A BARN REBORN
Antique furniture and vintage finds take centre stage in a renovated Norfolk brick-and-flint home
Some houses have a real sense of sanctuary – a quiet calm that makes you feel instantly at peace. Cara Bale’s is one of those. Calm thanks to its simplicity of colour palette, where uncluttered curated interiors meet carefully edited vignettes in every corner. ‘We moved here from a small two-up two-down cottage in a very pretty, more sought-after Broads village,’ says Cara, a lifestyle photographer and Instagram influencer, who shares her home with her partner Ben Mullard and their daughters Maisy and Mathilda. ‘Catfield is a working village, known for its boatbuilding firms and agriculture. Sacrificing location is something
I’d never normally do, but the barn’s easy single-storey layout and large room proportions gave us the growing space we needed. We moved in when Mathilda was six months old and not having stairs – especially when she began toddling – was a joy.’
Cara’s three-bedroom, three-bathroom barn is one of a series of previously converted mid-19th-century red-brick-and-flint farm buildings. Full of original features, such as the sitting room’s high-beamed ceilings with hooks that once held hay bags or animal feed, it also has old planked doors and a small loft hatch accessed by a wooden ladder in the kitchen.
‘When we moved in, the house was quite dated. Most of the rooms had magnolia walls and brown threadbare carpets, and there was old lino on the kitchen floor,’ says Cara. ‘We tackled a room at a time. As each one is fairly large with wide doorways, we were able to move beds and furniture from room to room as we went. For me, the biggest thing to get right was the flooring. I love painted floorboards. We sourced planks from a builders’ merchant and hired a brilliant local tradesman from mybuilder.com to fit them. They’re inexpensive and practical – and the unavoidable scuff marks they get over time simply add more character.’
Incorporating a mix of Parisian and Scandinavian influences, Cara and Ben designed an L-shaped kitchen, replacing the previous dark, wooden units with Shaker-style cabinets and white composite worktops. ‘As the kitchen has really high ceilings, I kept the walls free of eye-level cupboards so the dining space would be the main focus.’
The kitchen is the heart of Cara’s home, where the farmhouse table often takes centre stage at family gatherings. ‘We hosted a barbecue here for Ben’s 50th birthday, as well as birthday parties for the girls,’ says Cara. Her most recent project was to transform the family bathroom. She cleverly disguised pipework with floor planks in blush pink sourced from a local builders’ merchant and added traditional elements, such as an enamel bucket sink and rolltop bath, which work beautifully with floral prints and vintage accessories.
‘Hats off to the fantastic female decorating team I met at the girls’ ballet lessons: Michelle Stephens Decorating is a team of mums