Interiors
Life in colour Pat Smith has filled her eclectic Cornish holiday cottages with happiness, thanks to an upbeat approach to using colour. She tells Fran McElhone how she created this fun, cheerful look olour elicits all sorts of emotions in us. Walk into Bosinver Farm cottages near St Austell and the explosion of colours including lime, magenta, mustard and turquoise, will surely make you feel happy. “My aim was cheerfulness,” says their owner Pat Smith. “To make people smile, that’s the mission.” There are 20 cottages at the Trelowth site, a former farm with a mention in the Domesday Book, which Pat and her husband took on two decades ago. “When we moved here, it was a collection of wooden chalets and barns which required a huge make-over,” says Pat. “We looked at it like a blank canvas. It took 12 years to get everything up to scratch.” Every seven years or so, the cottages get a makeover. It’s taken around two years for Pat’s energy to manifest in eight out of the 20 and attain their current jazzy charm. Colour is everywhere. But it is used against a backdrop of crisp off-white walls and exposed wooden beams. So the result is more subtle than one would expect and gives a contemporary edge to these rustic properties, which are surrounded by rolling pastures not to mention sheep, goats, horses, chickens, ducks and geese. “I love colour myself,” says Pat. “But it was a leap of faith because it’s not to everyone’s taste. However, I’ve found that even if people wouldn’t
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27/03/2017 11:30:42