Season's GREETINGS

Beautifully textured schemes make Tracey Gill's cottage feel particularly welcoming at this time of year

- SARA BIRD

When looking for her next project, location and land were top of the list for serial renovator, Tracey Gill. ‘I had a buyer for my last home which was a big manor house and I was in the process of buying a 30-acre smallholding but it fell through and I had to find something fast.’

The house she found was an old farm worker’s cottage just 10 minutes away but the location couldn’t have felt more rural. ‘The manor house only had an acre and felt quite suburban while this place has land. The fact it isn’t listed gave me the freedom to do what I wanted and that was a huge draw,’ says Tracey.

Tracey has lived in America in the past and her design drew on classic weatherboarded houses of the south with a veranda. ‘That look is actually old England, too – you see it in the vernacular of the Suffolk Downs into Kent and Sussex and it’s what the pilgrims took to America,’ she says. ‘The brief I gave myself was to bring New England style back to Sussex via Texas and the deep south.’