Saturdays are normally about helping readers with their design dilemmas. Today, instead, it is all about a wonderful retreat in an exotic location, full of creativity and it’s a reader’s home. Maureen Booth is a painter and print maker who lives just outside Granada, Spain in paradise….in a chicken coop. Well her guests actually live in the coop. This bijou building is an artist’s and writer’s retreat.

“Yes, it was a chicken coop. After that it was a dog kennel, then a painting studio, then it was a junk room for years  before we got around to enlarging it, re-roofing it and renovating it. Artists love it, both for the peace, the atmosphere and the five-meter-long workspace.”

Nothing grand, very honest, practical and wonderfully romantic. A reclaimed Spanish outbuilding with a view full of inspiration and a garden full of respite. El Gallinero.