From henhouse to family home: a thatched cottage in Ireland

It all started with eggs. As a child in the 1950s in County Meath, Liz Pickett would collect dozens of eggs from the large wooden henhouse on her family’s farm, before walking to school. For more than a century, Liz’s family have lived on this bucolic windswept corner of eastern Ireland, just yards from 12 miles of overarching sandy shoreline, looking over the kinetic Irish Sea, where the range of blue on offer eclipses even the most committed watercolourist’s palette.

“It was Baltic in there today,” says Liz describing her daily dip in the sea. “But you feel great afterwards, you become addicted.” Liz, who lives with her husband, Roger, and their basset hound, Poppy, built their home in the early 90s on the site of the former henhouse. “We wanted to keep and preserve the old-world charm and feel when we designed it, so we decided to build a thatched cottage.”

Liz is in the serendipitous position of owning six 300-year-old thatched cottages, beside her own home. She inherited the fisher’s cottages and the former henhouse from her parents who, in turn, inherited them from theirs. Her grandfather, a merchant seaman, bought the lot at auction in 1908. “I am the fourth generation to live here, protecting the land and cottages, but really we feel like caretakers in time, just looking after it.”

After Liz met Roger, who is originally from London, they were dividing their lives between the two countries, but decided it was time to put firm roots down in Ireland. “We wanted our own home to blend in with the landscape, so we decided it should be thatched, to preserve that rustic feel. We textured the walls so they would look the same as the original walls on the other buildings, which were built from big, rounded sea-stones from the local quarry.”

Roger, an engineer and self-confessed frustrated architect, designed the structure, collaborating with master thatcher Paul Lewis from Suffolk, who arrived with 2,600 bundles of reeds cut from reedbeds at Walberswick, to thatch the roof, along with planks of pine and oak and a collection of huge oak branches chosen as wind braces, a traditional way to support beams.

Building the house took two years. Inside, the vaulted timber ceilings were left unplastered. “We could not bear the thought of covering up Roger’s design, the beauty in the geometry, the curved shapes of the woodwork and divine honey tones. They were just too beautiful, so we decided to leave them exposed,” explains Liz.

Wood is the foundation of this home, from the solid oak flooring to the pine kitchen and vaulted ceilings stretching above and all connected with vast, hand-hewn oak supporting beams that needed more than a dozen men to lift them into place. The mantelpiece in the sitting room is framed by a large aspen trunk, felled from a local tree that came down during Hurricane Charley in 1986, and discovered by Roger in a local woodyard; it fit perfectly above the fireplace with a Turkish rug before the hearth.

Roger is passionate about timber and spends hours in his workshop turning driftwood and offcuts into bowls and platters, which Liz uses for cooking and displaying her flowers.

Each aspect of their house was carefully considered, from the dining room in the open-plan space, where the wall was designed to fit the cabinet, which was Liz’s mother’s and is filled with glassware, to the pine shelving that neatly fits under the ceilings and is the perfect height and length for their collection of Royal Copenhagen china.

A Welsh dresser that Liz and Roger found at an auction is filled with her mum’s collection of blue and white china, which Liz is now collecting as well.

The deep “eyebrow” curved window fitted at the top of the wall in the dining room allows the evening sunset from the west to spill in and light the space. A small oval window was included above the front door, inspired by the 5,000-year-old Neolithic Newgrange site down the road, which was built to align with the winter solstice sun. It inspired Roger to plan something similar in their cottage to usher more light into the hall. The thatch around this one small window detail took almost two weeks to complete.

“It is incredibly bright in here,” says Liz, who mentions meeting a fortune teller many years ago who had predicted she “would meet a stranger and move into a house with huge amounts of light”. She laughs. “Even with all this wood it never feels heavy, because it is so bright, plus the vaulted ceilings and the timber is soft like amber.”

The thatched roof has not been touched since it was created more than 30 years ago, the reeds ageing gently in the wind blowing in from the Irish Sea, as are Roger and Liz. “It is such a tranquil setting, when the doors close behind us the outside world just melts away and a wave of peace comes over you.”

cottages-ireland.com