By Francesca Peacock
Dulwich is a London suburb with a magically rural feel. But there’s one house in the Sydenham Hill Conservation area that takes the air of countryside quiet to the next level. Ash Tree Cottage is a 200-year-old home with pale blue shutters that looks more like it belongs in Little House on the Prairie than somewhere with an SE postcode.
The four-bedroom cottage dates back to the days when Dulwich woods would still have been used for grazing sheep and donkeys, and with acres of green space nearby, it can sometimes feel as though the area has scarcely been urbanised. Mount Gardens, the private lane that’s home to the cottage, has retained an unusually bucolic feel with only five detached houses dotted along the road. But with train connections into central London, and galleries and museums close by, it’s an area that blends city and country.
The current owners, Francis Halliday and her husband, bought the wooden house in 2018 when they moved back to the capital. The cottage was formed of two buildings at the time — which the couple unified in a renovation project. As a part of that overhaul, they had the house entirely relined and insulated with lamb’s wool for warmth.
The house is listed locally, but not within the national listed building scheme, meaning the owners could add double glazing and underfloor heating as long as it didn’t change the appearance of the house. The interior previously had plaster walls, but the couple decided to replace these with wooden panelling that matched the exterior — and also lends the cottage the look of a clapboard house in Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard.
Halliday, an interior designer and muralist, decorated the inside of the cottage in the same style, with a blue and white nautical theme. With its bright walls and light oak floors, the feel is of a relaxed beach house relocated to a south-east London suburb.
But what about the practicalities of living in a wooden house? I asked Halliday if there were any differences to a brick structure and, rather surprisingly, she told me the most significant one was a saving on heating bills: in the winter, if the couple use their fireplace, they have to turn their central heating off to stop the house getting too hot.
The cottage is surrounded on all sides by a garden filled with flowers. When I talk to Halliday in late spring, she tells me just how full of flowers it is — so many, in fact, that her grandson claimed he had counted “150 bees”. The garden is incredibly private, too, with trees on all sides and not overlooked by anyone, thanks to being in the conservation area. “You could literally sunbathe naked in the garden, no one would know,” Halliday tells me.
I asked Halliday who she hopes will live in the house next. Her answer is someone who appreciates the area’s surprising urban-countryside location, and its feeling of space and charm. There “isn’t a window in the house that you look out of and don’t see something beautiful”.
Photography: Savills; Alamy
