An Artist's Magical Cottage In The English Countryside | House Tour

Hi, Homeworthy. I'm Tati Iles. Welcome to my home in Dorset. Come on in. You're watching Homeworthy where we believe every home has a story. I'm Tati Iles. I am a florist, set designer. I make scenes with all sorts of materials. And welcome to my home in West Dorset. When we first found this house, it was just coming out of lockdown. The whole world felt a bit scary. And we had had this long plan to find our dream home. And I found this house before we even really were able to start looking at houses. And then it disappeared from the internet. And just as our old house got an offer, it reappeared again online. And I couldn't believe it. So we went to see it. And the moment you walk through the gate, it has a feeling. And I don't think it's anything to do with us or me or how it's decorated or the garden. It just has this amazing feeling. And even Fred, my husband, who was very wary of a thatched cottage, grabbed my hand as we walked up the path and said, this is our home. I can't really explain it. It chose us and it drew us here. So I feel very honoured to be a custodian of it for a little bit of time. This house was built in the 1700s. The little village it is in, it's more of a hamlet. So there's just a collection of houses, a manor house, a farmhouse. And then this house was originally two workman's cottages. About 25 years ago, it was turned into one house, but it's very, very obvious still that it was two cottages because we have two front doors, exactly the same. And when you come inside and you'll see, it has two staircases that meet at the middle that are identical and two fireplaces that are identical. It's in the traditional thatch and it's listed our house. So we can't ever change that, which is wonderful. And it's cosy and it's cool in the summer. It's got thick walls and it's got a feeling of its age about it, which makes it really magical. This is our sitting room and it is the cosiest room of the house, I think. And we all squeeze in here, the six of us. So it's quite a squish, but that kind of makes it cosier. The kind of heart of the house is the two fireplaces. And this would have been an open fire and it's got the old bread oven, which when the chimney was open, you would have been able to bake in. And I just love it so much. But the wood burner is much more efficient and we need it for those winter nights here. These willow baskets are willow urns, actually. We use these a lot with our flowers. We have them in all different sizes. I love willow so much. I love the smooth texture of it and I love the smell. And we also sell these and they are now going all around the world, which is so wonderful because they're so beautiful and there's something honest about them. And I love that about willow. We have always tried to rescue and help animals. And my son, Alfie especially, is really... I'm Will, actually. They're real naturalists. They love... And I found this young barn owl when I was working once and unfortunately he'd been hit by a car and he was brain damaged. And we managed to look after him for quite a few weeks, but he didn't make it because he was so beautiful and so perfect. And I'm not really a fan of taxidermy on the whole, but none of us could really bear to just see him disappear. So that is why we have this beautiful barn owl who sort of watches over us all. We've got loads of different fabrics and textiles here. I think sofas are a great way to just kind of like go for it. And this was actually... This is a piece of antique fabric made into a cushion that was given to me by my friend Henrietta, who's got a very brilliant interior design company called VSP Interiors, and she very kindly gave me this because I did some flowers for the launch of one of her new collections. So that's really special to me. And this is a cushion, another gift from my very dear friend Nora, who's got a wonderful... You'll see many of her pieces around this house. A wonderful homeware company called... Now, it's a Finnish name, company name. So I will probably pronounce it wrong. So apologies to all the Finns out there. But it is Projekti Tyyni, I think. So she has the most wonderful fabrics and textiles, and that was a very kind gift as well. The most important thing about this room, other than the fireplace, is the ceiling. The ceilings are really low. It's got these wonderful beams, and my brother-in-law actually has to sort of duck as he walks through this room under the beams. But when I asked the children what I should do in here, they said, Well, Mummy, we love it when the swallows return and the housemartins return. Maybe you could do some birds on the ceiling. So on the ceiling, we've painted the housemartins returning, and they just scatter across the ceiling. And I sat here in the evenings just doing it, and it was a really lovely little thing and fun for the children who probably notice them the most when they look up sitting down playing their games. This is a photograph of the Palio in Siena, which is really special because it arrived from New York from my clients who are now my friends when I did their wedding in Siena earlier this year. We bonded massively over the Palio, which I have never seen, but I hope to one day. And so they sent me this beautiful photograph that she took, and I will treasure it forever. It's so full of life, and it's so wonderful. And this was also a present from a friend who was also a client, and it's a print of Picassos. And I just love it. There are horses everywhere. This is a little