Lisa O’Connor and her family have been living at Hawthbush Farm in rural East Sussex, England, for the past decade. They own an idyllic homestead on 140 acres dotted with ancient wildflower meadows and hundreds-year-old structures from where they operate a brewery, an all-natural skincare line —utilizing spring water found on the farm—and eco-holiday cottages. There’s nothing else that quite fits the bill when you think of the definition of picturesque.
“We were aware that there were ancient meadows and woodlands on our farm, so we contacted Natural England and invited them down to assess the wildflower meadows and what we needed to do to protect them,” Lisa says. Only 2% of the U.K. still has ancient wildflower meadows, and the family is working toward reinstating meadows on more of its land.
The family, who had previously lived 40 minutes away in Brighton, loved the serenity of the countryside. However, “it’s hard to find farms in the U.K., as they are typically passed down from one generation to the other,” Lisa says. But when they visited Hawthbush one day with their toddler son, “it was bathed in afternoon sunlight and was everything you could dream of,” she adds. The historic homes on the property, while inhabited for the past 50 years, clearly hadn’t been touched for a long time, and the land, which hadn’t been farmed in 20, had returned to its “organic status.” The main house—a rustic, modest 17th-century farmhouse—would be the family’s home but was small and cramped, and they wanted space for their young children to be able to play. The fixer-upper would need some major TLC from architects who were confident working with such an old building.
The main house was revamped with a glulam timber-frame barrel-vaulted roof structure covered in terne-coated steel.
