Surrey Homes | SH30 | April 2017 |Gardens supplement inside

Above: The two guest rooms, in the original south side of the house, are packed with more found treasures. In the pink bedroom,
hat pins, hat boxes, Victorian laced boots, tiaras and bow ties share space on top of a chest of drawers
Adrian’s ongoing collection of silver nail buffers.
With the second storey of the extension there are
now four bedrooms, each with its own special character.
Adrian and Sven’s room has a genteel Edwardian feel
with a suite of furniture from that period and a quilted
bedspread Adrian – one of life’s natural makers –
created from some old curtains of his mother’s.
One of the spare rooms – home to another mannequin,
called Charlie, the first Adrian acquired – is used to store
their large collection of fancy dress outfits. It’s their family
tradition for everyone to dress up for Christmas dinner
and they spend the whole year thinking about it.
A pale blue 1930s bell boy’s suit, with the traditional
chin strap hat, which Adrian wore a couple of years ago,
hangs on the end of the bed. It looks like something
from the Grand Budapest Hotel, but he found it in a
vintage clothing shop in Norman Road, St Leonards.
The bathroom opposite is packed with more finds, including
an amazing bright blue 1920s washbasin – not actually
plumbed in, they had a working basin already, but too beautiful
to leave in the second-hand yard in Hastings Old Town. Its
vibrant colour is matched by a pair of pale blue grosgrain
mule slippers Adrian couldn’t resist from Fortnum & Mason.
On the landing outside two small runs of stairs face
each other. The one to the south was the original and they
copied it for the extension. Adrian made the stair runners
himself, using scraps of old carpet. “It all cost about £80.”
The other two guest rooms, in the original south side
of the house, are packed with more found treasures too
numerous to mention. In the pink bedroom, hat pins,
hat boxes, Victorian laced boots, tiaras, bow ties, Klaus
the bear, and in the green bedroom, a Fortnum & Mason
biscuit tin showing a cross section of the store, which
includes Adrian at his millinery table on the second floor
(where his professional name is Adrian Phillip Howard).
The floor plan – and equally fascinating contents – is
repeated in the two original reception rooms below. The
sitting room on the right is a pale primrose yellow, the snug
on the left is a slightly deeper pink than the room upstairs.
The wall colours throughout the house are beautifully
subtle in this way, but unlike the litany of Farrow & Ball
paint names most of us spout, Adrian and Sven can’t
remember what any of them are. “Our decorator came
with some paint charts and we chose them all in twenty
minutes,” says Adrian. “I think they were mostly Dulux.
Then I added a bit of extra white here and there…”
65 wealdentimes.co.uk