Inside Our Cosy English Cottage 🧺 💛 - Full Nancy Meyers x Ralph Lauren House Tour

I meant to be talking to people. I meant to be talking. Hello and welcome to our house tour. So we have been in this house a couple of years now and I feel like it is finally getting to the point where I'm happy with it. You know we both love it here. I feel like this is the first house we've been in where it really feels like home. I think it's time to give you guys a proper tour and show you around. We're starting off in, it's kind of like an open plan kitchen diner with all the animals. This was, as you can probably tell from the ceiling, originally a conservatory and there was a wall here. It's a massive thick wall. I will insert pictures as I'm talking so you can see what I mean. And essentially the previous owners did an incredible job of knocking through and creating this lovely big kitchen diner space. And I absolutely love this space. It is very bright. It is very cheery. It does get kind, it does get hot in the summer. In the winter it's not too bad I have to say. It's not as bad in the winter. And this you will have seen in a recent Nancy Meyer's kitchen makeover video. So this is sort of like the relaxing area. So we've got this sofa that we absolutely love. It is probably my, I think it's my favourite sofa in the house. We got it from and I just love it. I love the check print. I love the colour. I love how soft it is. And then you'll have seen in a recent video that I did wallpaper with this sort of textured wallpaper to give it just a little bit more interest. I didn't want to add a lot of colour in here. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of plants, a lot of knickknack. And we added in this lovely shelf where I have all of my lovely bits and bobs on display that I just love collecting. If you're a regular to my channel you'll know that we go to a lot of car boot sales, charity shops, all that sort of thing. So this is just a few elements of my collection that I've built up over years and years of collecting. So this doesn't by any means happen overnight. This is definitely a long term thing. And also to caveat this video by saying, I love interior design. I'm very much a home bird. I don't really go out very much. My home is where my heart is, absolutely. So to some people this may be extravagant, it may be a lot, but this is what I choose to spend my money and my spare time on and it's what makes me really happy. Everybody has their thing, their hobby, their passion and this is absolutely mine. So let's carry on the tour. I think we'll flip and I will show you the other side, so what I am looking at. This is kind of the opposite space of what we were just looking at. So the sofa is right there in front of me and it's currently got all of the animals on it. Obviously the main thing is our lovely, it's kind of like a, yeah, it's a wood burning stove with an oven compartment. So this is the oven side of it and then that is the actual wood burner side of it. And of course you can, you know, cook on top of it. We don't necessarily cook on top of it too much in this space because it doesn't have an air vent, although we can open one of the windows in the roof, so it kind of works, but we tend to use the oven more than anything else. We actually bought this from our old house and we installed it into, it was an old Victorian tiny little two up, two down property it was, and we installed it into the chimney breast. So we stripped back all of the brick, popped this in there and it looked lovely, but we weren't there very long and we thought we can't leave it because I just, it's the most glorious thing in the wintertime. It's honestly, I think, my favourite thing in the whole house and I know it's my fiance's as well and having it on in the wintertime is just, it's the best thing. It gives off so much heat, it's lovely and warm, it's so comforting. Obviously, you know, we can also boil kettles, cook food, all sorts on it, so it really is a lovely addition to our household. You can kind of tell that this is the dining space, this is the dining space of the kitchen, so we've got this table here, which I actually got from Facebook Marketplace for £100, so it does actually extend, it has a leaf in the middle that comes out and we have two extra chairs that are actually in the attic. So it does sit six people come Christmas time or, you know, if we're hosting friends and family and all that sort of thing. I sanded it down, restained the top and the seats of the chairs and then I obviously painted the woodwork and the legs a sage green because that's kind of the theme in this part of the house. It's quite soft, pastel-y, pale blues, pale greens, soft beiges, greys, that sort of thing because I like to use a lot of jute, sheepskin, leather, wood, wicker, all that sort of thing. So there's lots of those sorts of natural elements dotted around the house which I suppose is quite on brand, being called natural living on this channel. So I thought I'd show you the space behind the dining table here. We obviously have a massive rubber plant and an ivy growing down here which I absolutely love and then we have a little Portnum and