The MINDFUL HOUSE

Taking a hands-on approach and making everything herself, from kitchen cabinets to utensils, has given Freyja Cox Jensen a deep connection to her historic cottage

- HOLLY PHILLIPS

Freyja Cox Jensen’s Kent cottage is a holiday home with a difference. For 20 or so weeks a year, she works as a university lecturer on the other side of the country and lives in a rented place near her day job. When each term ends and the students return home, so does Freyja.

Living room

As storage is lacking in the kitchen, Freyja’s father constructed a display cupboard for all of her glassware. Cupboard in Pitch Blue estate eggshell, Farrow & Ball

It’s a bold approach to finding a good work-life balance. Equally decisive was her intention to look for an old property in need of attention. ‘I prefer to work with a blank canvas,’ she says. ‘It’s wasteful if someone else has done work and I immediately want to undo it.’

Freyja limited her search to a tightly defined 20-mile radius and identified a house she wanted to view on a property website. ‘I’d known about this group of houses for a while because they stand out on a hill. I came to see the house on Christmas Eve and just as I’d hoped, it needed a lot of work doing to it,’ she says.