The house that changed me

The Old Parsonage in Dorset. Main image, Ben and his husband, garden designer Charlie McCormick (Emma Lewis)

If you are like me, everywhere you’ve ever lived will in some way become the warp and weft of your life: I’m thinking of the sixth-form boarding house at school in Dorset, where I managed to get a room of my own, complete with a working fireplace; or our freezing cold, voluminous, neoclassical flat in the New Town of Edinburgh, when I was a student there; the incredible cottage down an ancient unmade track in Norfolk, where I lived while doing my first job; or the garret apartment in the attic of a townhouse in Greenwich Village.

They’re all, in a way, homes that changed me. But of all of them, none was more so than the beautiful house in Dorset where I lived for 15 years (with my husband, Charlie, for the past 10) – the Old Parsonage, in the lovely village of Littlebredy, within the Bridehead Estate.

The light-filled drawing room (Emma Lewis)

I’ll never forget the moment when I came for the first viewing on Easter Saturday, 2009; but memories came rushing back because I’d known the house years before, when my best schoolfriend, also Ben, lived at the Parsonage for a decade or more. Now, the house hadn’t been occupied for over a year. Thankfully, the landlord hadn’t carried out any renovation, so I was able to put my mark on things.

We agreed terms and building works started a few weeks later.

The house is built into a hill on the edge of a narrow, steeply sloping valley, looking over to woodland on the opposite slope. It is this position that made it truly remarkable, with views even from the ground-floor rooms as if you were raised up – like being on the prow of a ship. There was a sleeping garden, waiting to be woken up, a task that I began, but that was completed comprehensively by brilliant, green-fingered Charlie when he arrived in Dorset a few years later.

The egg yolk yellow kitchen, with an old Aga and vintage furniture sourced from eBay (Emma Lewis)

The Parsonage became my laboratory, where I would try out new ideas for colours or fabrics. It was always gently evolving, with things being added or moved. I think this is important. Our homes are never fixed: they evolve to reflect our lives; and, like us, they need to shed their skin every now and again. Repainting a room, buying a new picture or bringing back a junk-shop find you’ve fallen in love with – all these change the dynamic in imperceptible ways. The ever-shifting whole is more than the accretive sum of the parts. Time is the magical ingredient here. And all through these years, this was being recorded in the various books that I was writing – English Decoration, followed by English Houses and, more recently, An English Vision. Somehow these struck a chord with others and I was engaged to do more and more decoration.

All good things end. Two years ago, the estate was put on the market for the first time in 250 years, and Charlie and I decided to make a fresh start somewhere else. That turned out to be Orkney, where we moved in the autumn of 2024 – to yet another adventure, and most certainly to a house that will add to the cloth of our lives.

Ben Pentreath OBE is an architect, author and interior designer. His latest book, A Year at the Parsonage, will be published this autumn by Quadrille.

This story also appears in the new Portfolio magazine. Request your complimentary copy here.

Design

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