CHRISTMAS AT HOME
The festive season in this pretty, wisteria-clad period property is one of celebration and sleepovers; a time for honouring precious memories and creating new traditions for the whole family to cherish
HOME PROFILE
WHO LIVES HERE
Jules and Ben Covey and their children Luella, Woody and Ludo, plus black Labrador Ottie and Miniature Dachshund Bobbin
A 19th-century, four-bedroom, brick-built, gabled house in the Berkshire village of Upper Basildon
DINING AREA
SITTING ROOM
There are nine for Christmas at Jules Covey’s house, including her own three children and her sister’s two. It means people ‘camping’ in each other’s bedrooms, she says, but that just makes it more fun: ‘I thought about booking some of them into a B&B, but everyone said they wanted to wake up here on Christmas morning.’
‘Here’ is an 1880s four-bedroom house, the oldest in the Berkshire village of Upper Basildon. Originally it was the rabbit-catcher’s cottage for Basildon Park, just up the road, and the view from the gate is of mellow brickwork and steeply gabled dormer windows, leading the eye along the pretty tiled roof to the garden beyond. Part of the appeal of the house, when Jules and her husband Ben found it in 2012, was that it needed everything doing to it. ‘We didn’t want to have to rip out an expensive kitchen just because it wasn’t our taste,’ says Jules. It meant they could give it their own contemporary look while appreciating the feel of a place that had been in the same family for 40 years, with all its accumulated memories: ‘We knew it was a real wrench for them to leave.’
Jules understood that attachment to a place full of family memories. Her own childhood Christmases were spent with siblings and cousins at her grandmother’s house, and she vividly remembers the excitement of arriving each year, seeing two huge trees ready for decorating, and rediscovering favourite ornaments, carefully wrapped in those special boxes with little individual compartments. ‘We would all get involved with setting the table and decorating the dining room. I loved those traditions, and we’re building our own now.
