An artist's house in the Cotswolds layered with bold colours and collected pieces

The question of whether it's the house itself that makes the home, or the stuff that fills it, is one we think about a lot at House & Garden (and indeed it's been expertly tackled by our own decorating columnist). An encounter with artist Catherine Cazalet’s house in Warwickshire directs us to the latter answer: it's what you put in the house that matters, rather than the house itself. “The house was well maintained but devoid of any character when we saw it,” she explains, describing it as “a shell of a house with no pictures on the walls.” Six years later and filled to the rafters with a lifetime's worth of collected art, objects, lamps and everything else Catherine is drawn to, the house couldn’t be further from that description.

Situated on the edge of the Cotswolds in a “still rather untouched area, with mud on the roads and untrimmed hedges,” Catherine and her husband moved into the house with a one-month-old baby in tow. “We had a tight budget,” Catherine says, “so during those moments when the baby was asleep and I should have been too, I was desperately trying to paint the walls. It was something of a false economy as it took so long,” she laughs. In the end they called in professionals for the bigger rooms, but those initial colours that Catherine chose are still there six years later. This includes a fiery orange living room which “horrified the painters – they thought I’d change my mind.”

As an artist who works in bold tones inspired by Japanese art, Catherine describes choosing the colours as “quite instinctive. I knew I didn’t want any white or off white; I wanted the paint to do as much as it possibly could – for me, it is just as important as all the things layered on top of it. I don’t look at colour as a backdrop.” Layered on top are “all things that have travelled from house to house” with Catherine, going from a tiny flat off Portobello Road to rentals in the Cotswolds. It means that for her, all the houses she’s ever lived in have a similar feeling – truly proof that it's the stuff that makes the house.

“I had a wonderfully eccentric aunt who was always dressed entirely in green or purple and I inherited a lot from her, mostly lamps,” she says, adding that her studio in the garden “has a weird amount of lamps and I’m not allowed to buy any more.” The mass of lighting aside, an inheritance of “lovely things from nice relatives has given everything else in the house more authenticity,” she says. Art is the main thing that draws the eye when you enter the house, covering the walls from ceiling to skirting board. It’s a combination of collected pieces (Catherine would go to Kempton every other Tuesday when she lived in London and never bought anything for more than £100), inherited art, pieces she’s bought from contemporaries and of course her own work. “I suppose at some point I would have put a piece up to take a picture of it to sell, and then thought, ‘oh I really like that’ and I’ll keep it there,” she laughs. “There’s definitely a moment where you realise it’s OK to like your work and there have been a few pieces I haven’t wanted to sell and now they are very happy in my house.”