Mason basket here with our, they're basically our firelighters, I'll show you. Our little firelighters and some matches in there, a little coal chute with our amazing woodlits, little roasty toasties in there and then we have a basket with our kindling and then of course we have to have a cat scratcher. I do also have an aloe vera plant here because I am quite clumsy and I'm always burning myself in the kitchen cooking either on the wood stove or on the actual oven so having an aloe vera plant is very helpful, it's very good for burns. This is the DIY sort of grid I ended up doing on the patio door, it's quite tricky to show you but they turned out really well, they look really good. Unfortunately we have had to put a fly screen on the doors because I love having the doors open in the summer time but obviously you get a lot of flies so we've popped that on and then the animals can just come and go. I'll just do a quick pan around so you can kind of get a feel for the space and then yeah, all the animals are fast asleep, bless them. We kind of have this intermediary space here, this is where the animals eat and drink, they have their food. I used just again jute place mats for the two cat bowls and the blue and white bowls were actually from HomeSense. Embers is again another jute mat, again from TK Maxx and then we have this lovely big plant here in the middle and this is actually a bioethanol so you can add fluid into here and it gives off a little bit of heat but not very much. We don't really use it, we basically put this in before we installed the word burning stove which is just behind you so that was just intermediary to kind of make do. And then this piece of art I absolutely love, I got this for my partner for Christmas last year and it's basically of a dog that's meant to look like Ember, I think it's supposed to be a Labrador made out of feathers, they look like pheasant feathers. And then this is the door into our pantry, I'll take you in there now. This is the entrance to the pantry and when we were viewing the house this is one of the things that I absolutely loved about it because it's sort of that additional space that you don't normally get in new build houses. So our house was built sometime in the mid 1800s I think, so it's very old. We think it used to be the which is so cool, I love that, I love houses that have history and have new life sort of breathed into them. I think it's, yeah, I just absolutely love it. This is the pantry, so we have all of our practical things in here like our microwave, coffee machine, washer, dryer and of course all of our bits and bobs and paraphernalia. And then we have all of our appliances up here, things like the slow cooker, the air fryer, all of that sort of thing. So just giving you a bit of a close-up here you can see the air fryer, the slow cooker, all of our jars of food, wash basket, a little stool there because the shelves do actually go up very high and I can't reach them, can't reach the top. And then we can slowly pan around, I don't want you to feel travel sick if I'm too quick with this. We kind of have this area of the pantry which is a lot more utilitarian, you know, we've got all the pet food, a lot of cleaning products down here, the snack bins here, things like the mop, the broom, and a lot of squashes that I have recently harvested from the allotment and need to do something with, so stay tuned for that. And then this is where I decided to put my onions because you need to keep them in the dark so they're all braided. So this is the main part of the kitchen which I'm sure most of you are very familiar with. I absolutely love the layout of this kitchen, it's a very sociable design in that you look out, you have this lovely island, you have the sofa there, the dining table there, and then the French doors going out onto the garden. So yeah, I really love the way that it just kind of flows in this house, I think it's really lovely. We've got the sage units, we've got wooden oak tops, we've got a lovely Belfast sink and an antique brass tap. We obviously have the garland above the units as well that I absolutely love. I am thinking I'm going to switch that up in next week's video for very much an autumnal themed one. I think the next video is going to be, yeah, an autumn decorate with me. So I'm going to refresh this with foraged plants, dried grasses, leaves, all that sort of thing. So if you're interested in the kind of interior design-y, autumnal decorating, then make sure you subscribe for next week's video because that's, yeah, I'm really excited to get filming on that one. So I thought I'd talk you through this area in a bit more detail because there's quite a few bits and bobs and knickknacks. We have our kettle and toaster, we have a little lamp down here because I like to create that soft warm lighting especially in the kitchen. We actually have this antique tea chest which is copper and brass where we store our tea. I don't know if you'll be able to see that but yeah, it's got tea written on it there which is lovely. We've got that from an antique store. We've got some nice wooden stackable measuring cups which I think I got from Dunelm quite recently