25 Beautiful Homes – October 2006
Wed. October 18, 2006
First printed in Beautiful Homes Magazine, October 2006
Betsan Bowen first met her husband Tim when she bought a chair from an antiques shop where he worked. ‘There were a few more purchases after that until he finally asked me out,’ she laughs, ‘and yes, we still have that chair.’
At the time, Betsan was pursuing her career in the property business in London, but soon she was travelling down to Wales most weekends to help Tim trawl the estate agents of Carmarthenshire, looking for the perfect place to set up home. Surprisingly, they both spotted this cottage at the same time – Tim in a local estate agent’s window, and Betsan on the internet while in London.
It had been empty for 17 years, and both recall that, although drab and dispirited, it still managed to exude an air of pride and character. ‘I liked it straight away from the outside,’ recalls Betsan, adding with a wry smile: ‘then we stepped inside and realised the huge amount of work that needed to be done.’
The Bowens think the house was originally a fisherman’s cottage, as the sea is a couple of hundred metres away. While the windows were in disrepair, the original walls and doors were still in place. ‘We didn’t want anything that had been modernised,’ explains Tim. ‘This place hadn’t been touched at all, apart from a modern render on the exterior, so we didn’t have to undo any bad restoration.’
Several builders cast worried eyes over the state of the cottage and advised gut¬ting it totally, but Betsan and Tim were determined to restore its original rustic charm and integrity. A new roof was needed, and a proper lime render had to be applied to the exterior. New windows were then installed that were exact copies of the originals. ‘We often receive cold calls trying to sell us UPVC windows,’ says Tim, ‘but we’d never consider them – we like the interior to breathe.’
Probably the most arduous task of all was removing the Artex, which seemed to cover virtually every surface, and the weeks ran into months as Betsan and Tim painstakingly chipped away at it.
‘We were driven by economy,’ explains Betsan. ‘We didn’t have much money at the time, so we went along doing what we could afford.’ With only a couple of hundred pounds to spend on the kitchen, the couple had a stroke of luck in that a previous owner had developed a penchant for rescuing materials that were being thrown out from larger houses in the village. Slabs of slate and chimneypots were salvaged and stored in the garden, just waiting to be put to good use by Tim.
One of the pieces of slate was used to make a worksurface. Combined with their existing furniture and a dresser that the couple had specially made by a local craftsman, the kitchen truly is the warm and welcoming heart of the home.
Unsurprisingly, as both Betsan and Tim are unashamed maximalists, they have filled the interior with antiques, country pieces and fascinating collectables. Neutral walls make an ideal setting for their Welsh oak furniture, while china plates bowls and jugs jostle each other for space along crowded shelves, lending colour and animation to the rooms. Yet, although their friends may gently chide them about the ‘Bowen Folk Museum’, there is no sense of the chaotic or cutesy here, and no clutter or confusion, just an air of quiet comfort. Opening up the wall between the sitting room and kitchen added not only space but light to rooms which, as the cottage backs directly onto the cliff, had a tendency to be dark.
Upstairs, the rustic restoration continues, with bookshelves fitted into an alcove in the stone wall of the guest bedroom, and a framed sampler displayed on the wall. In the master bedroom, a traditional Welsh quilt hangs above the Victorian pine bed. ‘Quilts are difficult to display,’ says Betsan, ‘you need plenty of wall space, or beds, and you shouldn’t really store them folded.’ In the bathroom, Tim has used antique Delft tiles, collected over the years, around the sink.
As Tim points out: ‘the whole house has a comfortable, friendly feel to it. When people visit, they come in, sit by the woodburner, relax and say: “Oh isn’t this lovely?”. Well yes, it is.’ ME