Charming Farmhouse Kitchen in Dorset England

Step inside the kitchen of a 300-year-old thatched cottage in West Dorset, England, where florist and set designer Tattie Rose Isles has created the hardest-working, best-loved room in the house.

You walk straight into this kitchen from outside, which Tattie says is one of her favorite things about it. There's always someone at the table — painting, eating, playing — and the room absorbs it all. When she and her husband Fred arrived, parts of the cottage had been modernized past recognition.

Plasterboard covered the ceilings. There were far too many cupboards and units. So they took it back: stripped the plasterboard to reveal the original beams, removed most of the built-in storage, and simplified everything down. The centerpiece is a kitchen island Tattie designed and had made by a local carpenter.

The room had an awkward layout, with the Aga at one end and the working kitchen at the other, and every surface pushed to the walls. She admits she can't bear cooking — but if she has to cook, she wants to face whatever's happening in the room. The island solved it. It's been painted several colors over the years and will change again, but it earns its place every single day. Guests comment on it so consistently that it's now being added to her studio's collection.

The Aga is on year-round. It's the only cooking heat source in the house, and it dries clothes, dries wellies after the children come in from outside, warms the dogs curled up against it, and warms four sets of small hands wrapped around hot chocolate. Behind it sits the original open fireplace and bread oven, though the flue now belongs to the Aga.

The round table came from a family Tattie nannied for in London twenty years ago. She'd had a rectangular one before and found it hard. With a round table you can always squeeze in one more person — hence the benches, and hence how many children end up around it.

There's an extended window seat piled with blankets, a willow lampshade of her own design, art by friends, and a set of little French market egg cups that cost a euro each and might be the best purchase she's ever made.