Inside my chocolate-box cottage, I let my imagination run wild. By Mary Rose Young, 66
As I carefully painted my newest handmade pot, the tutor came over to speak to me.
‘So, what’s the inspiration for your work?’ she asked.
‘Um… having fun?’ I told her. ‘I want to make everything fun!’
I’d always been creative, and when I’d finished school, I went to art college where I’d discovered pottery. I loved the laid-back joy of making and decorating ceramics.
When I graduated, I tried
to settle down to a more conventional job, teaching English as a foreign language.
But it didn’t suit me, so I set up my own ceramics workshop.
Before long, I was selling bits and pieces at craft markets and it turned out people loved my work.
Many of my pieces were designed along an Alice in Wonderland theme, with whimsical flowers and crowns.
Eventually I was earning enough that making pottery became my full-time job.
And before long, my boyfriend and I began looking to buy our first home together.
A friend had recently got her own home and I loved the way she’d decorated it. It had got my creative mind racing.
Soon after, we went to look at a cottage in Lydney, Gloucestershire.
‘There’s a lot of work to be done,’ my boyfriend said, looking around the dark, almost cave-like interior.
‘It’s a blank canvas,’ I replied excitedly. ‘We can do whatever we want with it.’
And since the price was just £30,000, we decided to go for it.
I moved in my kiln and pottery equipment, then got to work on transforming our new home.
It was a daunting task, and though I loved an intuitive approach, I knew I’d need to do a bit of planning.
Bringing character back into the house was going to be a real challenge.
But because it was so dark inside, it meant I could get away with eye-popping colours!
The cottage had no corridors, one room just led straight into the next, so I knew I had to think about how the colours of each room went together.
But not all my decisions were so thought-out.
There was nothing more freeing than looking around and deciding: ‘I’m going to put spots on that!’
It filled me with a
childish joy.
I added a checkerboard splashback to the kitchen, with yellow wallpaper and little pink flowers.
A friend built us a custom spiral staircase that led up to what I called the Arabian tent room, where I’d laid down beautiful rugs and draped silk from the ceiling.
‘It’s like a playhouse for adults,’ I told friends.
A magazine from London even wanted to come and take pictures, which made me finish up my decoration pretty quickly!
‘Do you think you’ll do anything colourful to the outside of the house?’ a friend asked when she visited.
'It's a blank canvas'
‘If it was up to me, all buildings would be brightly coloured by law,’ I replied, laughing. ‘But I’m not sure that my neighbours would
be thrilled.’
Also, I told her: ‘I don’t want everyone to think I’m a hippie lunatic, even if I am one in my soul!’
So while the outside remained like a traditional chocolate-box cottage, the inside was another story.
A few years into living there, we added a pottery studio space on to one end
of the house. Then I really went wild.
It took me three months to paint the ceiling with stripes of floral patterns before adding one of my signature ceramic chandeliers, and covering the floor in multi-coloured tiles.
I operated my gallery from the house too, and visitors loved it.
‘I want it to feel like a kid coming into a sweetshop,’ I’d tell them.
Whenever I’d go into the village, I’d always get comments from the neighbours.
‘You’re from the colourful house, aren’t you?’ they’d say.
At first I was confused, because from the road I thought it looked just like all the others.
But then someone said: ‘When I was driving by at night, all the lights were on, and it was like looking into a rainbow inside!’
Just recently, we bought another little property nearby. We did it up in the same style, so we could rent it out as an Airbnb.
‘You know. I wasn’t really sure if I was going to like it,’ said one guest. ‘But being here has just made me feel
so joyful!’
Now I’ve spent almost
40 years transforming
the interior of my little cottage into a life-size dolls’ house — even though you wouldn’t always know it
from the outside!