From the archive: Antonio Carluccio's country cottage (2001)

A thatched house deep in the heart of Hampshire gentle summer sunshine and Wimbledon on the television - you can't get more 'quintessentially English' than that; but the man at the centre of this idyll is the uncompromisingly Italian Antonio Carluccio.

Antonio and his English wife, Priscilla, bought the house about fifteen years ago, and set about taking it apart and rebuilding it. Its poor state of repair meant that everything had to be taken up, down or out, including all the floors and the roof. The Grade-II-listed former farmhouse consists of a fourteenth-century core with a sixteenth-century house wrapped around it, its walls of wattle and daub. Today the house shows no sign of its recent rude disturbance. It looks and feels old, tranquil and comfortable with itself. Antonio and Priscilla have treated it with sensitivity and respect. We consider this house to be a very precious thing, and that it is our duty to look after it,' says Priscilla. They refer to it affectionately as the 'bothy', a Scots word for cottage or hut.

The Carluccios entertain friends and family here and enjoy giving them 'a little sniff of what we get out of the house. Visitors are amazed at how well they sleep,' says Priscilla, who maintains that the most important things in a house in the country are 'warmth, good beds, decent linen and a nice big bath'. Added to this Priscilla likes bathrooms with a view, so the freestanding cast-iron bath stands in the centre of the bathroom. It was necessary to insert a steel plate into the ceiling below to support it, but this is the only concession Priscilla was prepared to make to modern convenience. She vetoed Antonio's desire for a shower as quite out of place. 'I tell him to use the hose in the garden,' she says.

Priscilla takes a 'functional approach to the interior of the house, which she sees as personal, "real" and comfortable within the constraints of the structure. The structure is very much in evidence, with exposed wooden beams and wall timbers. Now simple, wooden stairs climb what was once the external wall of the fourteenth-century house to the upper floor, and a galleried landing looks down into the sixteenth-century addition. In keeping with the house, the lighting has deliberately been kept low and no attempt has been made to brighten up the interior by adding extra windows or paintingit white. Instead, soft, natural colours blend with the dark structural timbers, and the effect is restful, and definitely not gloomy. The walls are bare plaster, pale grey in colour; in the kitchen, cooking and smoke from the open fire will render them even darker.

Unsurprisingly, Priscilla and Antonio-whose latest book, Antonio Carluccio Goes Wild (Headline, £25), was published last month - spend much of each weekend cooking, experimenting with new dishes. Priscilla admits that the kitchen is in many ways hopelessly inadequate', but they couldn't bear to make a 'proper kitchen', as they felt it would have looked wrong. So they make do, without gas, cooking on an inefficient electric cooker, with a single shallow, stone sink. The old bread oven doesn't work at the moment – but it will'. The cooking and eating areas are divided by a framework of old, gnarled wood and there is a well-stocked larder.

Old quarry tiles in the kitchen were bought from an architectural salvage company. Unfortunately, the delivery consisted of two sizes and so nearly half had to be cut down -almost the last straw for the poor builders,' says Priscilla. A door of huge, thick planks with a chunky wooden latch leads to the back passageway, beyond which is what the Carluccios call the 'glory hole', where their grandchildren regularly occupy the bunk beds set among piles of books and toys.