in the sale actually. And then this is an old ginger beer bottle that again I think I got from an antique store. These kind of things really aren't that expensive, this is just a couple of pounds but I just loved it. And then the pheasant feathers I got, I basically kept them out after Christmas because I stuck them in a lot of wreaths and garlands and things and I've just, yeah, popped them all into this jar. And we have this lovely green plate, sort of serving platter that I got from, I think it was a flea market for like a fiver. This is, I think she's a Norfolk-based artist. She uses real wool and just uses, and has obviously made these little sheep and I just think it's really sweet. And then we have the apothecary drawers. We bought them years and years and years ago from Etsy I think and they were, originally we got them to store tea bags in them but we actually store all of our tea in here now, in all the jars. So I think that's actually currently empty but I love it. I think it's a really beautiful display piece so it stays there quite happily. We've got a salt lamp here because again I love the warm orangey glow. We've got our cookbook on a stand. Got a lovely little handmade tea light holder which I picked up from a charity shop for again a couple of pounds. So that is pretty much everything in the kitchen, diner side of the house. We're now going to go through into the living room. So I thought I'd show you this space first because as you come through the kitchen door which is literally just here on your left is this sort of cubby hole. And again this is another thing when we were viewing the house it was just like an additional space that I really liked and thought was a bit quirky and a bit different because it's just, it's essentially like a mini tiny little library nook. So it is all of the shelving here has been put in and we've obviously filled it with all of our books. As you can tell we love our books, I love reading, it's one of my favourite things and I think it adds like a really nice pop of colour to the room as well. I've kind of organised the books in terms of colour rather than like alphabetically or anything like that. And then we have some baskets along the bottom where we have things like craft stuff, boring stuff you know just as many bits and bobs down there. So it's a really handy space, it's really really nice. And here we have the living room. There's only two rooms downstairs, obviously the conservatory part is like a modern extension so the house again is just sort of two up two down really. Originally the houses were I think one big block and they've over time kind of been divided into smaller houses. So they've had a I'd have loved to have seen what they looked like originally you know back when they were built but this is what we have today. I kind of joke that this is like my Slytherin common room because of the colour because it's very dark and very moody and I am a massive Harry Potter fan so it does kind of give a little bit of a Hogwarts vibe I suppose on like a teeny tiny scale. Incidentally I'm not a Slytherin I'm a Ravenclaw just saying. Anyway please let me know, please let me know if you've got houses down in the comments I would love that so much. Anyway we went for this lovely deep colour I think it was Dulux Heritage range and the shade was Mallard as in the duck. Because we live in an old house there are you know old houses are typically built quite crookedly and close to each other and old houses are typically quite dark aren't they. So this was a dark room and I thought because that room is so bright and airy we could absolutely kind of lean into the dark colours in this room. Luckily the panelling was already here which is incredible because whoever did it did such a good job there's a lot of detail in it and I'm very very grateful. We also put in the dark LVT herringbone flooring which I absolutely love the wooden flooring I think it finishes it off really nicely in this room. So we have this lovely big corner sofa which we actually bought from our old house. I wanted to add in a pop of like bright colour so I've gone for a few bits of sort of a rusty burgundy burnt red colour throughout the room. I'm conscious I don't want it to look Christmassy because obviously it's red and green but I think it just about kind of gets away with it in this space. So some of you may recognise this from a flea market haul that I went on recently. So these are Reader's Digest in Flight Comedic Dictionaries and I found them in a local like a local bookstore and they were free which was amazing. This is the view from the sofa so you can kind of see the books in there all the lovely colours, a few willow down here and then this is the television and there's not much to say here. We kind of have a few vintage chests that are my fiancée's, another lovely big salt lamp and a plant, a lantern and some sort of festoon lighting going down there from the very tall ceilings and then yes we have the stairs here which we stripped the carpet off, painted it, sanded it and had the runner put all the way up the stairs and we're really really chuffed with how it looks and just to give you a close-up of