children's rocking chair that they all fight over sitting in that was made by my great-grandpa. So it's really, really special. And again, the feeling like it's those special things that really have history. And this is very special too because it was Fred's grandfather's ashtray and is used now as mainly a weapon by my children. It's also had a parrot strapped to it. So it's just a rather lovely bit of nostalgia. If you come in here, this is the room that was boot room and utility room, and it was blocked off, and then there was a little funny corridor here. And we've made it now. At the moment, it is my little girl's playroom because she is very little. And with the three boys who are mad about Lego, I have to be very careful with separating Hebe from the Lego. I painted this mural, heavily advised by the children, on what we should do. And it's sort of just, it's about where we live. It's sort of based on the rolling hills of West Orset. We've got our little house here. It's all slightly surreal, and we've played with the scale a bit to make it feel more fun. So here's our little house with the two chimneys going, and we've got hares, which we see every day here. Up on the hill behind our house, there are hares, and they're almost friends now. It's really wonderful. A dragon, because I have always said to the children that nobody realises, they think I'm their mummy, but really I'm their pet dragon. So we have a dragon. What else have we got here? We've got a woodpecker. We've got the doves, which are very much a part of our home. We've got a little cheeky snail there. We've got moths, which are also a big part of our, a big part, I love moths. My son Wulf loves moths. They're part of our logo for our flower company, and so there are various moths around the house. We've got another one there, and then we've got the ponies somewhere here, and we've got this cheeky, wily fox just here, ready to head off. And then this is our wonderful rocking horse, Merrylegs, who is, before we actually had real horses, he was as close as I could get to a real horse, and a very kind present, a gift to my son Alfie from his godmother for his christening, and a very treasured boy who will be in our, I hope, passed down through the generations. My wonderful grandpa, who was a diplomat, gave me this rug, which is from Iran, where he was the British ambassador, and he gave Fred and I this as our wedding present, and one of my most treasured possessions, and I have it right in the middle, so I walk past and walk through and walk over it every day, and I really love it, and I hope one day one of the children will take care of it too. This is Pontoufla. She, I don't know if anyone knows about, remembers the book Chocolat, and there's a film called Chocolat. People have said that I remind them of the mother, because she travels with the wind and she likes chocolate. So the little girl in the book has a make-believe wallaby called Pontoufla, and so when I met Pontoufla, this one, she just made me think of her, so this is Pontoufla, and there is another one, Bridie, somewhere, who I'm sure you'll meet in a minute. When we first came here, it was a second home. The people who owned it, lovely family, used it as their holiday home, and so it definitely felt like that. It felt like it needed to have life put back into it, because it was two cottages, and various people have lived in both halves. It was slightly strangely pieced together. Some areas were kept very much like it would have been, with the beams out and the original floors, and then some areas were almost unrecognisable, with plasterboard on the ceilings, and the bathroom is very modern. So what we have done is, in the kitchen, we sort of took it back in a way. We removed the plasterboard from the ceiling to reveal the beams again. We took away a lot of the kitchen cupboards and units, and sort of simplified the whole place. The aga was there, and originally, where the aga is, in the open fireplace, which would have been a fire, and next to it is a bread oven. Unfortunately, the flue is now used by the aga, and so we can't use the bread oven, which is a real pity, but maybe one day we will have an open fire again, and I'll be able to cook bread in the bread oven, and I will give you a glimpse of that. And then we rearranged some of the rooms, because I've got a big family. We have four children. Three of them are boys, and then a little girl, and they're wild, and they come with lots of wellies, and lots of bulls and cricket bats. The house originally laid out had a very, very small boot room and utility room, and we felt that it's a really hard-working room in our house, so we turned one of the other rooms into the boot room, and we made the little utility boot room into a sort of playroom, walk-through, can be a dining room, which has really made sense and given us this back room, which is actually really, really useful, but also just a great space to have, and I think anyone with a big family will understand that you need that space. But I have to say that it will always change, this house, because I can't sit still, and I'm constantly painting something new or changing something, or the children grow up and they want something different, so this house will be ever-evolving and never quite finished, and I think that's kind of the joy in having a home. This is our kitchen, which, yeah, the heart of our house, and you walk straight into it from outside, which I really love, actually, because everyone lives in here, so if anyone ever arrives, there's always something going