Chapter 11: From 1992 to the Present Day

The next phase of the rehabilitation of the house, which took place in the spring of 1994, comprised decorating the entire central area, from the front door through the staircase to the upstairs landing. I forget where I got the idea that this was the key to making a house seem more finished than it really was -- in that it didn’t really matter that you kept entering undecorated rooms from this elegant central space, since what counted was the overall impression of completeness that this gave. Did someone suggest this, or did the idea come from the staircase at Oakley Square, which had the same effect? I think it worked, in any case.

Staircase from hallway

So, with the mouldings in the front hallway all repaired, courtesy of Mr Fillery, all I needed to do was to select an appropriate wallpaper. For this, I reverted to the shop that I had discovered in Battersea Bridge Road, Baer & Ingram, who had the ingenious idea of arranging all their wallpapers by colour, so you could select the colour you wanted and narrow it down from there. I must have made many a trip there by motorbike on my way from Hastings to Birkbeck: I wonder what they thought, considering that the papers I ordered averaged more than £20 a roll! It was either at this point or when selecting the paper for the north-easterly front bedroom (called ‘Amberley’, incidentally) that I noticed that I disproportionately often seemed to be selecting papers by G. P. & J. Baker, who also supplied both the main paper used for the hallway and staircase (I think called ’Octavia’) and the ‘printroom’ paper that I used in the upstairs toilet, which was decorated as part of the same operation. For this reason it was to G. P. & J. Baker that I went back in 2013, by which time the Baer & Ingram shop had long since ceased to exist, to select an appropriate paper for the sitting room, which up till that time still retained the striped paper inherited from the Willetts pending the completion of more urgent decorating tasks (see further below). The actual decorating and paper-hanging of the hall and staircase was carried out by Chris Whiteman - the first major job that he executed at Exmouth House -- and, as with all the work he did for me, it was immaculate.

Upper staircase and glazed light

The crowning triumph of the newly decorated staircase was the glazed light that was inserted to replace the sky-light. I don’t have proper documentation of this, but I seem to remember it was made by a glazing artist called Harcourt Lees who lived at Prospect Place (there is a diary entry to visiting him there in this connection in April 1994, which rings a bell). The point is that the ceiling is extremely low at that point, because the beams supporting the roof come so low. It therefore seemed a good idea to raise the level of the glazed surface by forming a shaped structure of leaded struts, and this is what Harcourt did, alternating coloured glass with sections of patterned glass as used in internal doors elsewhere in the house. The overall height of the resulting structure is only about six inches, but it gives a real ‘lift’ to the staircase area. If I were asked where the idea came from, I would answer that it was suggested to me by the ingenious use of glazing at the Sir John Soane Museum in London.