the flooring here. I'm very pleased with it. This is the mantelpiece so again I just love having a real fire. There's something so I don't know kind of innately caveman cavewoman about it I suppose. So we've got our log burner here. To start from the top we have this printer's tray so it's an old vintage printer's tray I got years ago from again flea market and we've just filled it with trinkets, keepsakes, a lot of my crystals and then we've got the styling so we've got a lot of brass and copper and gold to try and warm up this room because obviously it's a very dark and moody room and then this is a satin spa lamp. I think again I got this from ebay years and years and years ago and it's really lovely it gives us a really nice warm lighting and then a lovely plant which is doing very well it's quite happy here. We've obviously got all the fire, paraphernalia, eco coal, fire lighters, throw blankets, kindling in here, all that sort of thing and then this was another sofa that well we bought it from our old house. I think maybe in hindsight I may have gone for more traditional style sofas in this room. Sometimes with interiors everybody has their budget right so you've got to do work with what you have. I would love to get more traditional style sofas in here and perhaps not black but it is what it is. I'm not gonna spend you know thousands of pounds on new sofas when these are so comfortable they work perfectly well and they don't stick out like a sore thumb. There are a few random bits in this room so we have these brass bugs going up the wall. I love anything weird and quirky and then we've got chasing them down here and then on the coffee table this was my fiancee's brands which we sanded down, stained and painted. This is the footstool that me and my mum reupholstered and we added the the kind of black fringing around it. This is actually a liberty fabric that my mum got me for Christmas. This is the styling we have on the coffee table. This is a copper tray and I love the sort of mock which I don't know if it's crocodile or snake skin but I thought that was really cool. Just have a lantern, a lovely red candle and then this is actually an LED lamp. There we go. This is the boot room. I've actually done this house tour in reverse. I realised this is the front door so normally you'd start here and then go into the living room. This is a lovely addition to the house. We've got all of the shelving and the hooks and we've got a little bench here where you know you can just come in take off your muddy boots, your jacket and just hang it all up. It's quite it's a very small space it's a little bit tricky to film in but I will give you a little tour of it now. It'll be easier if I hold the camera but obviously that's the front door. We do have a curtain that we pull over the front door in the winter to keep the warmth in. So the flooring is we have this lovely sort of is it choir matting and then we have terracotta tiles here where we put as you can see all the muddy boots and shoes and baskets and yeah we've got all of our coats and things and shoes and bits and bobs up here. Yeah there's not much to show you in this room I don't think. This is modelled by Willow now. Okay so that is everything downstairs. I'm going to take you upstairs now to give you the second half of the tour. Okay so this is the landing at the top of the stairs. It's a very narrow landing as you can see. To try and make the space a little bit bigger I have popped a mirror at the end of the landing. It's not my favourite mirror I would like to replace it with something a bit more traditional and with something a bit more character but does a job in it reflects light down this corridor. I have put lots of pieces of artwork like along the walls in here. I love old maps and old paintings of the countryside and the artwork here. These are actually, I got another frilly market, but they are French patterns taken from like an old French magazine and they're so so pretty. I really really like those and then along here we have a bookcase with some more books in it and just a few you know bits and bobs. I love collecting old bottles. I don't know why I just love them. This one says poisonous not to be taken. I just think there's I don't know something really cool about collecting old vintage bottles and they're really nice to pop you know like stems and flowers in them and then we have the rug along the floor. So this is actually from Amazon and I did get it quite recently and it's really really soft. I would definitely recommend it and it fits perfectly along here because it's nice and narrow but it just adds a little bit of something to the space and then at the top of the stairs we've got our bathroom. So this is quite simple, quite minimal. There's not a lot going on in here. It's a lovely traditional suite which I really like with chrome fittings. Again it's quite classic and quite timeless. So we've got the lovely large sink. We've got the claw footed bath here. I put in a glass shelf and a mirror above the sink here and the fringe by the two candles which I do like when I'm in the bath which is really nice. I would like to replace the mirror with something