Surrey Homes | SH15 | January 2016 | Health & Beauty supplement inside

Above left: The couple bought this Salvador Dali lithograph, from the Femmes des Fleurs series and dated 1939, in Paris. It hangs above a chaise longue that
Sarah had re-upholstered by Steve Burton in Appledore Above right: Cocker Spaniels Milly and Pip enjoy the fire in the living room
nearest pub, before we put in an offer, to get a feel for the
area,” says Dean. “As we don’t have children, we knew that
our local, or local pubs, would be a social hub – and our
way of getting to know people”.
It’s clear that their research paid off – and they are now
an intrinsic part of the village. But things could so easily
have been different... On the day they put in an offer on the
house, Dean received a phone call.
“I was asked to head-up the Yorkshire Bank, whose
head office is in Leeds,” he says. “So, for three years I was
travelling up to Leeds, to be in the office for 9am on a
Monday morning, and coming back to Kent on a Thursday.
I was leading a bit of a double life for a while! I had to give
the impression that Yorkshire was the place for me, when
really my heart was in Kent.”
So, while Dean was away in Leeds, Sarah focused on
renovating the place. “I’d been working in an interiors shop
in Berkhamsted, so had a great contacts book – but that was
no good to me in Kent. I had a couple of friends down here,
but had no idea where to find decent tradesmen.”
Her saviour was the local hardware store, where the
manager had a fantastic address book of her own. “I found
several great tradesmen through Headcorn Hardware, and
then it was just word of mouth from there,” says Sarah.
The first room you enter, from the box-edged gravel drive,
is the kitchen. It is under a cat-slide roof at the back of the
house, with the ceiling raised to the roof, revealing what was
once the exterior rear wall and windows of the farmhouse.
“The house was very old-fashioned when we looked at it,
and needed a lot of money spent on it. But I wanted a
project and a house that needed work,” says Sarah.
A new kitchen was a priority, and Sarah had heard about
JM Interiors at Frittenden so, after a visit to the showroom,
they were booked in for the job: “I wanted to use local
On the day they put in an offer, Dean was asked to go and work in Yorkshire. ‘I
was leading a bit of a double life for a while. I had to give the impression that
Yorkshire was the place for me, when really my heart was in Kent’
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