Desig House: Real Homes: An Artist's 18th-Century Barn

When Lincoln and Tish Seligman discovered this eighteenth-century barn in Oxfordshire, they resolved to save the magical interiors crafted by its artist owner from unsympathetic modernisation and have subtly updated it while retaining its gloriously eccentric atmosphere

Were you to read that, when designing a house of the Seven Dwarfs in the animated-film version of Snow White, Disney's artists had taken their inspiration from early photographs of this very eighteenth-century barn, you might well believe it.

However, you would be off by several decades, for although the main footprint of the house is original, much of its glorious eccentricity and atmosphere is totally fake. The interiors reflect a lifetime's work by the artist Paul Nicholls, who lived here for 30 years before moving to France and devoted himself to making all the various niches, gargoyles and hideouts that you see today.

It is now home to another artist - the sculptor and painter Lincoln Seligman and his wife Tish - who bought it five years ago while in search of a weekend retreat. They had arrived in this Oxfordshire village - in itself something of a time-warp, with its small, triangular green forming an axis off which houses, a farm and several barns are placed willy nilly in an entirely pleasing manner that would be anathema to the present-day town planner. At the very end, and situated alongside farm cottages, stood this long barn.

'We were looking for somewhere sensible,' they say, laughingly. 'But then we saw this place and thought it so extraordinary and different that we decided to save it from the next person who might come along and destroy it all by modernising it. So it was a spur-of-the-moment decision to buy it.'

Few interiors could be more personalised. Each area has its different angles, curves and alcoves, with some decorated with stained glass, and the wood beams forming the partitions are roughly hewn and finished. It is easy to believe that no contractors were ever used in the making of this house and that the former owner did all the work himself - not that the work is in any way unskilled. 'In fact,' Tish explains, 'we are trying to replace one of the windows and it is a pretty major job. We can't do it, but he [Paul] just went and made it in his workshop.'

They have kept to the allocation of space they inherited, which all in all is only about 149 square metres. This had been divided cleverly by using beams, ladders, platforms and mezzanines to create different areas, so all they had to do was bring it up-to-date by putting in a kitchen, heating and a lighting system - since what lighting there was came from endless extensions leading from one main plug, which 'literally fizzed'.

Due to the lack of walls and size of the barn, both Lincoln and Tish were insistent that all wiring should be concealed and asked Joanna Mann of Light House Designs to create a lighting scheme with different moods to mark out the various areas of the house. This she did by hiding tiny, unseen spots in the wooden beams - which gently wash the plaster walls - embedding uplighters in the original flagstones and hiding wires in the deep-set windows and niches. 'It is now wonderfully cosy. The whole place looks very operatic in candlelight,' says Lincoln.

The original kitchen had consisted of a cupboard and a rescued nineteenth-century range, which the previous occupant had fuelled, as Tish says, with almost anything he could lay his hands on - coal being the last resort. Lincoln and Tish removed the range and the cupboards are now in Lincoln's studio at the end of the garden. They asked a friend, Probyn Miers (father of BBC MasterChef winner and Wahaca restaurant-chain founder Thomasina Miers), to build them a kitchen. 'He is a wonderful joiner and could not have done a better job, building it of aged oak with a zinc top, which we love. He even managed to make the handles out of olive wood that I found on a beach in Antibes,' says Tish.

Upstairs the spare room was separated from the landing with open-standing beams, giving guests no privacy. So a glass wall was lifted in, preserving the view through to the monumental stone chimneypiece from the landing living room where they watch television - they hasten to add that a curtain can be pulled across the glass at night for privacy.

The joy of such a place was that no decisions needed to be made about paint colours or wallpapers - instead Lincoln and Tish have used a myriad of textiles and patterns to furnish the rooms, and in winter more curtains are hung to increase a feeling of warmth.

The barn's history of artistic endeavour has been well preserved. Lincoln, fresh from exhibitions in New York and London, has completed designs for the New English Ballet Theatre, Sadler's Wells Theatre and Covent Garden. And Tish, who is a print specialist, also runs two watercolour courses in Porto Ercole, Italy, and is herself a painter with an exhibition next year in Malmesbury.

'This is not just a weekend home: it is another part of where we live,' explains Tish. 'With Lincoln's studio overlooking the meadow, it is a wonderful place to work. The village is a real community and tolerant of our comings and goings, for which we are grateful.' They gather at the barn every Christmas with their adult children - just about the closest one can get to the Snow White vision. 'They can scuttle up ladders to what we call bedrooms three and four - and if they don't want to get out of bed, you can have a conversation with them just the same,' says Tish. 'Mind you, it means you cannot have any secrets,' adds Lincoln.