on, and there's someone sitting around the table playing or painting or eating, and so I love this room. I love the way that you walk into it. There's so much to show in this room. The first thing was this kitchen island, which is my great love, and it is a workhorse, and it's something, actually, that we're going to be also making in our collection because it gets everyone who comes here comments on this beautiful island. I had it made and designed it when we first moved here, when I realized it was a slightly strange setup, this kitchen, with the aga being at one end and the kitchen being at the other end, and I also can't bear cooking, really, but if I have to cook, then I like to face whatever's happening, and so with all the surfaces being around the edge of the room, the first thing we did was get the island made by a very, very brilliant carpenter. It's had various incarnations. It's been different colors, and I'm sure it will be ever-changing, but the main thing is that it works really, really hard for us, and we really love it. More beautiful things from my very special friends. This is a little fern which has been gilded by a very brilliant friend of mine who is brilliant at gilding, and I really treasure this little fern because I love ferns, and it's just special from her, and this painting is by my incredibly talented friend Christabel Blackburn. She won Sky Portrait Artist of the Year, so she's really brilliant. She's one of my son's godmothers, and there's various pieces of her work. I love this lady so much. This is my husband Fred's most hated possession, but to me, it's the most beautiful thing. I was so excited when I found it. I don't know what it is about him that I love. I mean, he's a horse, but there's something about him. Fred doesn't understand it at all, but I love him, and he's always been there over the kitchen sink, so that will be probably our main reason to argue is over the horse, and these are beautiful little egg cups that I actually found in a little market in France, and they were a euro each, and I think probably the best buy, and I really love them, and then this was a painting that I did on my course with Frances Watts, who's an amazing artist, and this is another painting by my friend Christabel. She gave that to us as a wedding present, so I really, really, really love it. The table was, I used to be a nanny when I was about 20 for a really wonderful family in London, and they became very good friends, and I'm now godmother to one of their beautiful daughters, and when they moved out of the house, they were getting rid of this table and said would we want it, and originally we had in here a rectangular table, and it always felt a bit sort of, I don't know, a bit hard, and so I said yes please, and I now would always have a round table in a house. You can always squeeze another person onto a round table. It's just extraordinary. You can kind of keep going, keep going, and that's why we have the benches as well, because then we can squeeze more and more children onto the benches and round it, and it's very sociable, and if you're just having dinner with one person, you can sort of sit next to each other, and it's really lovely, so I really love it. And this is the AGA, always on. We don't have another heating source for cooking on. We do have central heating, but this is on all the time, and you can definitely tell if it's broken the minute you walk in or you walk downstairs. It really does warm up the whole house, and we use it for drying all of our clothes on, for cooking, for drying welly boots when we've been outside, and the dogs cuddle up on it, the children sit on it and have their hot chocolate and warm their bottoms on it. It is a really crucial bit of kit. I think we'll only have it for as long as it lasts, and we'll one day have to look at alternatives, but for now, I'm pretty grateful for it. I really love it. Another one of our beautiful baskets, which are just so useful. They get filled with shoes or blankets or flowers, trees. And then going up to here, so this, actually, when I started my business in Edinburgh doing flowers, it was hard work getting my name out there. Alongside doing my flowers, I also used to buy furniture in auction houses, and I would paint them, and sometimes I would do patterns on them or I'd paint them plain and rough them up a bit. And because I had a van for my flowers, I could then deliver them. So I had this little sort of side hustle of doing antique furniture, and most of it was pretty rubbish, really, but we made it look pretty, and I did it with a girl called Tor. And anyway, in one of the auctions was this dresser sideboard, and I fell in love with it, and so I bought it and kept it for myself, and I've had it in every home that I lived in. And on here, we've got some of my most treasured items. This painting here is of the horse. It was a gift from a very, very, very special friend of mine. And everything about it, it's, I think, the most perfect painting in the world. I love it so much. And it got placed here to eventually hang somewhere, and we just decided that it was the perfect place for it to stay because we can all look at it all the time. And now I have a grey horse called Mello, so it's even more appropriate, and I love it so much. And these are things collected by the children. Coral that was a Christmas present from someone. Old coral for one of the boys. This kaleidoscope, which is fought over and often used as a weapon as well on each other, luckily. Sea urchins. This one was found in Scotland on a beach