The characterful Sussex cottage of knitwear designer Anna Phillips

Spread across three floors, with the kitchen and living area on the ground floor and bedrooms and bathrooms on the upper two floors, the couple started with the bedroom and sitting room first. ‘The house was an unadorned shell and the walls were all very flat, so we added half-height panelling in the bedroom to try and add a bit of texture and interest,’ explains Anna. They also later added it in the hallway downstairs, giving a simple charm to an otherwise rudimentary space. In the sitting room, they opened up the fireplace, fitting it with a stone fire surround from Jamb. Much of the lighting in the house, including the wall lights above the dining table in the kitchen, are also from Jamb. ‘Will [Fisher] is a huge fan of my tank tops, so I’ve traded a few of those for lights,’ she adds with a laugh.

The kitchen was the first significant intervention the couple made about a year after they moved in. What had been a skinny galley kitchen was extended sideways to create an elegant and airy kitchen-dining area, which leads onto the garden through double doors. ‘It’s a classic side return extension, but it made complete sense because the little patio area by the house was just dark and damp,’ explains Anna. The couple worked with builders to create the basic shell and then, like with much of the house, did the rest themselves, including lining the walls with tongue and groove and fitting the kitchen. ‘We used standard Ikea carcasses and then Jeff made all the doors from old scaffold boards,’ explains Anna. Jeff also fashioned offcuts from these into shelves and plate and mug racks, which now play host to ceramics that Anna has collected over the years from everywhere from galleries to junk shops. Upstairs, one large attic room became two sweet little bedrooms for their sons, creating a charming bed nook in one out of tongue and groove.

Earthy, putty tones set the tone for the house and sit in pleasing harmony with all the reclaimed materials. ‘I guess it’s a nod to my Scandinavian heritage,’ explains Anna, who grew up here but regularly visits family in Denmark. ‘The colours I used in my knitwear definitely inform the palette of the house,’ she adds. While her previous life working in interiors and antiques means she is well accustomed to putting together a scheme and moodboard, the decoration here was more organic. ‘I just had a sense of the colours that would work,’ says Anna, who mainly used Atelier Ellis colours throughout, including in the kitchen where she paired ‘Double Bone, Shell & Quill’ – a colour reminiscent of bleached shore finds – with ‘Bitter Chocolate’ for the lower half of the walls and ‘Canopy’ for the dining area. In their bedroom, Atelier Ellis’s ‘Milk’ creates a soothing backdrop for a simple four poster that Anna had made by a local carpenter and painted with layers of different navy paints.

The palette gives the house a great sense of character, but so too does Anna and Jeff’s collection of art. None of it is especially valuable – much of it has been sourced from the likes of nearby Ardingly Antiques Fair or Danish junk shops – but they are the sort of pieces that make you look twice. Take the specimen frame that hangs above the dining table and features a line of little primitive wooden animals. ‘I found them on eBay when I was looking for a farm for my son and then when they arrived I found them so charming, I mounted them on a piece of linen and put them in a frame that I found at Retrovius,’ Anna recalls. In the sitting room, a decorative plaster plaque came from Parker's Atelier in Arundel, while a drawing by the artist Luke Hannam, bought from McCully & Crane in Rye, hangs above the sofa. But the couple’s favourite piece is a landscape of a cottage and lake, which Jeff gave Anna on the birth of their eldest son. ‘We had seen it in the window of a closed junk shop in Denmark, but Jeff managed to track it down after we came home,’ says Anna. ‘I was so touched.’

The latest big addition to the house was Anna’s garden studio, which the couple had built three years ago. Again Jeff did much of the work, insulating and panelling it, as well as fitting a floor made from yet more reclaimed boards. ‘The knits were spilling out of the house,’ says Anna who now regularly collaborates with anywhere between 10 to 20 local knitters to create her designs. ‘I put an advert in the Women’s Institute Magazine and now have an established group of them,’ says Anna. ‘My studio is now the dream space for shutting off and working.’