Stepping into this house is a sensory experience. Ted, who is adamant he is not a decorator, does himself a disservice, as he has an instinctive eye for not just pattern and colour, but also the subtler attributes that make a room work: composition, line and flow. The interiors feel effortless, but are properly thought through: hence that bar – discrete enough to feel gloriously special, close enough that you don’t miss a single word.
Ted has also inherited the curse, peculiar to decorators, of never quite being finished. ‘I’m constantly moving furniture, rearranging pictures, thinking about new things to try,’ he says, admitting a yearning for that hit you get when, having played around with something, you feel it just works. ‘The dopamine soon wears off, though. Then it’s on to the next experiment.’
But though this cottage has a strong interior focus, life here is also linked to the world around it. Ted and Olivia’s Saturday mornings – with or without friends – are spent walking, often taking the two-hour route to the pub. Cooking is important, too, as is shopping, with several market towns nearby: ‘We can go to a butcher who’s been here for 30 years, or a greengrocer I’ve visited all my life,’ Ted adds. He paints a picture of a disappearing sort of existence, where flocks of sheep block the road at some point and there’s always a tractor trundling ahead. ‘It forces you to slow down,’ he says. ‘You can just breathe a little easier here’.