last year. The emu egg here. Little scallop shells and starfish. And this is a very extraordinary creature made by Wilf, which I just love. And then this was a beautiful bowl left to me by my grandpa, and it's, I think, quite special. Chinese and a real treasured possession. I actually broke it, and it was so beautifully mended, almost the mending was a work of art in itself. Oh, we've got another arrival. Bridie. This is Bridie. Bridie is Pontoofla's daughter, and I'm not quite sure where she came from because she's enormous and ginger, but we love her very, very much. This is what made a lamp shade. It's made of willow and something I designed and that we sell with Tati Rose Studio. It's got this sort of slightly petally organic shape, but it's quite clean, which I love against all the sort of worlds of our house and home. You can probably hear a peacock. So this is really beautiful, and it sort of works really well in here. And then this is a window seat that has always been, there was an original window seat here, and we actually extended it because it was a bit too narrow, and now it's really wonderful because the children pile on here, and they've got blankets, and they can kind of cuddle up and read books or watch a movie whilst I cook, as they always seem to want to be around in this sort of proximity to me. So it's really lovely and really cozy. And we've got here, oh, a beautiful painting by my son, Alfie. Oh, no, that's Wilfie's. And then this is what my mother did, and it's of the children watching fireworks with the swans on the lake. This is by Christopher, and this was another one that I did on my course with Francis Watts. I love baskets. I use them a lot because we have chickens and for eggs, and we collect flowers in them, and they're just, toys get bundled into them. Also, our cars are parked quite far away from the house, so they're quite, I have them hanging up because then we can just grab them, and you can just put little bits and pieces in to go out to the car and come back. And really, I don't think you can ever have too many baskets. Well, I mean, my husband Fred thinks that you can have too many baskets and that we're verging on it, but I don't feel that that's right. So there are lots, and there's loads under the island as well. But just there's something about the sort of, this willowy texture, this smoothness, but it's quite wild at the same time. That's perfect to me. The garden and the animals here at Crookston are a really big part of the place. I love animals so much, and I've grown up with them. And we grew up with kind of ponies poking their heads through the windows, and my family is an army family, and we moved all over the place, but my mum made our life not feel like we moved. She always made our home, even if we were only there for six months, she made it home. And we would struggle sometimes to find grazing, and we would put the ponies in the garden, and we had dogs, and we had pets, and I love the company of animals, and I can't imagine a home without them. In fact, one night I had to stay here on my own between jobs, and the children were with Fred, and the dogs were somewhere else. And it was one of the strangest feelings coming back to this place. We have got peacocks, guinea fowl, chickens, doves, horses, dogs. We have got baby jackdaw called Greystoke, who is a few, about a month old, that is my son's, and he was rescued, and he has to be hand-fed at the moment. And we've had lots of sort of patience through our doors. Anything that's been injured or hurt, our friends seem to arrive with a basket saying, Tati and Fred and boys, can you help? And I love that. So they are very much part of our home, and partly why I can't really have a proper garden, because me and the peacocks have the same taste in flowers. So anything I love, the peacocks eat, and anything I don't love, they don't eat. So it makes having a garden difficult, but to be honest, I would rather have the peacocks than any flowers in the garden. So this is the outside of the cottages. We've got our well, which we actually get the water, our water from the well. It comes straight through, up a pump, with a pump through the wall and straight into our taps, which is really, and it's the most delicious water. This is the second front door. And then you can see the thatch and the old flint, built with flint and mortar. And then this is the thatch. Now the thatch is very mossy, which is actually a really good sign for thatch, because moss only grows where it's cold and where it's damp. So if it wasn't growing, it would mean the heat was escaping and the thatch wouldn't be doing what it was meant to be doing. So it's actually a really good sign to have thatch, moss on a thatch. And you have to re-thatch it every 20 to 25 years, and we're getting pretty close to needing to have it thatched. But there is a long waiting list for these very, very skilled craftsmen to come and do the roof. There's Mr. P, my very special boy, who was a Christmas present from Fred when we first moved here. I've always really wanted peacocks, and so I feel really lucky to have him. And he's really special. His wife's somewhere, Mrs. P. This is Mello, my beautiful boy. And these are the cheeky girls, Milly and Saffy. And then we've got Indy, who looks like she's about to climb a rope ladder. Hello, Ind. Hello, darling. Hello, beautiful girl. Hello. So they're very much just part of the family, and horses are... I think if you put a stethoscope to my heart, you'd hear the thunder of horses' hooves. Not a normal heartbeat. They really