The brick facade is ‘pretend Jacobean,’ put on in the 1720s for the Mildmay family of Dogmersfield Park. Its chalky look comes from the whitewash applied in the nineteenth century and then taken off again. NH points out the vista down to the lake to lunch guest Miss G.K.M.W.

The little entrance hall, added by Fowler and refurbished by Nicky Haslam. French decorative touches abound and the pedestal is in the style of those at Sanssouci, the summer place of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia.

In the long narrow old hall which runs the length of the house, John Fowler had a rather strict and chilly dining arrangement with a round Regency table pushed into one corner. Now it is a place for taking off  boots and winter drinks, with a sofa before the fire and huge club fender.

On the  marble topped table the etching After Chardin by Lucian Freud inscribed ‘To Nicky,’ sits next to a self portrait by Cecil Beaton. The cire perdue landscape was a gift from Hockney, behind is a huge floor plan by James Wyatt for The Waterloo Palace, in front is the visitor’s book. Signatures from its thickly inscribed pages are reproduced on the end papers  of Folly de Grandeur.

The three windows were curtained with Colefax and Fowler’s ‘Oak Leaf’ pattern, now out of production. Lady Homayoun Renwick  gave NH enough to remake them to Fowler’s scheme, and he kindly spared me the bit I needed to patch an old sofa cover  cover made from the same glazed chintz.

Nicky’s mother Diana Ponsonby, by whom he is descended from the earls of Bessborough, enshrined above the drinks tray. His last big party was held in their former villa Parksted House built by William Chambers on the edge of Richmond Park, where he installed a huge circular rotating dance floor for one night only. The paper in the Staircase Hall is a giant Mauny papier peint flower print which continues up the stairs, Fowler’s choice, restored by NH.

The sitting room walls were traditionally washed in a mixture of distemper and bull’s blood.

The needlework petit point cover on the low bench was worked by NH. It is a stylised representation of the house’s gabled skyline which took ages to complete. The guest-rumpled French linen cushions are edged with a deep wool and metal thread fringe.

The grand carved wood Baroque fire surround was put in by John Fowler. The lobsters were once part of a table setting designed for Cartier.

The mantle is crowded with invitations and the photographs of friends of the bosom, although in Folly de Grandeur you will see it more formally arrayed  with specimen roses from the garden in crystal vases. The painting of St. Francis of Copertino, the patron saint of aviation, belonged to NH’s father.

The busts of a French nobleman wearing the Order of the Golden Fleece, on the ‘David’ table in homage to  to the late David Hicks, inventor of the ‘tablescape’ and the giver of several items seen here. NH’s tablescapes are far more generous, running up to and almost over the edges.

The dressing room, tweed, more tweed and a bit of leather.

The dressing room, some hats and a lot of boots.

The master bedroom with its canopied bed (not seen) and blue grey dragged paintwork divided with wallpaper border strips of a Mauny design.

The garden room contains its own complement of books, pictures, pretty china, sofas, drinks and a huge fireplace. There is a potting shed orneé at the rear.

Lush.

Et in Arcadia ego : NH and house guest.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   All pictures copyright bibleofbritishtaste/ NH.

Soon after 10 am a huge field  began to assemble.

Everyone was immaculately turned out, despite the foul conditions.

The hounds arrive from their kennels at Wren’s Hill, built in 1877.

Richard and Amicia Oldfield were their hosts at Doddington Place.

This picture courtesy of Pauline Klewin.

Sausages and lashings of port in plastic cups were served to riders and followers,

Terrier men and a non-working terrier

A final rally from the roof, political blogger Edward Oldfield ( http://twitter.com/OLDFE1  ) looked on from the battlements like Hamlet at Elsinore.

The West Street Tickham’s collars are green and the Ashford are in yellow

Their faces wet with rain and  tears, the faithful listened patiently,

the hounds reformed into their pack and waited.

At last the West Street Tickham hunt streamed out along the drive for the last time,

foot followers dashed after them, the rest made off home,

leaving only the terrier men confabulating in the lee of the wind,

& then off  to mount their quads, like warriors on the field of Agincourt.

Which brings us inside and to the publication of Twentieth Century Castles in Britain earlier that week. Pictured above, its author Amicia de Moubray lives at Doddington with her husband Richard Oldfield and their family.

It tells the story of how castle-building continued throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and on,  into the 21st. ‘The British love of castles is deeply rooted in their psyche as an island race,’ John Martin Robinson writes in his review published in The Spectator. ‘Children learn to love them from fairy stories and Harry Potter. Castles are an emblem of Britain itself, an island surrounded by a moat. A castle is a place of refuge and safety where we can do what we wish. It has always been a grand symbol of status and success. It is also a two-fingered gesture to modern, bureaucratic, utilitarian society.’ 

When she is not writing Amicia is mainly in the garden. The grounds here have been open in aid of the National Garden Scheme for more than 50 years: http://www.doddingtonplacegardens.co.uk Doddington’s glorious spring tulip-fest was created and planted with garden designer Kirsty Knight-Bruce, Amicia replanted the Victorian Sunk Garden to a new design. Here she is in fetching Vita Sackville-West-style duds with Winston the lurcher.

Doddington has a romantic,  baronial entrance hall paneled long ago with woodwork salvaged from other, older houses. All over Kent in the last century and a half , castles and houses like this one were being invented, reinvented and domesticated.In Twentieth Century Castles in Britain, Amicia writes about Saltwood and Allington, Hever, Lympne and Leeds Castles with panache and the fluency born of local knowledge.

She describes the plutocrats and dreamers who poured their millions into the task of re-roofing ruined keeps, laying causeways and plumbing, heating, decorating and rehabilitating these comfortless, unforgiving structures originally meant  to defend and repel. Some like Edwin Lutyens’ Castle Drogo in Devon were brand new, built from scratch. Even modern castles could prove hard to live in and many retired defeated or bankrupted. But the Clarks are at Saltwood still and hundreds of miles to the north, Annie and Lachlan Stewart have built up the sixteenth century ruin that was Ballone, a wild and rugged keep at a cliff’s edge above the Moray Firth. Annie is a designer of great style, Lachie is an architect and their company is ANTA. To sleep in one of Ballone’s thick-walled turret bedrooms during a filthy gale is as good as it gets.

Twentieth Century Castles in Britain by Amicia de Moubray : Ballone Castle in Ross-shire. Annie and Lachie Stewart persuaded the farmer who owned its ruins to sell to them within a day of setting eyes on it, although Lachie had first seen it at the age of seventeen.

Britain’s latest castle: Corrour Lodge in Inverness-shire, a soaring  granite and glass structure built in 2003, with a castle-like plan around a Great Hall.   All images copyright bibleofbritishtaste/ A. de Moubray.

A.N.Wilson washing up, the  plate is from his father Norman Wilson’s ‘Summer Sky’ service designed for Wedgwood in the 1950s

My grandfather Tom Wilson made the most beautiful oriental-seeming pots with Bernard Moore. His son, my father Norman, joined the Wedgwood company in 1927 – first as Works Manager at the old Etruria Works . It was he and Josiah Wedgwood V, together with their friend the designer-architect Keith Murray, who organized the move from Etruria to Barlaston at the end of the 1930s. They were very much inspired by the first Josiah, who had intended Etruria to be a sort of rural worker’s paradise – little foreseeing that “The Potteries”, like the other industrial towns of the midlands and the north, would become polluted by the very success of their industry. Most of these mugs including the 1953 Coronation mug made from the design by Eric Ravilious, were commissions made for Norman Wilson at Barlaston. The one in the middle dated 1959 commemorates the second centenary of the firm and shows the new factory at Barlaston designed by Norman Wilson and Keith Murray.

The Wedgwood factory, Wedgwood family lore and the cult of Josiah Wedgwood were my father’s obsession. Here he is in 1961 escorting Princess Margaret around the works. Above them, a  largely female labour force admires that hat.

