Blog

'An agreeable house to live in' : Wolfeton House near Dorchester.

  Wolveton ( or Wolfeton) House stands in its little plot of green verdant land bordered by water meadows to the north-west of Dorchester, where trees and docks grow tall and small creeping flowers with medieval names  push up through the turf...

The Patinated Past: At Restoration House in Rochester

Growing up in Australia, Robert Tucker had set his sights on seeing the world and becoming a writer. ‘In those days I was teaching myself how to describe visual phenomena in words - it made me look more closely at things. I found that everythin...

Go Wild in the Country, Rusticating, with Luke Edward Hall

  In 2019, artist-designers Luke Edward Hall and Duncan Campbell were looking for a place in the country, somewhere to plant a garden and have friends for the weekend. They found it here, at the Gloucestershire end of the Cotswolds where the ...

'Framing is a language,' A. Prin Art, Benedict Foley, Daniel Slowik and Cottagecore

  Benedict Foley and Daniel Slowik began renting Pink Cottage soon after they met, because their London place is in Hackney and East Anglia is a ‘good trajectory’ out from there. Benedict is a a dealer in fine and decorative art and ant...

An Old House in Whitechapel, near Spitalfields, By Tim Whittaker

The story of how an old house in East London was saved from demolition and revived ...

Why we loved Laura Ashley, all over again.

Everyone helped with everything, loading the delivery vans with garments, then piling into the pub  - the Aleppo Arms - at the end of a big production run. There were staff football matches with factory girls playing shop girls and the w...

Bridie Hall 'At Home.'

Bridie was sent to England by a family friend, the pop musician Alanna Currie who had made the same journey of discovery herself in 1977. Bridie's first job was in the tiny branch of the parfumier Penhaligon in Brook Street - 'I never got...

A Magpie's Life, by Cath Kidson

I have always been an inveterate collector of stuff. I reckon it started when I was a small child with a trip to the white elephant stall at our local fete. I’d won the prize for the ‘Best Miniature Flower Arrangement’ and with the prize money ...

Recapturing the castle, Bernard Nevill, Eastnor and me, by Sarah Hervey-Bathurst.

‘Have you lifted your leg on the place?’ The question erupts from my portly and moustachioed neighbour at a dinner given for members of the Historic Houses Association. I have barely been introduced to Sir James Cayzer and am somewhat surpris...

Charleston Farmhouse needs you.

The French call the little, personal and inconsequential anecdotes that are most revealing of life, les petites histoires. Charleston Farmhouse is full of them, signposts and memoranda of the lives of the illustrious, clever Bloomsbury Group who pain...

On drawing, painting pictures and designing a new wallpaper, by Marthe Armitage

"I am an aged artist still working - just. My tubes of paint had been left un opened and ignored following a year of unhealth and it seemed to me that the muse had departed . ...

The Pauper's Cookbook and The Country Kitchen, china, compost heaps, cold frames & - country life by Jason Goodwin

Ever since I wrote Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, I’ve been brooding. On the face of it the Ottomans had precious little to shout about, though they ruled from the castle at Buda to the deserts of Arabia. ...

On delighting in cracked, chipped, 'Rescued' things and coming back to her old family house in Scotland, by Domenica More Gordon

  It is an odd thing to find yourself living back in your childhood house at the age of 40 with your parents and your own young family and husband. Sometimes as I walk through the house and garden I slip from mother to daughter and from adult t...

House, hearth, home and garden by Bridget Elworthy (@thelandgardeners)

An Argentinian cousin of my fathers once said to me - you do not choose a house - it chooses you. And I have to say she was totally right. Having moved rather a lot since leaving my home in NZ in my early twenties I have found that some houses grace...

A Wandering Eye, With Min Hogg in Gran Canaria, by Miguel Flores-Vianna

I met Min at my friends Charlotte and Alex de Carcaci, in their old Cheyne Row house, a freezing evening in February of 2012. Having recently moved to England I had been dying to meet the Grande Dame of Decorating so Charlotte organized a dinner to m...

For the Love of Houses by Veere Grenney

My childhood was in New Zealand, a pleasant and distant land, still rooted in England in all its forms and a society anchored to the land. Affluent but middle class, “Surrey in the South Pacific “ yet still egalitarian, thanks...

