Wealden Times | WT182 | April 2017 | Gardens supplement inside

This page: Adrian made the bedspread and cushions in the
master bedroom out of an old curtain of his mother’s
calendar from the council to tell you when it will be
in each neighbourhood and I would tour them…”
Sven shows me that the wooden table has a large
drawer with two large enamel basins set in it. “Once
this would have been the kitchen sink,” he says. “Now
it’s perfect for preparing food. When your friends
arrive and you don’t want them to see the mess, you
just scrape it in to the bowls and close the drawers.”
Adding to the interest in this one piece of furniture – and
we still have the whole house to see at this stage – Adrian
then explains the provenance of the slab of slate on top of
it.“My father found it in a wood near our house where I
grew up in Sidcup and it was just too good to leave there,
so every time we went for a walk he would drag it a few
more metres until finally he could collect it in the car. He
kept it for years and now it’s just perfect on top of this.”
And remember the Fortnum & Mason crate sitting
underneath the table? That’s a hint to Adrian’s current
life – he’s the in-house milliner in that most fabulous
of London retail institutions, the first they’ve had
working on the floor of the store since 1958.
Then taking it on again – a key to how he came
to have such an extraordinary job is sitting on top of
the slate worktop: a tea cosy made out of old ties.
“When we lived in Germany,” he explains, “I had a shop
called ‘Brit Bits’ selling bric-a-brac I would bring over from
England. I used to get bored sitting in there, so I got a sewing
machine and started making cushions. That led on to door
sausages and aprons and then I made some tea cosies out
67 wealdentimes.co.uk