I grew up knowing more about the Wedgwoods than many children know of Little Grey Rabbit or Squirrel Nutkin. This photograph was captioned ‘Andrew making mud pies, 1956,’ by my mother.

A woman who worked as a secretary at the factory in my father’s time as Managing Director told me recently – “Your father would look at a design, or a pot, and say – ‘If it comes up to the standard of the first Josiah, then it will do. If not – not’”. So although Josiah Wedgwood died at the end of the eighteenth century he was still part of my life in the mid-twentieth. Above, Wedgwood commemorative portraits of Josiah Wedgwood and Norman Wilson.

My novel THE POTTER’S HAND, which came out last year, explored the evolution of Wedgwood’s genius, and of his family : it tells the true story of how he came to buy white china clay from the Cherokee people, and how he made dinner sets for the Empress of Russia.

On Friday April 19th at 9pm BBC2 broadcasts my tribute to Josiah Wedgwood. The famous medallion “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” was distributed free of charge as part of his contribution to the campaign to abolish slavery.

Wedgwood did not come from nowhere. Many of his cousins, uncles, brothers, were potters too. But there was something extraordinary about the sheer range of his accomplishments – canal builder, scientific inventor, social reformer, as well as potter. His achievement was all the more remarkable when we remember his nickname among the workers at Etruria – Owd Wooden Leg. An attack of smallpox in childhood left him lame and in early manhood, the leg was removed. Far from diminishing his energy, this misfortune acted as a spur to fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run. What a man!    The Genius of Josiah Wedgwood is on BBC2 at 9pm on April 19th .          All images copyright A.N. Wilson/ bibleofbritishtaste

Jones’s Isle of Wight (1950), her cover design for In Trust for the Nation by Clough Williams Ellis (1947),  and Ruth Artmonsky’s monograph, published in 2008.

Jones’s six ways to paint a ‘routine Georgian house,’  by Mary Fedden, Julian Trevelyan, Kenneth Rowntree, Mary Adshead, Felix Kelly et al. from Water Colour Painting, (1960).

Barbara Jones’s house at 2 Well Walk  in Hampstead, a solid five storeys in red brick.

The Unsophisticated Arts, original artwork for bookjacket by Barbara Jones, 1951, a tattoed ventriloquist’s doll-cum-wrestler juxtaposed with merry-go-round prancers.

Sailorman by Alice Pattullo.

Funereal florist’s armatures, plates from Design for Death, Barbara Jones (1967).

Poster designs for Black Eyes and Lemonade, Jones’s 1951 exhibition of popular art and design at the Whitechapel Gallery.

Now that this horse is a few feet away, blocking my study window, I realise that the image that flashed into my mind when I saw it was this one, Jones’s School Print lithograph Fairground, a Proustian scene that I have been trying to revisit ever since.

Roundabout at the Royal Cornwall Show, 2010.

But this  gigantic optician’s sign recreated at Whitechapel by Simon Costin is a good touch,  commemorating the one that Jones had borrowed from the Croydon shopfront near her own father’s saddlery business.

Her  watercolour of the shop from which it came is one of the plates in The Unsophisticated Arts. It was item 58 in the sale of her studio contents in 1999.  I regret that I do not own it to this day.

John Betjeman and his daughter Candida in 1962..

An Oxford University Chest, John Betjeman, (London, 1938), illustrated with photographs by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and caricatures by Betjeman’s friend, Osbert Sitwell. These pages are captioned  ‘Bullingdon’ and ‘After Hall.’

JB’s prie-dieu ebonised and embellished with mother of pearl.

St. Mary’s Church Penzance, model encrusted with shells by an unknown maker, later furnished by Osbert Lancaster, with a gothic organ loft and a painted glass window at the west end.

The church was bequeathed by JB to the Cornish historian A.L. Rowse.

The bear Archibald Ormsby-Gore and his dimmer friend Jumbo, seen here back at home in the Vale of Uffington, propped against a painting of St. Enodoc’s, the Cornish church-next-the-sea where Betjeman lies buried.
His fervour is evidenced in the story book, Archie and the Strict Baptists, that he drew and wrote for his children, republished in 2006 by Long Barn Books.

Archie eventually cut a pair of wings out of brown paper to fly, Icarus-like, over the fields to a chapel where his preferred creed of Srict Baptiist was on offer.

Betjeman was the author of the Shell Guide to Cornwall, ( 1934), revised in 1964,  the surrealist collage for the cover of Wiltshire (1935), is by Lord Berners.

Here she is with with her husband Rupert Lycett Green, co-hosting one of their famously good parties on a boiling Sunday in May .

There was terrier racing and a  dog show judged ( with bias) by Maggie Hambling and Tory Lawrence,

the Eynsham Morris ( seen here resting after their labours) and the Wantage Silver Band.

Home, recycled architectural elements

main workshop

workshop yard

the Clovelly public fountain panels, two of a set of four, made and installed in 2013

Clovelly slate relief panels

Main workshop,

Main workshop, panel three in preparation

http://www.joehemming.co.uk

with her whippet, Moth. Philippa is part Scottish, Moth is from Yorkshire.

She bought this lamp from a flea market in America.

She bought a lot of the hand blown glasses and decanters in her kitchen in Italy, some in Venice, source of  the Murano glass beads in her longer necklaces.

The spare bedroom.

Studio workbench with natural light from french windows opening on to the garden.

Philippa trained in theatre design at St. Martins. The first time I met her she reminded me of a Valkyrie, beautiful, forthright and commanding.

Ivory animals from Burma were used in a jewellery collection in 2007.

Porcelain sake cups from Hong Kong, vessels used to hold and sort small beads.

Main bedroom.

Living room.

Philippa has been making and selling her jewellery for almost twenty years. The yellow necklace is composed entirely of hand made glass beads and stones including Venetian style beads bought from an Egyptian glass blower in Rome. The blue necklace is of agate stones from India and China, dyed to an extraordinary vivid colour .

Moth in the ‘Cruella’ necklace, of Swarovski’s  finest crystal ‘fancy’ stones.

Chandelier-drop necklaces in Philippa’s classic shape, a knotted pendant, strung with vintage silver  trade beads from Himalayan and Tibetan necklaces.

Web sites aren’t really the right place for me & my things, Philippa says. People need to see it feel & touch it, try it on & see if it is right for them, for something as personal as this. And for tiny companies it is very time consuming to run a decent web site – I prefer to spend my time designing & making, rather than sitting behind a computer editing…  I make the prototype, and then the assistants can produce it from there, all made in London.

Richard II, King of England from 1377-1399, in an engraving by George Vertue hanging in the bathroom.

The bathroom, the third looking glass with paper eyes cut from a magazine photograph of Paloma Picasso.

Workbench with  Quattrocento Painting in Florence poster and photograph of Clark Gable, a celebrity pin-up made for a hotel foyer and bought in an Islington junk shop.

Tools.

Moth in the yellow bead ‘Sweetie’ necklace. Emma Kitchener-Fellowes (married to Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey) is a fan and Emma Watson wears one of Philippa’s necklaces playing a young Hermione in Harry Potter.

Dodd (as he calls himself) is a painter, trompe l’oeil artist and muralist. His London home in the Caledonian Road (the second episode featured on the bibleofbritishtaste)  is perfect too, but he loves and tends his country house far more assiduously. He has been saving up to rebuild its tall chimney, with salvaged hand-made bricks, for years now. While Caledonian Road has the sootier, Dickensian charm of long occupancy, his Suffolk house grows more and more beautiful.

Just before the sale of his house was completed, there was a fire here. Dodd has spent years restoring it, using his skills to repair plaster mouldings, ceilings and walls. The kitchen is in a single storey flat-roofed extension built in the 1960s. Dodd has enhanced it with chinoiserie-lattice windows salvaged from a local stable block that was said to have been designed by James Wyatt.