are so important to me. So, yeah. Good boy. Milly. Now, this is something I feel so grateful to have inherited from someone who really cared about this garden. This is an amazing wisteria arch. It's slightly past its best. It was better about two or three weeks ago. We've had really hot couple of weeks. But now it's been overtaken by this absolutely amazing rambling rose. But it is really, really, really special, and the smell is just incredible. This is the marquee that is up all summer long, and it's where we hold our courses for our flower school. But we all use it almost every day of the summer. English weather is so risky. So it's a really brilliant outdoor but indoor space. And so, at the moment, we don't have a course on, but we have two next week, group courses and one-to-ones. So all of our flower kit is here ready to go for next week. But this is a really wonderful handmade canvas marquee made by a company that we decorate these sorts of tents a lot with our work. And they do all these amazing shapes and sizes. And this is one of their small tea tents, and I hope will be, again, a sort of heirloom. I think we'll use it lots for the children's birthdays, and it's just a really lovely space to have. Our old shepherd's hut, which is the coziest room of the whole place. It's got this bed opens up into a double bed. It's got the most amazing wood burner, which you'll have to sleep with the doors open. It's so effective. And this is a work in progress, because eventually we will have all the British moths, I hope, covering all the walls. I'm six down, and they take a long time, and there's always projects happening here. So this one's partway through, but I hope that eventually it will have all the moths that we have here. I have worked with flowers since I was 18, since I left school. I started working for an amazing event florist, and then after a couple of years, I decided that I really wanted to do it, set up my own business. And so I started in Edinburgh doing flowers for weddings and events, and anyway, I started to get more and more work down south and abroad, and it grew and grew, and we've really luckily had the most amazing, my gosh, what is it, 16 years of doing incredible, going to amazing places, working for brilliant people and brands and companies and private individuals and friends and family and royalty, and we've done flowers all over the world, creating these sort of sets and scenes, but we don't only use flowers. We use fabric and light, and we hand-paint backdrops, and we sort of create atmospheres rather than just doing flowers. So I am a florist, but I don't think that we, we never really call ourselves florists because it's sort of, it's so much more, really, and over, so we still now, we're very lucky to hand-choose our events, and alongside that, we also have started an amazing flower school here in Dorset, in West Dorset. We have a beautiful studio right here, which is an amazing place to be. We have wonderful people who are our students for the day or weekend or couple of days, who come here, and some are professionals, some are just people who really are creative and love using their hands, and we've even had people coming from abroad. One girl last week came from Australia to do a course, which was amazingly humbling, and I think maybe in this sort of busy world at the moment, slowing down for a day or two and using your hands, and especially with natural ingredients, it sort of refocuses everything, and I think our school is special because it's not really just about flowers, as with our work, it's about sort of creating atmospheres and unleashing people's creativity to make a place and a feeling and a home, and so that's sort of what we do, and our story, much like my home, with our business, is ever-evolving and ever-changing, and there are lots of sort of doors opening at the moment into doing some beautiful things that people can buy to have at home, and fabrics, so that's all sort of coming, and it's really exciting. Okay, so this is my home studio. I have a big workshop where most of our flower kit and where we work from most of the time, but this is my, this is our sort of home office and studio, and we teach from here as well. Whenever we do flowers, we test all of our ingredients each week to see how they change, how they last, how the weather might have affected them, and so this is a selection that we've cut for this week, just to see how things work, how things are lasting and how they're looking, and it's a brilliant time of year for flowers. All the sort of wildly beautiful things like honeysuckle are out. The roses are amazing. A little bit of Philadelphia's left, which has got a most beautiful smell. Feathers from the birds, I think those might have made their way in here from the children, and this is one of my favourite roses, called a Mutabilis rose, and it's really, it's really beautiful, and this is a climbing, rambling rose called Rambling Rector, and it's really magnificent, and its face, it's got the most sort of beautiful little head, little face on it, and it doesn't last very long, it doesn't flower for very long, but it's sort of magnificent when it does. Actually, with one of my classes last week, we made a sort of table arrangement using all the Rambling Rector, just in abundance, climbing through, and then these beautiful strawberry plants, which, this has to be my favourite thing in the world. It's just so, the strawberries last really well when they're kept on the root. Once these have finished being used for decoration, they will go