Wealden Times | WT213 | November 2019 | Gift supplement inside

Above: Ally updated the drawing room in time for the family’s Easter gathering – her
brief: “We want a sitting room we can flop in, with the dogs.”
and walls and surfaces covered in interesting things, you
know immediately you are in a house with sedimentary
layers of experiences. It feels joyously lived in, used, shared
and enjoyed. Years and years of people doing stuff, going
to places and bringing things home to remember it all by.
I didn’t spot one of those family height charts biro-ed
onto a door jamb, but the whole house feels like one. All
that growing leaves a very happy patina on a place. And two
lovely Irish terriers add to the general sense of wellbeing too.
The dogs were how Ally (as everyone calls Alexis) met the
owners. She has an Irish terrier herself and living nearby, they
dog-bonded while out walking the pups in the adjoining
countryside. So when the owners wanted to refresh one of
their guest bedrooms, Ally was the obvious choice to do it.
The catalyst for the makeover was that stage of family
life when the three children – for whose benefit the owners
had moved out of London, the husband having enjoyed
an idyllic East Sussex childhood himself – started to head
off to university and then on from there. “It was time to
turn their rooms around and get rid of the plastic,”
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