Wealden Times | WT215 | January 2020 | Travel & Wellbeing supplement inside

Above: Two large ginger jars, which Alex found on a trip to LA, sit on top of the dining room shelves
economies. “Paint doesn’t all have to be Farrow &
Ball, you don’t need to use the most expensive paint
everywhere. A good decorator can use any paint.”
This balance between where to invest and where to
make economies came into particular play with restoring
the period features of the house, which had been all
but lost. “It’s great to keep and restore period features
where you can,” he says, “but it can get expensive. We
had bespoke doors made for the special wide frames on
the ground floor, which I really wanted for the sense of
space and vista, but upstairs the doors are off the shelf.”
But there were some areas of restoration where they
very much chose to invest. “The decorators spent a month
just on the ceiling coving,” Alex admits, laughing. “Some
of it was missing, so once the bit that was remaining
was cleaned, they took a mould and cast it to make
new coving to fill in the gaps.” That wasn’t all of it.
“There were no ceiling roses left at all,” Alex continues,
“so the decorators used moulds from a house of the
same period in London. Then, the next time I was at
my dentist, which is in a building just round the corner,
built in 1895, the same year as this one, I was lying in the
chair looking up at the ceiling and saw that it had exactly
the same ceiling rose as the ones we had put in here.”
Some of the restoration involved moving original
pieces from other parts of the house so they could
be better appreciated. The fireplace in the drawing
room was upstairs in a bedroom. Alex had it
sandblasted, and polished the tiles and cast iron to
make it smart enough for this rather grand room.
But while Alex and Ellie took pains to put back as
many of the house’s original details as possible, this is
no period piece – the décor has a timeless contemporary
elegance, that looks fresh and wonderful here.
The left half of the drawing room, painted pale blue, is
a more formal entertaining space with two sofas, also pale
blue, facing each other across a white ottoman, with bergère
chairs next to a console table to one side and another
small table with lime-washed chairs in the bay window.
I suggest it has the feel of a modern version of the 18th
century Swedish Gustavian style, which was the simple
Scandinavian take on the furniture King Gustav III
43 wealdentimes.co.uk