Among the TREES

From the road this looks like an early Victorian cottage but inside it's a completely different story

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There can be few views as magical as the one from this sublime Dorset longhouse. Embedded into the hillside of an Iron Age hill fort in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, it has an uninterrupted panorama over the Marshwood Vale, stretching to the coast.

The early Victorian property, originally a one-bedroom worker's cottage, features in a landscape by Lucien Pissarro in Tate Britain but was virtually derelict when Majeda Clarke and her husband Gary bought it as an upmarket holiday rental 10 years ago. They already owned a nearby farmhouse, where they spent holidays with their children Zahir, Israar and Amara. To make the cottage habitable, they enlisted the help of an architect. “We didn’t want to destroy the view that you see in the painting,” explains Majeda, “so we kept the footprint of the cottage and built inside the original stone wall at the front, knocking down the three other walls and replacing the roof but keeping the height the same. From the road, it looks like the same flintstone cottage as in the painting - it's even painted in the same pink as the original - but it's a modern Scandi-style home inside.”