Surrey Homes | SH33 | July 2017 | Interiors supplement inside

Previous pages & above: Marta wanted to use the original St. John Ambulance station doors, but they didn’t
meet building regulations, so are used on an internal wall instead as decoration and to reference the historical
use. A new set of functional doors have been made in the same style. The double sided wood burning stove and
adjacent log pile are housed on a huge concrete plinth, creating a focal point, whether the fire is lit or not
They say that home is where the heart is, but if you
spend half the year in one place and the other in
a completely different space, you must have to
have two hearts (make that two sets of everything), in
order to feel at home. Award-winning Interior Architect
Marta Nowicka appears to manage two-heartedness
brilliantly, living for half the year at her home in London
and the rest of the time at her home in Rye, letting out
whichever house she’s not living in. “It’s all a bit Mapp
and Lucia!” Marta laughs when we meet at the former St
John’s ambulance station in Rye Citadel. Rye may have
been the setting for the most recent TV adaptation of EF
Benson’s Mapp and Lucia books (in which the occupants
regularly swap their homes about) but as I look around this
stunning contemporary conversion, it is definitely where
the similarity ends. Tilling this isn’t. When Marta first
came across the property she was (half) living in nearby
Camber, in an old coastguard’s cottage. “It began to feel a
bit remote there,” she says. “I wanted to be in Rye for the
ease of access, the shops. It feels like there’s more life here.”
“My assistant came across the building first, but it
was in the middle of a sealed bids race. I didn’t have
time to see it and by the time I contacted the agent
they said, ‘sorry, it’s been sold.’ I asked them to let
83 wealdentimes.co.uk