A 500-Year-Old Farmhouse Kitchen in Surrey England

Interior designer Louise Jones moved the entire kitchen of her roughly 500-year-old cottage on the Kent–Surrey border into what used to be the dining room, purely so she could open onto the garden and its far-reaching views of farmland. Louise runs the London design firm Fairfax Jones and has been an interior designer for around 22 years, after briefly and unhappily training as an accountant.

Throughout her own home she works sympathetically with the building's age, using antique furniture, textiles, tiles, and metalwork rather than anything from a mood board. The kitchen is deliberately freestanding, because a continuous run of fitted units simply didn't exist in historic English homes. She converted an old dresser base into the sink unit, dropping in a butler's sink under a marble top, with a dishwasher integrated alongside.

A scrubbed farmhouse table anchors the room, and everything had to survive three dogs, horses, and endless winter mud. When she lifted the previous owners' cream carpet, she uncovered the original brick floors running right across the ground floor. They needed days of Cinderella-style scrubbing on hands and knees. The splashback is set with roughly 400-year-old Portuguese tiles whose pattern, she notes, later inspired English rug designs. Open shelving displays very old porcelain, including a teacup she dates to around 500 years old. The original inglenook fireplace was already here; she painted its back a stronger khaki green to play off the copper pots, and lights a fire the moment the temperature drops, much to her wood-chopping boyfriend's dismay.

Original beams overhead — possibly reclaimed from a demolished house or old ships — cast-iron radiators, and a shaped splashback complete the sense of a home that has evolved over centuries. Next door, the old kitchen is now a pantry, full of food and auction finds: Delft plates from the 1600s, a coach-house cabinet, Smeg fridges, and a decorative Alpine cabinet from a Swiss or Austrian chalet.