Devon farm building with no roof transformed into set for major new Jane Austen film, Sense and Sensibility

A rural building on Dartmoor, once described by its director as little more than a cattle shed with no roof and no windows, has been transformed into Barton Cottage for a new Hollywood adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, which opens in UK cinemas today.

The film follows widowed Mrs Dashwood and her three unmarried daughters after their family estate, Norland Park, passes to their closest male relative, John Dashwood, leaving them with no choice but to move to the modest Barton Cottage. Eldest daughter Elinor struggles to leave behind her feelings for Edward Ferrars, while her sister Marianne falls for the dashing John Willoughby after he rescues her following a fall. As the sisters navigate love, loss and the expectations of the society around them, their bond sees them through heartbreak toward the hope of a happier future.

Director Georgia Oakley had wanted a cottage on the coast, but said every one she found had been converted into "some kind of twee holiday home." She said she wanted audiences to feel what it would have been like for the Dashwood family to move from a grand house like Norland Park to a cottage in the middle of nowhere in Devon, noting that few places in England still feel as the countryside would have felt two hundred years ago.

The Dartmoor building the production settled on, at Ditsworthy Warren Farm near Sheepstor and Yelverton, was a single open room with stone floors, no windows and no roof. Production designer Francesca di Mottola and her team transformed it into the cottage seen on screen, aiming for a look that suited the period while keeping the unpolished, lived-in feeling Oakley wanted.

Ditsworthy Warren Farm provided every interior and exterior scene at Barton Cottage, standing in for the parlour, drawing room, dining room, bedroom, kitchen, hall and corridor. Nearby Nun's Cross Farm, also at Yelverton, was used for the carriage journey that brings the Dashwood family to their new home.

The production also brought animals onto set to add texture to the scenes. Oakley said each character has an animal that represents them in some way, adding that many of the animals could not be trained, so the cast and crew worked with whatever the animals did on the day, giving the performances an element of surprise.

Cinematographer Arnaud Potier said the camera style shifted between the two Dashwood homes. He described the filming at Norland as more fluid and expressive, with a warmer quality, while the camera became stiller once the family arrived at the cottage, retaining a subtle handheld feel to keep the image organic. He said this reflected the more isolated, rustic world the family found themselves in, marking the transition from a wealthier life to a far simpler one.

While the Devon locations provided the setting for the Dashwoods' more humble circumstances, the family's original home, Norland Park, was filmed at Kingston Russell House in West Dorset, a seventeenth-century manor near the village of Long Bredy.

The production also travelled to Mothecombe, near Plymouth, where Mothecombe Beach became Barton Beach for one of the film's pivotal scenes, in which character Marianne Dashwood is injured in a fall and rescued by John Willoughby, played by Frank Dillane.

The film stars Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles as sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood, alongside Caitríona Balfe as Mrs Dashwood, George MacKay as Edward Ferrars, Herbert Nordrum as Colonel Brandon and Fiona Shaw as Mrs Jennings. The screenplay is written by Diana Reid, adapted from Austen's 1811 novel, and produced by Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, India Flint and Jo Wallett.

Sense and Sensibility is in UK cinemas from September 25, with a US release to follow on October 16.