This is a kitchen that reminds you of being small, of going into the kitchen and feeling as if everything is grand and big and grown-up and how your kitchen will be when you have a home of your own. It conjures up images of families doing proper traditional things, baking together, cooking a Sunday roast and settling down to hours around the table with a good bottle of red and lots of stories. It’s not the kind of kitchen you would ever want to change, why would you, it would just get better and hold more memories the longer you kept it. Beautifully aged wooden floors are the base for all these Classic cupboards, huge pantries laden with fine ingredients, last summer’s jam and pickles all lined up ready for the winter. It’s a proper old fashioned family kitchen, even the shiny brown ladder is reminiscent of a country house, climbing up the ladder to the top cupboard, just to reach the great big oval platter that you only use for the Christmas turkey or when there’s a party in the garden that calls for a whole poached salmon.

The Lacanche cooker is sumptuous but practical, we’ve begun to really love the brass details and the slightly more fancy design of these classic French cookers, they just add even more depth to the whole sentimental vision this kitchen creates. There are little flashes of modernity too and that’s what takes it from a good old fashioned kitchen to a thoroughly well-considered and out of the ordinary room. Mid-century art sits alongside a clever collection of 19^th century dark wood country chairs. The elegant mix of lighting is really good, new and old styles mixing cleverly together and we particularly like the Moroccan handmade tiles from Fez, the company Emerie and Cie say of these tiles ‘no one is ever quite the same, nor totally different from its neighbour’, such a lovely description of a handmade tile. There’s so much to love about this Classic English deVOL Kitchen, each little detail almost goes unnoticed but I’m sure each one was given the appropriate amount of consideration. My final and favourite small details were the beautiful heritage wavy glass in these floor to ceiling sash windows that gave a totally different view of the outside world than a flat piece of glass. The second delight was the coffee machine, not a thing I expect we would have found in our kitchens in Georgian times when this house was built, but so important to this household.