He is a very good cook. Greed is a factor, he says.

He is an inveterate collector of  ‘good’ china. Everything gets used, there are no ugly plates or chipped mugs at his table.

The spine corridor linking the seventeenth century with the 1960s is hung with a printed linen designed by George Gilbert Scott for  the Houses of Parliament. There is a compartmentalised, oak-grained ceiling that alludes to Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Romantic’ interiors at Abbotsford. His taxidermy collection pre-dates the current vogue by decades.

The principal room in the older, main house is now the Dining Room.

Dodd’s masterpiece used to add  Magic Realist glamor to the staircase at Caledonian Road. Now it hangs here, Fonthill Abbey, after the Cattermole print, (1974).

This is the best guest bedroom. Dodd designed the bed to frame the embroidered seventeenth century needlework panel.

It grazes the ceiling, inside it is like a beautiful tent.

Dodd’s Regency bedroom has manly stripes, with ebonised and mahogany furniture. Since I first clapped eyes on him I have admired his sartorial style, worn tweed jackets and jumpers, occasionally with a waistcoat on top,  and  a full beard.

He is good at symmetry.

The bathroom.

More of the bathroom. He put up the Soaneian cornice using turned wooden balls from a Camden Town hardware shop.

Bathroom.

Bathroom close-up.

The upper room of the seventeenth century house, Japanned furniture, cloisonne work, Ostrich egg and long views over the flat Suffolk countryside. Alfred Suckling’s History and Antiquities of the County of Suffolk (1846) describes this ‘small but curious edifice of red brick… its upper floor commanded a view of the German ocean.’ Dodd keeps his telescope up here.

There are no conventionally ‘comfy’ chairs. If guests want to relax, they might be told to go to bed.

Box room and abandoned painted chairs in the attic oubliette.

A huge archive of hundreds of his designs, many of them stored on top of and under a wardrobe, is slowly being  photographed and catalogued. So far we have done about 10 per cent, here are a few.

Last week at the Rex Whistler show (now just ending at Salisbury Museum and Art Gallery) I wondered whether RW hadn’t been Dodd’s first and most significant influence. They share the same decorative language and motifs. If Whistler had lived and had not become too grand, he might have taught the young Dodd as a student at the Painting School at the Royal Academy. But Dodd says that tho’ he much admires Whistler’s Tate mural and those at Plas Newydd and Mottisfont, he finds some of his other work creepy and camp.  His own work is more an extension of the architecture of the building, and an attempt to regain the traditions of the past, he says.  I think that this design, and the one below, are two of the five large architectural capricci  he designed for the Painted Room at the Victoria & Albert Museum, commissioned by Roy Strong in the 70s. Dodd is also responsible for the trompe l’oeil decoration on the Vardy staircase at Spencer House and the Pompeiian ceiling decoration in the New Picture Room at Sir John Soane’s Museum.

‘Gothick’ is probably what he does best. His latest canvas is the entire outside wall of a house in Eye in Suffolk.

There is a  ragged topiary garden behind the house that looks just right.

Day of rest – Saturday morning breakfast outside with the papers amongst the mole hills.

www.alandodd.co.uk

Royal Doulton policeman, Houses of Parliament [H.P.] Sauce, framed letterhead by the late great Barbara Jones.

Flanked by Bridie’s vitrines holding mud larking finds from the River Thames dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.  Hanging above is one of Bridie’s decoupage ‘View of London, 1845,’  plates.

The window with Bridie’s Tortoise House, a Palladian design after Sir Thomas Archer made by Ed Kluz. and Ben’s Dr Johnson memorial tea towel which simply says : ‘When a Man is Tired of London he is Tired of Life.’

‘London Landmark’ cushions, made up  in an edition of only 10.

One of Alice Patullo’s Bawden-esque limited edition print series for the London Cabinet : three London Drinking Fountains. The ‘Readymoney’ fountain was erected by Coswasji Jehangir Readymoney in Regent’s Park in 1869, a wealthy Parsi philanthropist whose family had made a fortune in the opium trade with China. Decorated with lotus flower finials and a Brahmin bull, it still refreshes joggers, walkers and their dogs with clean London tap water; dogs drink the overflow water from little marble basins at its base.

‘London Street Cries, ‘  from eighteenth century prints of street hawkers, “Rabbets,’ ‘Old Cloaths,’ ‘Singing Birds’ etc. and Thames map mugs, both designed by Matilda Moreton and made in Stoke on Trent especially for the London Cabinet at Penteath and Hall.

Vintage London pillar box money boxes from sixty years of the General Post Office and Her Majesty’s Royal Mail, with a pre-Boris double decker tin bus.

‘The Hounds of Spring,’ Regent’s Park, London,2013,  one of three signed photographic prints in an edition of 15, by Liz Neville/ bibleofbritishtaste.

Wedgwood mugs – Shakespeare’s theatre and the London to Bristol Road, with some of our many antiquarian books and maps.

An entry from In Camden Town by David Thompson, (1983) now scarce and out of print. Thomson was a modern Mayhew who produced this anecdotal and highly personal diary-cum-history spanning thirty years  of Camden Town life and lowlife, the harvest of years of research towards a  vast, sprawling history of Camden Town that was never finished.

Three years ago we bought this standard Late Georgian Forth Rate terraced London house, (Gavin Stamp wrote in 1980 in The Englishman’s Room, ) built the year Beethoven died…. once a sleazy lodging house, or worse, for this area used to be better known for red lights than for elegant facades. This was fortunate and not only because the house was cheap. In smart parts of London, houses have been modernised and restored over and over again, so that practically nothing original is left. Here, the chimneypieces had gone but everything else  – doors, staircases, cornices, etc, – albeit punctuated by tiresome holes for Yale locks or for the water and waste pipes which served the basins which once graced every single room… The back drawing room now has a fine reeded marble chimmneypiece of authentic date which was a wedding present from the Fitzalan Puirsuivant Extraordinary, that is, the architectural historian John Martin Robinson ( two chimneypieces from Dan Cruickshank are elsewhere in the house). …The principal chimneypiece in the front drawing room we actually bought.

Although fitted up with chandeliers and furnished with Indian rugs, the two drawing rooms remain undecorated. On moving in, the first thing we did after throwing out piles of slug-ridden mattresses , was to hire a ‘steam-stripper’ and get layers of paper off the walls. This had a curious side effect. The steam fug condensed on the ceiling and mixed with the rich deposit of cigarette smoke to drip on our bare shoulders as liquid nicotine. [This room remained undecorated as long as they lived there.] I suppose I can imagine the buff cracked plaster looking rather Palladian and chic,  Stamp wrote. Indeed, to get a clever stainer and grainer to achieve this decaying palazzo effect would be very expensive. As it is, it is very economical, as is the treatment of the joinery. The Bloomsbury mottled finish is achieved by the inept use of a blow-lamp.

Stamp’s first bachelor flat, recorded for posterity in a watercolour by the talented designer, critic and art historian Alan Powers.

After a restoring  a much larger house by the nineteenth century architect Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson in the 1990s while teaching at the Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh School of Architecture, Gavin Stamp returned to London and  a mansion flat on the south side of the river. The watercolour perspective of St. Pancras New Church hangs here, over another handsome white marble chimneypiece. The rich red and yellow colour scheme is neo-Victorian, a Peter Blake Pop Art take on a nineteenth century palette.

I cannot abide walls without pictures and, ideally, I would like them from floor to ceiling.there cannot be too many. I have absolutely no sympathy for that austere, puritanical, joyless approach which demands no clutter and just a few choice objects in a room of awful, boring, whiteness. Such rooms are not for real, clumsy human beings. I would rather have lots of moderately good things than one exceptional object, Stamp wrote in 1980.

As regards the pictures, I like anything, providing it is of a building. [G.S. 1980].

