In the dappled light of a sunny Oxfordshire morning, we headed for a Seventeenth Century cottage perched near the gentle banks of the Thames. Situated in Clifton Hampden it was updated in the Sixties by Christopher Gibbs, as a country retreat away from his celebrity customers in London, Paris, New York and Marrakech.

It would have been here when Charles Dickens captured the charm of Clifton Hampden in The Dictionary of the Thames from 1885:

“This picturesque little village, situated at the foot of a bold bluff, rises abruptly from the somewhat flat country around. The cliff is surmounted by the church and vicarage and is clothed with luxuriant trees down to the water’s edge. The village, a pretty collection of old-fashioned cottages, all of which are bright with flowers.”

We entered bare rooms that used to unfold like secrets, with tapestries of velvet and faded chintz, Persian rugs, worn soft by decades of footsteps and hand-carved armchairs inviting both conversation and solitude and set out to bring a taste of the travelling interior designer to this retreat for a more modern aesthete, dreamer and storyteller.

The sitting room was all about comfort so we put Berber style cushions on a large L shaped sofa reflecting the oil of Tangiers in the background and what looked like a hand me down bobbin legged chair in the background that might have been in the cottage in Dickens time. Dried flowers from the expansive garden in confit pots decorate the fire place.

The kitchen was so beautiful with its early Delft cracked tiles so we made sure the terracotta brought the blue out and created a scene that looked like pieces that had been brought by friends or from travels across Europe to the med and then on to North Africa were scattered around.

Marianne Faithful once bedded down in the study room so we put her most famous single on the desk in homage to her and a chintzy lamp that brought Christopher Gibbs into the room. We think Charlotte Perriand would approve of the Les Arcs chair that had been restored crudely with studs so looked like Gibbs might have pulled it out of a local barn set at an angle with the iconic OMK desk.

The product of a meticulous, years-long renovation by the celebrated interior designer and antiques dealer. Gibbs’s masterful touch brought the cottage back to life, restoring its original features with precision and care while ensuring its charm would endure for generations to come.

It was not easy to stage a tilting chimney breast but we did it with archaeological dig ceramics.

The staging was all about found objects, the bed had to be set on the crates we brought our accessories in as we could not get our usual floating platforms up the stairs. All in all it was an enjoyable day out and we had a lot of fun creating a small space to dream in.