It’s curious how years of history can be wiped away in the blink of an eye. The architectural virtues of a building accrue in layers over time, like a chronological onion, often to be swiftly and unceremoniously discarded – unless fate happens to intervene.
When the lifestyle photographer Sarah Maingot started contemplating a return to the UK after a stint in New York, her initial search for a home saw her gravitating towards the coast. ‘I thought that is exactly where I would want to be, but for some reason it just didn’t resonate,’ she explains. ‘And then I drove through a little town called Burford, in Oxfordshire, on the way to a shoot.’ It was here that serendipity lent that all-important helping hand and led her to come upon an utterly captivating cottage. ‘It was the colour of the stone; it just blew me away – this soft tonal world, this one palette. That, along with the rolling hills of the Cotswolds, was a magical combination.’
When asked about the state of the house on her first viewing, Sarah laughs, albeit nervously: ‘It really was at the point where it wasn’t feasible to keep it going!’ Decay had evidently set in: doors and windows had been boarded up and part of the supporting structure had even developed a bit of a lean. But one glimpse inside from the greenhouse was enough to convince her to take a leap of faith. Had she not, the outcome for the place would have been very different. ‘When I was trying to bid for the house the only other person interested was a developer who wanted to knock it down and start again. I was its last hope,’ Sarah says. Her role in the years since, she feels, has been akin to that of a custodian. The photographer is a true member of what one might call the new preservation society: owners bent on revisiting a house’s history, unravelling and revitalising each layer in the process, and sensitively, sympathetically and oh-so-slowly coaxing it back to life. ‘I could see those shutters in the living room, the big windows and thought, yes, there is definitely something interesting here to work with: the bare bones of a house. I felt I had the passion, the patience and the care that it called for.’
Not long after Sarah moved in, history came knocking. She relays several stories of local folk passing by and recounting tales of the house over the garden gate: ‘They would tell me that they grew up here, or that their great-great-great-grandfather built this house.’ One couple apparently comes every birthday to take a picture outside for a gentleman who was born in the room upstairs. Even the garden holds some powerful memories. ‘Once, when I posted a picture of the apple tree on Instagram, a lady said: “My grandmother ate an apple that was so delicious that she sat back, pulled the pip out of her mouth, put it in the ground and said I want one of those trees” – and this is that tree, that really wonderful old tree!’
Documents date the house to around 1720. Small in size and modest in manner, it likely started out as a humble worker’s cottage. As well as restoring structural stability, Sarah added a sympathetic cabin-style timber-clad extension that upped the bedroom quota from one to two and allowed for that most important of all modern conveniences, a bathroom –since, she’d been dismayed to discover, there wasn’t one when she bought the place. The rest of the renovation process felt like an archaeological dig, whereby the gentle peeling-away and dusting-off gradually allowed for beauty to reveal itself. ‘I’ve inched my way through doing a room at a time – very impractical, but it is all about taking the right pace,’ she says. ‘I find that sort of approach a joy.’ This way of tackling the project is everywhere apparent – perhaps most vividly in the intriguing hues produced by layers of paint colours built up over the years, now on full display in the kitchen. In the hallway, too, the plaster has been stripped out, revealing the original wooden laths. ‘It was incredible just taking away plasterboard and discovering the bare skeletons along the staircase. Seeing all that internal structure was really exciting.’
Sarah’s real talent in this respect –knowing when to meddle and when to leave well alone – is evident outside too. ‘There was a gardener before me who loved spring bulbs, so I already had this sea of crocus and bluebells, but there wasn’t any summer planting. Introducing that was a steep learning curve.’ Keen to honour her predecessor’s legacy, she decided to shoehorn in things she liked and move some of his bulbs over to accommodate them. ‘I felt he had passed the baton to me, so out of respect I didn’t want to just take everything out.’
Venturing beyond the boundaries of her pre-existing plot, the photographer had also been taken in by the wild flowers she’d spotted on nearby country walks. ‘I got a little Victorian flowereBay identifying book and getting to know the names of them gave me such pleasure,’ she says with a smile. ‘That was definitely a turning point with the garden.’
Now it is in full bloom and wonderfully wild, an experimental mix of climbers, shrubs, self-seeders and the odd vegetable adding height and structure, perfume and interest all year round. Wisteria, scented jasmine and a flourish of fragrant ‘Blue Moon’ roses haphazardly clamber over the doorway. Foxgloves fringe the greenhouse and, at the far end, a frothy cloud of cow parsley and pink deutzia draws the eye inexorably to the Cotswold landscape beyond. And the garden gave back in other, more unexpected ways, too. ‘People just dug holes in gardens like this and threw things in,’ she says, gesturing to the treasures she’s unearthed. ‘All those bottles on the cupboard in the sitting room were found in the soil.’
Rescue, reuse and reinvigorate seems to be very much the mantra here: Sarah’s trove of vintage, salvaged and found items weave charm absolutely everywhere, indoors and out. Even the outbuilding has been reincarnated, having been dismantled and rebuilt on the same footprint but modified with re-claimed materials into a pottery studio. There Sarah crafts ceramic vessels that are as organic in their evolution as the house itself, and made with that same sympathetic hand and inspired creative touch,of course.
Sarah Maingot’s pottery is available at bestillceramics.com
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