Designer Emma Diaz and her husband, Serafin, have sensitively transformed a lacklustre cottage to create a joyful, colourful family home filled with personality
FEATURE & STYLING JANET MCMEEKIN PHOTOGRAPHY RACHAEL SMITH
As Emma Diaz lights the festive candles on her oak table, lovingly laid for Christmas dinner, she reflects on just how far she has come since first setting foot in this once-neglected 18th-century cottage. “If someone had told me 10 years ago that my husband, Serafin, and I would be dining with our little boy at a table that I’d designed myself, in a cottage bursting with colour, I wouldn’t have believed them,” Emma confides. “It’s been a rollercoaster journey.”
In 2013, the couple, who originally hail from Kent, began scouring the Cotswolds for a renovation project within commuting distance of Bristol, where Emma was working as an animator for Aardman Animations. “At that time, Serafin had just finished his first cottage restoration and was keen to develop his skills,” Emma explains. When they discovered a damp three-bedroom cottage that had been rented for several years and was badly in need of modernisation, they felt compelled to give it a new lease of life. “The third bedroom was incredibly tiny and the galley kitchen so small there was barely enough space for one person, never mind two, but the cottage had a good feel and the potential to create our first ‘together’ home,” says Emma. Unsure of its exact origins, she believes the property was built in the mid-1700s as a worker’s cottage for the then-thriving local wool industry.
Fired with enthusiasm, Emma and Serafin, who were childhood sweethearts, began excitedly removing the render to expose the original Cotswold stone. “Although the cottage wasn’t Grade II listed, to our horror, we suddenly discovered it had a local listing,” Emma explains. “That meant we had to stop exposing the stone and get permission for exterior changes, which was very stressful.” After agreeing that, if the cottage had to be rendered, lime would allow it to breathe, the pair went on a course in Devon to learn more about building and plastering with lime. “We wanted to restore the cottage as sustainably and authen