 As for the furniture … the important thing is that tables should be able to bear the weight of piles of books  and that chairs should perform as filing cabinets.

HIs latest book, Anti-Ugly, Excursions in English Architecture and Design, is published by Aurum Press on November 7th. It’s an anthology of the best of his monthly columns written for Apollo magazine.

The piece from which it takes its name is the story of ‘Anti-Ugly Action,’ initiated by a group of students from the Stained Glass Department of the Royal College of Art, who demonstrated outside new buildings which they found offensive in the late 1950s.

The writer at home, 2013. Gavin Stamp was a friend of the poet and lover of architecture John Betjeman. Inspired, perhaps, by his example, he chose the life of an architectural historian-at-large, unattached to any academy or institution, although he teaches at several. He is a crusader for some of the causes that Betjeman espoused, and some more of his own. He writes the ‘Piloti’ column for Private Eye, which Betjeman originally founded and then passed on to him.

Anti-Ugly by Gavin Stamp, is about the Englishness of English architecture, its preservation, restoration, demolition and neglect, a trenchant, opinionated excursion around the architectural legacy which we have inherited, and to which we are so frequently dangerously indifferent.  [All images copyright Derry Moore/ bibleofbritishtaste]

This house is another of her works of art. The calm order of the rooms here belies the fact that in the year 2000, it was a no more than a brick carcass. Joinery, staircase, windows, chimneys and even the attic storey were gone.

The dining room at the front of the house, with reinstated fire surround and new joinery, but the chimney breast paneling left as found.

Paint colours were chosen from Emerie and Cie in Brussels. One of a series of John Goto’s photographs of carved saints and angels from East Anglian rood screens hangs on the walls.

Front garden from the dining room.

‘My collection hasn’t got a name, but it is all based on things to do with the sea.’ The earrings here are inspired by drawings of seaweeds and sea wrack in a nineteenth century German compendium of natural history.

The relevant page with the earring design-prototype  illustrated in the bottom right corner. The pod-like specimen above it became the necklace seen on the chimney piece in the photograph below.

The staircase is carpeted with lead fixed with copper nails.

The master bedroom, with Grayson Perry’s Map of an Englishman over the bed.

The bedroom

Dressing room.

The polychrome Victorian encaustic  tiles in the bathroom.

Study

Books are escaping and creeping up and down the stairs

On the front landing a little closet that would have served as a wig-powdering room in the eighteenth century now houses a jeweller’s workbench.

Drawing room, ceramics by Andrew Wicks and Edmund de Waal with a plate by Hylton Nel above.

Arts and Crafts chairs designed by Romilly’s cabinetmaker grandfather.

Romilly Saumarez Smith by kind permission of Lucinda Douglas-Menzies, copyright www.douglas-menzies.com/

Savage-&-Chong – Tattoo Ring

Here is the other end of the dining room, photographed in the wintry light of December 2013. The jolly nice 1790s mahogany chairs by Gillow came from an antique shop in Kirby Stephen in Cumbria.

 
John Robinson habitually wears pullovers and tweed jackets or pin striped double-breasted suits, Here he is at ease on his sofa. His sartorial preferences are still markedly similar to those of his circle as a postgradute student at Oriel College, Oxford, where he studied medieval history. His friend Bruce Wannell, aesthete and Persian scholar, hosted a fête champêtre with a real sheep, and a ‘Decadence’ party. ‘It was for that occasion that I emphasised my passing resemblance to the young Swinburne by growing a little red beard and wearing black velvet jacket, both of which I adopted as my permanent uniform for a time. … Bruce himself was once arrested by the police for murder after he sent his port-stained dress shirt to the laundry and was mistaken for the Oxford Ripper. Generally we wore old tweed coats, pullovers, or – a strange sartorial combination – the top half of a pinstripe suit with jeans, and black brogues or Gucci shoes with horse snaffles across the front.’

The upstairs sitting room, the still life in the manner of William Nicholson is by the portrait painter Diccon Swan.

The upstairs sitting room.

To the left of the fireplace is ‘Tea at Faringdon,’ a stunning watercolour by Glynn Boyde Hart painted relatively early on in his career.

JMR met the late Glynn Boyde Hart and his wife Carrie for the first time on being asked to supper at their new house in Cloudesley Square, soon after they had met his friend Colin McMordie while staying in Venice. After meeting for drinks in the pub the four set off together, and arrived at an, ‘uninhabitable Georgian wreck where the builders has just started the long slow job of repair. We removed a bit of rusty corrugated iron from a broken window, climbed in and ate a picnic off the floor. The room was to be their drawing room, decorated by Glynn with painted oak graining, a technique he revived using combs, brushes and tins of Mander’s Matzine acquired by the gallon from closing down sales in old fashioned paint shops. Cloudesley Square was the first of three beautiful house which the GBH’s were to revive and inhabit over the years…’ ‘Tea at Faringdon’ represents the occasion when Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners invited his friend and neighbour Penelope Betjeman to bring her Arab mare Moti into the drawing room at his country house to pose for an indoor equestrian portrait. Lord Berners was a composer, artist, writer and quasi-surrealist, who dyed the pigeons at Faringdon in exotic colours and was depicted as Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford’s novel, The Pursuit of Love.

One night at supper in our house, Glynn Boyde Hart dashed off this sketch of JMR on a scrap of paper. ‘It’s too absolutely ghastly’ is a characteristic expostulation, usually delivered after eight o’clock in the evening and the first few drinks of the day in a drawn-out-drawl through the long ‘a’ in ‘ghaaastly’. The quotation which follows is by way of an explaination, describing JMR’s sense of disaffiliation in the modern world.. ‘My memories of school, and indeed my feelings at the time, were that I was witnessing the collapse of not just an institution but a wider culture. My generation was the last. The last to be able to martial a shield of quartered arms, compose a Latin epitaph, read old books for pleasure, value formal manners, or tell the difference between Dec. and Perp. Nobody brought up and educated in this country after the end of the 1960s is the same as us. The unassuming cultural link, which made me feel at home in the 1890s or 1850s as much as in the present, has been broken.’

This is JMR”s pretty farmhouse at the foot of a Lancashire fell, with cows in the stone-paved yard at the back and a swift beck running at the bottom of the garden. The painting is by naive artist Caroline Bullock aka Carrie Boyde Hart. Glynn designed the two symmetrical wings which look as if they have always been there. Inside the house has elaborate  eighteenth century joinery by a local craftsman working from one of the pattern books of Batty Langley. John bought the house unseen in 1986, after seeing it (unillustrated) in a local agent’s particulars.

The upstairs sitting room in London.

Here is a tomato soup-coloured chair (which I sold him) designed by Lord Snowdon and made for the Investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle in 1969. Propped above it is a painting of the west Sussex town of Arundel with its castle, found for him by the Fitzwilliam Museum’s director Tim Knox at Portabello market. Every week on a Wednesday JMR catches the train to Arundel, where the towers and turrets of the castle hang over the town. Arundel Castle is one of the longest inhabited buildings in England and has been in the possession of the Howard family since 1138. A few years ago Julian and Isabel Bannerman designed a new garden full of curious 17th century conceits, in memory of the ‘Collector-earl’ of Arundel. JMR’s occupations there are essentially peaceable, usually taking place in the muniment room in one of the towers stuffed with documents going back to the 12th century, but his vision of England is of a country where martial tendencies are still latent :
‘In the course of the last three centuries of generally advancing tameness, the British deliberately and calculatedly kept alive and nurtured a primeval, male, barbarous streak in all classes as being best suited in the armed services, buccaneering and industrial-imperial life in general. ..This explains why the young British male, even today, is so much more of a violent, medieval, throw-back than his European, homogenized, social-democratic opposite numbers. Whenever I witness rampaging louts, glass-smashing yobs, vomiting football crowds, my heart swells with native British pride. We are not militarist, but we are warlike.’

