In the beginning there was a bookcase, a grand mid-Georgian breakfront of considerable dimensions, inherited in 1997 with a mahogany-clad insurance valuation. We didn’t yet have anywhere to put it; as a consequence, it was an accommodating wall that sold me on the house in Bath. The place had extended from a 16th-century foundation, and included a precisely dated 1800 front, a Franciscan chapel and a mixture of windows, including a ghastly bow one inserted a year before listing. In for a penny, in for a pound, and the house was fully gutted and put back together again under the supervision of Simon Morray-Jones and his colleagues, fresh from the transformation of Babington House. Malcolm Winyard took care of the decoration, without fuss or flounces. Wallpaper was confined to two bedrooms; all the other rooms were painted in a range of subtle but distinctive colours. Shutters outnumber curtains, the carpets remain cream – with the odd bald patch – and the stone floors downstairs are dog-friendly.
The bookcase was filled before the beds were made, and books have spread into every room in the house, first shelved, now piled, in ordered pillars of subject and size. A few years ago, a guest rather insultingly asked why we had so many books – I glibly responded that in the event of a hike in fuel prices, we would be well insulated. Lettering is not confined to the texts but finds tactile expression in inscriptional plaques, panels and sculptures, from Assyria, ancient Greece and Rome, on Koranic intaglios, a street sign from Jerusalem designed by an Armenian ceramicist a century ago and brought ‘home’ by Ronald Storrs, Chinese wooden printing blocks, Leo Wyatt’s Pitman alphabet and Will Carter’s Hebrew prayer for the blessing of bread, which props up an Edwina Bridgman ‘found‘ frame and figures in the kitchen.
As a trustee of the Paper Foundation I like to promote paper as the most important man-made material in history. The house is a giant work on paper, with more than 750 pieces framed and on the walls, and countless sheets piled in drawers and in boxes under the beds. We have sheets and samples of historical wallpapers, including two of Matthew Darley’s finest pieces, rolls of Pugin’s Westminster flock and fleur-de-lis and examples of Edward Bawden’s delightful domestic designs. These are complemented by 18th- and early 19th-century decorated papers from Germany (with a good amount of gilt) and Italy, as well as modern-day examples specially created for us by the saintly John and Jane Jeffery in Edinburgh, who have branched out into nature printing, bringing the outside in. Some of the prints are familiar, such as the Piranesis and Pipers (the Piranesis previously belonged to John Piper and his wife, Myfanwy Evans, and came from their home, Fawley Bottom Farmhouse in Oxfordshire). Robert Taverner and David Koster’s colourful lithographs are less well known, but always admired, and then there are the obscure and unrecorded, and impressions printed on silk.
There is a constant reshuffle and the 80 or so 18th-century mezzotint portraits of ladies of repute and disrepute had to go when my long-suffering wife, Laura, declared that she had had enough of dead grey dowagers and suspected that I had succumbed to a very dull midlife crisis (no fiery red Ferraris for me). The busts and masks have been allowed to stay, and as the children leave home we are greeted by heads of various nations, including a group of Indians, in wood, stone, bronze and silver, and – my favourite – a beautiful young Kenyan by Cathy Lewis. An early fondness for majolica has developed into a decent collection of English ceramics from between 1750 and 1850 – a field about as competitive as brown furniture. White Derby and Staffordshire figures of Shakespeare, Milton, Wilkes, Britannia, Justice and Minerva are certainly not to everyone’s taste, but they have history and their own stories. We should never run out of teapots, and an Imari spittoon and a bourdalou are to hand. I confess that the jugs are starting to take advantage of our hospitality, but we are well prepared for a leak in the roof.
We have far too many objects that are neither useful nor conventionally beautiful, but they are bound together. The Whieldon plates share marbling techniques with contemporary calf-bound books, whose spines are a match for the Ottoman calligraphic panel that hangs between them. An Ashanti stool in the drawing room has a spiral base similar to the giant turned screw in the bookbinder’s lying press tethered to the stairs as a knock-off Brâncusi.
Imitation has been largely resisted, while certain influences have been respected – the Sir John Soane Museum, Kettle’s Yard, Christopher Gibbs’s creations (he taught me how to stack and pile), Victoria Press’s sadly disassembled house in Cheyne Walk, palazzos in Venice. But there is a lack of discipline, and variable quality, with nothing of significant financial worth now that the bookcase has diminished dramatically in value. It will never be axed and reduced to kindling (or the contents to Kindle) and the ten fireplaces serve as showcases all year round, with Enid Marx’s giant linocuts of an iris and an agapanthus taking pride of place in the kitchen.
As a history graduate, antiquarian book dealer, chair of the Holburne Museum, vice-chair of the American Museum and Gardens, and past chair of four other museums, I tend to dwell in the past and the real world, where objects are tangible and genuine. To my knowledge everything on show in the house was made by hand, a good number by women, including Mick Lindberg’s embroidered portrait I Met a Flower and She Was Blue, which now guards our stairs (and masks the cracks that come with living in an old house on the side of a hill). There are scatterings of cushions embroidered by my late mother, some commemorating our son’s cockerel and chickens. The latest addition, or addiction, is eight kawandi, or quilts, made by female members of the Siddi community – Indians of East African and Ethiopian origin. Taking discarded pieces of cloth, they work inwards, applying appliqué techniques to create joyfully colourful asymmetric coverings, backed with a sari, incorporating tokens of good fortune and finished with corner pieces called phula, or flower, which serve no purpose, but they would be unfinished without them. They are over the top but offer snugness, smugness and layers of human creativity. And they make us happy, which is the bottom line.
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