Whitecross Farm

A lot of you in the UK will have heard of Baileys, a great vintage and vintage-style homewares shop based in Herefordshire. It is run by Mark and Sally Bailey who live on a farm and showcase their wares in a series of barns on their property. If you go over to their website and click 'the store', you can have a look around these barns. There is also a cafe on site, they've written two inspirational books about simple, recycled living... they seem to have the dream life!

To get to the point, when I was bored yesterday I had another snoop around Light Locations and came across Whitecross Farm, which I believe is their house. And what a house it is! OK, so a lot of people wouldn't want to live with so much raw wall and peeling paint, or such an austere atmosphere, but the colours are just that right kind of washed-out for me, and things like the flooring and furnishings are beautifully unfussy. I like the random bits of junk, the airiness of the colour scheme and the imaginative use of lighting. I hate it when a period house has been 'renovated' in the sense that it has had all the character knocked out of it, all the roughness smoothed over, all the corners sharpened. It makes me sad when someone has gone into a house and shoved downlighting, awful modern furniture and a big plasma TV into it. Urgh. I'd rather go the other way and be half-feral, living with cracked walls, dodgy electrics and having to wash from a bucket. Really I would. Although maybe not in winter ;-)



Anyhoo, these are some of the location photos of their house. I don't know how anyone really lives like this - where do you keep all your books and teddies?! :-)