The cottage was the place where Harold worked, writing in his book room overlooking the sunset colours of the Cottage Garden, and where Vita tended sick plants, in the flower room, before crossing the garden to her own writing room in the Tower. A seeming island amidst a sea of flowers, the cottage is in fact part of a wider, ‘village-house’, and the family lived between the cottage, the Priest’s House and the front range – with the garden knitting these buildings together.
The South Cottage was built from a fragment of the great Elizabethan mansion of the Bakers. Together with the Priest’s House and the Tower it was one of the first buildings at Sissinghurst to be addressed by Vita and Harold, who drew up plans for an extension to the north in 1932. Today, the cottage remains much as they would have known it and Harold’s description in 1933 reveals his affection for the building: