In another age, an all-rounder like Hilton Marlton designer, conservationist and carpenter would have been a familiar type, but in the era of narrow qualifications his array of gifts and enthusiasms is a rarity. In 2003, he fell in love with a remote Welsh farmstead, Pant-y Ffynnon, and for the past two decades has conducted a painstaking restoration of the house and surrounding land, creating a magical retreat as well as a haven for wildlife.
A specialist in the restoration of historic houses, he is obsessed with detail and authenticity. Everything must be done properly, however long it takes. As he puts it: ‘Five minutes with a 150-grit disc sander can obliterate 150 years of history.’
He was brought up in South Africa and remembers, as a child, constantly being drawn to his grandparents’ old house with its ancient Cape furniture and longcase clocks, and much preferring it to the sharp-angled, picture-windowed modern bungalow belonging to his parents next door. At the age of 18, in order to avoid South African national service, he came to Britain, eventually living with architect Craig Hamilton and his wife, the painter Diana Hulton, in Wales, designing several small gardens for Craig’s projects before enrolling as a singer at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
Over the next years he performed in several seasons of the Glyndebourne Chorus, then the English Touring Opera and the Scottish Opera, and covered several leading roles; he bought and restored a 19th-century terraced house in Battle, East Sussex. ‘We completely rebuilt and refurbished both the interior and exterior ourselves, irritating the person living next door when we eschewed the pebbledash of our neighbours and painted the outside lemon yellow,’ he says. ‘A few years later barley-sugar colours were the norm and the price of the houses went up proportionately.’
In December 2003, he moved to Carmarthenshire, to Pant-y-Ffynnon Farm, attracted to the buildings, the setting and the uncompromised privacy - a dream for musicians but most importantly by the fact that the place had never been modernised. The house had no running water, no sanitation and, when it had been fitted with electricity in 1953, each room was wired up with a single light and one plug socket. There is a saying that ‘living in a hill farm keeps you eternally impoverished’, and indeed the condition of the house was completely basic.
He moved in at Christmas time, and the first thing he did was to temporarily plumb in a bath and buy half a dozen extension leads. The outside privy (known as a ty bach in Welsh) remained in use until he could bring water permanently into the house. The farmstead sat on a steep slope, so more than 2,000 tons of soil had to be moved to create a level garden in front and a workable yard at the back. Hilton Marlton fitted a wood-burning boiler to heat the house, in what is now the dining room, and this was fired with farm timber, a byproduct from the woodland and hedgerow restoration programme. A long shed was built across the yard to store and air the 25 tons of wood needed each year.
Travelling to and from singing engagements had become a logistical nightmare, and besides which Hilton was determined to be an active farmer – ‘something of a fantasy’, he now admits – and restore the biodiversity of the land, which had never been ploughed. He would not introduce sheep, since they graze in a specific way, eating the rosettes of any flower so that they never bloom properly, whereas cows leave more of the plant. He bought White Park cattle, a rare breed that is inextricably linked with the history of the area, having first been documented in the laws of local ruler Hywel Dda in the mid-tenth century. ‘They were wonderful conservators, maintaining the ancient species-rich meadows, the sort of rewilding habitat that many are now trying to re-establish,’ says Hilton, ‘and today the farm is teeming with listed invertebrates, most notable being the marsh fritillary butterflies.’
The previous owners of the farm had only lived in one room now the dining room. Here, they cooked, ate and sat around the table in the evening. In order to enlarge the house and provide a two-storey extension, Hilton, with the help of Craig Hamilton, drew up plans for a new kitchen and principal bedroom, creating, at the same time, a beautiful and practical courtyard. The plans went through without objection and have greatly added to the property’s appeal.
The main room had been painted in yellow gloss, the only modern finish in the house. This Hilton painstakingly removed using lime and soda, before lime-washing the room. Elsewhere, thick layers of wallpaper were stripped and the walls either given the same treatment or a coat of chalk distemper.
During the 18th and 19th centuries the Chapel dominated much of rural Wales, and so, because the elders frowned on any show of frivolity or ostentation, in many houses of that period a stark difference can be discerned between the public rooms, which were plain, even dour, and the more colourful bedrooms upstairs. Hilton decided to honour this tradition, keeping the ground-floor colours muted; the limewash finish was without exception quiet and based on simple earth pigments. The jollier primary colours of the bedrooms were mixed on-site, often using sheep raddle – used to mark ewes after they’ve been covered by a ram – to tint the chalk distempers. The limewashes in the kitchen and dining room use mudstone from the farm, which combined to achieve the soft green-grey of the very first layers of the coating they discovered.
During the restoration and remodelling, Hilton had been keen to respect the evidence of the lives of previous occupants. ‘In our Changing Rooms culture, vernacular buildings, with their rough edges and damp spots, are vulnerable to our wish for instant results,’ he says. ‘This house has taught me to embrace the challenges and quirks of old buildings and it has been hugely rewarding.’
Over the 20 years that he has spent resuscitating his own buildings and land, he has worked on the restoration of several small and large historic buildings, as well as designing glass houses, kitchen gardens, orchards and formal gardens and re-landscaping the estate. His next imminent step is to complete his dissertation for his MA Course in the conservation of historic buildings at the University of York. As he says: ‘By putting aside our own expectations of what a building needs to provide, and by rather listening to the demands of the house itself, we can respectfully leave a positive legacy.’
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