When designing bespoke kitchens in the Cotswolds we often find ourselves falling in love with the honey coloured buildings, picturesque villages, market towns and historical homes.  It is an area rich with beautiful period properties ranging from more modest cottages through to listed manor houses.

The spine of the Cotswolds runs southwest to northeast through six counties, particularly Gloucestershire, west Oxfordshire and southwestern Warwickshire and Wiltshire.  The area is characterised by attractive small towns and villages built of the Jurassic limestone, known as Cotswold stone.  This bedrock of limestone is rich in fossils, particularly fossilised sea urchins, and creates a type of grassland habitat rare in the UK.  The predominantly rural landscape contains stone-built villages, towns, and stately homes and gardens featuring the local stone.

Designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) in 1966, the Cotswolds covers 787 square miles making it the largest AONB in England, roughly eighty percent of which is farmland.  During the Middle Ages, thanks to the breed of sheep known as the Cotswold Lion, the Cotswolds became prosperous from the wool trade with the continent, with much of the money made from wool directed towards the building of churches.

The town of Chipping Campden is notable for being the home of the Arts and Crafts movement, founded by William Morris at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.  Craftsmen and women followed in William Morris’ footsteps, whose country home was at Kelmscott Manor, and settled in villages throughout the Cotswolds and Gloucestershire.

Today the Cotswolds are a far cry from that idyllic timeless place on the verge of change, depicted in the 1959 novel Cider with Rosie; an evocative and poignant memoir of Laurie Lee’s childhood in a remote Cotswold village.  Now the Cotswolds attract tourists and those wishing to re-locate from London, as well as those looking for a slice of countryside with a second home in one of the UK’s most desirable areas.

Following in the footsteps of those relocating are London hotels such as Soho Farmhouse – set in 100 acres of Oxfordshire countryside, it offers a bucolic setting with 3 restaurants, spa and an extensive kids club and family friendly activities.

Thanks to tot the wool trade it is an area peppered with many historic manor houses, stately homes and properties of significant importance, we regularly use the area and its buildings for our bespoke kitchen design inspiration.  Notable buildings include Calcot Manor, a manor house with origins in about 1300 as a tithe barn, now a hotel and spa.

Chavenage House is an Elizabethan-era manor house, Chedworth Roman Villa, where several mosaic floors are on display, Malmesbury Abbey was one of the few English houses with a continual history from the 7th century through to the Dissolution of the Monasteries.