Into the woods: restoring a Welsh hill cottage

Mark and Sally Bailey met in an auction house in Pontypridd in south Wales 38 years ago, bidding against each other on the same brass and iron bed. Sally won the bid and convinced Mark to help her transport the bed back to her top-floor flat in Penarth. As a thank you, that evening she took Mark out for dinner on Penarth pier. Four months later, they were married. “When you know, you know,” says Sally.

The makings of a successful business partnership (the shared aesthetic, a willingness to act on instinct) were there from the start. The couple went on to found Baileys, an award-winning homeware brand that has evolved over three decades. “We’ve always thought naturally,” explains Sally. “Our philosophy has always been plain, simple, useful – and that hasn’t changed.”

Before they met, Sally had trained as an interior designer in Cardiff and Mark, who studied furniture design, owned an antique shop in south Wales. They began to renovate houses together. “If we couldn’t find the things we wanted, we’d get them made,” Sally explains. They soon realised there was a market for the fixtures and fittings they were commissioning, so Mark turned his shop into the first iteration of Baileys: a homeware store specialising in utilitarian goods and one-off antique objects.

In the mid-80s, the couple moved to Herefordshire with Sally’s parents before starting a family of their own. They converted an old engine shed near Ross-on-Wye and the brand took off. “We’ve always had quite a natural, pared-back look,” says Sally. In an era of flounces and decorative stencilling, Baileys went against the grain. “I think people thought we were a bit odd, but that’s been our aesthetic right from the start.”

Gradually, as tastes have evolved, the couple’s “undecorated” look has become more mainstream and the business has expanded. Fourteen years ago they bought White Cross Farm – a collection of barns and outbuildings just outside Ross-on-Wye. Nowadays the store has become a destination in its own right: a place to while away an hour or two, filling your basket with unpackaged wooden dolly pegs, vintage French pottery, maybe a bundle of slubby table linen, before ordering tea and cake in the tin tabernacle tea room.

The barns have been converted with a light touch: concrete floors, exposed wooden beams, chalky white walls. It’s a formula the Baileys use at home, too. During the week they live in the main farmhouse, at weekends they retreat to Maesgwyn, a two-bedroom cottage overlooking the Black Mountains. “We’re surrounded by sheep, red kites and hares,” says Sally. “We have no neighbours apart from farmers, who occasionally have to dig us out of the snow.”

The 18th-century cottage was in a sorry state when the pair bought it five years ago, so Mark set about building a shepherd’s hut which enabled them to dedicate their weekends to a full-scale renovation. The cottage was stripped back to its stone walls, which were then stuffed with sheep’s wool insulation and covered in lime plaster. A ground source heat pump powers the underfloor heating on the ground floor, which is so efficient there’s no need for heating upstairs. Throughout are examples of the couple’s commitment to their philosophy. “We are forever rescuing and reusing, repairing and rethinking everything,” says Sally. “Which is where wood comes in…”

Wood has been such a constant in their lives, the couple made it the focus of their fifth interiors book, Made of Wood. “Wood conforms to almost every aspect of our wider philosophy,” reads the introduction, “To be surrounded with handmade objects; to embrace imperfection; and to celebrate humble, everyday things for their simple, sculptural beauty.” Evidence of this can be found throughout Maesgwyn. In the kitchen, for example, their sink unit is a repurposed French baker’s table. Above this is a renovated wooden gun cupboard that now contains their herbs and spices. The kitchen island is also hand-crafted from reclaimed floorboards and topped off with a slab of honed black granite. Upstairs they have rebuilt the oak and elm studwork walls using pine floorboards to fill the gaps. In the bedrooms, tired chipboard floors were replaced with wide-plank antique oak boards and the headboards are made from reclaimed flooring.

As well as showcasing warm, wood-clad interiors, the book suggests ways in which the material can be incorporated into your own home, for example by choosing wood over plastic or metal when purchasing everyday utensils. (At Baileys, they have been working with the same German brush supplier for years, tweaking the bristles on each brush until “they are just right.”) The book also encourages readers to give space to wooden objects that are apparently without function: “seek out wooden items that have some personality… then let that personality take centre stage.”

It’s an edict put into practice at Maesgwyn, where curious objects have crept into every room. Above the dining table, Mark has fashioned two low-hanging lights from wooden bobbins. There’s an old Spanish anvil in the wet room and a row of wooden exercise pins in the bedroom. Some objects have been given a new function, others have not. “Timber is a survivor,” the couple says. Clearly, in the right hands, it thrives.

; Made of Wood by Mark and Sally Bailey is published by Ryland Peters & Small at £19.99. Order a copy for £17.19 at