The writer Olivia Laing on falling in love with a house
When my sister and I were small, we played a game in which we tried to describe our perfect house – sometimes an Elizabethan pile, sometimes an art deco flat in Highgate, but always old and with a distinctive character. We didn’t live in places like that. Our houses were newer and more flimsy. We moved often, travelling through a dozen addresses over the course of my parents’ marriage break-up and subsequent misadventures. Though there were beloved as well as hated houses, nowhere ever felt like the storybook vision of home, where people stayed in place for generations and no one ever packed a bag and went away for good.
The habit of shallow roots continued into adulthood. I rented until I was forty, in Brighton, New York, Cambridge, trying to build my fantasy of home in sublet flats or six-month shorthold tenancies: painting over the damp and planting gardens on borrowed ground, until the inevitable eviction notice arrived. When I finally got married, I moved into my husband’s house in Cambridge and immediately started campaigning for the country, ideally Suffolk.
We first saw our house at the very beginning of January 2020. From the outside, it looked absurdly beguiling, like a child’s drawing, with three neat rows of sash windows and enormous Madame Alfred Carrière roses either side of the front door. We sat in the café over the road and admired the box topiary, shaped like giant French fancies. We’d seen dozens of houses by then: beautiful old houses that had been neglected too long or had the heart ripped out of them. We weren’t going to get overexcited by a Georgian façade.
Any hesitation fell away the minute the door opened and we saw the long hall running right through to the garden. I would happily have bought it then and there. The house was wonderfully liveable without being at all over-restored, a credit to its owners, who had gently nudged it into the 21st century without losing any of its faded, faintly raffish charm (the stripped yellow bathroom walls was a particular stroke of genius). There was a larder and a pantry, a potting shed, a greenhouse, even a Tudor cellar. It appeared to have manifested exactly from my eight-year-old specifications.
Lockdown put the move on hold, and we didn’t arrive until the summer. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as excited as that first night, wandering the empty house, unwrapping Staffordshire figures and slotting them into place. It felt like home immediately, not least because within a fortnight we’d not only unpacked every box but shelved the books and hung the pictures too. Things inherited or collected over years seemed instantly to belong and we bought very little: a farmhouse dresser to make up for the absence of cupboards, a few rugs and a lot of giant country house curtains, a whole faded garden of chintz.
MAY WE SUGGEST: Artist Sarah Graham's London home and studio
We did a minimum of decorating, too. Part of the house’s charm is that so many different people have lived in it over the years, and the marks of their presence haven’t been erased. One of the top floor rooms still has its 1950s wallpaper, block-printed with ribbons and bows. There’s a rickety ladder up to the attic floor, used by generations of maids. Between the 1960s and 2010, the house was owned by a garden designer who’d first trained as an architect. He opened the old house up, cutting light wells everywhere, and building the elegant staircase with its lovely chinoiserie banisters. I suspect he also put in several of the seemingly Georgian fireplaces, with Delft tiles showing Biblical scenes of angels and lions.
Our contributions were more minimal. We built shelves where possible (a library in the coach house will follow, for Ian’s 12,000 books, still languishing in storage). We injected blasts of colour: mustard for the larder, and a beautiful Wedgewood mauve from Papers and Paints for the china cupboard. It’s now presided over by a photograph of Jilly Cooper, and stocked with years of our mutual collecting of lusterware, canaryware and Art Deco tea sets. The huge dining room was trickier to get right. We painted it Pink Ground, a colour I’ve used in nearly every house I’ve ever lived, and after messing the fireplace up four times, finally settled on a jaunty custard yellow.
Minimal it is not. Every room is stuffed to the gunnels with books and pictures and china. It looks and feels as if we’ve been here for decades, especially in Ian’s wildly cluttered study. It’s a portrait of a marriage, representing the intersection of our tastes and interests. The hot pink candles come from me, but the hot pink Christopher Logue print above the fire is pure Ian. There are paintings by Wyndham Lewis, an obsession of his, and Derek Jarman, an obsession of mine. Lots of things were made by friends or have sentimental value, like my grandfather’s clockwork boy soldier on a horse or the portrait of David Wojnarowicz that my friend, the painter Chantal Joffe, gave me when we first met.
It’s a house to fill with people, a house made for parties. For years there used to be a Twelfth Night party here, the house lit entirely by candles. I’m longing to bring it back. Ian is decades older than me and I’m always worried about how long we’ve got, but we’re home now and hopefully we will be for years to come.
Owen Gale1/26Writer Olivia Laing and her poet husband Ian Patterson in their kitchen. The walls are painted in ‘Pink Ground’ by Farrow and Ball, while the curtains - in a GP&J Baker chintz - were an Ebay find. The painting over the sink is by Pat Porter.
Owen Gale2/26The kitchen opens in to the dining room. The dresser was an Ebay find; the tablecloth is from the Suffolk-based homeware studio Faro.
Owen Gale3/26The pendant lights over the table are from The Conran Shop. Around the table is a mix of ‘Gentle' chairs by Front for Porro (at each end), and Habitat chairs at the sides.
Owen Gale4/26A picture by Chantal Joffe of the painter David Wojnarowicz stands in the window.
Owen Gale5/26The sitting room is painted in Little Greene's ‘Yellow-Pink’. A print by Christopher Logue hangs over the fire, along with a Cornish scene by Romi Behrens over the bookcase.
Owen Gale6/26The sofa is from sofa.com, with an Eames coffee table in front. The Globe-Wernicke bookcase is one of several throughout the house. The painting of Olivia is by Chantal Joffe.
Owen Gale7/26The kitchen walls are painted in ‘Blossom’ by Dulux.
Owen Gale8/26Ian and Olivia's joint collection of pottery in the china cupboard.
Owen Gale9/26Ian's study is painted in the Farrow & Ball archive colour ‘Book Room Red’. Over the chimneypiece is a collection of pictures including a photograph of Christopher Isherwood and WH Auden by Lettice Ramsey, a landscape by Dick Lee and an engraving by Gwen Raverat.
Owen Gale10/26Ian in his study.
Owen Gale11/26A Habitat chair and a lamp from John Lewis define another study area in the book room.
Owen Gale12/26Light floods in from above on the landing, where a print by Edward Ardizzone entitled 'Shelter Scene' hangs over the bookcase, along with a photograph by Edwin Smith on the right.
Owen Gale13/26A flower painting by Chantal Joffe hangs over the Eames rocking chair, while the lamp on the wall above is a working gas lamp.
Owen Gale14/26The main bedroom has walls in Little Greene's ‘French Grey’. The bedcover is from Toast, and the curtains originally hung in the billiard room at the house of a former boyfriend of Olivia's.
Owen Gale15/26Through the door is a view of a painting of David Wojnarowicz by Chantal Joffe and a print by Grace Hartigan.
Owen Gale16/26An attic bedroom has a 1950s French wallpaper from the previous owners.
Owen Gale17/26Olivia's study has curtains in a William Morris pattern, the blue picked up by the Eames chair at her desk. The rug was bought at an auction.
Owen Gale18/26The bathroom has stripped walls left by the original owner. A chair originally belonging to Olivia's grandmother stands by the bath, with a striped curtain from Toast at the window.
Owen Gale19/26Looking out into the garden, the hallway is painted in Farrow & Ball's ‘Pigeon’.
Owen Gale20/26The tablecloth in the garden is from SZ Blockprints.
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Owen Gale22/26Olivia in the garden.
Owen Gale23/26A pink ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ rose climbs up the wall.
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