The Single Room
The seventh bed: a snug little room tucked off the landing, beamed and lime-washed, just right for a child or a guest travelling alone.
The seventh bed: a snug little room tucked off the landing, beamed and lime-washed, just right for a child or a guest travelling alone.
Open the dark plank door off the upstairs landing and the single room gathers you in. The walls are soft white lime plaster, and one is left as bare cottage stone, lumpy and lovely under the hand.
The single bed is made up in striped linen with a waffle blanket folded at the foot. Children take to it at once; the low beams and the enamel number on the door make it feel like a den.
A little shelf of poetry — Eliot, Auden, Heaney, Dylan Thomas — put there for exactly the kind of slow morning this room invites.
A great oak beam, gnarled and silvered with age, leans across one corner like the rib of an old ship, and the single bed sits beneath it.
It is the seventh bed at Well Cottage: the room that tips a family of six into a family of seven, or gives a solo traveller a corner all their own.
A little enamel plate on the plank door — the small touch that turns the smallest room into the children's favourite den.
Pine shutters fold back from the deep window onto greenery and birdsong, and in the morning the room catches the first low light.
Grown-ups find it just as easy as the children do, close enough to the other bedrooms to feel part of the house, far enough off the landing to be properly snug when the latch clicks shut.
Dusky-pink sheets, a striped pillow and a cream waffle blanket — soft layers waiting at the foot of the bed.
Four bedrooms, sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse. Check dates and book on Airbnb.