An off-the-wall spectacle
Caroline McGhie is staggered by the incredible interior of a deceptively ordinary-looking Newcastle home
Little Elms ought to be called Big Screen. It is an uncompromisingly new house built in the sedate streets of Gosforth in Newcastle upon Tyne which wears its surprises on the inside. It is the vision of Wendy Robson, who has recently moved in with her sevenyear-old twins Jake and Maddie and their three greyhounds. The minute you arrive you realise you are taking a walk on the wild side. “The house is so plain and square and large that it needs to say this is my real personality,” says Wendy. “It says, ‘I wear this coat but look at what I have on underneath.’ ” A lot of it is about her jackdaw instinct. “I have collected all sorts of things over the years,” she says, “like a proper ‘Don’t Walk Now’ pedestrian crossing sign from America which I put in the kids’ playroom.” The Pulp Fiction quote “Say That Again” is spelt out in bright lights in the hall. A scarlet neon sign announces the “Kitschn”, and three beautiful glass Victorian pub doors now open into the kitchen and living room. Words such as “saloon”, “billiards”, “gentlemen” and “private” are etched onto them. You could be anywhere but Tyneside. Upstairs, Maddie’s room has a whole wall covered in a romantic black-and-white scene of ballet dancers. A wall in Jake’s room is filled with the word “Dynamite” in explosive comic strip style reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam!. Is it because Jake is turbocharged? “My children are twins and don’t know how not to be full of energy,” says Wendy. “Each room needs to summarise what it is about in a bold stroke.” She hopes that the ballet dancers will enchant the teenage Maddie as much as the seven-year-old she is now. “I have spent years collecting a file full of images which I love,” Wendy says. Murals now have gone digital. They can be made from any existing image, rather than painted by hand as they were for thousands of years, in a long line from prehistoric cave paintings to 14th-century Italian frescoes and 18th-century English scagliola, which created faux marble effects. For Wendy, the digital, bespoke computerised image was the way to go, so she contacted Surface View (surfaceview.co.uk) to make the printed murals to scale. There are sepia flowers in her bedroom so big that you are the scale of a bumblebee to their petals. “All of the doors are oversized, too, so you do sometimes get the feeling you are in a giant’s house,” says Wendy. In the home cinema room the screen wall is plastered with an enormous photograph of Michael Caine air-punching in Get Carter, the atmospheric 1971 gangster movie set in Newcastle upon Tyne. “When you start from scratch you can have anything you want. I started from the inside out,” she says. “The house gave me a blank canvas.” Darren Blake, of Blake Hopkinson Architects, designed Little Elms for her along the lines of a PassivHaus with impressive energy-saving credentials. “It is zero carbon,” he says. “Usually this means you are very constrained with design but we wanted to give Wendy free rein. We made models all the way through so she could see what she might do with each room. All we’ve done is take her ideas and bring them to life.” Wendy is particularly fond of a local map that features pubs and landmarks, and which covers the walls of the downstairs cloakroom. “People vanish in there and don’t come out for ages,” she says. Home owners often forget that there is a huge amount of fun to be had with walls. At Pipewell Hall, near Kettering in Northamptonshire, Trudie and Shawn Baker have restored the house from top to bottom so that it now sits graciously in its parkland beside the lake. Entering their drawing room, you are confronted by this wonderful view. “But then people turn around and they are hugely surprised,” says Trudie. Across the length of the room stretches the slightly absurd image of an American spoonbill – lovely salmon pink with a green-capped head, pink eye, splayed feet and a bill like a flipper. It is a gigantic copy of an illustration from Audubon’s The Birds of America (of which very few original editions exist; one recently sold at Christie’s for more than £7million). Like Wendy, they had the image made to fit by Surface View. “We call it the Marmite bird because you either love it or you hate it,” says Trudie. “I chose it and I love it, and it’s great fun. We used to have wedding celebrations in this room and it was lovely with the big bird in the background.” As Pipewell is now too big for them, they are selling it at £1.95million, through Strutt & Parker (01858 438710, struttandparker.com). Leila Kent wanted an oldfashioned mural in the entrance hall of her large Devon home, The Cedars, a Grade II-listed Regency house in St Leonards, Exeter. She asked her scene-painter friend Julie Eyott to paint something like a ruined Roman temple. “She made views of the Devon countryside beyond, and painted wisteria around the pillars as if our own huge wisteria had crept inside,” says Leila. The conceit went further. “We also have a cheeky plaque of me as a Roman matron and my husband Mark as general, and little coins of our four boys. But the biggest portrait is of our dog Cromwell, a Hungarian Vizsla, in his basket.” She and Mark are also now selling to buy something smaller. Wilkinson Grant & Co (01392 427500, wilkinsongrant. co.uk) and Strutt & Parker (01392 215631, struttandparker.com) are asking £1.46million. Look out for the wood panelling in the drawing room. It is pure trompe l’oeil.