Last year, John Robinson  published the research on which he has been working since he was an Oxford postgraduate, James Wyatt, 1746-1813, Architect to George III, and organised an exhibition ( with the Georgian Group)  on the same theme in the famous  Yellow Room at Colefax and Fowler. The colour on the walls of the Yellow Room was the inspiration of Nancy Lancaster, who bought out Sibyl Colefax when she retired, and John Fowler, paint wizard, who stippled many coats of paint on the walls and then glazed them, giving this electrifying sheen.

Also on show was this scale model of Wyatt’s Gothick masterpiece, Fonthill Abbey, made for James Wyatt, now belonging to the Bath Preservation Trust and usually on display in the Lansdowne Tower.

These pistachio green, Wyatt baby blue and sugar pink tea towels have now sold out.

English Heritage lent chairs, tripod flower stands, demi-lune tables, a  torchère and looking glasses from Heveningham Hall. They had been in store since the 1970s when the hall and its furniture were acquired from the Vanneck family by the government. Michael Heseltine, the Secretary of State for the Environment at the time, oversaw the transaction. The Department of the Environment failed to find a solution for the house, and it was sold again in 1981.

Also for sale were these watercolours of the plasterwork ceilings at Heveinngham by Georgian fanatic and artist Royston Jones.

Long ago as a junior curator at English Heritage I spent three claustrophobic days immured in the attics at Audley End House, where hundreds of pieces of Hevengham’s furniture had been taken into storage while everyone wondered what to do with it. Royston Jones and his partner Fiona Gray were taking measurement of every spindle, strut, arm, leg and moulding in order to fabricate a series of scale models of them all, and I had been left in charge of them. I don’t know if they ever finished this exacting task.

The photograph of Wyatt’s hall at Heveningham was taken by by Alfred E. Henson for Country Life in 1926. His clever trick was to throw a bucket of water over the marble floor, bringing its colours and patterns into gleaming high relief.   All images : copyright bibleofbritishtaste

The cooking apple-green entrance hall, part of a new front added to the house in the 1760s.

This ebonised chair was made by the celebrated George Bullock for the Emperor Napoleon during his lonely exile on St. Helena, an inherited souvenir or perquisite, brought back to Smedmore by the Colonel John Mansel, gallant peninsula officer,  who was garrisoned there.

This is the side wall of the same room  – same chairs – rather more austere – as it was last photographed by Country Life, in 1935

The principal front. Behind it, the older parts of the house date from the seventeenth century, but the de Smedemores were living in a house on these lands in the 1300s. The estate has passed down by inheritance through seven centuries.

My host and Smedmore’s owner, Dr. Philip Mansel, distinguished author and historian, founder of the Court Studies Society, Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, seen here with a small, ancient cannon.

The old kitchen is lit by a tall,tripartite Vitruvian window,

but from the outside you can see that this window has probably been inserted into an even older building range.

The garden front, early 1700s, in the manner of Christopher Wren.

Where you would expect to find dogs’ graves there is the tombstone of a long-dead tiger in the  grass under the trees.

Lunch, grilled sea trout, white wine, at the table in the dining room window bay.

The long table behind seats twenty comfortably. The plasterwork is by the Bastard brothers of Blandford.

This Tinteretto-pink on the walls was mixed  by Philip’s friend, the late, great Gervase Jackson-Stops, taste maker and scholar. The colour becomes lighter as it rises up the walls to the ceiling.

China cupboard.

A guest here in 1878, J.B.B., left this little album of sketches entitled,’ Reminiscences of my visit to Smedmore.’

Farmyard animals, small mishaps and funny anecdotes  feature on almost every page.

Philip is the creator and curator of this family museum in a corridor leading to the Butler’s Pantry. The head of a long, long-dead rhino is a grisly thing, sans horn.

The drawing room.

Yellow water iris in the blue and white vases were picked from the margins of the pond outside. Philip has brought colour back to the house with oriental ceramics and Ottoman carpets from Istanbul.

The Turkish Room, Philip’s work-in-progress.

The Cedar Room with some of the cargo of furniture and paintings inherited from Lady Elizabeth Villiers, who left everything to her Mansel niece..

Souvenirs of the past, pince-nez, spectacles, reticules, reels of embroidery silk, notebooks and diaries crammed into every drawer.

Shagreen reticule cases, miniatures, pill-boxes, eye-glasses …

one evening I went out for a pint of beer and found Corfe Castle, looking like a poster for the Dorset tourist board.

that night the moon was full and close

Working breakfast in the kitchen, before,

where School Prints by Julian Trevelyan and  John Nash hang next to the fire extinguisher

and after, ship-shape from the ministrations of the housekeeper.

Off-limits, a pantry in the old kitchen range

painted a hygienic light arsenic green

The bedroom corridor, miscellaneous  furniture washed up, waiting its turn. Note the crossed sabres, last seen in the entrance hall in Country Life’s photograph of 1935

a pink bedroom

My pink bedroom, with the most exquisite rococo fireplace

the paneled bathroom corridor, in the older, rear of the house

a blue bedroom with traditional English backup heating, although the central heating at Smedmore is fiercely powerful

Behind the stable block, a small craft beached amongst nettles

the stable arch and nature rampant

work yard off the back drive

A long allée or ride leads away from the house, cut through woods to give a view of the sweep of Kimmeridge bay (part of  the Smedmore estate along with the village of that name), and beyond, towards France.

On the left is the Clavell Tower, a folly pr perhaps an outpost for smuggling, built by an ancestor, the Rev. John Richard Clavell. Thomas Hardy took his first love Eliza Nicholl there, and the building inspired P. D; James’s thriller, The Black Tower (1975). Twenty years ago it was derelict and poised to topple as the soft, shaley cliffs beneath were eroded by the sea. Philip’s friends advised him,’Let it go,’ but instead he worked to have it transplanted 25 metres inland.Now you can stay there, courtesy of the Landmark Trust.

Verdure, cow parsley and cuckoo flowers (Red Campion) grow in wild abundance. Smedmore House can be rented for holidays, weekends, house parties or weddings when Philip is not in residence. The house and gardens are open to the public on certain days, which you can find on the website. Read more about Smedmore in the September issue of World of Interiors.  All images copyright bibleofbritishtaste.com

The hall.

When Richard and Tricia bought the Old House it was empty and derelict, divided into flats for the workers who ran a tractor-tyre retreading factory from its yards. The house had been empty for six years and most of its chimney pieces and joinery had been stripped out. Now it is the portrait of a marriage, and a family. Here is the hall, with Easter palm crosses.

The staircase hall, hung with prints, edge to edge.

Richard designed this handsome, immodest fireplace, the largest in the house, around the two end pilasters that he found in a Bury St. Edmunds antique shop for £25.

This cushion stitched with badges from military uniforms was made by their daughter.

The Wedgwood teapot with a crocodile finial celebrates the Egyptomania that marked  Nelson’s victory in Egypt at the Battle of the Nile in 1798 . ‘When I met Trish, she was the only person I knew who liked porcelain, and I was the only person she knew who liked porcelain,’ Richard says.’ She had a collection of little cups.’

The dining chairs belonged to Oxford aesthete Dadie Rylands, a fellow of Kings College, Cambridge : Richard found them in a local country auction. His college rooms were decorated by the Bloomsbury artist Dora Carrington, and immortalised by Virginia Wolf in A Room of One’s Own.

Propped on an easel is the finest portrait in the house of the powerfully built John Davenport, Tricia’s first father-in-law, writer, fund-raiser for Dylan Thomas, boxer, pianist and poet.

The wallpaper was deigned by Edward Bawden in 1935, and supplied by Coles of London. The floors were exactingly hand sanded by Tricia and bleached with lye.  The chimneypiece was created from salvage, bought at a local country house sale. When I last visited in the late 1980s, the room was decommissioned, with a gaping hole in the ceiling;  I could not have imagined how beautiful this room would look when it was finished.