Egyptomania, Portobello Market, Camels, Whippets and Ottoman textiles, At home in London by Lulu Lytle

These have been very long days sitting at my makeshift desk (3 Nigerian batiks draped over a folding picnic table) writing endless emails and communicating on zoom. ...

Friends, not Chickens, by Jasper Conran

Waking up this morning I realised that our house, the things in it and I have much in common. We are mostly chipped, frayed at the edges, quite old and sometimes, especially in my case, desperately in need of restoration. ...

Seaweed, Smoking and Scale, the Importance Of : Molly Alexander remembers her great aunt, Min Hogg.

Feted as the inventor-founder-editor of The World of Interiors magazine, in later life Min Hogg reinvented herself as the proud designer of an exquisite range of seaweed pattern wallpapers. Professionally she was often fierce, but her private life wa...

Gavin Houghton, On Wallpaper, The World of Interiors, Painted Floors, Jack Russells - and Darren.

I found my house in Stockwell 20 years ago. It’s an early Victoria terraced house second from the end, with steps up to the apple green front door and a ground floor bay window on metal stilts. ...

On Moving House (for the Fourth Time) to half an Elizabethan House with a 'Jennifer Archer ' Kitchen - and hanging sill-length curtains...By Isabel Bannerman.

The bibleobritishtaste has asked what it is that one does turning to a new place and re-using all the leftovers for the fourth time in a lifetime . ...

Humble Elegance: John Fowler’s creative response to troubled times, by Daniel Pieckielon Slowik

Arriving one Easter at Veere Grenney's scintillating house in Tangier, Gazebo, I was curious to know who the other guests were. A bedroom door was flung open and Daniel Slowik appeared, smiling beautifully beneath a Panama hat. After we left Sunday c...

S J Whitework's Design Heroes: Cecil Beaton, J.E.T. and Marthe Armitage.

I started trailing the designer Susanna White because of a lamp shade. It was a tall cone printed with 'Hunters,' the dashing repeat design of a man and woman on horseback drawn by her grandmother Joan Evelyn Thomson - aka J.E.T. 'Hunters' is entirel...

By Ben Pentreath: A Month in the Country and the Story of Parsonage Pink

It’s four weeks now since we’ve been here, down in Dorset. I’d say a couple of weeks ago the house got very tidy indeed. Everyone in the country, housebound and feeling helpless, went on a massive spring clean. We were no exception. It was ...

the bobt: a trip to the archives

To mark April's Renaissance, the bibleofbritishtaste presents new stories and themes. Some are being commissioned from generous and talented friends. But these are not them. Today's story is an amuse gueule from its archives of thousands of pictu...

I am a painter and I paint every day: Romi Behrens at Prussia Cove

Romi Behrens, b.1939, who lived at Prussia Cove in West Cornwall, belonged to no school of art and received no formal painting tuition ...

Peter Hone, Master-Plaster-Caster.

I've called on Peter Hone in his Notting Hill studio flat a few times recently I was working in the zoo serving the fellows, Sir Solly Zuckerman and the man who was the Naked Ape man, what’s his name? Luncheon, and f...

Old Albion, Ben Pentreath, Charlie McCormick and their Old Parsonage.

As some of you will know, architect and designer Ben Pentreath and plantsman, florist and collector Charlie McCormick live for most of the time in a small hamlet in West Dorset, although they have a London life as well. The dogs and their...

Trereife House in West Cornwall, Lost Land of Lyonesse.

They rebuilt the 'new' house at Trereife in 1710, on and around the older one, as has so often been the case. There's a back drive with high stone gate posts and rhododendrons and this front one, running up beside the old park palings. The Le Grice...

Min Hogg's World of Interiors: Seaweed wallpaper.

Min Hogg lives round the corner from the V and A and the Brompton Oratory. She is the creator and founding editor of the World of Interiors magazine, generally considered to be outstanding in the western world. Interiors (as it was originally cal...

Alan Powers on Enid Marx (& the bobt on 'lost' 30s artist Suzanne Cooper).

'I was aware there were a number of houses up for sale all at once around here. I was standing on the other side of the street one morning and someone in the doorway came over and said, do you want to look around? So I did. Part of my imagining...

