When selling a property the advice is always to make the home feel like somewhere new owners can put their own mark on.
One cottage owner certainly fell four of this rule when she attempted to sell her eye-popping candy-colloured cottage that has an interior that’s worthy of a doll house. But her outrageous decor meant that Mary Rose Young’s cottage-turned-workspace failed to shift when she put it on the market.
It was back in 2014 when potter Mary and her husband Phil Butcher decided to put the house, located in Lydney, Gloucestershire, for sale with plans to open up a boutique hotel.
She’d bought the property in 1987 for a bargain price of just £30,000 with estate agents saying at the time of her attempted sale the property was worth at least £250,000, reports The Mirror.
It appears she still lives and works there, posting a picture of the cottage on Instagram back in October of last year.
In 2021 she said: “I made this house around my own life and I wasn’t thinking about it being sellable. We’re living like two children in a doll’s house and in retrospect why would anybody else want to buy it? It’s like a playhouse for adults.
“I just thought it might go to a mad collector of my work who might want to buy it, but no one was interested.
“Only one person came and looked at it in the year it was on the market and they weren’t here long.”
Mary added: “I think they had just come out of curiosity to see the decoration and were never interested.”
But as she ages Mary says her love for her property is only growing saying she’s a “colourful person” and likes it “more and more”.
The gloriously technicolour property features bright colours on every spare inch of surface. Her candy coloured pottery also helps to accentuate the living space.
Mary added: “Lots of people are self-conscious and don’t say much when they see the decoration, but the right reaction is to laugh and go ‘oh wow.’ It should make you feel like a child walking into a sweet shop.
“I want people to feel like adults can have lots of fun too.”
