Like many freelancers, Sandy Suffield’s work schedule ranges from round-the-clock to nothing doing. During lulls, the London-based art director and set designer is self-occupying in all sorts of astonishing ways. Her biggest project? Purchasing a derelict turn-of-the-20th century electrical building in the Suffolk countryside, two hours northeast of London, and resurrecting it as The Engine House: A Modernist’s Dream Vacation Rental.

Surprises continually pop up at The Engine House: Sandy delights in chasing down vintage things, such as 1970s Danish hanging lights that look like flying saucers: see Remodelista Reconnaissance. “I’m an eBay, charity shop, vintage addict,” says Sandy. “This is both an aesthetic choice and a reluctance to contribute more stuff to landfill.” Sandy also takes a creative reuse approach to her DIY projects, which include turning packing materials into Paper Quilts as Wall Art and using fallen branches and duct sealing tape to make Twinkly Oak Branches, An Inspired Alternative to String Lights.

Currently Sandy has been celebrating the plants growing around The Engine House using thrift shop frames, tissue paper (from her eBay purchases), grocery bags, and her nieces’ used school notebooks. Come see Sandy’s paper flowers in progress and on display for her lucky renters.

Photography courtesy of Sandy Suffield, The Engine House (@TheEngineHouseSuffolk).

“I used to buy flowers from Steve at a tiny market stall in my neighborhood,” she explains. “Every week I’d ask him not to wrap my bouquet but to save his paper—I lived just two minutes up the road—but every week he’d insist on wrapping them. It was just part of Steve doing his job well. And so when I got home one day, I started making flowers from the paper he’d used to wrap my flowers. This resulted in a little series called Flower Paper Flowers.”

Writes Sandy, “These paper flowers were made using found paper with all its creases and marks, and these characteristics are reproduced on the prints.”

Make these yourself (and with your kids): more art projects from found materials:

• Summertime DIY: Pressed Seaweed Prints
• How to Turn Sea Glass and Other Beach Finds into Wall Art
• Don’t Toss that Zest: 3 Surprise Uses for Orange Peel from Priscilla Woolworth