Plain English work-ethics – the artist-designer and craftsman Greg Powlesland’s house and workshops at Frenchman’s Creek
This is the house that Greg Powlesland built - artist, designer, maker, boat-builder and reclaimer, repairer and re-purposer of old things - boats, vehicles, architectural salvage and industrial materials. He shares it with his son... 
Jane Hill at Shepherd’s Cottage: Every picture tells a story.
Jane Hill has lived at Shepherd's Cottage for about 20 years now. Its unique, a seventeenth century backlands cottage just behind Highgate high street, once inhabited by a sheep drover who may have penned his...
Beauty and Utility in Dorsetshire – Bonfield Block-Printers
This is Bonfield Block-Printers, the workshop and home of Janet Tristram and Cameron Short and family, in Thorncombe village, Dorset. They came here about 9 years ago - This is their story, told...
Viola Lanari, artist, home and studio – in her own words
'I came here in 2011. The flat was all white, I was a student, but I had people renting the spare room. I was trying to fill the void, buying things and hanging them everywhere.' ...
The Magpie Eye : Mark Hearld
Mark Hearld is the busy, polygamous artist and maker whom I've long wanted to meet. He has made multiple marriages, to print-making and collage, drawing and painting, lino-cutting, ceramics, wallpaper and textile design, cut-outs and collecting,...
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...
Bridie Hall ‘At Home.’
Bridie Hall, artist-designer and co-founder of the amazing shop and homestore, Pentreath and Hall, was born in New Zealand and ran away to seek her fortune in London twenty years ago, on finishing art school....
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...
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 ....
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...
Friends, not Chickens, by Jasper Conran
The designer Jasper Conran O.B.E. is the author of Country ( Conran Octopus, 2010), still the very best book of its kind and a subject on which he is eloquent. He says that country life...
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...
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...
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 Romi grew up, very happily, riding donkeys, in the idyllic surroundings of...
Peter Hone, Master-Plaster-Caster.
Peter is a Master-Plaster-Caster, the only one of his kind. Now he does bespoke commissions and sells some more via Pentreath and Hall's Rugby Street shop.
Alan Powers on Enid Marx (& the bobt on ‘lost’ 30s artist Suzanne Cooper).
Alan Powers moved into this flat-fronted terraced house of London stock brick 35 years ago. He was a youthful painter manque who has instead become a historian of twentieth century art and architecture, the author...
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...
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...
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...
In Somersetshire, kiln from John Piper, ceramics by Prue Piper.
The Old Laundry in Somerset. This is the house that Prue Piper and her husband Edward found in the 1960s. Built from the local oolite limestone, it was once the laundry for a large country...
Glynn Boyd Harte, painter, author, post-Pop young-fogey-bohemian and genius,1948-2003.
Glynn Boyd Harte was born in Rochdale in 1948. He met his wife Caroline Bullock (herself an artist and historian) in the foyer of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in 1968, when he was...
Ian Archie Beck, Elton John and les Frères Perverts.
A family of aesthetes live here, in Thames-side Isleworth to the west of London. These are some clues to their identity. The hanging mugs feature monochrome woodblock vignettes of the Dorset countryside by...
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...
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...
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. Home, recycled architectural elements He was brought up in Constantine near...
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...
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...
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. Jonathan Miller, Portrait of the Artist At Home, 2012 (homage to...
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...
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...
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...
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)...
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...
