Inside an Italian-inspired Georgian country house, secluded in English countryside

[Greta] Nothing stays for long in this house,

but all is patient.

The morning star is a god on our ceiling.

You hold me like a rare world,

traveling in darkness and ending in darkness.

Arriving in infinite light circles tonight, tomorrow.

[bright music]

[Rob] We bought this house during Covid lockdown,

so we were feeling a bit trapped in England

and pining for Italy.

With the general feel of the house,

you wanted to make something that blended,

like an English Georgian house

with like an Italian color palette in a way.

Rob, you were thinking this is like the dream place

to have an art studio

and I was thinking this is the dream place

as a film location.

We ended up shooting a feature film,

which I co-wrote, Tell that to the Winter Sea.

[bright music]

[Rob] In London I would have these studios

that were constantly getting shut down.

The building got developed, the artists got kicked out.

I must have had four studios in six years

and there was no sense of security with studio space,

which is why we finally sort of made that leap really.

[bright music]

This is what we call the music room

and when we first moved in, the owners said to us,

it has perfect acoustics.

[Rob] It was built in 1820

and they said it was built with its own set of instruments

and they used to give concerts here once a month.

We didn't have a piano here,

but then my literary agent came to stay

and she basically was like, I'm sending you a gift.

And one day this piano just turned up

and that's the piano over there.

[Rob] It's a good room for a party.

[Greta] Like every time we go to Italy,

we smuggle objects in our suitcases

Constantly bringing like Italian vases back on Ryan Air.

This light we found in a little junk shop

close to the Vatican in Rome.

Poetry is like fundamental to what we both do.

[Greta] When we first met,

we wrote a lot on the walls, didn't we?

And then over the years it sort of,

we just kept doing it, but it kind of got a bit more fancy.

We just sort of had these mottoes

that kind of become poetry but become part of our lives.

[Rob] As our family motto for this house,

Art, Labor, Love, Life, which is pretty good for us.

[bright music]

We try to save and reuse as much as we could

that we found in the house.

So these kitchen cabinets were like over there,

jammed between these 1970s Formica fitted kitchen units

and we hauled them out and painted them

and moved them and give them a sort of second life.

So these are like bedside cabinets from eBay

for about 150 quid.

These are two old French dressers

that probably cost 300 quid each,

that we adjusted the height and put together

and went to Swanley for the stone [indistinct]

and then got a bit of Terrazzo for the marble for the top.

And we sort of improvised on a really low budget,

a kitchen that we liked, basically.

We invested more in the paint, as the kitchen evolved.

Then one Sunday I said,

Rob, let's turn the clock into a sun.

We just end up basically always-

Painting the walls basically.

We just can't help it.

[Greta laughs]

[Rob] Greta's like the master of color.

I think Greta really is the creative director of the house

and she started with a really strong idea of a color palette

and I just followed her guidelines

and got on ladders and did it really.

[Greta giggles]

Yeah, I think it's something about playing

with two types of the same color.

So this is sort of this very bright green mixed

with more of a bluey green.

Something quite interesting about pulling the two together.

So you almost have like a natural shadow to the color.

[bright music]

When it's just us,

we spend a lot of time eating in the kitchen,

but then when we've made something really good,

we come and sit in here.

[Rob] It leads to the front garden

and there's roses by the windows.

There's fig trees inside, a bit like a garden room.

[Greta] And this is one of my favorite tablecloths

by the most incredible Florentine designer,

called Loretta Caponi.

We have lots of kind of big paintings,

but then very, very small paintings,

kind of to counteract the big paintings.

So we have a painter that we absolutely love,

called Julie Goldsmith

and she paints these kind of ceramic, ghostlike portraits

of poets and historical figures.

[bright music]

It's a real privilege to be able to live

and work in the same space with your family.

The art studios are the old sculleries of the house,

the old kitchens basically and food storage.

And so I have a few rooms, a painting studio,

another studio, wood workshop area here.

Greta has her writing room.

The children have their painting studio.

So you know, we can all, we all come to this part

of the house in the day

and we all work sort of side by side.

[bright music]

My art probably has changed since we came to this house.

It probably has become more lyrical.

I started painting again a lot more.

I obviously I work with like installation

and light sculptures and urban space

and that's been a big part of my work up till now.

But I've, living here, you know, amongst the trees,

I've started making landscape paintings again,

which I hadn't made for decades,

which at some point would've seemed

like a terribly traditional thing for me

to start doing again.

But yeah, yeah, that's what I did when I was 15.

You know, I was obsessed with Turner.

[bright music]

[Greta] This room had this kind of cherry red carpet.

We found this headboard.

It's a Spanish painted headboard

From Peter Barrow, our favorite Kent antique dealer.

This is a painting by a friend called Faye Weiwei

and it's of me and Robert on our wedding day.

Yeah, it sort of lives above the fireplace.

I think it's quite like a romantic painting.

And this drawing here is a real treasure.

This is a drawing by Sylvia Plath, the poet.

One of very few drawings Sylvia Plath made,

but she made really good drawings.

Greta bought that with her student loan

when she was a student.

But what I discovered afterwards was

there's actually a love letter behind it written

with Ted Hughes' handwriting,

which is quite, quite a nice surprise.

[bright music]

When we decided where we were gonna have our bedroom,

we were like, our dream is to have a bathroom with a bath,

what both of us can have a bath in at the same time.

[Rob] Yeah. [Greta chuckles]

This paint is a clay paint called ballet shoe.

[Rob] I think we like antiques

with a bit of faded grandeur, you know.

[Greta] Something which needs to be repaired

or just, we don't mind if it's got a bit of a bash or-

[Rob] No, so you can see it's lived.

I like that.

[bright music]

This is Lorca's room, our eldest son who's eight

and then the other room is Lucian's room, who's five.

And this room is inspired by this tent

that we found on eBay

and the room kind of feels like a tent in a way

with this House of Hackney wallpaper.

And then the ribbons.

The fireplace is one of my poems, which Robert painted

and I love the line, Blown here by the wind.

This is Lucian's room, our youngest son,

and I think we started off

with this room putting the red carpet down

and then we discovered this amazing wallpaper,

which is from a brand called Ottoline

and it comes in different versions of spots.

But they had this red version

which we just instantly fell in love with

and it kind of reminded me of like jazz symbols.

But yeah, this room feels really fun and playful

and it feels like a children's book, to me.

[bright music]

[Rob] Yeah, there isn't a sensibility

of getting an old house and fixing it up.

[Greta] Yeah, I think it's about restoring it back

to its original beauty.

So it's not about sort of necessarily modernizing anything,

but just finding the areas

and bringing out the hidden magic within them.

[Rob] A house is a dance really,

the footsteps of the family as you all move around.

And I think that when you know a house,

it's when you can wake up in the dark,

walk into the hallway,

you know where the light switches are

before you have any light

and you know, the dance of the house.

It's in a way the choreography of family life, you know.

[bright music]