ALL SWEETNESS AND LIGHT Painted furniture, faded linens and distressed wood create a relaxed shabby chic feel in a whitewashed Suffolk cottage
Brick floors, bare windows and all-white walls provide the perfect backdrop for vintage furnishings in this Suffolk cottage
The downshift from townhouse to country cottage can be a bumpy ride. But if you’re lucky, enough of your old furniture will suit your new place to smooth the transition. And if you’re really lucky, as the Daughtry family was, everything fits so well, it actually looks better in its new setting – as though this was the house it had been waiting for all along. Amanda Daughtry and her photographer daughter Belle have always collected pieces from antiques shops and brocante fairs. Their eye for design – and Belle’s natural gift for creating camera-ready rooms – found the perfect home in this whitewashed Suffolk cottage with its steep red-tiled roof. They’d moved from a residential street in an Essex town to an isolated village four miles from the nearest shop, so the lifestyle change could hardly have been greater. ‘Especially as the Beast from the East arrived a couple of months after us,’ recalls Amanda. ‘We were snowed in for a week and wondered what we’d done.’ But the house itself welcomed them with ease. Open and ‘flowing’, with rooms that lead naturally into one another, it has a surprising amount of space for a cottage, with no narrow corridors or poky corners. It’s managed to retain all its original character – 17th century in the oldest part – without being the ‘jumble of small rooms’ that Amanda and Belle wanted to avoid.
Crucially, it also has two adjoining sitting rooms, ‘so Dad can watch the football in one of them,’ explains Belle. The downshift was prompted by the fact that her three elder brothers had all left home and the family no longer needed so many bedrooms: the Suffolk cottage has all the hallmarks of a place where its female inhabitants – and their possessions – can breathe freely after years of accommodating male priorities. You can understand how cream-covered sofas, elegant painted furniture, faded floral linens and antique chandeliers would look more comfortable here than in a three-storey townhouse, and their scale also suits the lower ceilings and smaller windows.
There’s nothing precious about it, though: it’s all relaxed rather than careful-where-you-sit perfect, and it’s home to Peppa, their rescue Shih Tzu, as well as Richard, Amanda and Belle. The downstairs floors are reclaimed brick, plain and rugged; the kitchen worksurfaces have been crafted from zinc and scaffold boards; and the windows are left pretty much curtainless apart from the odd length of voile or lace. ‘The countryside is so wonderful here that we’d rather put up with draughts and have the view,’ says Amanda. The cottage is surrounded by farmland, with a meadow of ox-eye daisies in summer and dozens of walks for Peppa. ‘I think being townies makes us appreciate it even more,’ she says.
Amanda remembers Belle being the sort of child who couldn’t resist rearranging her bedroom furniture. ‘I would be downstairs and hear her dragging things across the floor.’ Belle studied photography at A level, then started work at the Cabbages & Roses store in Chelsea, initially as a sales assistant but gradually taking on photographic work for the brand and then consolidating her skills by assisting on shoots (she helped with the visuals for Rachel Ashwell’s book My Floral Affair
and Pearl Lowe’s Faded Glamour). The move to Suffolk gave her the momentum to launch her freelance business full time. Her garden studio doubles as an extra guest room (for when her brothers come to stay), furnished with daybeds that can be pulled outside on summer afternoons. But most of the time it’s fully stocked with her fabric and wallpaper swatches, moodboards, huge buckets of dried flowers and trays of her postcard images of the garden.
The house itself, meanwhile, provides any number of backdrops for Belle’s Instagram posts and lifestyle and interiors photography. Her favourite is the dining room (‘the light there is perfect for my photos’), in the 18th-century extension that reaches out under a lower roof at one end of the house. Amanda’s happy place is the kitchen, tucked in under the cat-slide roof at the back, looking out onto the garden. It’s the only room where the family made any major changes, fitting new cabinets from British Standard and leaving the upper walls clear of cupboards; instead, a couple of shelves hold carefully curated ceramics and the occasional painting, and a narrow-planked ceiling highlights the steep pitch of the roof.
Three staircases – one for each bedroom – provide the house with plenty of private space, despite the open flow of the ground-floor rooms. It’s the bedrooms, with their steep, beamed ceilings and low dormer windows, that give scope for Amanda and Belle to indulge their more romantic decorative ideas. Painted cabinets in pastel blues and pinks match the faded florals of rugs and bedlinen, mostly from Rachel Ashwell, whose Shabby Chic brand suits the house perfectly. (‘Only she’s based in LA now, so we have to ship things over from there!’)
In Belle’s room, a tiered lampshade, suspended above the bed rather like a canopy, adds a fairy-tale quality. And on a cream-painted chest sits a vintage chandelier hung with crystal droplets and turquoise glass flowers – a long-ago purchase from the Country Living Fair, says Belle. ‘It used to hang in our old dining room, but the ceilings are too low for it in the cottage.’ One small piece of the old house that didn’t quite fit the new one – but still manages to look completely at home…
The COTTAGE is surrounded by FARMLAND with a MEADOW of ox-eye daisies in summer