Luke and Duncan have been renting a cottage on the border of Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire for the past seven years. This is the heart of the Cotswolds, a region steeped in medieval history stemming from its historic wool trade.
Estate Cottage, Gloucestershire
“It was a drab day in January 2019 when Duncan and I began hunting for a new place to live. As we trawled the web for cottages, our new lives flashed in my head as a gleeful, arcadian slideshow: garden weeding and village dog shows, long walks and longer lunches with friends and brilliant new neighbours. One March morning, a house in the Cotswolds appeared on my screen. In no time at all we were there, poking around and quickly falling under its spell. It didn’t have turrets or crenellations, but the views of fields from all windows won us over. I could spot a barn full of cows a bit further down the lane along from the house, but no other buildings as far as the eye could see.”
“From the off, we laughed a lot. We slept on an air bed for weeks and used a cardboard box for a bedside table. Our oven (a Stanley, much like an Aga) gave up the ghost on our first night, so we decamped to the pub for fish and chips. Friends turned up for a housewarming weekend, piling into the two guest bedrooms and sleeping on more air beds. We went for a walk and ended up clambering over fences to get back to the house, a baby, a pushchair and a friend with an injured leg and a walking stick in tow.”
Photography by Max Kindersley for Neptune