It started with a change of plan.
We had intended to build a cabin as part of our Somerset project. Then Barry announced one morning that what he would really love was a shepherd’s hut. As Michelle puts it in the film, “As he’s nearly 80, I thought it was time for him to get his way.”
So the search began. Locally, naturally.
That brought us to Blackdown Shepherd Huts, a Somerset maker based near Ilminster. One visit to their workshop was enough to understand why the fit felt right.
A shared eye for the details
For us, a space is never simply about how it looks when it is finished. It is about how it has been made.
The materials matter. The proportions matter. The small details you notice every day matter. And, perhaps most importantly, it has to work properly for the people living in it.
That same thinking runs through Blackdown.
Walking around their huts for the first time, Michelle was struck by the quality of the construction, the generous sense of space and the level of finish. These were not simply attractive huts. They were properly made buildings, with the sort of attention to detail that felt completely at home alongside the wider project we are creating in Somerset.
Blackdown’s craftspeople build each hut around the person who will ultimately use it. Rather than asking customers to fit themselves around a standard design, the process begins with how the space needs to work.
That gave Michelle plenty to get involved with.
Choosing rather than decorating
Anyone who knows Michelle will know that she notices things.
How a room flows. Where something sits. Whether one material feels right beside another. Whether a detail is earning its place or simply filling space.
The shepherd’s hut was approached in exactly the same way.
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Working with the Blackdown team, each decision was considered as part of the whole. The layout had to make sense for how Barry and Michelle would live there. The finishes needed to sit comfortably alongside the materials being used elsewhere on the Somerset project. And every choice needed to feel as though it would still be right long after the hut first arrived.
There is a difference between adding things to a space and properly considering it. This was very much the latter.
Blackdown brought the knowledge of their craft and an understanding of what makes a shepherd’s hut work. Michelle brought decades of experience putting interiors together and a very clear sense of what she wanted to live with.
The best collaborations tend to work like that. Nobody is trying to impose an idea. Everybody is paying attention.
Made by people who know their craft
Part of the pleasure of choosing Blackdown was being able to see that process close up.
Their huts move through the Somerset workshop in the hands of craftspeople who build them from the structure onwards. Customers can see completed examples, understand the possibilities and then work through what their own hut needs to become.
For Michelle, that ability to see, touch and compare things mattered.
A photograph will tell you whether you like the look of something. Standing inside it tells you rather more. You understand the scale. You notice the weight of a door, the finish of the joinery and how the space feels around you.
As Michelle says in the film, visiting Blackdown felt like “a whole experience”.
It also meant decisions could be made with confidence rather than guesswork.
A small home, properly considered
The finished hut has an important job to do.
For a period, it will become Barry and Michelle’s home while work continues on the main house. So although the footprint is small, this was never going to be treated as an afterthought.
It needed to be somewhere they could genuinely live.
That made Blackdown’s approach particularly appealing. Their starting point is not simply what can fit inside a hut, but what someone needs from it and how those things can work together.
It is an approach we recognise from our own interior projects. Good design is often less about adding more and more about making better decisions.
When every inch counts, those decisions become even more important.
Built to stay
There is another reason this project feels particularly Salcombe.
We have always believed in buying things once and keeping them.
Furniture, lighting, a favourite bowl, or in this case an entire shepherd’s hut. The scale may change, but the principle does not.
Choose the right materials. Find people who care about how something is made. Spend time getting the details right. Then live with it.
Blackdown describe huts made around their owners and intended to work for them for years to come. That mattered to us. This hut may begin its life as Barry and Michelle’s temporary home during the build, but it has been considered far beyond that moment.
As Michelle says at the end of the film, “It’s a product to last a lifetime.”
Which, for us, is rather the point.
Tried, tested, loved. And very much worth keeping.
