Home for me, until I got married, was wherever my parents lived. But for my husband Charlie, it was a house. A house his grandparents bought in the early 1950s, where his mother had grown up and his parents had lived for around 20 years before, three years ago, they handed it on to us and our young children in time for us to make a life here. And now, having lived here, I can quite see why. There is a beguiling allure to this quietly grand yet liveable Grade II*-listed house, with its high ceilings and Regency detailing, its double-height oval hall and its sweeping cantilever staircase. Built in 1804, Brockfield Hall was designed by Peter Atkinson, a partner of John Carr of York.
When we took the house on, top of our wishlist – after installing new heating, plumbing and wiring – was to rethink the neglected back-of-house areas. We were also keen to reinstate the original flow between the main reception rooms, where doors had been blocked off – presumably to stop draughts – long before Charlie’s grandparents’ time. The narrow main bathroom with its blue suite may have been a brilliant solution in the 1960s, but times change and we were keen to create something befitting the room it adjoined – our bedroom – and to include a shower.
Christopher Horwood
We put all our thoughts in a long document and scribbled on plans as to how they might work, but it was calling in architectural designer Rupert Cunningham of Ben Pentreath that set us on the route to where we are now. Taking a cue from a drawing by Atkinson we found in the North Yorkshire County Record Office, Rupert had the idea to reinstate a wall on Atkinson’s original plan that had presumably been moved to make a housekeeper’s flat, the ground floor of which we were to take back into the main house. In fact, instead of a wall, he designed a handsome, partly glazed panelled screen, which has given us a new boot room on one side and a playroom on the other. We reused an old door from the housekeeper’s flat within the screen and Rupert’s genius is that most people assume it has always been like this.
