A farmhouse in Somerset lovingly given a new lease of life by one half of Compton Marbling
In the depths of midwinter, as the icy wind whistles through bare hedgerows glistening with frost, it is hard to imagine what Bridle Farm in Somerset looked like on a sweltering summer’s day in 2016, when Alex Lewis first set eyes on it. The charming old farmhouse was nestled in an ‘overgrown wonderland’, he recalls, and the house was surrounded by its own meadows, abundant with daisies and head-high grass, and numerous ‘wibbly wobbly’ barns.
How fitting, then, for Alex and his late wife Anneke to have been met by its owner at the door looking like a character from a fairy tale. ‘Somewhere between Ronnie Wood and Worzel Gummidge,’ says Alex. ‘A proper old boy who’d lived there his whole life.’ They fell for the house instantly.
The couple had been living in Bath, with Alex working as a prop stylist and Anneke as a garden designer. They had a new baby, Freddie, and were looking for a family home. The previous owner had lived in the house with his dog and pet tortoise, otherwise alone since the deaths of the other members of his family. He had made a deep impression on the house – literally, as the silhouette of his form in a halo of ash and nicotine stains around the chair by the fireplace attested. The place was magically untouched – a rarity in this part of the world – but in a grave state of disrepair. As Alex says, ‘Everything needed doing.’
There were multiple lifetimes’ worth of belongings in every room and outhouse. ‘We told him to leave everything. And he did,’ says Alex. ‘I’m always on the scrounge for stuff, but this was mostly rubbish – piles of metal, broken agricultural parts, even old wardrobes.’ Months of riffling and sorting unearthed some gems that the couple rescued – a wooden mantelpiece that is now in the sitting room, for example – but most of it had to go. ‘We had bonfires every day for what felt like a year,’ he adds.
Renovating the house has taken time. ‘I think you have to live in a place first,’ Alex observes. For a good three years, they hunkered down in one or two of the rooms, using the old oil-fired Rayburn and getting a feel for the house before making any rash changes. It was their great friend, the designer Patrick Williams of Berdoulat, who suggested a few sensitive tweaks that would transform the space. ‘He came up with this genius idea of knocking out a dormer window and glazing the sides, which opened up and brought light into the kitchen,’ says Alex. Furniture was cobbled together: some inherited from Anneke’s father, who lives in France; some picked up for a song locally at Shepton Mallet Antiques Fair; some bid for on Ebay. The interiors also reflect a lifetime of curiosity and collecting – a glass cabinet in the sitting room is full of found eggshells, stones and fossils, gathered by Alex since childhood.
Keen to use local craftsmanship wherever possible, he commissioned beautiful, hand-forged banisters from a local blacksmith. ‘The guy taught me how to do it, so I had a go. The bends in the iron are meant to look like my own thumb prints,’ he says. This give-it-a-go attitude was what led Alex to his current job – running Compton Marbling, the oldest marbling studio in the UK, which was founded in nearby Wiltshire in the 1970s. As a teenager, he had visited his school friend Lucy Stone at her parents’ house near Tisbury and had been transfixed by the sight of Lucy’s mother, Solveig Stone, at work in her marbling studio in the garden. Alex spent hours watching the alchemy as she flicked and swirled paint, before dipping paper in it to create designs that would be made into lampshades and notebooks. ‘I think a seed was planted in my mind,’ he says.
It took another couple of decades for the seed to take root: ‘I was staying with Lucy and her family a few years ago and thought I’d give paper marbling a go. Solveig gave me a lesson and I seemed to get the knack of it. She said I had a feel for colour and pattern.’ Solveig was thinking of retiring by then and her daughter Clementine was taking over the business – the start of a new era for the studio. Alex bought half the company from the family and he and Clementine now run Compton Marbling together, with Alex doing the marbling and Clementine dealing with the orders. ‘Solveig is still involved,’ says Alex. ‘We run new patterns past her and she always has the final edit.’
The company has deep connections to the landscape around it. All its patterns are named after words in the old Wiltshire dialect. These include ‘Bobbish’ (happy) and ‘Chaff ’ (light). Many of the other products it sells – diaries, notebooks, lampshades and picture frames – are made locally. The studio is still in the garden of Solveig’s home.
Alex now lives 20 minutes down the road. He grew up on a farm in Narberth, near Tenby. It was Alex’s grandmother Felicity who introduced him to creative pursuits. ‘She was a headmaster’s wife and also an amateur artist, always making things, dry stone walling or sketching,’ he says.
‘She was a major influence on me.’ After studying fine art at Farnham College, Alex got a job assisting stylist and photographer Kristin Perers. This led to a styling career, working for brands such as Toast, Boden and The White Company. In his work – and for the improvements he and Anneke have made to their family home – he has always been interested in using natural materials and finds inspiration in their surroundings. Anneke’s vision for the garden and landscape around the farm was to hold onto the wild magic of the place and to not tidy up too much.
Christmas in the Lewis household is all about bringing nature indoors, as abundantly as possible. ‘Anneke and I go all-out with decorations,’ says Alex. ‘We gather anything we can from the trees and hedgerows.’ Ivy and holly are twisted into homemade wreaths and ‘anything in the house with a hook’ is decked with mistletoe. ‘I often find bits still hanging in places that have been forgotten in July,’ he says with a laugh. ‘We make paper chains and origami tree decorations from marbled paper offcuts from the studio.’
Christmas lunch is always a crowd – 15 this year – with stockings hung by the old chimneypiece for the couple’s children, Freddie, now 10, and Coco, six. Overflow guests stay in the family’s showman’s wagon Ernie, which sits in a field on the farm and which they rent out at weekends.
The couple bought it a couple of years ago from a local farmer whom Alex had visited about a tractor. Alex’s head was turned as soon as he saw the old wagon in a corner of a field, covered in ivy. ‘It was rotting away – I knew we had to have it,’ he says. ‘My grandmother had been friends with some local traveller families in Wales and they’d taught her about wagons. In the early 1980s, she actually built one from scratch herself, which she had in her garden.’ Alex renovated the wagon himself, just as his grandmother would have done – a love of making beautiful things in old-fashioned ways, passed down through the generations.
Compton Marbling: comptonmarbling.co.uk
Follow Ernie the Showman’s Wagon @somersetbarns. It is available to rent at canopyandstars.co.uk and airbnb.co.uk
Andrew Montgomery1/4Coco with an ivy wreath.
Andrew Montgomery2/4Homemade sloe gin is an ideal accompaniment to present wrapping on Christmas Eve.
3/4Alex with Freddie and Coco beside one of the farm’s tin
barns.
4/4Alex and Anneke with Coco and Freddie in the sitting room, adorned with locally gathered greenery. ‘We go all-out with decorations,’ Alex says. ‘It’s all about bringing nature indoors as abundantly as possible.’
