Wealden Times | WT179 | January 2017 | Health & Beauty supplement inside

Previous pages: The stylish and light sitting room features
the original Crittall leaded windows on three sides. The walls
are painted in Fired Earth’s Ambergris This page: One wall in
the kitchen has been painted a very dark grey – Mercury by
Fired Earth. The kitchen is dominated by a free-standing unit
painted in Farrow & Ball Slipper White. Featuring big and
bold is a magnificent set of scales
Geoff and Annie Waring had pondered for some time
the idea of upping sticks in Islington and finding
a greener life for themselves and their two young
children. They wanted a bigger garden and easy access to
the countryside and with his work as the art director for a
glossy fashion magazine Geoff needed a train line that would
go into Charing Cross. Annie had a successful business
hand painting bone china pieces for sale through shops like
Liberty and Thomas Goode so she could work anywhere.
As is often the case, it was while in Greece, sitting in
a taverna with time to muse, that they decided to make
the dream a reality and on their return the wheels were
put in motion. Tunbridge Wells seemed like a good base
from which to search for properties and the brief was
fairly straightforward – a biggish garden, not a busy road,
easy access to the station and preferably Victorian.
Needless to say, that’s not exactly what they ended up with.
Smitten by the idea of half an acre of garden and easy walking
distance from the station they went to view a property in a
rather unusual road where all the houses on one side had been
constructed in the 1920s by one builder, Mr Bates. He was
evidently a man of some stature – all the manhole covers in
the road bear his name – and, having bought a plot from the
Abergavenny Estate, he set about building a street of houses
where each one represented a different vernacular style. So
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