A Home with a History: Freddie and Sophie Garland’s blushing pink weekend bolthole

When Freddie and Sophie Garland started dating in their early 20s, it wouldn’t have dawned on Freddie to present Sophie with a bunch of flowers to woo her. Too obvious. For 30 years his parents had run a smart flower shop in Pimlico, selling the kind of striking blooms that Rowan Atkinson or Princess Diana might have swooped in to buy.

“As a child my parents’ flower shop wasn’t something I thought much about, but now I reflect back on it, it was a magical world with these amazing creative things happening in it,” says Freddie, sitting next to the wood burner in his thatched Wiltshire home. It wasn’t until Freddie had spent a stint working for the organic vegetable box company Abel & Cole after university, that the idea of a weekly flower subscription came to him – like the vegetables, but more fun.

A gazebo was erected in his parents’ garden, and so began eye-wateringly early trips to Covent Garden Flower Market with the help of his mother Caroline’s expert eye, followed by hopefully knocking on doors with the opening gambit: “Do you like flowers?”

“I remember cycling back home with three sets of bank card details that I’d scribbled down on a bit of paper on that first day. The third customer I got was this 23-year-old bloke who I don’t think realised what he’d signed up for, but it was proof that anyone would give it a go,” recalls Freddie, who bought a milk float off eBay for those early deliveries, soon realising that it reached a top speed of six miles per house. “I had to put a sign on the back that said: ‘Please don’t honk, I can’t go any faster.’”

Fast forward a decade, and now married to Sophie with two small children, Jesse and Sadie, Freddie’s Flowers has well over 100,000 customers in the UK and Germany who have the delight of freshly cut flowers landing on their doorstep each week. The couple spend the week in Kensal Rise, with Freddie’s offices in Battersea, but their latest project has been transforming a fairy tale-worthy cottage in the Vale of Pewsey into a weekend sanctuary.

Around every nook are vases filled with blooms – not just foliage hauled from the hedgerow, but electric-coloured roses and alstroemeria. “Flowers make a house feel alive, they really do,” says Sophie, who after her son was born, swapped teaching for interior design, training at KLC School of Design. “The way Freddie’s Flowers arrive cut and ready to be arranged, means there’s something quite ritualistic about them –­­ it’s 10 minutes to yourself to be creative.”

At their Wiltshire home Sophie has added her signature injection of colour and pattern – defying any expectation of what a Grade II-listed cottage on a winding country lane should look like: think leopard print sofa, humorous art by Sophie’s aunt Edwina Sandys, a wall-filling Indian tiger from Studio HÁM and jungle fabric from Jessica Osbourne. If Freddie’s hope was to make flowers a little more fun, a little less formal, then the same can be said for the couple’s approach to interiors. Let’s take a tour …

Sophie Garland: “Because we’re splitting our time between here and London, you can take risks. We weren’t thinking: ‘Are we going to get bored of that?’ And it’s been fun because we’ve done it from scratch. The house – which dates from the 17th century – was originally two cottages which were joined together about 20 years ago. There was no structural work that needed to be done – the only room we changed was a dressing room that we turned into a child’s bedroom – and so it was just a case of redecorating, including painting the outside of the cottage Farrow & Ball’s Middleton Pink.

“People thought we were a bit mad when we bought it because we’re both quite tall and it’s got these low-slung ceilings. But straight away we thought it was perfect with its thatched roof, and I remember us looking at each other, but not wanting to let on to the agent how excited we were. From the garden you can see the 12^th-century church in the village, and from the windows at the back of the house you can see the Alton Barnes White Horse and Salisbury Plain. Both of our families live in London, so there was nowhere for us to escape to. But this feels like a different world here.

“We didn’t have a single thing for the cottage, so it was quite daunting to begin with. There was a lot of looking on eBay and Vinterior. And about 10 minutes from here is an amazing place called Tryon Antiques at The Old Potato Yard near Devizes. It’s lethal going in there because her prices are really good and there’s always something new that’s popped in. Then there’s a great guy in Bristol at a place called Sofa Magic who made a lot of the sofas and armchairs. I started with headboards – mainly because you only need a couple of metres of material so don’t have to spend a fortune ­– using fabric from Clarence House, GP & J Baker, Svenskt Tenn and lots of stripes in the children’s bedrooms.

“When we moved in, we were quite overwhelmed with how much wood there was, and at one stage we were planning on painting all the doors red, and whitewashing the beams, but thank God we didn’t. We’ve really tried not to disrupt any of the old beams or characterful features. In the past we’ve tried to have white walls but every time we do, we end up repainting. So here we’ve painted the downstairs Farrow & Ball’s Pink Ground – which is a good colour for not feeling like you’ve walked into a pink house – with Farrow & Ball’s Radicchio on the bannisters for the stairs.

“We’ve recently had a mural painted on the upstairs hallway by an artist called Eliza Downes, who I came across on Instagram, and she came to stay for a week to do it. She draws her inspiration from historic patterns from around the world and natural forms, and we put together six or so images for her to work from of trees and leaves. We wanted it to feel like you were in a tunnel of greenery. I didn’t really think the children would even notice, but I have a photo of when Sadie had been crawling down the corridor, and then had suddenly stopped to marvel at it.

Freddie Garland: “Taking on a garden is quite overwhelming, and it takes time to appreciate it – there are surprises as things appear throughout the year, like the apple, plum and pear trees. I would absolutely love a cutting garden, but it’s a huge undertaking – Instagram sells us a lie with before and after pictures … But a lot of my inspiration for the business does come from the colours as they change through the seasons, which you notice much more in the country.

“We love Christmas here, with the fireplace to hang the garland that I make with fresh pine from New Covent Garden Flower Market, and beams to hang bunches of dried alliums from. I think my excitement for Christmas is something that stems from the flower shop as a child, when that time of year was ridiculously huge and crazy there. Last year we hosted, filling the cottage with our family who could all find different corners to hide or chat. But on any weekend, there’s a sense of relief of leaving London and heading down the M4, knowing that here’s a place where our children can have space and we’ll create our best memories.”

Further reading

Freddie’s Flowers
Sophie Garland