Finding a new house is a bit like online dating: you do the due diligence – pore over pictures, read and re-read descriptions – and yet when you meet in person you can still find you’ve got it wrong. A house that looks perfect on page or screen may prove a disappointment, while another you view with low expectations turns out to be The One.
Antiques expert Philip Astley-Jones and jewellery designer Johnnie Lloyd Morgan had been together for 13 hectic years, living, working and partying in London, when they began looking for a quiet weekend retreat. ‘Philip wanted an 18th-century folly – something small and of architectural merit, and ideally without neighbours,’ says Johnnie. ‘It was the early 1990s and we thought it might be easier not to drop into a community, as we weren’t sure we would be accepted.’
Habitable and isolated 18th-century follies are thin on the ground, so they cast their net wider and arranged to view a rectory next to a church in a small village. It was in the right area, on the border of Oxfordshire and close to friends, but in every other way it was ‘exactly what we didn’t want’, as Johnnie puts it. To the couple’s surprise, it was love at first sight. ‘Philip instantly saw the potential; Georgian, unspoilt but not listed, with good light, well-proportioned rooms and a simple layout of four rooms downstairs and four plus bedrooms upstairs.’
They bought it and found they had been wrong to worry about the neighbours. ‘We immediately got planning, dreaming and designing and we worked like stink every weekend for three years or so, painting, decorating and creating a garden to a design Philip had drawn on the back of an envelope,’ says Johnnie. ‘Then, in 1996, when most of the new garden was in place and the house was looking elegant, we gave a dance for 300 people in a series of tents.’ The village had never seen anything like it. Nor heard anything like it when, later, through Johnnie’s brother, Richard, who was chaplain of King’s College, Cambridge, the university chapel’s world-famous choir sang in their local church. More than accepted, Johnnie and Philip were welcomed.
After 30 years of additions and tweaks to make the old rectory home, both house and garden have a sense of real rightness about them, as if nothing could or should be different. Of course the graceful staircase rising from the entrance hall is uninterrupted by carpet; of course the dining room is green and the drawing room a pale grey-blue, like the morning sky. Every fireplace looks meant-to-be – even those in the dining room and study, both imported finds. Johnnie, who says his taste is more ‘contemporary’, thinks of it as ‘a bit too full’. But each object – from a sofa that once belonged to Merle Oberon to Charles II’s hairbrush, portraits of 18th-century royalty to a pair of clown’s shoes – seems to have found its perfect place.
Despite having worked on it shoulder to shoulder, Johnnie sees the house as more Philip than him – a testament to the antiquarian’s legendary eye, which extended to decorating and arranging rooms. ‘It could be quite infuriating, but he was always right – like when he spent a whole day mixing a single ladleful of black into a big tin of white to make that magic colour for the walls in the drawing room,’ says Johnnie. Occasionally, he put his foot down. ‘I once came home to discover the hall jammed with 24 dining chairs. I screamed and they went.’ The dining room is green rather than the more obvious choice of red thanks to his intervention.
Although creative himself, with a discernment prized by his clients, Johnnie was right to cede to his partner’s choices. Philip was a born dealer. Already buying as a child, he was spotted by the owner of an antique shop in Shropshire, who introduced him to the renowned dealer Roger Warner. Aged 23, he was whisked to Los Angeles, where he worked for Sotheby’s, before taking the helm at Hatfields conservation company in the 1980s. Here he oversaw the restoration of the Badminton Cabinet, at that point the most expensive piece of furniture ever sold at auction.
‘Philip’s knowledge and expertise were extraordinary, and he had an encyclopaedic visual memory – he once spotted some chairs in a garage in India that belonged to a set that had recently sold in London,’ says Johnnie. ‘When he bought something he would really study it, stroke it, clean it and then find a place for it.’ As the contents of the house attest, he could appreciate a copper jelly mould as profoundly as a finely carved console table. ‘He loved the humble and the quirky as much as serious pieces, which explains why we have a collection of children’s crutches in the house.’ Nor was he averse to copying for effect. The grand bookcase in the dining room is largely made from MDF, and a cloth covers the cheap catering table, which was regularly laid with Georgian silver, Tiffany cutlery, cut glass and porcelain.
Philip died in August 2021 and while Johnnie Lloyd Morgan still lives in the Pimlico flat they shared, he has decided to sell the rectory and nearly all its contents. ‘This house has been a brilliantly happy home and a wonderful creation, but it feels like the end of an era and time for someone else to breathe new life into it,’ he says. And so the stairs may acquire carpet, the green dining room might turn red and the hundreds of pieces of furniture, pictures and objects so lovingly accrued will find new homes. The house will move on as all houses must, but its current incarnation, the work of a master, is recorded here.
A version of this article appears in the March 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
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