The art pottery and glass is Tricia’s, and the big pottery jug was fished out of the River Ouse when a lock was being drained there.

Tricia found the hand painted hound place-card holders  that run along the chimmneypiece moulding, and she is waiting for her daughter Maud to paint some huntsmen and horses to run with them. You can see them a bit more clearly in the picture below.

The small, enigmatic oil painting was a student work by their son, Arthur Hewlings.

The bedroom, with poltergeist curtain activity.

A sweet disorder. Shoes and shells lie distributed over the carpet, and wind-blown billets-doux flutter to the floor.

Still life with upright vacuum cleaner.

The children’s toys and books make a museum in the bedroom corridor

Bedroom picture, an early C20th fairground scene by Clodagh Sparrow.

The much-admired kitchen, hand built, partly by Richard, with a new (in 2014) lead splash-back designed by Tricia. Better than Plain English.

Saturday lunch in preparation. Not a museum, everything is for use, and in use.

Probably the nicest kitchen in East Anglia.

‘This is our ‘dirt’ room, its the scullery, it has a sink.’

The third of their kitchen dressers

The lower garden, where food is grown. The land was reclaimed from beneath rafts of concrete which covered the farmyards here for fifty years.

More food in bountiful profusion

Arcadia. Compost heap and nature rampant.

A family of aesthetes live here, in Thames-side Isleworth to the west of London.

These are some clues to their identity. The hanging mugs feature monochrome woodblock  vignettes of the Dorset countryside by the artist, engraver  and typographer Reynolds Stone (1909-1979), and the three coffee cans below have motifs taken from his graphic designs  ( winter is coming in now, so we switched on the electric lights).

On the top row are Eric Ravilious’s Garden Implement mugs, designed for Wedgwood in its glory days.

Which brings me to my subject, another artist, author and designer, Ian Archie Beck, who is married to Stone’s youngest daughter Emma. Here is the 40th Anniversary special edition of the album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which he designed for Elton John in 1973 when he was twenty-six years old, over the course of a long weekend. Rocket, Elton’s record company asked him to include a piano and teddy bear. You can read more about it here.

And here is their rescued greyhound, a fine ex-racer who ran at Hove dog track, named Gracie.

On the shelves behind her, what looks like a full set of mid twentieth century books with jackets designed by Barnett Freedman are lined up.

And above the book case a small leather suitcase is plastered with enigmatic luggage labels including one which reads, ‘Les Freres Perverts…’

Les Freres Perverts is the performance or cabaret group invented by Ian and his friend and fellow artist the late  Glynn Boyd Harte, of whom there is much more to say later.

Glynn Boyd Harte,  Celia Stothard and Ian Beck, ‘Les Freres Perverts’ on May 1st, 1975.

GBH (as he was known) went for the total immersion experience. Here is the record of his enthusiasm, his ?crayon drawing of the sheet music which provided their songs and inspiration, much of it sourced for them by their friend and fan, Patrick O’Connor, critic and music hall enthusiast.

For me, the climax of their performances was the moment when they became seedy sellers of dirty postcards in an unspecified Egyptian location, dressed in white cotton gloves and solar topees, Ian displaying his wares to the audience with throaty cries of, ‘Carte Postale, Carte Postale,’ Glynn seated at the piano and craning over his shoulder at us.  This is what Ian was holding, very kindly ‘dug out’ from his archives.

Here is the window sill in the dacha in the garden, where Ian works.

And on the drawing board below, copies of his latest work, a limited edition illustrated volume of poems, that was three years in the making. It is seen here with a vintage unredeemed, book token designed by Barnett Freedman and a copy of that small, extremely rare publication, Murderer’s Cottages, by Glynn Boyd Harte (1976), a chap book-style publication that gave him the opportunity to draw Staffordshire china souvenirs of notorious murderers’ cottages on every double page. Ian has been writing these poems ever since Glynn died, in 2003. The first one came to him when he spotted Jude Law in Camden, and thought, ‘he looked so handsome, he looked like a god!’

Each plate in each volume is currently being hand coloured by Ian. Each book takes around four hours to complete and they are all subtly different. The page describing its publisher and editions is below.

A wedding present, John Piper’s screen print from his 1972 designs for Benjamen Britten’s opera,  Death in Venice, hangs on the back wall. Below are works by David Jones and a sketch by Denton Welch, one that Ian inherited from Patrick O’Conner ( ‘rather touchingly, he had written my name on them,’ says Ian),

next to a poster by Barnett Freedman from 1956  for the London Underground, reprinted in 1965

and a framed sample of Eric Ravilious’s Garden Implements design, printed by Edinburgh Weavers in the 1950s.

and here is the naif still life painted by Ian’s mother in her old age with a paint box which he had discarded, hanging in the kitchen. She was annoyed by it, unable to make the perspective correct as she would have liked, and so slightly ashamed of it and cross with her son, for taking it away and liking it.

Ian Beck’s limited edition and hand-coloured book is published and sold by Neil Jennings Fine Art , contact him at : neil@jenningsfine art.co.uk. All images copyright Ian Beck and  bibleofbritishtaste.

The painting is of an ancestor of Roger’s, who who is descended from soldiers on his  father’s side and the Pre Raphaelite painter  John Everett Millais via his mother’s family, He bought the gothic tabernacle on the right with an inheritance.

But their house was last photographed in the 80s for the World of Interiors, and then featured in Min Hogg’s’ A Decoration Book’  in 1988. Min used this picture in the chapter entitled, ‘Simple,’ and wrote there, ‘the chintz on the seats of the three matching chairs (found for £1 each) has been dyed black, but its original pattern still shows through, giving an effect of expensive damask.’ ‘That was the front room when we first moved in,’ says Christina.

This is the Drawing Room, painted in Farrow and Ball’s Saxon Green. Or perhaps it is Cooking Apple Green? The Italian sofa came from Christina’s grandparents and they gave her the damask covered chair for her eighteenth birthday. The standard lamp comes from Roger’s family. Christina took the gold thread embroidery from another lamp shade and stuck it on this one.

Beyond is the modern extension, added 11 years ago. A friend who was an architect designed the kitchen.

On a high shelf are dozens of china models of cenotaphs collected by Roger. Many of these are currently on loan to an exhibition in London’s Wellington Arch Quadriga Gallery, We Will Remember Them: London’s Great War Memorials. As Dr. Roger Bowdler of English Heritage, historian and Director of Designation, he is the curator of this exhibition, which runs until the end of November and is highly recommended. Below is a shelf full of French apothecary jars.

The Wedgwood black basalt ware was bought thirty years ago. Did you always collect stuff, I asked? ‘Yes, my parents were always going to auctions,’ said Christina. ‘I used to go to jumble sales all the time, mainly clothes, fantastic fancy dress stuff.  In the 1970s we lived in a road that had the Plymouth Brethren, Jehovahs Witnesses and a church hall, all in the same street.’

The plaster on the kitchen wall is an effect known as faux Elephant skin.’It’s really easy. You colour the plaster, you stipple it when its wet, and when its almost going off, you smooth it over and put linseed oil on it.’

The print above the lamp commemorates the  ‘Loyal Order of Free Mechanics,’ fellows of a Masonic lodge.

Christina is an Art Director and Production Designer. For  the last few years she has worked on the series Game of Thrones, but she is also an  architect and graphic artist who teaches Film Studies. She redesigned the front of their eighteenth century terraced house, a former butcher’s shop that had been badly converted in the 1960s. ‘It was based on the shops in Flask Walk in Hampstead, and an old shop front that I was going to buy, but its timbers  turned out to be rotten. But the front door is old and once I got that, it it gave me the detail from which to copy and construct the rest.’

Christina bought the painting from a junk stall in Flask Walk. Top shelf, Wedgwood commemorative mugs.

