Wealden Times | WT182 | April 2017 | Gardens supplement inside

Above: Maximillian the mannequin watches over the pink room in his German army helmet. The wall outside the green bedroom
features a sign from the Victoria Line, bought at a boot fair in tribute to Queen Victoria, who was monarch when the house was built
feel with a suite of furniture from that period and a
quilted bedspread Adrian – one of life’s natural makers
– created from some old curtains of his mother’s.
One of the spare rooms – home to another mannequin,
called Charlie, the first Adrian acquired – is used to store
their large collection of fancy dress outfits. It’s their family
tradition for everyone to dress up for Christmas dinner
and they spend the whole year thinking about it.
A pale blue 1930s bell boy’s suit, with the traditional
chin strap hat, which Adrian wore a couple of years ago,
hangs on the end of the bed. It looks like something
from the Grand Budapest Hotel, but he found it in a
vintage clothing shop in Norman Road, St Leonards.
The bathroom opposite is packed with more finds,
including an amazing bright blue 1920s washbasin
– not actually plumbed in, they had a working basin
already, but too beautiful to leave in the secondhand
yard in Hastings Old Town. Its vibrant colour is
matched by a pair of pale blue grosgrain mule slippers
Adrian couldn’t resist from Fortnum & Mason.
On the landing outside two small runs of stairs face
each other. The one to the south was the original and they
copied it for the extension. Adrian made the stair runners
himself, using scraps of old carpet. “It all cost about £80.”
The other two guest rooms, in the original south side
of the house, are packed with more found treasures too
numerous to mention. In the pink bedroom, hat pins,
hat boxes, Victorian laced boots, tiaras, bow ties, Klaus
the bear, and in the green bedroom, a Fortnum & Mason
biscuit tin showing a cross section of the store, which
includes Adrian at his millinery table on the second floor
(where his professional name is Adrian Phillip Howard).
The floor plan – and equally fascinating contents – is
repeated in the two original reception rooms below. The
sitting room on the right is a pale primrose yellow, the snug
on the left is a slightly deeper pink than the room upstairs.
The wall colours throughout the house are beautifully
subtle in this way, but unlike the litany of Farrow &
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