Chapter 11: From 1992 to the Present Day

During the early months of 1993 I was on sabbatical and went to the U.S. twice, but on my return there were two developments concerning the house, both involving the council. The first involved Mr L.A. Fillery of Golden Square, New Romney, who repaired the plaster mouldings in the hallway, which had been smashed up when the partition was inserted there view image. I was put onto him by Paul Read, then the council’s conservation officer. I think I was encouraged to do the work partly by the expectation of a Council grant which didn’t materialise, but I would surely have wanted to have the mouldings repaired in any case. I mainly remember that Fillery’s work was incredibly messy -- though he did a good job, thus preparing the hallway and staircase for decorating, on which see below.

Front door showing inner door

The other improvement, which did get a generous Council grant (of £400, towards a total cost of £650), was for a fanlight above the front door. This was executed by John Sambrook, an expert on fanlights and author of a book on the subject, who lived at Northiam and has since died. The fanlight was based on a model at Annetts Crescent, Islington, which had a Greek key pattern in its surround which seemed appropriate because it matched the pattern in the body of the front door (see figure d on p. 78 of Sambrook’s book, Fanlights, London, 1989): it also incorporated a large roundel in which we painted the house number, ‘6’: this was a gold numeral painted on the glass, for which I had to pay extra.

1993 is mainly memorable, however, because that is the year in which I first had contact with Simon Bartlett of Woodbase Joiners. This brought with it the ancillary services of Malcolm Seabrook as joiner and Chris Whiteman as decorator, who were to do much of the structural and decorating work on the house over the next two decades. The first quotation that I have in my file from Simon is dated 20 May 1993 and it is for the construction and installation of a set of French windows, including an elaborate shutter case: the invoice also includes various other doors for different parts of the house and a fire surround for the north-easterly front bedroom which didn’t actually materialise until a couple of years later, but it gives a sense of the schedule of work that unfolded over the next few years. We started with the work on the rear study in 1993, before moving on to the hallway and staircase in the early months of 1994. Then, the kitchen followed in the early months of 1995 and the north-easterly front bedroom in 1996.

French windows in rear study

Beginning with the rear study, the French windows with their surround were duly inserted in the back wall by Malcolm in the summer of that year. As has already been explained (in chapters 7 and 10), planning permission had been obtained for this replacement notwithstanding the fact that, as became apparent before the old window was removed, it was in fact a Georgian one with some of its glazing bars removed rather than a Victorian one, as I had thought when I submitted the planning application. Although I should perhaps feel slightly guilty about removing an original feature of the house in this way rather than restoring it, the French windows undoubtedly enhance the house: it is lovely to be able to step from the rear study straight into the garden. View image. I’ve always felt that this represents a bold twentieth-century feature which I think enhances the character of the house: after all, restoration of a house doesn’t just mean meticulously restoring every tiny feature but adding to it and adapting it to new tastes. As for its details, the design of the pair of opening doors with a rectangular panel above is exactly derived from the inner front door to the house: the advantage of the rectangular panel was that it provided a space to hang the roundel of medieval stained glass that I had obtained from London Architectural Salvage many years earlier and which had formerly hung in a similar position in the French windows in the study at Ashburnham Cottage and then in the glazed conservatory at Oakley Square. The elaborate shutter cases just seemed appropriate: initially, the whole thing was varnished but it was undercoated and painted in 2008.

Once the French windows had been installed, it made it much easier to tackle the rotten floor inside the rear study, which Malcolm proceeded to deal with in August 1993. (For the reasons for the rot under the floor, see chapter 9.) This all went quite straightforwardly, including the reuse of as many of the original boards as was feasible and the replacement of the remainder, which were appropriately painted in Antique Oak varnish to match the existing floors of the house. An ancillary operation was of sifting the rubble that came out for traces of the former Exmouth House School, as outlined in chapter 8 above. The other embellishment to that side of the house that occurred in the autumn of 1993 was the commissioning of two large bookcases to go on either side of the chimney breast in the front study: it was not feasible simply to fit shelves to the alcoves, as was the case in the rear study and the sitting room, because of the architrave to the double doors separating the front and back studies. These plain but functional units were supplied by a firm called Occasional Pieces on the Churchfields Industrial Estate—which I remember noticing subsequently went bust. Then, early in 1994, Malcolm seems to have fitted various doors that Woodbase had made for me according to the May 1993 estimate, including that to the bathroom and the one opposite the toilet on the landing. More significantly, I’m pretty sure that it was at this point that he created a new opening between the upstairs side room (or music room) and the rear rooms of the house, in which a door and architrave were also installed: this greatly improved the circulation to the upstairs of the house, making it possible in principle for the music room and the rear rooms to be linked together as a separate flat, should the need for this ever arise.