At Wardington Manor, the Land Gardeners.

'Walled gardens  - and restoring them  - is what we really want to be doing,' says Bridget Elworthy. Four years ago Bridget and her friend and partner, Henrietta Courtauld, started the Land Gardeners. Cutting gardens and seasonal cut flowers, soil ...

Measure, Draw, Build: George Saumarez Smith, architect.

    George's exhibition about drawing, the essential tool of the design process, Measure, Draw, Build, is at the RIBA until Novemb...

The Old Sweet Dove of Wiveton.

Almost everything here was inherited from Desmond’s grandparents Primrose and Dick Buxton, who bought Wiveton in 1944. The Buxton's  beautified the house and improved its gardens and model farm. Chloe Buxton, their only child, met her future...

David Bridgwater, his curious world.

David Bridgwater wrote to me a few weeks ago. He had read the art book that I published with Yale, Owning the Past, about the English collectors who scoured Italy, Greece and Turkey for antique sculptures in the eighteenth century and brought the...

Shulbrede Priory near Lynchmere.

On the borders of Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire, Shulbrede Priory is the surviving corner of the rather obscure religious house of Wlenchmere, founded at the end of the twelfth century and suppressed by Henry VIII in the 1530s. ...

Back to the Drawing Board: Pat Albeck.

In the autumn of 2016 I visited the artist and renowned textile designer Pat Albeck in the Oxfordshire gate lodge where she has lived for about four years. She came there with her husband the acclaimed stage and costume designer Peter Rice (w...

Domenica More Gordon, an artist's house in Scotland.

Years ago, when our children were young, our generous friend Mary took us all for summer holidays at her family house, on one of the outermost islands in the Outer Hebrides. There in the rain, with white sands and beach lunches cooked for 22 people, ...

At home in West Dorset 2, Julia de Pauley.

I photographed my friend Julia de Pauley's house here  a couple of years ago. It changes all the time. She was designing some belts under her pseudonym, 'shophound' but her perfectionism meant that things were never finished. There again in Septembe...

Wonders of the East End: Malplaquet House.

  Grateful thanks to Tim Knox  and Todd Longstaffe Gowan. All images copyright bibleofbritishtaste/Tim Knox and Todd Longstaffe Gowan. Excerpts and links may be...

Stone and shell in Somerset-shire: Belinda Eade.

Flanking the chimney in Malplaquet House - the home of Tim Knox and Todd Longstaffe Gowan - are shell candle sconces in the Baroque taste made by Belinda Eade almost 20 years ago. As a pupil at Marlborough School Belinda had helped to  restor...

New Years greetings from the bible of british taste 2015

The Eynsham Morris, boy novices at the first stop on their local Boxing Day four-pub fixture. NB Green Man. Photo credit my sister Lizzie who was standing next to me. Thank you for subscribing. A new post from BOBT follows shortly....

Dingles Fairground Attractions.

The first fairground ride-upon that I coveted was a life-sized goat that hung for almost two years against the window in Malcolm Glickstein's junk shop. Although I had left no deposit on it, I thought of it as already mine, until sudd...

Peepshow in London E2, Simon Costin's Museum of British Folklore by Adam Richards Architects.

At Unit 1, Cremer Business Centre, 37 Cremer Street https://architecturediary.org/london/events/4970 there's a peepshow that you can visit for the RIBA London Open Studios / London Festival of Architecture this weekend. ...

In Somersetshire, kiln from John Piper, ceramics by Prue Piper.

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Glynn Boyd Harte, painter, author, post-Pop young-fogey-bohemian and genius,1948-2003.

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Trematon Castle : "Escape culture all day & night at Bannermans."

All images except this one, copyright bibleofbritishtaste. Excerpts and links may be used,...

The real thing, Tanya Harrod, essays on making (and Peggy Angus).

Tanya Harrod published  'The Real Thing, essays on making in the modern world,' this week. Its essays are about art, craft and design, and the shifts and spaces in between them.These are subjects she has been thinking and writing about for 30 years....

New year, new build, Bavent House in East Anglia.

Lucy, Clea and Richard Turvill have been here now, in the house they built, for about 5 years. While they lived in London their countrified alter-egos had been well disguised. I thought they were truly metropolitan, but now I realise that they were s...

