Surrey Homes | SH18 | April 2016 | Garden supplement inside

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