Thatch me if you can

When looking for a compact country home, the cottage is surely perfection

- James Fisher

SOME three years ago, I sat in an office, anxiously, being stared down by the Editor of this very magazine. ‘What’s your favourite part of COUNTRY LIFE?’, he asked. ‘I adore the features,’ I replied, reading from the script I had mentally prepared. ‘They’re of an extremely high quality, varied, eccentric and always interesting and engaging.’ I got the job and the rest is history.

I lied of course. Not about the features (they are all of those things, and much more), but they were only my second favourite part. What I loved, and still love—and I’m sure I’m not alone—are the houses.

I love the Gothic masterpieces, the Palladian mansions and the Arts-and- Crafts style so perfected by Lutyens. However, nothing can beat the picturepostcard English cottage. That gentle wisp of smoke rising through the thatch on a crisp winter’s evening; the borders of the garden bursting with colour in the spring—it is, as Rupert Sweeting, head of national country sales at Knight Frank, says, ‘the quintessential English idyll’.

‘When I picture a traditional English cottage, I envisage a quaint thatched home on the outskirts of a Cotswolds village, with a pub and local shop only a short walk away,’ he adds.