Jill and Kish Sharma’s oak frame cottage in the South Downs National Park has delivered on all the couple’s expectations for the perfect home to retire to

WORDS REBECCA FOSTER

PHOTOS BORDER OAK

It was as Jill and Kish Sharma were approaching retirement that the idea to self build materialised. “We’d been thinking about what sort of house we wanted to live in, but we’d never come up with a solution,” says Jill. Originally they were looking for a property to renovate, but this turned into a fruitless two-year search. “We even contemplated the possibility of doing up a really rundown house, but the one we found required significant amounts of work; including insulation and a new roof, and its beautiful, large single glazed windows needed replacing,” says Guy. “It would have been lovely to go ahead with that project but we decided it would have been beyond our tolerance levels and budget.”

After a relative showed the couple a photograph of a house by Border Oak, their plans changed. “I was hooked on the idea of an oak frame home straight away. I knew I wanted to live in one of the company’s Pearmain Cottages. I was still working at that point, so I spent all my lunch breaks looking at their website!”

Lucky find

When Jill retired several years ago, she decided the task of finding a plot to build the couple’s own Pearmain home would be her new project. She focused her search online, hunting for a suitable site within easy driving distance of Surrey, where the rest of the family is based. “We offered on a plot but failed because we didn’t realise it was customary to propose more than the guide price,” says Jill.

However, this setback didn’t dampen the pair’s spirits and they continued their search. After 18 months of scouring plot finding websites online, Jill came across a patch of land in Hampshire that ticked most of their boxes. In an incredible stroke of luck, the site already came with planning permission to build a Border Oak Pearmain Cottage – the exact design Jill had spent the last two years fantasising about. “We dropped everything, got in touch with the agent and arranged a viewing the following day,” says Jill.