The Way We Live, Now.

'Nothing much has happened to our house for about 20 years in terms of its look,' says Christina Moore. 'It's not designed although I guess when we first put it together it was. We moved in here in 1984. Now it's about managing the amount of stuff th...

Ian Archie Beck, Elton John and les Frères Perverts.

Here is the dacha in which they hang, where Ian works each day,  ...

Big Old House, Fen-land.

Richard and Patricia Hewlings live in the Fens, the district known as the Holy land of England. Their house is a flat-fronted, red brick farmhouse with a pretty Georgian doorcase, and an older wing jettying out into what was once the farmyard at the ...

Reminiscences of my visit to Smedmore.

I stayed at lovely Smedmore House in Dorset, settled in its green declivity between ridge-backed Purbeck hills, in May. The first day was grey, with scudding wind and rain, but then the sun came out. This is a room in the old kitchen range, not much ...

John Martin Robinson, Maltravers Herald Extraordinary and architectural historian

This is the London dwelling of John Martin Robinson, aesthete, architectural historian and controversialist. He holds the offices of Maltravers Herald Extraordinary, Librarian to the Duke of Norfolk and Vice Chairman of the Georgian Group ( tho he ha...

Romilly Saumarez Smith, a maker and her house in East London.

From  a temporary gallery arranged in the downstairs rooms of her house in Stepney, Romilly Saumarez Smith has just sold her latest jewellery collection. 'That collection is done now, we'll make up the orders but then we'll go on to the next one, an...

The Englishman's Room, Gavin Stamp and Anti-Ugly.

The architectural historian and writer Gavin Stamp is one of the  'new Georgians,'  pioneers of gentrification who brought up their families in the unloved and unlovely bits of London, where boarded up and multi-occupied old housing stock survived ...

London Calling.

My friends Bridie Hall and Ben Pentreath are a decorative artist and an architect, both designers and interior designers who also keep an excellent shop, Pentreath and Hall. This week we are doing something together. It's called London : A Cabinet of...

Mr. Dodd at home, 2 : Country.

Local children nicknamed this seventeenth century folly 'Mustard-pot Hall.' It stands on the edge of a field in south-eastern England. ALAN DODD has lived here since the 1980s. I was a guest here one weekend about a decade later and I was smitten, an...

Philippa Kunisch, Jeweller.

Philippa Kunisch lives in north London, Philippa's jewellery has been sold in Liberty's, the General Trading Company and specialist shops in New York and all over America, Florence, Paris, Milan and Japa...

Joe Hemming, artist, stone carver, part-time shed-dweller.

Joe Hemming carves  incised and relief images and lettering in stone, slate and wood,  and plays the violin in a string  swing band. He was brought up in Constantine near Falmouth, and has been carving now for about twenty five years. He ca...

Ghastly Good Taste? The Best of John Betjeman.

John Betjeman hated experts, antiquarianism, art historians and research fellowships. As his daughter Candida Lycett Green has pointed out, he never set out to champion conservation in the academic sense of that word, but rather to work in the cause ...

The hounds of spring.

 'When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces...'Atalanta in Calydon, by Algernon Charles Swinburne. Photography by Liz Neville, www.lizneville.com/ model, Flora Neville, grateful thanks to both. vintage tweed coat by A...

Something for the weekend - Barbara Jones.

The King Penguin Guide to the Isle of Wight  - a place that I once commuted to each week - was the first book by Barbara Jones that I bought. One of her illustrations shows the Horn Room at Osborne House, with Prince Albert’s Teutonic antler furni...

A.N. Wilson's Wedgwood.

A.N.Wilson writes:  I grew up in North Staffordshire, where my forebears had been potters since the end of the eighteenth century. My brother Stephen and I sometimes look at our hands and think - we are the first men in our branch of the fami...

In the North Kent Downs: the West Street Tickham's last meet & Twentieth Century Castles.

Hunt supporters don't carry umbrellas. On March 16th under lead-grey skies and needle-sharp rain the West Street Tickham hunt met for the last time on the gravel in front of Doddington Place in Kent.  Lachrymal weather and these rain-blotched pictur...

'Nymphs and Shepherds, Come Away' - Nicky Haslam's Hunting Lodge.

