Inside Sarah Vanrenen's Wiltshire, UK Farmhouse

My style is definitely eclectic. It's lived in, it's real, it's colourful. I never really feel that comfortable sitting in an environment or a room that is absolutely perfect, where everything matches. It's got to have a kind of organic feel, really. I'm Sarah Van Rennen, and I'm an interior and textile designer. This is my home in Wiltshire, where I live with my family. I moved here when I met my husband, and it was his grandmother's house before that, and it was completely empty. So it was a perfect opportunity and project to make our own. I think my style of decorating kind of suits it perfectly because every room is a different colour, has a different feel. Some rooms are quite dark and some are much lighter. So I really kind of wanted to unify it by making it characterful throughout. I crave colour. It feeds my soul, I think. I think I crave colours that make rooms or a place feel inviting and warm and comfortable. I crave also for there to be relief, to be able to give a kind of a neutral contrast so that you can come out of a room and go and breathe, maybe, you know, not just go straight into another one that's absolutely crammed full of colour and things as well. I think a house can definitely have too much stuff, but I don't think a house can ever have too much art. And I really think that art says everything about a person who lives in a house. It describes them, and I think that art, when it's hung well, you know, adds huge character to a house. My favourite piece of art of all time, it's a photograph. I had found an artist called Dan Marbet who used to go around and take photographs of derelict places. I just contacted him and asked him if he would blow this photograph up to this enormous size. And I love the fact that it's modern against the traditional paintings and gilt paintings. And also, again, it's the only other part of the house which has got walls big enough to hold it. This is my favourite room in the house. It's the lightest, I suppose, and it obviously faces out into the garden. It's got the best view. And when I first came here, the ceilings were really low, like just below these beams, in fact. And I seized the opportunity to open up the ceiling and take it all the way to the top and always wanted to have a canopy bed. So all my dreams kind of came true. I opened the ceiling up and then now I've covered it in my new dotty wallpaper, which I love, and I've done the curtains in the same. So it's all kind of seamless. It's just the happiest, lightest, most airy room. And I always feel happy and comfortable here. It's important to me that not everything matches to a certain extent. It's a process. I think when I'm decorating a room, I do it like I'm starting a painting. I can start with a colour, like a wall colour, and then bring in all sorts of things that might go, and you put them all together and you sort of see what works best and you move them around, and that's how I do it. And then, of course, there's always scale. It's about balancing the scale always. They've got to be big pattern, small pattern, and then a bit of space around it that lets it breathe so that your eye doesn't get all confused and makes you feel kind of dizzy. This is my kitchen, where everything happens. It actually is the centre of the house for many reasons. It's where we live every day and spend most of our time. I love kitchens that you can dine in, sit in, do everything in, cook in, because we really just like informal eating. Whenever we've got family or friends, we love to sit around this table, which is quite a big table. It sits about 12 of us. It is the hub of the house. And also, there are windows that can be completely brought back. It's like watching a screen, like a television screen. It's absolutely wonderful to be able to have the outdoors in and vice versa. So the outdoor green room happened because it was a cow barn and the roof was collapsing and the whole thing needed to be redone. And so they took their wall down and they redid the roof. And we just thought, God, this is such a lovely space. Why don't we use it? It is really important. The exterior of the house works with the interior of the house. And once you've done the interior of a house, then you can create rooms outside, which is what I obviously end up doing. I kind of never stop. My husband always says to me, when are you ever gonna stop? But I probably just keep on going. Being in my home, when it's at its best this time of year and my family are here, we're all sitting around the kitchen table having lunch or supper, it's the happiest I can ever be. It's what making this home all beautiful is about. I guess it's what I've worked so hard all these years to achieve. And there's nothing better.