a bit more traditional. Again this mirror is something we bought from our previous house which is a bit more modern inside. So yeah I've got my eyes peeled for something a little bit different but I do like the oval shape of that. So yeah we shall see. And then I do have this piece of artwork on the wall which is of, it looks like an old farmhouse on the moors. So it's nice to be in the bath and admire the artwork and fantasise about being in such a beautiful house one day. We have a few bits of pottery on the windowsill, more house plants, a lovely by the plant here that is obviously very happy. This blue and white china vase that I got from a charity shop. Honestly I think it was maybe a pound or something. And then we have our shower cubicle here. There's not really much to say about that. It's just a nice shower and that's it. That's pretty much it in the bathroom. I painted this in, I think it's called Dulux Natural Hessian. So this is actually the same colour as my office and again I did colour drench this so I painted the ceiling in the same colour and all around the windowsill it's all the same colour in here just to help make it feel a bit bigger because it is quite a small bathroom. You know it's very close, like you're on the wide angle lens at the moment so it may look bigger than it is but I can almost touch both sides of the room if I spread my arms out. So it's quite dinky but it is lovely. So this is our guest bedroom. Again it is quite a small room, everything is much smaller upstairs. We have a cupboard here which basically forms a built-in wardrobe and it's built in over the head height of the stairs which is why it starts quite high up. And then we kind of have this nook behind me where a king size bed does just fit in there, it just fits. There isn't space for a bedside table so we have a little side table here and a little touch lamp. I really like the colour in this room, it's like a really soft kind of sea greeny blue. It's very calming, it's small but it's lovely and I particularly love the curtains actually in this room, I really love the pattern of them. They were from Dunelm and we've got the same in our master bedroom and the quality of them is really good. I was very impressed with those actually. I'm gonna flip you around and just show you the little unit that I've got behind, well for the right of you, because that was a little DIY Facebook find. This is a little unit that I absolutely love, it is all wicker, it's absolutely beautiful, I love it so so much. So I found this on Facebook marketplace for £10! So I have painted it and I just absolutely love it, I think it's so sweet and it fits perfectly in this space. And we've got on here a lamp which I did actually film a video where I added the trimmings onto it and just a couple of books, Rediffuser Candle and the Blue Lace Agate Crystal. And you can see we've got pieces of art on the wall, so this is quite a blank wall at the foot of the bed, so I'm thinking of potentially more paper in this, I think that would be really nice. And Willow who likes to follow us around. This is the bed and it literally, just as you can see, fits in this little corner here. So it is very cosy when you're in here, it's really nice. And then the little marble side table and then that's the cupboard. And then that is the room, it's quite small but it is perfectly formed isn't it Willow? So this is the bedroom, again it's quite a small room and you know nearly touch both walls. So I did wallpaper the chimney breath which I absolutely love. A few of you commented in my last video about the wallpaper that I used, again it's actually from Dunham, I think it's called Arboretum. I did link it somewhere, I'll link it again in case anybody's interested. But it was really, really nice to work with. I never thought I'd say about wallpaper but this was actually my first attempt at wallpapering and my mum kindly taught me how to do it basically. I really like it, I think it's lovely. I love the birds in it, I love the leaves and the acorns. Yes, I just think it's really, really sweet and it ties this room together really nicely. So this is my dressing table which was an old pine desk that my auntie and uncle gave to me and I basically sanded down the top, re-stained it and then painted the bottom bit and I recently re-kind of rub and buffed. You can see there's a theme during this house tour. I'm quite impulsive with my little DIYs and I'll just do them off the cuff. So I redid the handles here and I think that they look really nice. The lamp, again I did the fringing in another video. I have some photos from our holidays there. This is my vision board which I do the start of every year, just in terms of things that I want to aim towards for the year. This beautiful big mirror I bought from, again it was another antique centre, but it was on sale for a pound. It was an absolute steal, I'm really, really chuffed with that. Then we also, I will zoom in and show you, we also have lots of more plants. There's a little bowl as well that I keep on my dressing table that I put all of my lipsticks and lip balms in just so that they're like really easily accessible. Over here I have my