Inside Ben Pentreath's fully-renovated parsonage nestled in the Dorset countryside

[bell dings]

[rooster crows]

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This particular valley,

I think is one of the most special parts of West Dawson.

It is an incredibly tranquil kind of secret little place.

You know, coming down into little birdie,

down the steep hill into the village,

you somehow feel as if you're entering a slightly...

It's almost like coming into a slightly lost world

that time has forgotten.

[chicken clucking]

The house, I think it's fair to say,

was in a little bit of a state when I first took it over.

Slightly cut of black, and moldy, and a little bit grim,

and it definitely needed some love, and care, and attention.

And we negotiated a deal where I took a 10-year lease,

which was great.

So I had enough certainty to actually spend

a little bit of money on it and to make it nice.

I've always been interested in architecture,

and interiors and design broadly,

and I've always been interested in old houses

and old places, and old buildings, you know.

Kind of quite nerdy when I was a child.

We did lots of alterations

and sort of redecoration and made it nice,

but it was very, very empty in the early days.

And then slowly over time, it's got more and more full.

When I first moved in, I painted this room pale gray,

and then in the middle of winter,

it began to feel a little kind of gloomy.

So I got my friend Patrick Baty from Papers and Paint.

He mixed this color for me and then he said,

I want to kinda give it a name.

Can I call it pantries pink?

And I was like,

No, that's too specific,

but you can call it parsonage pink.

And I think it's now one of the very bestselling paint.

It started here.

And it's nice that the name will live on.

This fireplace wasn't here, it just had

a sort of kind of really basic old wooden surround.

So I took that off and installed this lovely one

from my friend, Will Fisher, at Jamb.

These two beautiful examples

on the piano and over there, Robert Keim.

Really beautiful quality of metal work.

This sofa, which is from my great friend, Max Rollitt,

is one of the very few new bits

of furniture in the whole house.

And other than that, I think every single piece

of furniture in the house is old, bizarrely,

and yet there's a weird thing about the house

that it doesn't entirely feel like you're walking

into an antique shop.

And I can't quite put my finger on it,

but I never quite get that feeling here.

[gentle music]

This is the room we live in most of the time, I'd say that.

I sort of spend most of my life working at the kitchen table

and we've got the sofa at the end,

which is very much now the home of the dogs

as well as Charlie and I.

We just went bright yellow, high gloss,

and it's a bit like living inside the middle of an egg yolk.

It's kind [laughs] of even on the grayest day,

it's very cheerful.

And you come down in the morning

and it is a happy space to be in.

It's probably the least kind of fitted kitchen

that you can imagine.

When I got here, there was just this fantastic

array of cupboards.

It's like a kind of messy old shoe.

The China collection, which grows, and grows, and grows.

It just goes on and on.

And so, the pots and pans, it's an addiction,

and we can't quite stop it,

but I guess it's a healthy addiction in a way.

I've got a real passion for typography.

In particular, for letterpress printing.

And if I see it somewhere, I can't resist an old poster.

This is our wedding invitation entertainment

and live camels.

So that was our wedding party invitation,

which was designed by me, in fact.

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This is kind of one of the most fun rooms in the house.

It doesn't get used that often,

but I think that every house needs a dining room,

because it gives us sort of peculiar magic to an evening.

So, one of the best things in this room

is this fantastic drawing by my friends, Sheen Byrne,

showing a huge exuberant vase of dahlias

in a wonderful kind of pot with crazy colors,

which I absolutely love.

The other thing that you'll notice in here

is that we have a lot of China.

This amazing set came from my grandmother,

and it's a 19th century set of China

made by a fantastic company called Flight Bar and Barn.

The house would've originally had the small windows

in these rooms, and this is the other huge bay window,

which was added on.

And when we have a lot of people run

for dinner or for lunch, you know,

we extend the tables all the way into the bay window

and all the way up in that direction.

So it really makes the room actually quite a lot bigger.

It's really practical.

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We've come up the top of the stairs.

This is the corridor,

and then heads down to the guest bedroom in that direction.

Is a really beautiful old original oval window.

And then over there is an oval window

that I inserted when I kind of first came into the house.

I did a fantastic, like, one of my all-time

exciting life projects was working

with Morrison Co on not one, but two collections.

This wallpaper was one of the designs, and I really love it.

It's just brought a kind of, I don't know,

wonderful green, leafy feel to this whole corridor.

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This is our guest bedroom.

It's got the little bathroom tucked around the corner.

The nicest bedroom in the house is not for us,

it's for people who're coming to stay.

This is one of my favorite colors of all time

made by Patrick Baty,

but I would say that it only works

if you've got plenty of paintings.

Curtains I bought from Colefax and Fowler.

These little gothic chairs,

it's always nice to have a little touch

of gothic when you're living in the old parsonage

with the gothic church just outside the window.

If I had to get one thing outta the house in a fire,

probably be this, which was made by my mother.

She was a potter, and it says,

It is the end that crowns us, not the fight.

Which I always think is a really nice, you know,

it's all about a sense of continuity and tradition.

For me, the perfect bedroom,

you've gotta have a comfortable bed, number one.

You've gotta have a good bedside table

and a good reading light, number two and three.

And then it's all really about having nice,

interesting things to look at and to live with,

particularly in a guest bedroom, I think.

It's really nice if there's sort of a sense of personality.

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This is the flower room.

This is really Charlie's domain.

It is filled with Charlie McCormick collections,

We've piles and piles of books.

We've got trophies, crazy trophies.

The one above the fireplace in that cabinet,

I actually bought from Drew Pritchard.

1950s and '60s Pony-Mad Girl,

who was winning many, many events.

And there's just something so visually stunning

about all of those rosettes in her cabinet.

Peter Hone, the Master-Plaster-Caster,

as he describes himself,

creates these fantastic, perfect replicas of old bits

of architectural fragments and wall brackets, keystones.

Charlie's coronation collections are next level.

These are coronation flags and bunting

you can see all over the place.

It literally just goes on and on.

It's an addiction.

Yeah, I mean, it's completely mad.

We can't quite stop, but we just love it.

So, it is what it is.

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I mean, one of the reasons why this place is just so special

and so beautiful, and this is an estate village,

they're all owned by the same family.

And the family have been here for a really long time,

for about 300 years.

And then they actually created this wonderful

picturesque landscape and groupings of buildings.

They have made a decision that they, as a family,

are going to leave and move on.

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We are soon going to be moving from the parsonage.

We've been house hunting and looking

at over the last few years since we sort

of found out the news that the estate was going to be sold

and that our house was therefore gonna be sold

as part of that.

And we're going north in a few weeks time, actually.

And it is going to be one

of the most exciting new adventures of our lives.

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