Wealden Times | WT188 | October 2017 | Kitchen & Bathroom supplement inside

Above: In the large kitchen, ironed cotton sheets hang on wooden hoist and spindle airers
It felt as though the clock had stopped at
midnight on December 31st 1899.
This impression heightened as we passed a dumb
waiter and a board of servants’ bells in a flagged hallway,
patchworked with old Persian rugs, and went into the
large kitchen, where ironed cotton sheets hung on
wooden hoist and spindle airers and the cook’s labours
were apparent on a scrubbed deal kitchen table.
When one of the house’s owners, Paul Oxborrow, appeared
in the doorway from the garden I was still lost for words,
gazing around at the lace-trimmed cloth atop the mantelpiece
– complete with a pair of fine Staffordshire dogs – dressers
stocked with blue and white china, copper pots hanging on the
walls and two armchairs with cosily worn floral loose covers,
either side of the Aga. It was like being in a book by E. Nesbit.
Stocking a tray with a coffee pot and elegant
cups and saucers, Paul took me back upstairs to the
drawing room, a superb double salon with matching
fireplaces at each end, where it would be possible to
succumb to the nicest kind of sensory overload, taking
in the richness of the furnishings and detail.
The passementerie alone is dazzling – in a good way – with
decorative bullion and tassels hanging from the elaborate
pelmets, golden braid along the mantelpiece and a large tassel
dangling from the brass chandelier. The light over the table
in the bay window, which goes up and down on a satisfying
pulley system, is trimmed with extra long red silk fringe.
The side of the room we were sitting in, Paul explained,
was once their sitting room. The other half, now resplendent
with a grand piano – the house’s co-owner, Stephen Groves,
is a pianist and church organist – was their kitchen.
“The house was built in 1881 and divided into three flats
in 1925,” explains Paul. “We bought the entrance level flat
in 1995, then six years later the maisonette above became
available so we bought that and then a year later, we were able
to buy the basement, so by 2002 we had the whole house.”
But Paul and Stephen didn’t wait until then
to start their grand decorating project.
“We decorated this end of the room like this when it
was still a flat,” says Paul. “Then, when we were able to
take the kitchen out of the other side, we already had
the fireplace which was a perfect match for this one. We
found it in an antiques shop in Tunbridge Wells and
thought we’d buy it, because ‘maybe one day’…”
Because of this staggered time frame, the marbling on both
fireplaces and on the panelling all round the conjoined rooms,
from the skirting boards to the dado rail, was done over the
years by three different sets of craftspeople. It looks seamless.
Adding the final touch to unify the two spaces, they
commissioned the woodworker who has done all the
work in the house to match the gold-leafed mirror they
had over the original fireplace, so now the two sides
of the room are perfectly symmetrical, right down to
the two delicate Chinese blue and white tea bowls
57 wealdentimes.co.uk