly with the rest of the village, its thatched extension matching the original roof so exactly that no one can tell it’s new.

The cottage was a tiny two-up, two-down when Samantha and her husband Richard found it in 2003, the thatch shot to bits, the old cobb walls punctuated by utilitarian 1960s single-pane windows. But surrounded by fields, on the edge of a pretty village with its own pub, church, primary school and farm shop, it felt perfect. And because the house wasn’t listed, they wouldn’t be restricted in restoring it. “We’d bought it within a week,” she says. “Then lived in chaos for six years while we decided what to do with it.”

The only features that remained were an inglenook in the sitting room and one lovely old crook beam (the upper floor had been added much later, so the groundfloor ceiling beams are more recent). But there were ancient tree branches worked into the roof under the thatch, and the architect they consulted, who found 17th-century carpenters’ marks carved into the woodwork, told them the building had probably been constructed as a cattle shed. So the challenge was to put back the character while opening up the space.

Samantha was on site with the builders from the start, taking on the role of labourer when two workmen had to be cut back to one to trim the budget. “We pretty much lived in a breezeblock cave for a year,” she recalls. She and Richard had got into the habit of buying houses and doing them up – initially for themselves, then as a full-time occupation – but this one was a step further: extending the house to one side and right along the back involved knocking doorways through the outer walls, chipping the cobb away with a pick hammer.

The original kitchen is now a large, open hallway, with the staircase rising at right-angles across the back wall. An entrance straight ahead leads into the new L-shaped kitchen, with another on your right (next to the old fireplace, now fitted with a Swedish-style electric stove) into the ‘sitting’ end of the room and a second little sitting room, opening off to the left.

There’s no sign now of the ‘breezeblock cave’. The white-painted interior is serenely beautiful, its renewed character highlighted by simple furnishings and authentic materials. The 20th-century windows have been ditched for traditional small-paned frames made by a carpenter. Old carpets were replaced with salvaged scaffold boards, and flush 1960s doors

THIS PAGE, LEFT White-painted floorboards and ceiling beams maximise the space in the hallway, which was originally the kitchen MIDDLE The mirror from an old chest of drawers has been set on top of a painted table from one of Samantha’s favourite shops, The Sea Garden in Portscatho; the sofa covers were made from dust sheets, meaning they’re durable and dogproof BOTTOM The little thatched summerhouse has its own woodburning stove and terrace area

THIS PAGE, FROM ABOVE The kitchen was hand-built by a local woodworker – the old gilt-framed painting was from Richard’s aunt; Claire fitted an electric Swedish-style stove in the hall, which is roomy enough for her bicycle