This week Nicky Haslam's Folly de Grandeur was published. It's the story of the house in which he has lived for over thirty years, told in a  prose which is never purple but ever so slightly lilac. He writes in the same distinctive, confidential ton...

Dark Satanic Mills.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For my taste, these twin cranes or derricks at Battersea Power Station are the only public art worth pausing for from here to Tate Modern. But they won't be there much longer. The eighty something year old power ...

How Cecil Sharp sowed the seeds of love.

Nothing could be more Romantic than the English Folk tradition as it was revived at the start of the twentieth century. Much of the glory for this belongs to a single character, Cecil Sharp, for whom Cecil Sharp House was built as a memorial, library...

More Spitalfields Life.

Eloise and Will Palin live in an old house in Spitalfields. It was built for a Hugenot silk weaver in 1717, one of the refugees from religious persecution in France who colonised the area then, and its beautifully proportioned rooms were paid for by ...

Thames-side.

A large family grew up in this early nineteenth century villa, standing close to the course of the Thames where it runs into London from the west. Most of these children have come of age but none have completely left  yet, and their discarded winter...

The past in black, white and sepia.

My grandmother is the one near the middle, sidesaddle on the donkey like a small, shaggy camel. The caption of the picture, if there were one, would be 'Haymaking in Bierton,' a ceremonial harvest home when the village dressed up and posed self-consc...

Sue and David Gentleman.

The artist David Gentleman and his wife Sue have lived in the same north London house, in the hinterland  between Camden Market and Regent's Park, since 1971. I have never seen it untidy, it is always serene, but there is a visual intelligence and h...

What to do in Walton-on-the-Naze in Winter.

Have you ever been to Walton on the Naze? Like its sister resort of Clacton on Sea it has a long (790 metre) pier with fairground amusements and fishermen casting lines fruitlessly into the grey-green swell. But Walton on the Naze is tiny by comparis...

At home in West Dorset, John and Julia de Pauley.

John and Julia de Pauley and their two daughters live in Bridport, a market town next to the west Dorset coast. These photographs were taken on a broiling day towards the end of last summer. Jo...

The Nativity comes to Kentish Town (II), Epiphany.

Saturday January 5th. This was the scene at the Church of St. Silas in Kentish Town yesterday evening, where the Christmas Crib was being reordered for the feast of the Epiphany today, when the three Magi complete their journey. The Three King...

In Camden Town.

This is the Camden Town desk from which the bible of british taste is published each week. There are many good things about living in NW1, but for years now all my old affection for the place has been drowned by the horribleness of being just around ...

The Nativity comes to Kentish Town, (I).

At All Hallow's Church, Savernake Road,  on the south eastern corner of Hampstead Heath, Father David Houlding started the business of decorating his church on Wednesday. Today, Sunday December 23rd, is 'Advent IV,' the fourth Sunday in Advent, and ...

Beautiful Britain ? Roche Rock.

Hundreds of picture have been taken of Roche Rock looking sublime and Romantic, like this.   The granite chapel on the outcrop is roofless now, reached by a vertical iron ladder embedded in the side of the rock. It was dedicated to St. Micha...

Stephen Medcalf's books.

Just after bonfire night in 1989, Stephen Medcalf, who was tickled by the idea of being photographed at home, wrote to me , 'I do not promise not to tidy it a bit ... a clergyman in Norfolk told me what my room looked like from the way I sat in my ch...

Breon O'Casey, painter, sculptor, (d.2011).

Breon O’Casey, who died last year, never courted or followed fashion, but rather turned his back on it. Throughout the 60s and early 70s he was part of the complicated jigsaw puzzle picture that was the St Ives school, but then he cut himself off, ...

At Boleigh Farm.

Deryck and David Eddy and their mother Marion live at Boleigh Farm, where they have been looking after the dairy herd since they were schoolboys.     A little way along the road is a stone circle once called  Dans Maen ( Stone Dance) ...

Virginia White at home.

Virginia White is an art collector who works as an interior designer. She is a brilliant colourist. She likes Kettles Yard and the St. Ives painters especially. The last room in this sequence belongs to her daughter Iona.    https://virginiawhite...

The National Collection of dahlias.

