Interior Designer in the Cotswolds
Style Cannot Solve What the Stone Has Already Decided
A good scheme will not rescue a Cotswold house that has been misread. These are stone buildings, most of them listed or inside a conservation area, and they carry rules you cannot decorate your way out of. Thick walls, small deep openings, floors that have shifted over centuries, and a conservation officer who will have a view on all of it. The decisions that matter here get made long before anyone opens a paint deck.
Andy trained in architectural technology and spent over twenty years on the technical side of major buildings before moving to residential interiors. He reads load bearing walls, service routes and where damp and heat actually move the way most designers read a colour palette. For a beamed cottage near Burford, or a barn outside Stow on the Wold being reworked from the inside out, that is the difference between a result that lasts and one that fights the building.
We do not design around a Cotswolds house and its problems. We work out what the stone will allow first, then design into it.
Chapter Seven Design is Andy and Joe Smith. On a project like this, Joe runs the part that decides whether the experience is bearable: the timeline, the trades who actually understand old stone, the order things have to happen in when a building is listed and nothing can be rushed. Months of work on a period home can feel relentless or manageable, and which one you get is mostly down to how it is held.
We take on full home renovations across the Cotswolds, and focused work on the rooms that carry a house, the spaces you actually live in. Either way the building comes first, because a home that is right structurally is the only kind worth finishing well.
Because we sit just over in Leicestershire we cover Warwickshire and the wider Midlands too, so a project on the northern edge of the Cotswolds is well within reach. If you are restoring a stone home anywhere from Tetbury to Broadway, we would love to hear about it.