Surrey Homes | SH21 | July 2016 | Interiors supplement inside

Above: A vaulted ceiling and honey-coloured beams above the comforting cream Aga help to make the room feel light and airy. An old clock on the bressumer
above the Aga belonged to Mark’s parents and was once natural wood. It was given a distressed white finish by Tara
a single human activity in which one could engage
without the assistance of a head torch. Try as we might,
it was difficult not to conclude that we’d spent a not
insignificant amount of wonga on a gloom with a view.
Losing the leaded lights would have been sacrilege and we’d
never get planning to increase their size or add more so the
only option was to make better use of what light they allowed
us. Accordingly, we ordered a tanker-full of white paint and
hired a sandblaster. Anything that wasn’t wood and couldn’t
move fast enough was painted white and the timbers were
blasted back to lovely clean oak. The cottage was all but
transformed and divorce was put on the back-burner.
Tara and Mark’s farmhouse is considerably larger than our
first cottage and its supply of light considerably greater but
they, too, were moving from a town property to a period
country home and for them, too, light was a priority.
Mark was the driving force behind the move with Tara a
little more sceptical. It took a year to find the right property
but when they saw their farmhouse they both knew it
was the one. The course of true love, however, often has
a habit of not running quite as smoothly as one hopes.
“We fell in love with it but we had to fight for a year to
get it,” she says. “We kept losing our buyers but Mark
was like a dog with a bone. It was the setting that was
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