back into the ground, and come up for years to come, which is just really lovely, and yeah, little wild strawberries, just beautiful. So I love using things like this when we do our flowers, and if there's anything that can go back into the earth, then that's the very best way. We've also got over here our mood boards, which are sort of ever-changing as well. We do quite a lot of like, as well as flowers, we do quite a lot of painting, and various sort of illustration for various projects. We've got here like, this was a drawing for the, we did the main gate at the Chelsea Flower Show a couple of years ago, and we've done it twice actually. So that was the drawing for one of them, and it was, I kept it up because it was a really amazing opportunity, but also I was really proud of what we made when we did it. So I just, I'm not very good at celebrating the things we've done, and I tend to always just gallop on to the next project. So I thought it was nice just to keep that one there as a reminder of something that was special. That's me and the boys meeting our queen when we did an installation at the Garden Museum. Her Majesty came to see us, and the boys gave her a bunch of daffodils, actually they were tete-a-tete, picked from home. So that's a rather sweet picture. And that's my beloved Fred, who is my world. And then we've got some of our photographs of our flowers here as well, of work we've done. Yeah, and it's taken us all over the place. And I think, much like our home, it's sort of, our flowers change year on year, and we sort of, the palette changes, or the amount, or the way we do it, or what we thought was wonderful last year, we kind of slightly go in a different direction. It's a fun thing, it's a really great job to have. My favourite thing about this home is the people, the people in it, and the animals around it. But other than that, as well as that, my favourite thing about this home is that, is the feeling it gives people when they come here. I think everybody always comments on the feeling it has, this sort of warmth, it's a very genuine place, it's very unpretentious, it's quite scruffy in a nice way, and it sort of just makes you feel good when you're here, so that's why I love it. So this is the boot room and utility room, which used to actually be another reception room, but I think we spend so much time outside, and very little time sitting down, that it was slightly unnecessary, much more useful as a boot room. So these again are the old cheese boards used for the surface, and this house is very home-made, it's very carved by us, or people we love, or friends, or family, and so Fred's made the pipes that hold the curtains, they're just copper pipes, and then we've got, this is actually a dresser split in half, because it looked a little bit too cottage-matchy-twee for me, so I took the top off, and that's a drinks cupboard, and then the bottom is over there. This is an old snooker table top, which was our wonderful friend and builder who has done various parts of this house, had the idea of using that, and I love that it's reused in some way. All the stuff for life is on here, animals, and we have got a loo here, and then this is an amazing sort of storage space, and we have so much outdoor clothes because we spend so much time outside, and the English weather is precarious and changeable, and so you need to have loads of coats, and I think I like baskets, Fred thinks you can have too many coats, but I think there is no such thing, and he believes I'm verging on too many coats, but I'm not quite there yet. So this is our boot room storage area, and then hats and scarves and gloves galore at the top here. So this house has got two staircases because it was two cottages, and I hope one day my plan is to make a slide down the second staircase, so you can run up this one and then down the slide, proving quite difficult to find someone to make a slide on the stairs, but we'll get there the next time you come. So come on up, open this little door, I've had great fun painting this mural, which goes up these stairs, it meets in the middle, and then goes down the second staircase here. Again sort of guided by the children, it has got birds and insects, and it will be ever evolving, I think I'll continue to add things to it. It's painted with just Farrow & Ball tester pots, now I very kindly get given little bags of them by people and friends when they've finished using it or testing a paint out. This is our bedroom, the main bedroom, which is so nice to sleep in, and I love this room, the window looks over the river, and you can hear it at night, and it's usually full of children in this room as well, even though it's our bedroom, but we've got this amazing quilt, which is by my friend Nora with her beautiful textile company, some wonderful antique cushions and some old cushions, and then this, I love Cezannes, I love the colours of them, this to me is the perfect colour combination, I just love it so much, and I found this, I think on Facebook Marketplace actually, and it was such a find, so it makes this room really... I'm very lucky, I think I have the best friends in the world, this was a present from a very special friend, who gave it to me as a thank you for something, so I really love her, she's called Celine, so come on this way and I'll show you a bit more. I think my style changes every day almost, I think I'm quite eclectic, and there is part of me that loves a sort of very... I think as my life gets more chaotic, there's also a part of me that likes a slightly pared back feeling, but