bureau where I do my day job, where I do my work. So I literally just wheel the chair over and do my work all over there. So I've just flipped you around and again you're on the wide angle lens because otherwise this would be so zoomed in. So this is yeah the chimney breast and this beautiful mat that I've got here and then we have this lovely chest where I keep loads of throw blankets and I actually have this cloche that I got from Sophie Allport and I've just filled it with the heads of hydrangeas that we grew in our garden last year and they just dried out and I just filled them with that and I think it looks nice. It looks quite cool, it's just something a bit different. I have all my shelving here where I like to style my bits and bobs like I have some more books, I have a speaker, my teddy that I was given the day I was born. Yeah lots of books and artwork. I really like old botanical prints, I just think there's something really beautiful about them so I like to collect those like as and when I find them. Then this is the bureau so this is where I work. I won't open it because it's full of stuff, it's full of all my work stuff at the moment so it's to just keep all that locked away nice and tidy in here. This I got from basement marketplace, I think it was like 50 quid so yeah a lot of stuff in here is second hand and old. I just think stuff like that has a lot more charm about it. I'm one of these people where my house will never be done. I'll always be tinkering with things and playing with things and adding bits and bobs here and there as I go. I kind of enjoy that though, that's what I love doing. So last but not least this is our master bedroom. This room I painted again quite a dark green, it's a different paint from the one in the lounge. It's a bit more of like a lighter more olivey like sort of mossy tone than the one in the living room and again we colour drenched it so the ceiling is also this dark colour which in a bedroom I love. I am a very light sleeper so the darker the room the better for me I really like that. This is the bed, this is from Dusk I believe and it has like a lovely herringbone pattern on the headboard which is lovely. This is actually a projector so opposite me I will show you are we have some built-in wardrobes and they're a lovely sort of cream stone colour so we can project onto them and basically watch you know whatever movies we want in this room. So that's a really nice touch and I do love watching a movie in bed, it's one of my favourite things. Because of the way that the room is laid out there isn't space for a television in this room because this whole back hall is all built-in wardrobe so there's just nowhere to put Kelly. The bedside tables are again from Dusk and the lighting, these bedside table lamps mounted on the walls are from Dunown. They're actually ones for like a physical plug-in so they're not like wired into the walls or anything, there's a plug underneath. And this is the windowsill so we've just got lots of plants on here, a piece of artwork, some candles and some incense and lots of old vintage books. I think I like to give height to things by styling them with books. Then behind the door we've just got a few more pieces of artwork here. I love these two, they're quite haunting and spooky. I like quite spooky gothic-y art and again another map, I love a good map. I just think they look really lovely there. So the final bit that I have to show you is the garden. Now it has literally just stopped raining and it's kind of drizzling a bit and it's really cold so I'm gonna overlay a few clips over this. So you can see behind me is the kind of seating area, we have this lovely old bistro table that I inherited and I painted and I've put a little parasol in it and it's very sweet. In the summer it looks lovely with some nice cushions out there. I have planted the borders with an apple tree and some evergreen shrubs and also a lot of hydrangeas over this side because this side gets a lot of shade and obviously hydrangeas like their water. And I did paint the fences, so the fences were originally kind of like an off-green colour and I painted them with this, I think it's called country stone and it's lovely and warm and bright and because it's such a small space I feel like it really brightens up the area. Lots of herbs, mint, fennel, lemon balm, oregano, whatever, you name it I probably have it in pots in this garden. So I think that that is everything, I'm not going to show you the cabin because that's my partner's space, that's for him so we will respect that. But yes that is the house tour, I really hope you guys enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up if you did enjoy it and if you want more home-based natural living content then please do subscribe to my channel. As I said next week's video is going to be diving into autumn so I feel like I'm finally, I feel like the weather has made up my mind for me. I was happy to cling on to summer for a bit longer but no the weather has said no, autumn is here so okay fine we will listen to the weather. We'll see you here at five o'clock next Sunday, have a lovely rest of your day, stay happy and blessed be.