Surrey Homes | SH46 | August 2018 | Wedding supplement inside

Left: A deconstructed piano, used in a recent composition. The collective are always looking for unwanted instruments to repurpose
Right: Seddlescombe-based artist Mark Fisher painted this portrait of Jane Eyre for the ATownExploresABook17 festival. On the wall
are young musician Ali Alana’s grid paintings, inspired by Rimsky-Korsakov’s synesthesia scale
which they live, and create something within their home
and present it to the world outside. Throwing open their
doors and blurring the normally defined edges of what we
consider private and public space, family and community,
the real and the imagined, the theatrical and the every day.
Walking into the house on a glorious sunny
seaside summer morning, the first thing you hear is
music. Not the usual banging bass that has become
the backdrop to our everyday urban lives, at Archer
Lodge it’s the sound of a violin, a recorder, a flute.
The elegant notes seem to tumble from an open upstairs
window, setting the tone for a journey through a house
that is individual, inspirational and completely organic.
Later I stumble across the source of this angelic sound
and find a room crammed with five teenagers, practising
for a forthcoming performance at Cecil Sharp House in
London, not an iPhone or game of Fortnite between them.
Folk-inspired music fit to stir the soul and, no
doubt, the audiences that attend Archer Lodge
for the series of multi-disciplinary performances
that Explore the Arch produce each year.
Archer Lodge is situated on a wide leafy avenue in St
Leonards, near the very aptly named Bohemia Road.
Like walking into the pages of an Esther Freud novel,
it is words and books that are the backbone of this
home-come-creative-space – indeed you enter it under
an arch of books, apparently suspended in mid-air.
Taking me on a tour of the house is Gail Borrow, one
of the founders of the company, along with engineer
Paul Beadle and composer Vladimir Miller. A further
cast of writers, artists, performers and, of course, musical
teenagers appear and disappear as the house welcomes
like-minded individuals from around the world.
However, any sense of hierarchy or traditional domestic
structures are firmly left at the large front door, under that
book arch which feels like the house is beckoning you
57 surrey-homes.co.uk