Victorian Renovation
Viewing it by torchlight only added to this cottage’s charm, and the former carpenter’s barn had many more delights in store, as Laura and Patrick Butler-Madden have since discovered
The Butler-Maddens caught their first glimpse of Carpenter’s Cottage by torchlight, huddled over a tiny screen in a rustic farmhouse in Menorca. It was February and the couple, with baby Lily, were on a no-frills business trip. ‘We design and renovate properties,’ they explain modestly, although they are experts at what they do. ‘It wasn’t part of our plan, but something kept drawing us back to this small, dated cottage.’
On returning to the UK, the couple headed straight to the Cotswolds. A quintessential honeycoloured village welcomed them, but the little red-brick property was nowhere to be found. ‘Back and forth we drove until finally, we saw a tiny footpath signed to Carpenter’s Cottage,’ recalls Laura. Virtually invisible from the road, it peeps out between two cottages, utterly at home yet quite unlike any other property in this area. Hidden behind a jungle of a garden and an overgrown jasmine that threatened to bring this plucky place to its knees, was a symmetrical doll’s house façade with a jaunty white porch. What Laura and Patrick could see was delightful; it looked cheerful even on a damp winter afternoon. ‘Only a few of the inside lights worked, so again we were reduced to torchlight,’ Patrick says.
‘It wasn’t just small, but also quite narrow,’ says Laura. Downstairs comprised a snug, a compact living room, an even more petite dining room and a tiny lean-to kitchen. Upstairs, two bedrooms flanked a bathroom. ‘It was cold, damp smelling and had peeling lino,’ explains Laura, ‘but it had redeeming features, too – aspiral staircase, shutters and lots of character. We put in an offer instantly.’
Moving in that June, the couple spent a happy summer exploring their new home. ‘Wonderful details about the cottage came to light – aprevious owner had been in the music industry and Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton had visited – this humble place had played unlikely host to rock royalty!’
Fortuitously, one neighbour, David Bradley, was an architect, and they had meetings together with paper plans spr
