When we first moved into this old farm manager’s house on the Wiltshire border, my second daughter was six weeks old. Minus the two dead ravens we found on the top floor, the house was a stripped-back bare and brilliant shell. Sleeplessness had made decisions about colour even more drawn out than usual (I can spend a good three weeks debating a pool ball red against a crimson flash on a good day) but the builder Boris, a friend’s husband, had had enough. “We’re doing this colour in here!” he said pointing to one of the infinite splodges on the wall, “this one in here!” and so on and on. What we filled the house with was easy – every kindly family member opened their barn, their storage container, their cellar, their loft, and we pilfered like quick-fingered magpies.
For around 15 years it had worked perfectly, this mashed-up collection of happy overflow, this peculiar mix of 18th-century oil paintings from Belgium and a cut-up book of Manolo Blahnik shoe drawings that I had stuck into position with double-sided tape in IKEA frames. This was not a stuffy house for stuffy people; it was for little girls to wear fairy dresses and muddy boots, it was for our best friends to gather round the kitchen table and cook up vast vats of chilli con carne while we laughed and drank and smoked and played cards and spoons and washed our workaday skin off ourselves.
After a while, of course, the cracks began to show. Windows were coming off their hinges. My mother’s four-poster, with slices in the canopy we had embraced previously, began to truly tear like a sail on a doomed ship. Walls started peeling, and moths had a full bacchanalian feast on one of the carpets. The point was to make the house work for us, not us for the house. But she was grumbling, and she had a point.
We started with big plans. “We’ll knock down this kitchen wall”, we thought, “let in the light. We’ll open up the cellar and convert it into some nocturnal den. We’ll tear out those old baths we always meant to.” But all of this totted up to rather a lot, and there would still be the old cosmetic stuff crying out for help, such as our beloved Howard chair with gaping rips in his arms and horsehair yowling out of them. So, we abandoned the big work, and focused utterly on fixing what was in front of us.
At this stage, I now had three daughters and two jobs. It wasn’t something I felt I could do properly and thoughtfully on my own. But I trust no one. It took me another six months to find the perfect person, and it turned out she had been right under my nose the whole time. Sarah Vanrenen had been someone I’d known for years; we had stomped around London in our 20s, and I would still bump into her from time to time. In the meantime I absorbed her Instagram feed like a child sucking up a single strand of delicious spaghetti. Her colour combinations were so good, the way she always uses chest of drawers as side tables, so cool. How funny then to find her studio, no exaggeration, was four minutes down the road.
We now had eight weeks to do the work, and a very particular pot of loot to cover it. “Don’t worry” said Sarah, “I’ve just brought out a new range of wallpapers and fabrics, if we can use some of them on the walls and curtains in this house, and I can then photograph them later for my portfolio, then let’s say we have a deal”. Her new creations were beautiful, in any which colourway you looked – I couldn’t have been happier. More than ten months later, and budgets akimbo, Sarah not so much. Poor Sarah.
In the last stages of the refurb it became clear that in fact what doesn’t necessarily survive the next decorative round in the ring are all the old lampshades that are either heavily dented, or ripped to shreds. Sarah has a fine line in the most beautiful lampshades conceivable. Her studio is chock-full of them, all repurposed saris from India like delicious patterned sticks of rock. It is not impossible that I spent as much on lampshades as I did on the entirety of the rest of the project. And for this, I feel a modicum less guilty. Sweet lord, those exceptional lampshades…