How a tiny rented Cotswold cottage became a warm, inviting home for interior designer Joshua Hale

Fortune favours the brave. Joshua Hale stands as a case in point. The artist and interior designer certainly has his pluckiness to thank – at least in part – for his recent successes.

Take, for instance, his landing a job assisting Emma Burns, the joint managing director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler. ‘I followed her on Instagram and knew she lived nearby. Then I saw her walking through my village and just had to introduce myself,’ he says, recalling the day in 2020 he met her in Bampton, Oxfordshire. A few hours later, Joshua received a text inviting him for a socially distanced drink that weekend. ‘And so began my serious education in interiors.’

It could not have come at a better time. In the middle of lockdown, Joshua was panicking slightly. His first interiors project – revamping the residence of the provost of The Queen’s College, University of Oxford – had gone brilliantly. ‘I’d thought, naively, I was onto a winner career-wise,’ he admits. Then the pandemic hit and, without an established reputation, he found that the work dried up. While making as many paintings to sell as he could in his spare time – he paints in a variety of styles and has a preference for oils on canvas and board – he returned to his old job working as an artistic assistant to the watercolourist and designer Matthew Rice, who lives in Ham Court (featured in the January 2017 issue of House & Garden). Joshua’s chance encounter with Emma Burns proved to be fortuitous.

Dean Hearne

At the time, he was living in an unremarkable rental in Bampton. The village is still home, though now he is Matthew’s tenant, contentedly ensconced in a Victorian cottage at the end of his drive. When Matthew suggested he rent the house, he had never been inside it. ‘There were sitting tenants when he bought Ham Court, so he just left them to it,’ explains Joshua. Consequently, he had no sense of what lay within. ‘It was pretty grim,’ he says, laughing. ‘All buckling lino and laminate.’ The sitting room had an Artex ceiling and, like the kitchen, ice-blue walls, the memory of which makes him shiver. Totting up how much a revamp would cost, Joshua negotiated a rent holiday with Matthew and ‘blitzed it in a fortnight’.