FULL BLOOM
Flowers are everywhere in a Dorset parsonage redecorated by a Kiwi gardener and a UK interior designer
The stone stairs down to the front door of this Dorset parsonage sag in the middle, worn by the footsteps of time. Some of those footsteps belong to current inhabitants Charlie McCormick and husband Ben Pentreath. “I feel very at home here,” says Charlie, originally from Christchurch.
“And we often have a houseful,” he adds, smiling. “It’s fun having people to stay. I especially love it if they haven’t been to Dorset before: I still remember my delight at discovering it three years ago. It’s such a special place.”
Named the Old Parsonage, the house is snuggled into the side of a hill in a hamlet in the south-west of England. Built in about 1820, in the late Georgian period, it has survived world wars and the changing face of the West Country as growing numbers of tourists discovered the delights of cream teas and rock-pooling. All with barely a window pane being replaced.
Charlie and Ben divide their time between a flat in London’s Bloomsbury area ( NZ H&G July 2016) and the Old Parsonage. In the winter, Charlie makes the three-hour drive most weekends with Mavis, their black Labrador, and Ben hops on the train as often as he can. Then when the spring sun starts to warm his seedlings, Charlie spends as much time as possible here. >
Charlie is a garden designer as well as gardening editor for The Times’ Luxx magazine, and says having a proper plot helps him feel more connected to his Christchurch roots where he was a regular at Canterbury A&P shows. Here in his little corner of England, he has put his green fingers to work creating a series of garden rooms, walled with wicker fences and beech hedges that are a perfect meeting of the two men’s worlds: classic English country garden with bursts of New Zealand colour and sculptural elements.
“The garden is a huge part of this house,” says Charlie. “The parsonage is only one room deep downstairs; all rooms lead off the hallway. So there are garden views from most windows.” But Charlie hasn’t crafted a garden that is only good to gaze at, it’s also productive: potatoes, courgettes, broad beans, raspberries, gooseberries, blackcurrants, salad leaves and herbs all make their way into the kitchen. Anything that can’t be grown is sourced at the local farmers’ markets and farm shops. >
It seems fate decided that Ben and Charlie should be the house’s current guardians. Says Ben: “I have loved this house since my best friend lived here in the 1970s and 1980s. I knew the area well, having grown up nearby, and I often used to walk past the parsonage.” When Ben heard the previous inhabitants had left, he applied to the estate for tenancy.
“In 2008, I got a long lease and immediately gave the house the complete refurbishment it needed,” says Ben, an architectural designer, co-founder of London store Pentreath & Hall, and author (most recently of English Houses: Inspirational Interiors from City Apartments to Country Manor Houses). “The roof was good and the walls were sound. Everything else was a bit crazy. The house had been vacant for about a year so the main decorative feature was black mould on the walls.”
Rewiring, replumbing, bathroom upgrades and a lot of painting followed and now every room positively glows. Contemporary colours set the stage for picture-wall galleries of botanical prints and architectural drawings. There is enough antique furniture to fill a showroom, but not even the formal dining room feels precious. Every room is designed to be filled with life. >
Though they relish their London life, the couple both feel inspired in their Dorset retreat. “It has transformed our creative lives,” says Ben. “It’s a place where I can experiment decoratively, in the same way Charlie experiments in the garden.”
Ben’s work with the Prince of Wales’ Duchy of Cornwall estate now enables him to spend more time in Dorset, where he is heavily involved in designing properties for the estate’s flagship new town, Poundbury, a 20-minute drive from the Old Parsonage. So far, Ben has designed around 1000 of the 1600 new homes built there – including the flat his parents are about to move into.
Charlie spends his days working in his garden, with the breeze playing in the copper beech leaves in the wildflower meadow below the house, his workload determined by the seasons. So by the time the couple hop on a plane in January to visit Charlie’s family and friends back in New Zealand, the garden has been put to bed for the winter. The house then slumbers quietly until the couple return to breathe life into it once more.