Living

Houses, neighbourhoods, interiors and the habits that fill them. How somewhere is built and run, and what it is like to be there for more than an afternoon.

Often the quietest pieces in an Edit, and frequently the ones readers return to.

Published here

Hyll, Charingworth
Hyll — The Cotswolds Hotel That Wants You to Do Nothing
Country-house hotels have become very good at giving you things to do. Hyll has built itself around the opposite idea.
Edit No. 30
Dumbleton Hall, Evesham
Dumbleton Hall — A Cotswolds Country-House Hotel Restored From an Unusual Past
A Tudor Revival house below Bredon Hill, reopened in April 2026 as a 34-bedroom hotel. Its more unusual chapter came in 1959, when postal workers bought it as a living memorial.
Edit No. 30
CoolRooms Palacio Villapanés, Seville
Palacio Villapanés — Sleeping Inside Old Seville
Seville has plenty of hotels that borrow the language of the city's old houses. Palacio Villapanés has the advantage of actually being one.
Edit No. 29
Casa La Siesta, Vejer
Casa La Siesta — The Hotel That Started With a Field
A junior lawyer left London to learn Spanish, bought a field outside Vejer and built a hotel from salvaged materials. The search for the right tiles became Bert & May.
Edit No. 29
Villa Grand Voile, La Rochelle
Villa Grand Voile — Eleven Rooms in a Shipowner's House
An 18th-century shipowner's mansion, turned into eleven rooms by a three-Michelin-star chef and his sommelier partner. Every room is named after something from the sea.
Edit No. 27
Hôtel Le Garage, Biarritz
Hôtel Le Garage — The Garage That Kept Its Arches
A carriage shed, an aero club, a garage for some of the finest cars arriving in Biarritz, then thirty years behind closed doors. The arches never went anywhere.
Edit No. 27

From the archive

Earlier living pieces, from Edits 01–26. These were published on Vitae and still live there.