Designer Bunny Turner's Oxfordshire rectory is as grand as it is comfortable
There are parts of the UK that still have the power to surprise with their beauty. Take the Chilterns, a rolling chalk escarpment between London and Oxfordshire, where gentle hills and fields give way to pockets of dense sylvan green. Go deeper into the countryside and you enter an England held in amber, where gnarled trees and ancient hedgerows – tall as your car – enclose narrow roads that feel as if they have been worn into the earth through hundreds of years of use. The sound of the motorway fades – and god forbid you come across another car coming in the opposite direction.
‘It’s quite weird, isn’t it?’ observes Bunny Turner, who co-founded interior design studio Turner Pocock with Emma Pocock. ‘You come off the M40 into a slightly unremarkable town, drive down this little lane and you’re suddenly in Gandalf world. It’s so bucolic, but it’s only an hour from my London studio door to door.’
The story of Bunny’s house is, in many ways, tied to the extraordinary events that have shaped the UK over the last few years. She and her husband bought the house in 2017 after their plan to undertake a more substantial project –renovating a larger property with outbuildings – fell through. ‘We were about to exchange when Brexit happened and we stopped in our tracks and thought, this is a monster of a thing to embark on when everything feels so insecure,’ she recalls.
They went back to the drawing board, searching for another year until they eventually came across this Georgian rectory set in acres of fields just outside the village it had once served. Connected to the churchyard, the house had graceful proportions and glorious windows looking over the church spire and surrounding farmland. It, too, had been on the market for some time but it was not in an area that they had originally been considering. ‘I just kept coming back to it,’ says Bunny. ‘There is something in the spirit of this house that gets under your skin the moment you walk through the door.’
They moved in, knowing they had some superficial work to do, but with no plans to do anything architecturally. ‘The thing I felt most strongly was that I wanted to use a light touch,’ Bunny explains. ‘I didn’t wish to make any drastic interventions, or leave my mark too obviously on it. If I were to build it from scratch again, there’s nothing I’d change in its shape and form.’
The previous owners’ style had been quite different, with swagged curtains, silk-damask walls and ornate pediments. Bunny and her family moved in with just beds, using cardboard boxes with Ikea office lamps as bedside tables. ‘There was something freeing about the fact that none of us cared if it got messed up,’ she says. ‘The children could draw on the walls and cartwheel round the empty rooms. It felt gloriously liberating.’
For the first three years, the renovation was carried out piecemeal, with the family retaining their London home while gradually chipping away at the work. A richly coloured Austrian marriage chest, which now sits on the hall table, was the linchpin of the scheme: ‘I had a really instinctive reaction to it when I bought it. It encapsulated how I wanted the house to feel, and was a guiding force I could return to as the interior evolved.’ Piling down at weekends, with friends, kids and dogs, Bunny gradually collected art to fill the walls and bits of furniture – a high low mix of serious pieces, such as the mirror in the sitting room from Max Rollitt, and things she has picked up for virtually nothing from antique fairs and high-street shops.
Then, in 2020, the unthinkable happened. Just as the world was heading into lockdown, Bunny received a cancer diagnosis: ‘It took Covid and the realisation that I would be having treatment during that period to give us the push to move here full time. But we settled into life so quickly that it felt incredibly hard to imagine how we could go back to London. It was only then that I started bedding in to the idea of furnishing it.’
‘This is my chemo bed,’ Bunny says with a laugh, referring to the enormous four-poster in the main bedroom with its decorative box pelmet – which was inspired by a Veere Grenney design – and crisp linen curtains hanging like soldiers. ‘When it turned up, my husband said, “Are you sure this is what you asked for? It’s a bit theatrical.”’
But it is these notes of theatre – the cast of the Elgin marbles in the hall, the Chinese family paintings in the sitting room, the bench in the dining room hand-painted by Tess Newall to look centuries older than it is – working in counterpoint to Bunny’s considered approach to colour, textiles and finishes, that make the rooms sing. Where she could not find pieces that worked, she designed them. The bench in the hall, the desk in the bedroom and the ottoman in the sitting room were initially made for this house and then added to Turner Pocock’s collection in collaboration with Lorfords Contemporary. The bedroom and sitting room rugs are from the studio’s range with Peter Page.
Although this is a grand house in many ways, Bunny has pulled off the magic trick of creating a space that also feels comfortable and welcoming. The kitchen is modelled on her grandparents’ farmhouse. There is a cosy snug where the ottoman is used as a stage for the kids’ karaoke shows. It is an old house that feels young and fresh. ‘I was always adamant that I didn’t want this to be a precious place where people didn’t feel like they could relax,’ she explains. ‘Our approach at Turner Pocock is to show people how to live well in their homes.’ Now Bunny is fully recovered, it is evident that living well is what she intends to do here.
