Interior Designers in THE COTSWOLDS
Studio November is an interior design and architectural studio working across the Cotswolds from our base in Oxford — thirty minutes from the region's eastern villages, and close enough to be on site whenever a project needs us. We design and deliver complete renovations of Cotswold stone farmhouses, listed cottages, barn conversions, former rectories and contemporary new builds, combining interior design and architectural design within a single studio. Founded by Samin Sahabi and Christopher Cooke, we bring backgrounds in London's leading design houses to homes that deserve the same level of care — and we stay involved from first drawings to final styling.
Interior Design For Cotswold Homes
Cotswold houses reward designers who understand how they were built. Thick rubble-stone walls, low beamed ceilings, deep window reveals and rooms added over centuries produce homes full of character — and full of quirks that generic design approaches flatten or fight against. Our work starts with the building itself: how light moves through it, how the plan has evolved, and where it can be opened up or reordered without losing what makes it worth living in. Because we offer architectural design alongside interiors, we can resolve the whole problem rather than decorating around it — reworking layouts, designing bespoke joinery that follows an uneven wall honestly, planning lighting for rooms that were never wired with modern life in mind, and specifying finishes that sit comfortably against lime plaster and old oak. The result is a home that feels contemporary in the way it lives and unmistakably itself in the way it looks. Our Cotswold House project is a good illustration of the balance: a full renovation that preserved the fabric and rhythm of the original house while quietly rebuilding how the family uses it day to day.
Villages and Areas we cover
We work throughout the Cotswolds, with most of our projects concentrated along its eastern and northern reaches the stretch closest to our Oxford studio.
That includes:
-
Burford
-
Chipping Norton
-
Kingham
-
Charlbury
-
Woodstock
-
Stow-on-the-Wold
-
the Slaughters
-
Bourton-on-the-Water
-
Moreton-in-Marsh
-
the Evenlode
-
Windrush valleys.
For larger projects we also travel further west and south, including Cirencester, Tetbury and the Gloucestershire Cotswolds.Being based in Oxford rather than London matters more than it might seem: we can attend site regularly, meet joiners and builders in person, and respond quickly when a wall is opened up and reveals something unexpected which, in a three-hundred-year-old house, it usually does.
See one of our recent project in the Cotswolds for inspiration
Listed buildings and conservation areas in the Cotswolds
A large proportion of Cotswold housing stock is listed, sits within a Conservation Area, or falls inside the Cotswolds National Landscape (formerly the AONB) often all three at once. That changes what a renovation involves. Internal alterations to a listed building require Listed Building Consent, not just Building Regulations sign-off; Conservation Area status constrains external changes; and local authorities across West Oxfordshire, Cotswold District and Stratford-on-Avon each apply the rules with their own emphases.This is where our architectural grounding earns its keep. We prepare the drawings, heritage justifications and specifications that consent applications require, and we design proposals that conservation officers can support, distinguishing clearly between historic fabric to be preserved and later alterations that can be reworked. Nineteen years of experience across period and listed properties means we know what is likely to be approved, what will be resisted, and how to design something better than the compromise you feared. Clients come to us for interiors; they stay because we can carry a listed building project through planning without drama.
