An early Victorian house in Winchester with interiors slowly built up from a series of collections
It’s not a particularly special house in itself,” says George Saumarez Smith of his home in Winchester. “It’s a typical early Victorian suburban semi-detached house, there must be thousands and thousands just like it all over the country.” Over the course of a successful career – he is now a director of the distinguished classical practice Adam Architecture – George has devoted himself to extraordinary buildings, drawing them, studying them, and creating them. But his own house, charming though it is in its essential structure, has been made special from the inside out, by the imprint of a personality, a family history, and an ever-evolving conversation between the building and its inhabitant.
At the beginning of that conversation, when George first moved in, his interiors were considerably more modern and less decorated. “The whole trend in decorating at that time was for things to be plainer,” he recalls. He made a couple of efficient structural alterations at the start to help the layout of the house feel more like its original self. Under its previous owners, the kitchen had been confined to a tiny space where George now has his study; it now occupies half of the light, generous double room on the ground floor, with french doors opening onto the garden. On the lower floor, where there is a sitting room and spare bedroom, a redundant passageway became a guest bathroom. “I like the adaptability of the space,” he says. “There are two good-size rooms on each floor, and you can use them in all sorts of ways. It’s also a ‘concertina’ house – it will quite happily expand to fit six or eight people, but it still feels friendly when I’m here by myself.”
Its flow restored, the sparsely decorated house eventually began to communicate what would feel right within its rooms. In his talk for The Calico Club, George called the process ‘slow decorating’ – a feeling of the way by intuition, rather than a deliberate process of design. As time went on, he found himself increasingly drawn to furniture and objects produced around the mid-19th century when the house was built, and began hunting through auction houses, developing a taste for brown furniture, Howard armchairs and antique pottery. There were various influences at work as the rooms filled up: George’s aunt and uncle’s house, designed by his grandfather in the 1930s, whose wallpapered rooms were filled with interesting objects; trips to India, where he bought many of the printed fabrics in the house; and a longstanding love of linocuts, which are displayed on practically every wall.
It was perhaps inevitable in any case that the house would come to feel much fuller and more lived-in than it did in the early days. George admits to being subject to the collecting bug, and linocuts are indeed the first collection one notices in the house. Some of them were made by the architect Quinlan Terry, who worked with George’s grandfather Raymond Erith, to illustrate houses they designed. Others are by Sheila Robinson, a member of the Great Bardfield community where Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden also worked, and whose pieces George collects. His fondness for the graphic form exemplified in linocuts extends to the wallpaper; the spare room is papered in a pattern of Robinson’s, and the Morris & Co ‘Indian’ pattern in the dining room is not dissimilar in feel.
There is much family history in all this, including a love of architecture that runs through the generations. George’s own architectural drawings decorate the study, along with piles of the sketchbooks he has been working on since his student years, highlights of which, including many painstaking measured drawings of buildings, are now published as a book. Books are the other collection most in evidence, another thread of family history, as George’s father was a bookseller and ran the shop Heywood Hill in Mayfair for many years. They are cheerfully heaped on surfaces or perfectly arrayed on shelves he designed himself to accommodate the exact height of the volumes. “People say how useful adjustable bookshelves will be, and then they never end up moving them,” he points out.
“Collecting is an enjoyable hobby,” says George, though he admits that “there will come a time when the house is too full.” For now, he seems to be staving off this danger perfectly well. One trick he uses is to alternate quite simple spaces with more elaborate ones: on the ground floor, for example, the kitchen is relatively plain and austere, while the dining room is alive with pattern and filled with things. Aesthetically, the alternation keeps any sense of clutter at bay. This instinct for balance carries through into the arrangement of individual objects. “I tend to put everyday things alongside more precious things,” he explains, “like a Grand Tour obelisk next to a Habitat candlestick. It’s quite an ordinary house, and if I was to try and fill it with rare objects, it would not feel very real.”
There are still rooms to do, and the slow decorating continues. George disavows any ambitions in the direction of interior design; his passion is for architecture, and he prefers not to obsess over his interiors. “I love the house when it’s full of people,” he says, “when my children are here, or when I have big dinner parties with lots of friends. And it’s funny because those are the times when you don’t reflect on your house.” It’ll be left to the rest of us, then, to reflect on the peculiar charm of the house, and try and figure out just how he has achieved it.
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Owen Gale1/15In the dining room, the wallpaper is Morris & Co's 'Indian' pattern. English Delftware plates are arranged over the mantelpiece.
Owen Gale2/15The table is covered in a block-printed cloth from India.
Owen Gale3/15A linocut of a cat by Sheila Robinson (a favourite subject of the artist) hangs next to the fireplace.
Owen Gale4/15The sideboard was one of George's first antique purchases, bought at auction for £20. Quinlan Terry's linocuts of the houses Raymond Erith designed for Frog Meadow, Dedham, hang over it, and a collection of Sunderland lustreware jugs sits on top.
Owen Gale5/15George designed the kitchen cabinets himself; on this side of the kitchen they are painted in 'Porphyry Red' by Papers & Paints. The stainless steel island is an old Bulthaup design. The ground floor has the house's original pine floorboards, warmed up with kilim rugs.
Owen Gale6/15The other side of the kitchen is painted in Papers & Paints' 'Duck Green', with Emery et Cie zellige tiles behind the Aga.
Owen Gale7/15Downstairs, the basement sitting room is papered in a different colourway of Morris & Co's 'Indian' pattern. A linocut print of the Rock of Cashel in Ireland by the architect Andrew Anderson hangs over the sofa. George covered the sofa in a suiting fabric.
Owen Gale8/15A painting of Roman ruins by John Aldridge hangs over the side table, where a bust of either Ariadne or Bacchus presides over the sofa.
Owen Gale9/15George designed the bookshelves himself, filling them with books on architecture. A Howard armchair sits in front of the chimneypiece, on top of a French rug that belonged to George's grandparents.
Owen Gale10/15Next to the sitting room, the spare bedroom is papered in Sheila Robinson's 'Monkeys and Birds' pattern, available from St Jude's. A drawing of Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, for which Raymond Erith designed the entrance, hangs over the bed, and the bedside table holds a collection of Shell guides.
Owen Gale11/15A Regency bookcase holds more architecture books. The kilim rug is from Tinsmiths.
Owen Gale12/15George found the bed at Bed Bazaar in Framlingham.
Owen Gale13/15The bathroom is decorated in shades of blue and green – Farrow & Ball's 'Sugar Bag Light' on the walls, and green-yellow tiles from Emery et Cie – to reflect the colours of the garden beyond.
Owen Gale14/15Upstairs, George's own bedroom is painted in Farrow & Ball's 'Vert de Terre', and decorated with more prints by Sheila Robinson.
Owen Gale15/15The bathroom next to the bedroom is painted in Farrow & Ball's "Dix Blue'.
