Journalist and TV presenter Mariella Frostrup and her husband, the human rights lawyer Jason McCue, weren’t planning on moving to Somerset, but fate intervened. On their many visits to stay with a close friend nearby, the acclaimed photographer Don McCullin, they passed a house and knew that should it ever come up for sale they would not be able to resist.
“We would peer over the wall and dream of living there,” Mariella says. “We just fell in love.”
It is an enchanting place, seemingly cut off from the world and, even on a chilly early spring day, it is like stepping into another world. In 2012 the dream became a reality when the house came up for sale. It was an opportunity too perfect to pass up and it didn’t disappoint. 
“It feels like a kind of magic wonderworld with a river running past the kitchen door and a little waterfall with a pool in the river you can swim in,” Mariella says. “So, it’s heaven in the summer. When you’re here you feel like you’re away from the rest of the world, even though we’re not particularly isolated in this fairly well-populated part of Somerset.”
Mariella is exactly as you might imagine: ridiculously clever, hilariously funny, and warmly welcoming. Stepping into her world is at once relaxing and invigorating. She has that real skill of making you feel immediately at the centre of things.
Her life is busy. She is a government menopause advisor and is about to go to America to promote a US edition of her brilliant book, Cracking the Menopause, which she wrote with health journalist Alice Smellie.
August 2025 will see the launch of Menolicious, a cookbook Mariella has co-authored with chef Belles Berry (daughter of Mary). The pair have teamed up to create a menopause survival kit in the form of an essential cookbook of quick, easy and totally delicious recipes designed to help manage key symptoms.
Mariella is also about to launch a new podcast, is chair of the advocacy group Menopause Mandate, and a regular on TV’s Loose Women, as well as working on many other projects. All this makes it easy to see why having a home that is a sanctuary to come back to is all the more important.
The house was originally three small cottages before Mariella and Jason decided to completely reconfigure it.
“It’s a bit mish-mash like everything else in my life,” Mariella laughs. “We built the kitchen and another extension on to what were three gardeners’ cottages for a grand house. The big house blew up in a gas explosion in the 1940s, so we have a very grand driveway for what would have been three tiny cottages.”
The house needed a lot of work, so much so the couple and their children, Molly and Dan, lived in a tiny cottage in the grounds while the renovation took place. The kitchen – with an AGA eR7 150-5i centre stage – is by a local company which also built the extension.
“I didn’t have an interior designer and when I look at it now I think ‘how did I make all those decisions – the cupboard doorknobs, the paint colours – it seems almost insurmountable.”
Mariella designed the kitchen from scratch and it has quite a story behind it. A tree that needed to be felled on the land became a pillar for the kitchen. Mariella fell in love with some ruinously expensive tiles she saw in a London tile shop and a friend suggested she got them made in Morocco instead.
"It was a saga beyond sagas,” Mariella says. “The tiles had to be driven from Morocco by a driver who spoke no English and only a little French, all while our builders were racing to finish. When the tiles finally arrived they weren’t even particularly like the tile I’d designed. But by then I was so emotionally wrung out by the whole experience it just didn’t matter. Now I’ve grown to love them even more.”
The pan rack above the AGA was designed by a local blacksmith and was everything Mariella hoped for. It’s a statement piece that works perfectly in the space.
When the kitchen was initially installed Mariella bought an old AGA cooker and had it converted to run on electricity.
“When energy bills started going up, I suddenly started noticing how much energy it was using. Also, people would walk around the kitchen in their underwear because it was just so hot! There was nothing we could really do about it. The energy bills – coupled with the tropical temperatures – made me think it was time to look at a more modern AGA.”
Mariella decided enough was enough and in 2024 chose the state-of-the-art AGA er71 50-5i. 
“The idea of having everything that the AGA is, but it being more receptive to what you actually need, was just fantastic,” she says.
The couple run the kitchen on solar panels in the summer and they also provide some of the electricity in winter. “It makes you feel an awful lot better about using energy,” Mariella adds.
The all-electric AGA eR7 150-5i has three cast-iron heat-storage ovens for roasting, baking and simmering and two additional independently controllable ovens for slow cooking and warming, making it perfect for those who love to cook.
The roasting and baking ovens offer ultimate precision with additional pre-set temperatures for accurate cooking. This also model features an induction hob. Models from the ER7 collection are flexible as they allow individual ovens to be left on while others can be switched off to save energy. The eR7 programmer can be used to conserve energy and the model has fast heat-up, on/off hotplates which can save up to 50% on running costs.
“I love so much about the new one,” Mariella says. “Switching off the hotplates is great for cleaning them and they heat up in 10 minutes. With the old AGA I’d have to turn it off for 24 hours to wait for the temperature to go down. You’d scrub it clean, then something would boil over and you’d have to go through the whole process again.
“I love the fact I’m much more in control of it. I love fish, but I hate the way it makes everything smell like a fish factory. That doesn’t happen when you cook it in an AGA. This one is properly sealed unlike my old one so there are no smells at all.
“I thought about getting a trendy colour or perhaps a grey, because of the tiles, but the AGA we had before was Cream and I really liked it, so I thought why change.
“I could go on forever about the AGA. I love the slow cooking part of it because it works really well in my life. Putting on something at night that cooks until the morning or putting something on in the morning that cooks until the evening.
“I love the warmth that exudes from it. In the winter we huddle around it. In the summer we dry our swimsuits and walking boots on it.
“It’s not just a cooker. It is the beating heart of the kitchen. There’s something really personal about how you cook with it. It’s like a relationship. Every AGA is different and you get to know each other’s idiosyncrasies…”
