The MINDFUL HOUSE

Taking a hands-on approach and making everything herself, from kitchen cabinets to utensils, has given Freyja Cox Jensen a deep connection to her historic cottage

- HOLLY PHILLIPS

Freyja Cox Jensen’s Kent cottage is a holiday home with a difference. For 20 or so weeks a year, she works as a university lecturer on the other side of the country and lives in a rented place near her day job. When each term ends and the students return home, so does Freyja.

Living room

As storage is lacking in the kitchen, Freyja’s father constructed a display cupboard for all of her glassware. Cupboard in Pitch Blue estate eggshell, Farrow & Ball

It’s a bold approach to finding a good work-life balance. Equally decisive was her intention to look for an old property in need of attention. ‘I prefer to work with a blank canvas,’ she says. ‘It’s wasteful if someone else has done work and I immediately want to undo it.’

Freyja limited her search to a tightly defined 20-mile radius and identified a house she wanted to view on a property website. ‘I’d known about this group of houses for a while because they stand out on a hill. I came to see the house on Christmas Eve and just as I’d hoped, it needed a lot of work doing to it,’ she says.

The house is one of a small row built for weaving families during the 1750s. ‘For a timber-framed house, it’s tall and thin and the ceilings are unusually high,’ says Freyja. According to hearsay, the houses were constructed by prisoners taken during the Seven Years’ War against the French and held captive at nearby Sissinghurst.