An atmospheric 18th-century workers’ cottage in historic Greenwich

Stepping into the 18th-century workers’ cottage that belongs to Anna Rhodes and Fred Scott is much like stepping back in time. With its working fireplace, period-appropriate palette and narrow staircase, you would be forgiven for assuming the house has been brilliantly preserved, handed down from one conscientious custodian to another. Yet, when this creative couple first moved in, the cottage was almost unrecognisable from its current state.

“A family had been living here for twenty years and the house had been pretty neglected,” explains Anna, a production and interior designer who worked on Raine Allen Miller’s 2023 film, Rye Lane, and ‘Urchin’, the recently released directorial debut from Harris Dickinson. “The ground floor had a paper thin 90s extension on it, with very mean little windows, and all the original panelling had been covered up with postwar tongue and groove panelling or plastering.”

The renovation journey began by removing any unfaithful and unsightly additions to the building. As Anna says, “we slowly started peeling away layers of the building, travelling back through the decades until we hit the Georgian layer.” Perhaps the finest discovery was in the space that is now the dining room. “There was a tiny Victorian fireplace that was completely wrong for the scale of the room,” Anna recalls. “It started coming loose when we were removing the tongue and groove panelling around it, so we took a crowbar to it and discovered the original hearth.” Unexpectedly, Anna elected to leave the space empty. “Now you get to imagine what would have been there, rather than trying to replicate it. I tried hard not to do reproduction stuff. I prefer to let the building do the talking.”

Instead of indiscriminately stripping the house back to its original features in every instance, Anna took the time to think about what really worked. “My job has taught me how to look and feel my way into any space–and sometimes, you have to stop and say ‘it might not be accurate, but it is still worth keeping.’” Thanks to this unusual philosophy, you can be sitting in the cottage next to an original Georgian wall, look up, and see a “bizarro moulding” a previous owner added at a later date. Ultimately, Anna is always looking to make “appropriate, but interesting, design choices.”

When it came to choosing paint colours, Anna considered several alternate approaches. “The colour palette could have been informed by so many different things and looked totally different as a result, but I wanted the base colours to be period accurate.” In her quest for authenticity, she took a trip to Papers and Paints in South Kensington. “They suggested this gorgeous creamy white that looks like you can just dive into it. Most of the walls in the cottage are very neutral in grey sludge-y colours that would have been typical in a workers’ cottage like this.” Despite the neutral walls, the overarching feeling is that this is a warm family house. “I introduced colour through the woodwork, cabinetry and furniture. In those places, I tried to be more surprising with my colour choices.”

The landing, stairs and hall are painted in Farrow and Ball’s ‘Breakfast Room Green’.

Chris Horwood