Wealden Times | WT170 | April 2016 | Garden supplement inside
Wealden Times - The lifestyle magazine for the Weald
Wealden Times - The lifestyle magazine for the Weald
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Above: The kitchen was originally three rooms. Now open plan, an Aga and large kitchen table occupy one end of the room while a sleek modern kitchen by<br />
Howdens occupies the other. Overhead lighting comes from rooflight windows during the day and funky filament lights at night<br />
Pliny the Elder once offered the opinion<br />
that ‘home is where the heart is’ and, over<br />
the centuries, it has come to mean that<br />
no matter where you are, so long as you are with<br />
those you love and who love you, home could be<br />
anywhere. It’s often a comforting thought but there<br />
is an ingredient missing from this interpretation – an<br />
ingredient Lawrence Durrell called spirit of place.<br />
Home is not only people, however essential they<br />
may be. Home is also landscape – rural or urban, it<br />
makes little difference. Home is skies and hills, streets<br />
and shorelines – the places we are or have been at<br />
our happiest. For many, this means where our earliest<br />
loves were formed, the surroundings of childhood.<br />
For a lucky few, these essential ingredients have<br />
come together in one time and place but often,<br />
though, life is a compromise and we find ourselves<br />
with two homes – one where we live happily with<br />
those most important to us and the other a little<br />
home of the mind which we may rarely visit but<br />
which will always be with us wherever we may be.<br />
And so it was for Ben. Brought up in a particularly<br />
lovely corner of the Weald, his career took him to<br />
London where he married, became a father and made<br />
Imagination was going to carry the day – the imagination to take a collection of tired,<br />
300-year-old spaces and truly make them their own<br />
<br />
65 www.wealdentimes.co.uk<br />
<strong>WT170</strong>Book.indb 65 22/03/<strong>2016</strong> 12:44