It is no surprise that it was its abundance of flora that first attracted florist, Florence Kennedy, founder of the flower delivery company, Petalon, to the Cornish farmhouse she now lives in with her family. “The wisteria was in bloom and curling around the building and there was columbine everywhere,” Kennedy says of her first visit to Scotland Farm, with her husband James in 2020. “Even though I was a London florist working with flowers every day, we didn’t have a garden at that point. So to be able to see flowers, even borderline weeds, outside the door was amazing.”
Four years later and what lies outside that door is even more appealing: an 85-acre working flower farm. While Petalon began life as a London florist with a hallmark of delivering flowers by bicycle, since the move to the north Cornish coast it has become an agricultural business; a B-corp certified, carbon neutral, regenerative flower farm, employing 13 people and delivering full bouquets of its own cultivated flowers, grown pesticide-free.
The early part of the season sees tulips, ranunculus, anemones and Icelandic poppies flourishing, before summer yields hundreds of flower varieties: Sweet William, xeranthemum, achillea, didiscus and dahlias, to name a few. On Petalon’s Instagram feed, Florence shares videos of the fields and beds and demonstrates her prowess with her hand-tied riotous bouquets to almost 60,000 followers.
At the same time as changing the business, Florence and her husband, James, Petalon’s co-director, have renovated the roughly 200-year-old, Devonian-slate farmhouse and its outbuildings, which lies between Newquay and Perranporth. They have turned a dark, damp space into a minimalist sanctuary, which helps them to better cope with the chaos of raising two small children as they battle the British seasons, coaxing seeds into blousy bouquets. “We’re a small business and we’re at the mercy of many changeable factors, including unpredictable weather,” says James. “We want the place where we live to feel as calm as possible.”
It has required a lot of heavy-lifting to get there. For all its outward romance, the farm — the house, a cowshed and a dairy shed, which butt up against each other in a U-shape around a courtyard — was in a bad state when they bought it and had previously failed to sell at auction. The walls in the house were “squidgy” with damp, carpets were rotten, and the cowshed was roofless. “It felt like it had been loved once, but was on a break from that,” says Florence.
What might have been a more leisurely renovation and move became more urgent when the lease of their home in east London came to an end at the same time as the 2020 lockdown began. James, who had integrated his own business manufacturing bicycles into Petalon before joining permanently, had done short courses in plastering and carpentry and put them to immediate use, with help from his father.
Working long hours and sleeping upstairs on a mattress, over three weeks he made it liveable enough for the couple and their two small children to move in. “It was mostly a matter of taking down and throwing away rather than building,” he says. “Stuff needed removing, cleaning and pulling out. If you looked at it as a floor plan, you realised it had a good shell, so that’s what we had to focus on.”
There were some surprises along the way. While planning to put in a new kitchen in what had been a grotty downstairs bathroom, James removed a wet plasterboard wall from above the bath and uncovered a black and white tiled surface. “An enormous Victorian cast iron stove suddenly appeared, complete with all the tiling,” he says of what is today a statement feature in the house.
Another notable discovery under carpet and boards was a large slab of stone with a rotating handle, which turned out to be a 15m-deep water well. Now in the floor of what has become their boot room, it has been illuminated and covered by reinforced glass. “You can walk over it, but most people prefer to walk around,” says James.
Completing the main house took three years. Making it damp-proof, energy-efficient and light-filled were the priorities. Aesthetically, it was informed by architecturally interesting conversions of old buildings, including Hauser & Wirth’s farm-turned-gallery in Bruton, Somerset. “I’m an architecture graduate and we’ve both always shared a love of buildings that retain their original exterior but become something completely different inside,” Florence says. “We wanted to work with the character of the old building to create space and light out of somewhere that historically would have felt dark and damp,” adds James. “That meant more windows, fewer walls and light-coloured walls and flooring throughout.”
Their vision of blonde modern minimalism reaches its zenith in the cowshed, now integrated into the house via a short set of deep steps. “You get that changing gradient as you go through and it suddenly opens up into a big, light space,” says James. He refers to it as “the birch plywood dream”, having used this material as a second skin on the walls to improve insulation and to install a mezzanine in the former hayloft — used as a playroom for the kids, which opens on to a field and vegetable patch. The rest of the space is useful for entertaining and also incorporates two guest bedrooms and a laundry room.
The old dairy is now used for drying flowers (and wetsuits) — this year for the first time, Petalon will sell Christmas wreaths using their own grown and dried product. A timber and galvanised steel cabin, built by James last year, overlooks a meadow and is now Florence’s office. The walls are lined with cork board so she can pin her seed and planting plans.
Having stripped everything back and imposed straightness and right angles on previously wonky surfaces, organic elements have been reintroduced throughout the house. Raw-edged wood is used on deep window sills, shelving units, cupboard doors and the kitchen table — all cut and milled from Cornwall’s trees, including Macrocarpa. “We probably have three or four people that we can call who will have big, interesting pieces of wood,” says James. “It gives you a scale you don’t get with manufactured furniture, which has an interesting impact visually.”
But as far as furniture goes, that’s almost it. The couple say they can count on their fingers the number of freestanding objects they have in the house. They dislike artwork on the walls. If you’re looking for that cluttered, countrycore vibe, you will not find it here. “In many ways, it’s a traditional farm. The fields surround us and most days we’re working in them,” says James. “We’re stepping out of the door and we’re in it, so that door needs to be a border between the unpredictable and the serene.”
“It calms my brain so much,” says Florence. “There are so many different aspects of the job that I’m still learning — I only planted my first seed four years ago — so for the house to be unbusy is just so helpful.” Besides, they’re dealing in a product that provides a variety of colour and vibrancy for most of the year — with a growing season that is only going to lengthen. “It’s great to have a neutral space for the flowers to really shine in,” says Florence. “In many ways, the flowers are the artwork here.”
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