The romantic Waterfall Cottage in Wales
Waterfall Cottage is a 200 year old stone cottage within the Brecon Beacons National Park of Mid Wales. Once part of a large estate, the cottage overlooks a beautiful waterfall and is surrounded by a mix of woodlands and pasture.
The cozy living room features a beamed ceiling and a wood stove. The living room and kitchen have gorgeous wood floors (more easily seen in the kitchen photo in the gallery). The cottage has two decent-sized bedrooms, one on the main level and one upstairs.
One problem with older cottages is that they almost always have layouts that are awkward for modern living, with small closed-off rooms and poor circulation. Waterfall Cottage has a floor plan that is extremely inconvenient as getting from the upstairs bedroom to the downstairs bathroom requires a long tour of the entire ground floor. There is an alcove in the living room that looks like it was once a doorway, but it was likely blocked off in order to make the downstairs bedroom larger. As a result, the small kitchen has become the main hallway for getting anywhere in the cottage. We would move the bathroom to the upper stair landing. Then the space gained downstairs could be used to improve the circulation and enlarge the cramped dining room.
If you owned this small cottage, what would you do to improve it? The comments are open.
Click a thumbnail to view a larger photo, then click on the photo to advance to the next one.
-
- cottage floor plan
-
- garden room
-
- ground floor bedroom
Photographs courtesy of Sunderlands and Thompsons.
Text copyright 2012 SmallHouseBliss. All Rights Reserved.
This is a lovely home…I would love to live here…it has great peal…
It sure does! Thanks for reading Yvonne!
Frank
I spent many a happy school holidays in this cottage!!! 🙂
Enchanting! I believe I would leave it precisely as it is.
What a charming cottage. I love many of the original features.The downstairs bedroom was most likely the dinning room. Since they are using it as an office, I’d reopen the archway and return it to the dinning room function and make the smaller room off the kitchen an office. Bringing back the flow of the downstairs. Upstairs, I’d make the small section off of the bedroom, a powder room, with small wall-mounted sink and toilet with storage for linens. If they needed a second bedroom or a place for guests, I’d suggest a sofa bed in living room. This plan in my opinion works better as a one bedroom than two, it would have a better flow. Adding a powder room upstairs would help in having to run downstairs in the middle of the night. I’d also add some comfy chairs to the garden room and use it more as a sitting reading room, maybe a small table for two, for morning coffee.
What would I do to improve it??? Who in the world bothers with perfection???
its lovely to see this cottage once again my great aunt and uncle lived here, i remember collecting eggs from their garden on the other side of the waterfall. the stairs in the living room used to be a straight up ladder, it always scared me to go upstairs.