Pointed Criticisms

Paul Gerrard was a difficult child. While his friends were assembling Airfix models and swapping Dinky toys, he was already collecting anything and everything Victorian, and with a dogged determination that dismayed his mother. It was this enduring obsession that eventually brought Paul and his partner, John McCall, to the Victorian vicarage of Norton, a very small village below Offa’s Dyke, the ancient earthwork that still marks the border between England and mid-Wales.

Norton is old enough to be recorded in the Domesday Book, but its glory days came when Richard Green Price inherited the estate from his uncle in 1861. Green Price was already a successful solicitor with an entrepreneurial streak that saw him investing heavily in local railways. After inheriting the estate he served as MP for Radnorshire, first as a Conservative and then as a Liberal in Gladstone’s parliament. His instincts were philanthropic and having enlarged the manor house, he transformed the lives of his employees by building comfortable cottages for them to live in, a school for their children and almshouses for their dotage. He used local builders for these jobs, but when it came to restoring the Medieval church at the centre of the village and giving Norton its own vicarage for the first time, he set his sights very much higher.

The politician commissioned George Gilbert Scott, one of the best-known and most prolific Victorian architects, to design the vicarage, coach house, stabling for two horses and a hayloft. The commission was small fry for a man already accustomed to building asylums, hospitals and workhouses, a man who would go on to design London’s Albert Memorial, the Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras, Glasgow University and Edinburgh Cathedral, but he accepted it and work began in 1863. The vicarage was completed in time for the reopening of the church in 1868, and the vicar moved in promptly with his family and servants.

Scott’s design was for a plain building, imprinted only with the few ornaments that would express his devotion to the Gothic Revival. Paul Gerrard, who trained as a priest, is particularly well placed to appreciate the symbolism of these decorations. ‘It’s all there,’ he explains, ‘the 12 finials on the roof, with their shining golden orbs, represent the kingship of Christ over the world, and the seven trefoils cut into the bargeboards represent the Trinity.’ While Scott’s restoration of the church was criticised for giving the ancient building a wholly Victorian appearance, the distinctively pointed porch and window arches of the vicarage recall only the church architecture of Medieval Europe.

Paul saw the vicarage for the first time in 1997, when it had already passed through a succession of owners since being sold off by the diocese in 1963. The garden was overgrown, trees blocked every view to the hills, a garage had been erected in front of the coach house and only two of the roof finials survived. Undaunted, the couple bought the house and Paul embarked on six years of painstaking restoration. He started by pulling out temporary divisions that made part of the building into flats, stripping emulsion from walls and ceilings, and gloss paint from doors and shutters. He liberated floorboards from a covering of fitted carpet and rediscovered the quarry tiles beneath a layer of concrete in the kitchen. The baize door to the service rooms had lost its two-way swing, but he found the original mechanism and had a spring made by hand to repair it. He also replaced the finials on the roof.

Paul and John already knew the work of local decorator John Arnold from the restoration of the high Victorian interior of the Judge’s Lodging in nearby Presteigne (WoI Jan 2012). A previous owner had asked Arnold to cover the walls of the vicarage in brilliant white emulsion, but now he had the happier task of reproducing the original graining on the doors, gilding the orbs on the new finials and hanging 19th-century wallpapers throughout the house, many of them reproduced from the V&A archive. Arnold identified red distemper Paul had uncovered in the hall as a shade known to Victorians as ‘dragon’s blood red’. Serendipity led them to a wallpaper in a similar colour designed by Scott’s son, George Gilbert Scott the Younger.

A starry sky above the staircase of the Grand Midland Hotel at St Pancras inspired a heavenly firmament on the coffered ceiling of the stairwell at the Old Vicarage. They commissioned Katrina Lubovna to scatter stars across a dark blue background, making each one from ten layers of gesso covered in gold leaf. A Gothic inscription at the top of the wall spells out a familiar quotation from The Confessions of St Augustine: ‘Lord give me chastity and continence, but not yet.’

Paul and John often accept bed-and-breakfast guests. Some choose to arrive at dusk, when the house is lit like a cruise ship, every window illuminated by soft light. Indoors, candles make the gold stars above stairs twinkle. Paul and John have reinstated the distinction between ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ by installing a bell beside the baize door to the kitchen, and instructing their guests to use it rather than penetrating the ‘servants’ quarters’. Given the comforts of the place, it would be easy to imagine a team of staff beyond this frontier, but in the kitchen there’s only Paul, who was a chef before becoming a priest.

The rooms have a settled feel today, as if the vicarage had recovered a memory of itself, but Paul insists the interior is their own interpretation of a Victorian house, rather than ‘a slavish reproduction’. And any guest could confirm that the warmth of the drawing room, the food served in the dining room and the comfort of the bedrooms are entirely 21st-century.

To book bed and breakfast at The Old Vicarage, visit oldvicarage-nortonrads.co.uk

A version of this article also appeared in the January 2017 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox