How a Northamptonshire shoe factory became a lustworthy country bolt hole | Style

With 48 windows (not a typo), five bedrooms, a mezzanine bathtub and a living space so vast you could rollerskate across it, to say that Lisa Rodwell and Jonathan Howells’s country getaway is roomier than the cottage they had envisaged would be an understatement. And as a former shoe factory retaining many industrial characteristics — coal shutes and original loo doors marked “Ladies” — it’s infinitely quirkier. The Canadian couple, both 53, were alerted to its coming on the market in a way familiar to many of us — by that friend living vicariously through the house-hunting process, who pings links to the most outlandish of properties just for fun. It was Rodwell’s boss at the time who spied the property on the Modern House