Roger is a former president of the Mausolea and Monuments Trust, with an ‘ongoing interest in ossuaries, skeletons and death’s heads on tombs, monuments, outdoor tombs and the inexhaustible pleasures of British churchyards.’ He framed up and hung this series of prints, a ‘Dance of Death’ by ?George Cruikshank, garnished with poppies for Remembrance Day.

Roger’s upstairs study, and his son’s electric guitar.

When their son was a baby this became his night nursery, and Christina slipped the illustrated pages from a ‘Babar the Elephant’ book into these frames. Now George  Vertue’s prints of the Kings and Queens of England, around which this whole room was designed, are back on show.

This print of a London square is by Denton Welch.

Bedroom.

Some of  the house’s most  familiar landmarks have migrated to the basement, things that I have been looking at on my visits there for over twenty years.

This vitrine was made for displaying chocolates, now it holds Christina’s Cabinet of Curiosities, ‘ old architectural models that I made, beach finds, wax ex votos, plaster casts of members of the family’s teeth.’ The little deer hoof pegs are French and the model of a house is by their daughter Iris.’ The memorial picture is one of the first things I bought in Brick lane. It’s beautifully hand made but says, ‘In Lovnig Memory,’ rather than ‘Loving.’

Min Hogg used this stupendous picture of their 1980s bedroom in her chapter called ‘Eccentric.’ She described Christina as ‘the owner of this domestic mausoleum … a robustly cheerful student of architecture who is amused by her own taste for the macabre.’

Roger and Christina, 1990s. ‘She had furs, it was very very rare to see a student wearing furs in Cambridge in the early 1980s,’ says Roger. ‘Double red fox, several layers of very long skirts and a big Sam Brown belt. Crucifixes.’  You were north of Pre Raphaelite?  ‘South of Chateaubriand’, says Roger.   All images: copyright Conran/World of Interiors/ bibleofbritishtaste.

A corner of the Sitting Room. Print by David Hockney, cushion by Rose de Borman.

Bavent House sits on a derelict farmyard plot by the Suffolk coast, and its footprint is minimal. This is the facade that you see on first arrival, its interesting, jumbled silhouette is intentionally picturesque. Its architect is Anthony Hudson, who won an RIBA award for this design.

Its robust, box-like structure has an engineered timber frame and black zinc and Iroko timber cladding that has already weathered grey. Its design was inspired by local vernacular buildings, timber framed barns and the old black tarred fishing shacks on Southwold Beach.

The core of this house wraps around three sides of a shallow, sheltered south-facing courtyard. Light travels straight through the central living space with its huge opposing windows.

The house sits on the top of a slight rise; carefully positioned picture windows of different sizes frame the views. This is the north side, with long sights across open country towards the Hen Reedbeds. The old brick built stables that house their horses belonged to the earlier farmyard here.

Corner of the Sitting Room.

Xmas jigsaw in progress.

The more formal seating area around the fireplace, the Cornish landscape is by Barbara Hepworth’s daughter, Rachel Nicholson.

The maximum of glazing in the centre of this house allows the light and wide landscape to come inside. The sofas were commissioned by Lucy’s interior designer sister Virginia White, whose London House was featured on bibleofbritishtaste here. She also advised on the look and styling of these rooms.

White-ish walls and wide Douglas Fir floorboards emphasise interior geometry. Brown furniture from their last home, a Georgian terraced house in north London, looks even better here.

Decoy ducks under the window. The Georgian armchair is covered in a turquoise Ananas fabric pattern from Raoul.

Outside, live and shattered oaks in the middle ground, a December landscape by Graham Sutherland.

Looking through the centre of the house from the kitchen. Richard getting on with stuff.

Meissen serving dishes and Moomintroll cups, just before Sunday breakfast.

A corner of the small sitting room, equipped with wood burning stove, Labradors and TV.

Stone flagged Entrance Hall.

Staircase risers and two chairs designed by Lord Snowdon for the Investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarvon Castle in 1969.  For another example, see here.

The Master Bedroom has long views over the reed beds. The blind and bolster fabric is Virginia White’s Forest Spring, designed by Rose de Borman.

Lucy very patiently and kindly waiting for me to get on with it.

Wood panelled bathroom leading off Master bedroom. The portrait of Lucy is by her sister Philippa Kunisch, a jewellery designer who features on bibleofbritishtaste here.

One of two guest bedrooms, this one has the best view of the marshes. the cushions on the bed are in Virginia White’s 2014 Whippets fabric.

Camp chair with more de Borman cushions. Table lamps converted from Scandinavian glass vases.

Corner of the best guest bedroom, with a very handsome wing chair. Lucy has a good eye for Georgian carcass furniture, spindly chairs and looking glasses.

The second guest bedroom, with junk shop Uccello  lampshade bought by Virginia from Paul’s Emporium in northern Camden Town.

Clea’s bedroom and her bathroom papered with Marthe Armitage’s Chinoserie paper (one of my three favourites). Marthe was the first artist maker to be featured in the bibleofbritishtaste, you can read about her here.

The house’s core is double height, with an office in the angle of the bridge running between its upstairs guest and household wings. The interior spaces here feel large and exhilarating to be in.

Looking down from the bridge. Advent calendars in the course of manufacture, cat n’ dog.

Light-box.

Spotty cat cleaning its paw in the entrance hall..

Wind, birds and meadow grazing for their sheep and horses to the north.

Lucy and Birdie.

All images copyright bibleofbritishtaste. Many thanks to the Turvills.

Cutting a dash as a research student at Oxford.

She grew up in this Modern Movement house in Surrey, and still describes herself as a Modernist.

The house which she shares with her husband Henry Harrod  in west London is a palimpsest, containing the belongings and decorative finishes from three generations. Henry’s  paternal grandmother Frances Forbes Robertson made her home here in the 1930s, the portraits that she painted hang together in the staircase and hall. Next came her son the economist Sir Henry Roy Forbes Harrod and his energetic and strong minded wife Wilhelmina Cresswell (always known as Billa), aesthete and historian who was briefly engaged to the poet John Betjeman, complied the Shell Guide to Norfolk for him, founded the Norfolk Churches Trust and made her last home in the Old Rectory, Holt, in that interesting county. She died in 2005. On the Biedermier tallboy is a  ceramic Madonna and Child by contemporary artist-craftsman Philip Eglin, of whom Tanya writes in The Real Thing, ‘Studying my Madonna and Child reminds me of how learned good artists invariably are.’

The overmantle picture is by the St.Ives School modernist Terry Frost.

‘Beasties’ Wallpaper by Peggy Angus (1904-1983), designer, teacher and painter, of whom Tanya wrote this obituary when she died in 1993. The painted plate is by Philip Eglin. (You can buy Angus’s papers once again now, from Anne Dubbs at the wonderful Blithfield and Company.)

The oil painting on the left is by Tanya’s mother Maria Sax, who painted her own mother on horseback galloping away from her two small, distraught children.

Large jars by Richard Batterham.

A Zimmerlinde, a large leaved Austrian Linden or Lime tree cultivated as an indoor plant. Lucian Freud had one of these, it appears in his ‘Large Interior, Paddington‘ 1968-9, and several of his drawings.

‘Billa’s table.’ Her country house was anatomised and photographed for Alvilde Lees-Milne’s book,’The Englishwoman’s House’ in 1984.

Small ornaments that she arranged on its hardstone top . ‘We all liked her table so much, so we decided to recreate it.’

Tanya’s first subject was John Ruskin and the Arundel Society, the fons et origo of all her writings since on the arts and the crafts. Some of the nineteenth century prints of Italian Renaissance paintings published by the Society and collected by her as a postgraduate student hang in the hall, against crimson ‘Suns’ wallpaper designed by Peggy Angus and hand printed using lino-cut blocks and household emulsion in her Camden Town studio.Tanya’s essays on ‘Peggy Angus and flat pattern’ and ‘William Morris in our time,’ are published in her new book, The Real Thing.

