Tour an antiques dealer's characterful cottage in Kent
Gloria Stewart is something of a serial renovator. For more than 30 years, she lived in France, restoring one 18th-century house after another, while dealing in antique furniture and perfecting her skills as a garden designer.
Lessons learned from multiple property makeovers had a chance to prove their worth when she returned to her old hunting ground in Kent in 2021.
This time, she was looking for a small house in a village and a less hectic lifestyle.
Gloria found a near-perfect match for her requirements when she viewed this 19th-century cottage in the Kentish village of Appledore.
“As I walked in, I clocked that it has lots of windows,” she recalls, “so light comes in from every direction. And I gave a silent whoop of joy on noting the pristine blue Aga in the kitchen!”
In a former life, the cottage had been a workshop for drying herring. Its unusual history may account for why it is so pleasingly quirky. The position of the cottage – situated in the middle of the village but set back from the main street – ticked all the other boxes.
Nothing inside the cottage cried out for immediate attention but Gloria couldn’t resist starting work on it right away.
She engaged a team of builder-decorators to replace the old-fashioned bathroom with a walk-in shower. And she had the walls, ceilings and woodwork painted and papered in a decorating palette she describes as “clay colour and its relation”.
Although there were aspects of the kitchen Gloria knew she would change, she was content to get used to its layout for six months and eventually decided to retain the existing configuration and tiled flooring.
She did, however, want to give it her own stamp, introducing her trademark antique pieces on walls, shelves and worktops. “I do set up a kitchen to feel like a space for living in,” she says.
Down-sizing to a cottage from a large house with significant antiques needed realistic decision-taking on which furniture would fit into different rooms. “However beautiful a piece, if it wouldn’t fit in a cottage it couldn’t come,” she says. The pieces that have made the move include fine 18th and 19th-century chests of drawers, cupboards, small tables, arm and side chairs and a legion of small antiques and textiles.
Gloria plans the layout and furnishings for each room before a move, usually taking colours from old rugs or a curtain fabric she’s keen to use. Kitchen apart, she always lays sisal matting through the ground floor. “I can visualise furniture placement and how a room will look in my head very quickly,” she says. “But I’m beginning to introduce more colour than I used to.”
The inevitable question for someone who is always on the move: where next for Gloria? She pauses for a moment, then smiles. “I’m loving English village life, the local shop, the pub, the sense of community. I think I’ll stay put for a while.”
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