All the world's a stage

When we meet, Sue is working on costumes for a production of Faust at the Santa Fe Outdoor Opera Festival. Her resume is impressive – she has also designed costumes for English National Opera, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, Old Vic Theatre and for Opera Houses in Germany, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Israel and Russia and recently for Phantom the Spectacular in Las Vegas. The original farmhouse was built in the 1650s, and the story goes that Father Postgate, a Catholic martyr, used the house as a hiding place in the same decade.

"People sometimes arrive at the door – often Catholic priests – wanting to find the house where Father Postgate hid," says Sue. With its dark beams, low ceilings and small windows, this cosy cottage is very typical of that time, although it did have many original features stripped out in the 1950s, and Sue has made few changes. Adjacent to the original house is a barn which Sue has spent the last five years converting into a far more contemporary open-plan living and working space with gabled roofs, light wood and Velux windows. It offers a strong contrast to the snug spaces of the original house.

"In summer, I live in the modern bit," says Sue, "but I watch TV in the old bit – and I have my office there, too." Sue says that some guests have found the layout of her barn conversion unconventional – "the kitchen leads straight into my bedroom, which some people find odd – there will be doors one day, I just haven't got round to putting them in yet." What's more, the whole place is on a slope, but this only adds to its charm.

Religious artefacts clearly attract Sue – there are great numbers of them in both parts of the house. "I collect things that people have worshipped," says Sue. Somehow this resonates with the house's own Catholic roots.

As well as an exquisite green leather crucifix with hand embroidered valance and a portrait of nuns above her bed, there are icons in the old sitting room and ex voto (votive offerings to saints or divinities) attached to beams in the kitchen. An accompanying interest in taxidermy means that, apart from various creatures – a hare and a badger on the stairs in the original house – Sue has also managed to acquire a preserved nun's finger, a particularly holy relic.

In the kitchen and bedroom, Sue has left the pinkish plaster unpainted, which gives the rooms a warm feel. This continues into the bathroom, where one gets the impression that Sue has been quietly indulgent. She has had the sides of the large contemporary freestanding bath sprayed in the same Farrow & Ball Lichen as the lower walls. This lovely sage green colour is further complemented by the hand-painted Japanese mosaic tiles (which Sue has also used in the kitchen).

All this organic colour is infused with touches of glamour in the form of a Moroccan lamp and a French mirror – and touches of eccentricity in the form of a stuffed badger on one windowsill, a French wedding wreath in a glass dome bought from an antique shop behind King's Cross Station on another.

While the sitting room of the original part of the house is dark and cosy, the sitting room in the adjacent barn conversion is bright and spacious. The room is dominated by two dramatic focal points – a Scottish fireplace on an exposed brick wall, and opposite it a floor to ceiling bespoke bookcase, home to Sue's library, which is organised by colour – black books on the bottom shelves graduating through the colours of the rainbow to white at the top.

Sue also displays her collection of Cristoleons (Victorian photographs printed on glass which are then hand coloured to produce beautifully luminous images) in this room. "My mother collected these and I have continued the collection," says Sue.

Ultimately, this is a home in two halves – but also two houses in one. The architectural contrasts are strong, but Sue's sense of style and collections of religious artefacts create a thread that bring the two together.

www.suewillmington.co.uk

The bookcase in Sue's home was made by Tom Warlow, www.tomwarlow.co.uk/

Sue's bath came from www.albionbathco.com