Sun’s out, beautiful Devon seaside town, 18th century façade, lovely owner, great interior designer. This was one of those Through the Keyhole moments when you know everything is going to be just fine.
Poplar Cottage in Budleigh Salterton certainly ticks all the right boxes and I’m not even through the recently painted grey front door yet.
‘Mum’s made biscuits,’ says owner Angela Riddell, just when this morning couldn’t get any brighter. ‘Look, she’s even given me a doily to put them on.’
Angela looks almost as pleased as I am to be here. She bought this elegant, perfectly proportioned house, just a pebble’s throw from the seafront nearly two years ago to be closer to her family.
Angela, a doctor in London, grew up in east Devon and her mum and sister both live nearby.
'Covid came and reset everything, didn’t it?’ says Angela, a consultant radiologist. ‘I realised that I wanted to have somewhere I could come and see family regularly and spend time with them. And it’s worked, it’s worked really well.’
Poplar Cottage was a great find. The house in the heart of Budleigh Salterton - a town recently named as one of best places to live in the UK by The Sunday Times - is an important local building, with the Grade II-listed front section dating back to 1792.
Angela shows me a fantastic old door finger plate taken from the house, the back of which has been written on by a series of Poplar Cottage’s previous owners. One of the signatures is by George W Cowd, a local carpenter and joiner, who notes that he painted the door here in 1888. George, also a coffin maker, is thought to have lived in the house and had workshops along Poplar Row.
There are also old documents which show that at one stage it was owned by the Duchess of Westminster. More recent owners have also had connections with Royalty.
‘The house has got this real history to it,’ says Angela. ‘So it’s rather boring now that a radiologist from London has bought it. I’ve got no royal connections whatsoever!’
Angela, however, was determined to do the right thing by this characterful cottage that has seen so much life. She didn’t want it to become another bolthole that would be shut up with the lights off in the few weeks of the year when she wasn’t in it.
Instead, she decided to create a luxurious, stylish home for lots of people to come and holiday in.
‘I could have just bought a house but what I didn’t want to do was take it away and make it a black hole when I wasn’t here,’ she says. ‘It had to be somewhere that would allow other people to enjoy it, to access the shops and support the local community.’
Poplar Cottage was structurally sound but needed a rethink inside if it was going to become an aspirational home from home. Angela knew what she needed to do - and also that she wouldn’t have time to do it.
‘It was so daunting,’ says Angela, who works a 50 to 60-hour week. ‘I knew it would take me two or three years and I’d basically have just a deck chair in the living room for a while, you know the type of thing… the reality of it all.
‘I’m fully aware of my limitations and although I know what I like, I don’t actually know how to create it. That’s why you have people like Caroline.’
Interior designer Caroline Palk of Ashton House Design in Ashburton has (by prior arrangement) just joined us in the kitchen. She has decades of experience in the design industry and is behind some pretty amazing residential and commercial interiors across the South West.
It’s not often that Caroline gets to come back and see the homes she’s worked on, so this is a real treat. In preparation, Angela was up late last night, straightening rug tassels and pictures to make sure everything looked interior-designer-ready.
‘You didn’t have to do that!’ says Caroline, laughing. ‘It’s just so nice to see you in here and enjoying it.’
Keen gardener Angela wanted her seaside home interior to be based on a colour palette inspired by natural tones, including the autumnal shades of her Cercis canadensis (forest pansy) tree in London to compliment the Cotinus coggygria (smoke tree) shrub growing here in the sunny courtyard garden.
READ MORE: Why you should visit Budleigh Salterton in East Devon
‘Angela told me what she liked and what she didn’t like (blue-and-white seaside theme was a no no) as a starting point,’ says Caroline, adding that once the brief was in place, she was pretty much left to get on with the job.
‘It’s great when you work with a client who puts their trust in you and allows you to do what you do,’ she says. ‘And it was a lovely, easy space to work in.’
‘Do you remember the sofa?’ says Angela, talking to Caroline about the logistics involved in getting the huge, comfy sofa delivered on time.
The delivery men had to be met halfway in a car park off the M5 near Bath.
‘Logistics are a massive part of our job, and I just thought, right, this is going to happen, we’ve just got to work out how to do it,’ says Caroline. ‘We worked out we could meet the delivery guys halfway.’
Angela was none the wiser about this episode until a long while after the installation date. In fact, she was mostly kept out of the loop when it came to any challenges with the project and very much enjoyed not having to make too many decisions.
‘You have to play to your strengths, don’t you?’ say Angela. ‘I mean, I sourced a little octopus hook for the keys which I was really pleased with, but it took two months to find!
‘It made the whole project so much better knowing I had someone to help me,’ she adds. ‘I had to buy the crockery and cutlery, duvets and pillows and, to be honest, that was overwhelming enough. I did one order a week and went to collect it after work.’
Leaving the detail to Caroline meant Angela could get on with her full-on day job and then come down and reap the rewards.
It’s fabulous in here. The sunny house ebbs and flows around you as you walk up and down. It’s three-bedrooms, two bathrooms but feels so much grander, and that’s thanks to the details. Layering of textures and textiles makes the bedrooms feel luxurious, plus the wall décor and artwork add colour and interest. And that deep, soft, sumptuous sofa downstairs, well, you could just lie-back there all day, looking out the window.
‘I do feel relaxed when I walk through the door,’ says Angela, who loves being here, in this town, in this house. ‘It’s exactly what I wanted,’ she adds. ‘It’s stylish, you have that wow factor, but you actually feel totally at ease in the space.’
Yep, I knew this was going to be a goodie.
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