An interior designer's 17th-century farmhouse in a secluded Devon valley

“I have dreamed of this house for years,” says Tom Cox of his remote farmhouse in Devon, which lies at the end of a farm track in a peaceful valley where the river rushes past and the hills rise up on each side. “I'm surrounded by nature, which I love, and I've filled the house with things I love, so it's a brilliant double whammy.” Bought two years ago as an escape from his busy work life with the family company HÁM Interiors, the farmhouse and its outbuildings are now both a comfortable, inviting retreat from outside stresses, as well as a perfect representation of Tom's own and his family's collective taste.

Tom grew up in the world of interior design. His parents, Nick and Pamela, have run a design business since his childhood and he grew up hanging around the upholstery studio at home and going along on weekend trips to fairs and market. After a spell working in a software business, he joined his parents in starting HÁM Interiors; his sister Kate joined a little later, so that it is now a true family affair. Sourcing antiques and salvaged materials is a shared interest, and such is the extent of their collection that a significant part of the business now resides in Studio HÁM, which sells antiques and art (as well as original designs) to clients outside their interior design projects.

The family is lucky to have a strong shared aesthetic, which runs both through their projects for clients and their own houses. “It's not like we all sit down and discuss what we're going to buy for our own houses,” says Tom, “but sometimes one of us will buy something and then one of the others will realise it's exactly what they need at home.” His parents' taste has clearly seeped in, even when he isn't conscious of it. “I've got this huge love of decoys [models of ducks and other wildlife] and of folk art,” he explains. “Mum and dad used to sell a lot of that sort of thing in the shop when I was growing up, but I had completely forgotten about it, and it was only when I saw an old photo of the shop that I realised that's where it came from.”

Tom's house in Devon, then, is an expression of everything he grew up with and still works with today, with a hefty dose of his own love of the outdoors and nature thrown in. The main farmhouse has the feel of a deeply comfortable cabin or lodge, its long, low structure comprising a snug, sitting room and kitchen on the ground floor, with three bedrooms and a bathroom above. A second compact cottage next to the farmhouse has an office space on the first floor and a bedroom and bathroom, and out in the garden is a deeply covetable outdoor kitchen.

Like many houses of its period, the main house is low-ceilinged, with small rooms and plenty of architectural quirks–something you might think would be off-putting for a man of Tom's considerable height (he is 6'5") but this was not the case. “I gravitated towards this kind of building from the start when I was looking down here,” he explains. He does concede that it was difficult to get the arrangement of furniture right. “It is a listed building, so you're completely snookered with the space, you can't open anything up. Every entrance to this building is absolutely tiny, so just getting furniture through the doors was a nightmare.” Determined to introduce a dining table that would fit into the compact kitchen area, he still ended up having to saw a bit off it to get it through the hallway. Having access to lots of different pieces was a boon in this respect: “I just kept bringing things in and out until it made sense!”

Although furniture came and went at the beginning, Tom is a big believer that one key piece can have the power to transform a room. When he was struggling to think how to lay out the sitting room that leads into the kitchen, he found a large Irish dresser that brought the whole thing to life. “It suddenly made sense that it was where I'd keep my whisky collection, and then from there I saw that there should be a little place to sit by the window and look outside, and it just grew from there.” The Delft tiles around the fireplace in the snug sparked another idea: Tom chose Farrow & Ball's ‘Oval Room Blue’ to echo the blue of the tiles, and the enveloping colour scheme of the room emerged from there.