The precise history of Katherine Marland’s Welsh home, set beside a narrow winding track in a wood-fringed Monmouthshire hamlet, is unknown.
What Katherine, an antiques dealer, can tell you is that the stone buildings originally began as turf-and-mud huts, built by smallholders working in the forest. Taking advantage of squatters’ rights, which existed between the 17th and 19th centuries, their descendants went on to build the low cottages that survive today.
‘Tŷ unnos, or ‘one night house’, was the Welsh tradition that if you could build a dwelling in a night and, according to folklore, boil a pot within the space of 12 hours, unchallenged, then you could lay claim to the plot,’ explains Katherine.
‘Successful squatters would then enclose some land around their new dwelling and rebuild it over time, to make it more liveable.’
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Since then, successive owners have put their mark on the two-up two-downs – yet despite various improvements, the house has kept its ‘humble, rural feel’, says Katherine. The Range Rover on the unblemished gravelled driveway is not her thing.
‘Both my husband and I grew up on farms, and we craved isolation and authenticity. It can be hard to find that in the Home Counties.’
Apart from dealing with a few maintenance jobs, the couple chose to live with the house as it was for 10 years, while they gradually built up an idea of how they wanted to renovate it. And when Katherine finally began decorating the interior, she looked to the original architecture to guide her, opting for natural tones and unfussy, botanical prints rather than overtly period schemes.
‘I love houses that aren’t over-designed or too polished,’ Katherine says, explaining that she prefers homes ‘with layers that feel as if they’ve evolved over time.’
For the older part of the house, where the rooms are smaller, Katherine’s friend, interior designer Lucinda Griffith, advised her to consider when she was most likely to use them before committing to specific shades.
'We mainly use that sitting room during the winter and in the evenings, because it’s so cosy,’ says Katherine, who finally chose a vibrant leaf-green for the walls. It comes into its own when lit candles throw flickering shadows around the room.
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In the kitchen, which was a later addition to the house, the couple felt they had more freedom with their choices. ‘We put a lot of thought into it,’ says Katherine, explaining that they didn’t want it to look overtly kitchen-like, but to remain as versatile as possible.
‘It’s a luxury to have such a big room in a small house,’ she says. With light falling in generous squares through the newly installed Crittall windows, it is a convivial space, with a table that can seat up to 14.
Katherine commissioned the under-counter cupboards, which were painted in layers of gloss paint ‘to feel like furniture’ rather than fitted units. She also commissioned a wall-mounted cabinet from Bath-based designer Berdoulat, which specialises in Georgian-inspired furniture, in which she houses more antique finds.
Upstairs, the renovation involved sacrificing a bedroom to make a new bathroom. Large enough for a deep armchair, there are also generous shelves on which part of Katherine’s impressive collection of Staffordshire figures is displayed.
For a guest bedroom, she chose striped trompe-l’oeil wallpaper to emulate traditional tongue-and-groove cladding. In the main bedroom, the four-poster, bought on a ‘nervous’ trip to a Somerset auction house, has just been decked in a graceful canopy. The non-matching pair of Pembroke tables either side were local finds.
Like the 18th-century Staffordshire hens that populate the kitchen, the vintage French school maps, or the exquisitely poignant cushion, embroidered by a wounded French soldier during the First World War, these antique finds add the ‘layers and depth’ Katherine loves, and that can’t be achieved from amassing new things.
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‘Beauty above all’ is the motto of Katherine’s Instagram-based antiques business, Marland Home, and it also applies to her own antiques-filled home. Although this does mean that some of the furniture, such as the slender-legged chair in the bedroom, is charming but fragile.
‘My husband teases me about that,’ she says, adding that ‘not everything has to be utilitarian’. One of her earliest finds was a Dante Gabriel Rossetti chair made by William Morris. She spotted the wheatsheaf-shaped back and rush seat and had an inkling she’d found something special, she says.
A dealer friend confirmed her suspicions, telling her she was lucky. She kept it for a while, she says: ‘I felt I needed to enjoy it before I sold it.’
At the back of the house, a stream runs through the garden providing the soundtrack to their existence, says Katherine, who has spotted otters, rare ducks with brilliant plumage, and the occasional straying Jersey cow drinking from its shallows.
On silent summer nights, ‘moonshadows’ flit across the grass in a setting that feels unchanged since the 19th century.
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- Newly renovated barn filled with mid-century furniture in Wales
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