Winter is icumen in fast, now, over the dahlia meadow at Varfell Farm,  where they keep the national collection, blackening the edges of leaves and petals. Over 275 miles off from London, it is a comparatively modest operation,  but this year they ...

Sir Jonathan Miller, artworks.

Jonathan Miller has shown his formalist, Modernist sculptures at Flowers East, the Boundary Gallery and Danny Katz's Gallery in the West End of London.                       ...

Summer Season interval at Grange Park Opera.

Far, far, far more beautiful than Glyndebourne and so much nicer than Garsington, with patron Lord Ashburton and his impresario Wasfi Kani on stage before curtain up, fundraising  for the next season. No tax payers money is used in these productions...

Agricultural-theme wedding in Honiton, Devon.

Wedding March - 'I've got a brand new combine harvester ... '....  wishing them great happiness            ...

Blackpool Illuminations For Sale.

This enormous, circa 4 foot high Peacock head which lit up the sky on the Blackpool seafront for many years is now for sale with Malcolm Glickstein at : Relic Antiques, 133-135, Pancras Road, London, NW1 1UN, 100m from St. Pancras Station, tel. 07831...

Dr. Feelgood theme birthday cake, tablecloth by David Hockney.

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Barbour - Green is the colour.

Black Barbour jackets are on trend in Cobham, Crouch End and the Cotswolds. That's why you should stick to your old green one.     ...

Huntin' table.

        Bombadier beer by Wells and Young at the Eagle Brewery Bedford and 20 Woodbines. ...

Rose Hilton's studio in Newlyn, West Penwith.

Rose Hilton paints every day in her studio in Newlyn. Her retrospective show was at Tate St. Ives in 2008.  One of a large family brought up in the Plymouth Brethren, she was a prize winning student at the RCA when the artist Sandra Blow introduced ...

Buck the Trend. Epitaph added, December 2014.

- and live happily ever after                   the end.   Epitaph for a lovely house, a work of genius that was also a home, December 2014. ...

The Anthony Shaw Collection.

Every surface on the lower floors of the small terraced house in which Anthony Shaw grew up used to display pieces from his collection. They were even on the kitchen worktops next to the toaster, but there was a palpable sense of more, unseen rooms o...

The Royal Cornwall Show beats everything.

Merry-go-rounds, Britain in Bloom, flower arranging, garden-in-a-box, huntsmen, otter hounds, prize winning holsteins, tractors, morris men. Female Morris men....

At St. Buryan Church in West Penwith.

  There are three or four new ‘kneelers’ – the flat cushions that preserve the knees of the devout – in the pews at St. Buryan Church every year. Shelia Hosking began making them in 1982. ‘We had blue kneelers and they were gettin...

No Life without Trees : Ann Stokes, potter.

  Ann Stokes (b.1922) began making these trees about half a dozen years ago, ceramic trunks which grow upwards, section by section, and branches with a bosky canopy, each leaf of which she cuts out by hand. Squirrels and birds cling to the...

A Farewell to Hanham Court.

Julian and Isabel Bannerman, Ismay, Rex and Bertie don’t live at Hanham Court any more. When they gave their farewell party last summer the gardens for which they and Hanham have become justly famous were at their best.     Christies...

Alice Pattullo, artist and designer.

Alice is an artist and printmaker whose work is firmly vested in the very best traditions of twentieth century design and illustration. She knows about and sees the point of Barbara Jones, Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious and their circle and pays homag...

Roy Conn, b.1931, artist presently living in St. Ives.

Roy Conn's early training was in structural engineering but by his mid twenties he was painting instead. In the 1950s he showed with the London Group (along with Victor Pasmore, Kenneth and Mary Martin and others) and exhibited in several of the John...

Mr. Dodd at home, 1 : London.

ALAN DODD was born in Kent in 1942. He attended Ashford Grammar School, Maidstone College of Art (where David Hockney was one of his teachers) and then the Painting School at the Royal Academy. By the 1970s he was painting murals : five large archi...

The best hand-made wallpaper in the world is by Marthe Armitage.

Marthe Armitage studied painting at Chelsea School of Art just after the war. When marriage and motherhood interrupted she laid down her brush, but then in the 60s she and her architect husband wanted to live with a new more minimal style of decora...