Hanging higher up the stairs beneath Tanya’s ancestors, are portraits of the young Roy Harrod painted by his adoring mother,  some of them returned again to London from the Old Rectory in Holt.

The best bedroom with Omega-ish walls hand painted by Joao Penalva.

A painting by Stella Cardew, first wife to the composer Cornelius Cardew. Tanya’s biography of his potter father Michael, is ‘The Last Sane Man,‘ published in 2013. A. S. Byatt described her as ‘the perfect biographer for such a complex and gifted man,’ you can read her review here.

Spare bedroom with Billa Harrod’s Victorian shell flowers under a dome.

Peggy Angus bathroom wallpaper. As Tanya has written,

Sailor’s tokens and shell souvenirs collected by Billa Harrod hang above the bath.

Posters advertising Sir Roy Harrod’s lecture tour in Japan.

The kitchen overmnatle. Drawing by their little granddaughter, a bird plate made by Seth Cardew at Wenfordbridge Pottery and assorted ceramics amassed by earlier generations of Harrods.

‘The Future is Handmade : the crafts in the new millennium,’ poster advertising Tanya’s lecture in Krakow.

Large bowl by Michael Cardew, two small apprentice pieces made by Tanya at the Wenfordbridge Pottery under the tuition of Seth Cardew, and her masterpiece biography of  his father Michael Cardew, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Father and daughter. The Crafts in Britain in the 20th Century, her outstanding magnum opus published by Yale in 1999, and its beautiful offspring, The Real Thing now a 5 star read on Amazon.

Tanya possesses the visual objectivity and academic rigor of the architectural scholar Nicholas Pevsner, but this is overlaid with a sensibility and humanity that makes her writing so much more nuanced, rewarding and pleasurable to read.
All images (3 portrait photographs excepted) c.bibleofbritishtaste.

The postcard advertises Bannerman’s Bar in  Cowgate, Edinburgh Old Town,  Julian Bannerman’s legendary first venture in 1979,  the place where he met his wife Isabel Eustace (it is still there). This is a tour of the house and garden which they recently took on in 84 pictures, beginning with the garden, then the house. The pictures are large so that you can see the detail. If you don’t like gardens, fast forward now, but you will be missing the best bit.

In 2012 the Bannermans left Hanham Court (one of my first and favourite posts here) the house they had restored and the garden they had created near Bath, for Trematon Castle on the eastern edge of Cornwall.  Here they live in  a long low Regency house built by a practical naval man who was also a follower of Sir John Soane.

The entrance front, with olive trees donated from a client’s garden and the Victorian planters that they found in a  salvage yard two years ago and rebuilt. Light bounces off the water and shines straight through the house from front to back.

I’ve stayed at Trematon half a dozen times and watched the house transformed with new colour schemes and dozens of their pictures unpacked and hung. This was the front drive at the end of winter in 2014.

There was no garden as such before they came. But by last summer the nine acres of castle grounds in which the house stands had been utterly re-made.

This is the double border planted and designed by Isabel in the curving contour of the bailey wall. It is what the Bannermans are justly famous for  as I and J Bannerman, Garden Designers and Builders, gardeners by appointment to the Prince of Wales. They have been working together since 1983.

The green oak obelisk are  a Bannerman speciality.

This is the border in 2014. This year it will be even bigger, bursting and overflowing from its beds.

Trematon Castle was built to command the mouth of the River Tamar over the water from the naval base of Plymouth. This is its gatehouse with a handsome upper chamber in which the Black Prince spent a night in the fourteenth century.The castle belongs to the Duchy of Cornwall, it fell into the hands of the Duke of Cornwall soon after the Norman Conquest. When Sir Francis Drake sailed back to Plymouth after his circumnavigation of the globe in 1580, he waited at anchor, then came ashore to store the treasure he had gathered up for his monarch Queen Elizabeth  – gold, silver and emeralds pirated from Spanish ships around the coasts of South America – in safety at Trematon.

Here is the garden ‘in the green,’ in early spring.

And again,  a couple of months further on.

The nineteenth century builder of the new house here hit upon the plan of bashing out sections of the curtain wall at strategic viewpoints, bringing in great gusts of bright effulgent light.

The ancient Motte stands on a steeph tump like an upturned pudding basin. Julian sprayed the winter heliotrope that was rampant here choking out all other growth, and now the long dormant seeds of  thyme, Valerian, native orchids and wild fennel have burst back into life.

There is a narrow grassy walk along the rampart under the wall that makes a path between Motte and Gatehouse.

Here is the garden front, with little wooden dummy cannons made by the Bannermans, trained on Plymouth.

The house with its castellated garden front stands on the elevated plateau where the original castle dwelling hall and chapel was once.

Young and ancient apple trees and Gunnera in a protected meadow cum orchard between the walls.

The ‘Hindoo’ swimming pool installed by previous tenants, where a few newts were swimming around the steps.

Stables on the back drive.

And at last, the house. The Staircase and Entrance Hall, decorated for the World of Interiors shoot last year (for which the photographer was the excellent Christopher Simon Sykes, who is also David Hockey’s biographer ) and (just) published in March 2015.

Isabel’s garden flowers taken as she was arranging them for the shoot on the kitchen table.

Binoculars for scanning Her Majesty’s fleet or any other shipping anchored in Plymouth Sound.

The Dining Room which often doubles as Isabel’s office.

I like this room so much, I’ve taken its picture six or seven times.

Isabel getting on with it.

Topographical prints and watercolours of antiquarian scenes.

A flotilla of warships.

Beyond the dining room is s Morning Room or parlour with the TV.

All the fireplaces here are original, of the same Regency date as the house.

And I am proud that Isabel has added the two little Cornish Serpentine lighthouses from the Lizard peninsula that I  gave her to the mantlepiece.

In 2014 she made stripey covers for the chairs.

But I like the room in deshabille too, here we watched the Downton Abbey Xmas special in 2012 by the roaring fire, the one when Matthew Crawley dies horribly in a car smash.

The huge copper sphere is an ancient finial from Christopher Wren’s Tom Tower in Oxford, taken down during restoration in the 1960s.

View of the long border from the Drawing Room window.

Blissful Drawing Room.

Isabel’s mantlepiece arrangement are matchless, the dynamic opposites of the ‘tablescapes’ contrived by that careful decorator, David Hicks.

This picture hang which I like hugely includes a poster for Graham Sutherland and a Paul Nash-like gouache by David Vickery.

Upstairs.

Master bedroom with the bed made up from lengths of carved Gothick pelmet.

More gouaches from their David Vickery collection.

A profile silhouette of Julian tucked behind the looking glass frame.

Spare room. Isabel’s botanical photographs.

These pictures were taken soon after they moved in.

A year later the daybed had been re-webbed and the room was looking a lot swankier.

Ismay’s bedroom.

Early morning. View from my bedroom.

My bed, facing out to sea.

Isabel and Julian’s bathroom is the nicest I have ever seen.

Isabel’s sewing room.

Some of her document textiles.

And one that puzzles her, she has no idea what it was woven for.

That evening we went up onto the rampart walk,

turned left at the gatehouse with its plaque commemorating the Black Prince’s visit,

where the fireplace held a bundle of bunting,

(the recalcitrant pug is their son Bertie’s dog)

then up the steep castle mound,

and via a vertiginous iron ladder, to the precarious ledge fifty feet up, where Isabel hauled up a new Union Jack in place of the old one, shattered by winter storms.

Cannons still trained on Plymouth. This photograph c.Isabel Bannerman. The gardens at Trematon are open to the public, more information here. Isabel’s botanical photographs are with  jonathancooper.co.uk . Probably one of the most beautiful places in Britain. Thanks to the Bannermans.