I kind of naturally go back to more layers, and I'm so curious about everything, that I sort of collect things as I go, and so do my children, and it's really important for me that they can put their mark on this place, so I think my style has not got a particular genre, but I have decorated this house with my children in mind, it's their home, it's not designed at all, it is just a reflection of our family, so there are lots of paintings on the walls, there's murals, we play a game with the children, I usually paint in the evenings, instead of watching telly, I sit down with my paints and I paint the walls, and then they have to come and find in the morning what I've done in the night, there are quite a few murals by the children as well, some of them not planned, but I love antique fabric, I'm sort of a bit of a magpie, so there are layers of different fabrics, and textures, and I really love, we are surrounded by the most beautiful countryside, and sort of in the heart of West Dorset, and there's a lot of the natural world around in our house, so a lot of natural textures, baskets and willow and sheepskin, and a lot of bits that have been collected by the children, that they love, like feathers, and eggs, and urchins, and all sorts of curiosities I guess, that all to me are, it's definitely a big part of our home. The children all pile in with each other, so they're all constantly swapping rooms, fancy dress is a really big part of the family, so we have it hanging up all over the place, and there's a wonderful fancy dress box in the children's playroom, but these are here for quick access should you need it. This is one bedroom, we've got these amazing wonderful bunk beds, which are really solid and chunky, and the boys are so wild, and they're throwing themselves off, and it's a pirate ship one minute, and then it's a mountain the next, so we really needed something that was really good, and strong, and solid, so these are amazing, and old quilts from India, because I used to spend a lot of time in India, and I've had these ones for about 20 years now, and they sort of started just in my home on my sofas, and now they're perfect in here, so this is one child's bedroom, this is a really sweet little room, it's tiny and petite, but I think you can make small spaces feel really lovely and cosy, this is a bed canopy from my friend Nora's company, I may have said that wrong, and apologies Nora if I have, but having a tent bed is to me the definition of childhood, they love it, it feels like a little space of inner space, Welsh blankets which I love, cosy, and again lots of curiosities, they're not curated at all these bedrooms, they're their bedrooms, so all their bits and pieces, always important to keep your bow and arrow, your quiver by the door should you need it, and there's a bird's nest on his shelf, and it's sort of intriguing always to come and see what they've collected and found, and got some fossils here, and crystals in a bird's nest, and that's what children's bedrooms to me should be like. Another bit of the mural here, which is on a different background, it felt all white and so we painted this wall a different colour, don't know if I regret it or not, but anyway with the mural it helps liven it up, this is my oldest son's room, and I love coming in here, it's not tidy, because the way he works, he is a real collector already, and quite an extraordinary boy really, he has piles and piles of books, usually there is a stack here, he reads so much, and he's got a baby jackdaw at the moment, and he collects lots of things to do with the natural world, and he's a pen pal of David Attenborough's, who's written him two letters, and they've written to each other, I'm reluctant to get too involved with their spaces, because it is their way of expressing themselves, and I love that he's got all the things that are important to him, and pine cones, and urchins, and a dried seahorse, and a cast of a bear's paw print, another seahorse here, I think it's the best we can do, if we have to keep them inside, let them have their little spaces that show who they are, and let them explore, there's a bird's nest I've just noticed by his bed too, and a spoon that he whittled himself, which is amazing really, quite nerve-wracking to watch as a mother, your children whittling away, but they seem to be pretty good at it, and another little cosy tent bed for him, and he cuddles up in here and spends many hours reading. I think a home feels soulful and feels alive, when you can tell who lives there, the sort of person that lives there, I think a home can be beautiful, if it hasn't got the personality of the people who live there running through it, then it loses that soul, so I think really the important thing, and I think that's through things that are maybe not beautiful to everyone, but beautiful to you because someone special gave it to you, or it's photographs of your friends and your family, or it's a rug that got handed down, I think that's the thing that creates the soul, and without the soul it's sort of a bit, leaves you feeling a little bit like your mug, your cup isn't full. Home, the word home means, well, to me, my family have always laughed, because it doesn't really matter where I am, or what I'm doing, if I'm staying with, if we're camping, and we're out on the beach, and we're ready to get back to our tent, I will say, let's go home, so the word home to me is my family, it doesn't really matter what building it is, it doesn't really matter where it is, anywhere where they are, that's my home.