An Arts and Crafts gem with the butterfly effect
After Simon Finch bought the double-winged Voewood House on impulse, he spent many years preserving its artistic heritage, writes Rosalind Powell
Voewood House “has a playfulness”, says its owner, Simon Finch. One of the country’s finest Arts and Crafts houses, it was built using the flint and stone quarried from the land on which it stands. But it is as traditional as it is idiosyncratic: “It’s calm, brilliant, welcoming and impressive – but in a liveable way. It’s not a ‘look at me’ statement house, but you can’t help but look at it.”
Finch, 63, a rare book dealer based in west London as well as north Norfolk, says he bought the four-storey Grade II* listed 33-room mansion, which lies just outside Holt, “almost by accident” in 1998 after first seeing its details at a friend’s house.
“I wasn’t thinking, ‘I’m going to buy it’ but I was nosy enough to book an appointment with Savills to go and see it,” says Finch, whose mother had a house in nearby Walsingham. “I remember coming to have a look with my son and a small puppy and it completely captivated me. There was something in its presence.”
In fact he’d been so overwhelmed that it was only when he was driving back to London that he realised he’d left the puppy behind. He went back to collect it and as soon as he returned home, he rang Savills to make an offer. “It was slightly impulsive to say the least. But I was obsessed with it,” admits Finch, who bought the house for about £570,000. “But what I spent on it was another figure altogether,” he adds.
The house sits on the wild north Norfolk coast, surrounded by 10 acres of terraced gardens and woodland. It was built in 1903-5 by the architect ES Prior, a leading proponent of the Arts and Crafts movement, for the clergyman Percy Lloyd, whose family had made a fortune in publishing, including the story of Sweeney Todd.
Designed on a “butterfly” principle with two wings spanning out from a central body, it was described by the architectural historian Pevsner as “wild and violent”, as well as “inventive and daring”. He added that, “the inventions sometimes remind one almost of
Gaudi”. Following the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement, the materials dug up from the turnip field on which it was built were used by the local craftsmen and labourers to provide the decorative facings on the house.
It didn’t remain a family home for long: from 1907 it was a boys’ school, before being requisitioned by the government during the First World War, then used variously as a hospital, convalescent home and private care home. “It hadn’t been a home for most of its life,” says Finch, who spent several years on the “mammoth task” of renovating and decorating the house.
He removed partition and fire doors as well as a lift, knocked down a “horrible” sunroom and had the Grade I listed garden landscaped. “We managed to save most of the original features, such as the oak doors, the parquet floors and concrete moulding in the ceiling,” he says. He did all this while living in London, where he had bookshops in Notting Hill and Mayfair, which he has since sold. He would then belt up the motorway to Norfolk at the weekends.
With the renovation work completed, he commissioned his friend Annabel Grey, also an artist and textile designer, to work on the interiors. “My remit was for her to have fun. We’d sit around the kitchen table and talk about ideas but I gave her quite a free rein. She was brilliant, and exactly the right person for the job.”
No one room is the same, each decorated
HANDCRAFTED DESIGNS
The idiosyncratic interiors include murals by artist Annabel Grey, below and bottom in its own style. All the curtains and blinds are hand-painted (there are butterflies and birds) as are many of the bedroom walls with frescoes. One bedroom is Gustav Klimt-inspired with gold and silver-leafed walls, which took Grey “three or four months”, says Finch. There’s a bathroom with a mosaic wall made from buttons, tiles and pebbles, with a bath from France that they painted turquoise, and a mosaic floor in another anteroom.
Arts and Crafts furniture sits cheek by jowl with modern and retro pieces with pony skin chairs, Sixties light fittings and a Seventies bubble television. “I’ve got a lot of pop art and funky stuff,” Finch explains. “I wanted to make something incredible and special, and for it to be everything it could be.”
He decided to turn the house into a business in 2003 and it’s now primarily used as a location for events and weddings, as well as retreats and the odd film and photo shoot. Finch, who divides his time between London and Norfolk with his girlfriend, film producer Alexandra Derbyshire, now lives in the coach house in the grounds and runs his rare books business from the estate.
He’s reluctant to name-drop clients, but they are reported to include Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page and Whoopi Goldberg. His books range “from the modest to the very expensive”, from the medieval period to the counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies. The most expensive so far was a medieval manuscript that sold for £5 million. The first folio of Shakespeare’s collected plays has passed through his hands twice.
Keen to connect the house’s artistic heritage with the present, Finch started to run an occasional literary and music festival on the estate in 2011. Guests over the years have included artists Martin Parr, Antony Gormley and Richard Long, the writer Hanif Kureishi, and musicians Adam Ant, Beth Orton and Billy Bragg. David Gilmour of Pink Floyd stayed twice with his writer wife, Polly Samson, but Finch was too shy to ask him to play. He’s planning another festival for next summer.
Can he ever imagine selling the house that he fell in love with and so painstakingly restored? “I haven’t thought about it, but all things pass, so who knows? Maybe my son will want to take it on,” he says of Jack, an actor living in London. “I’d like to see it go to a safe pair of hands, but I’m enjoying it very much myself at the moment. Looking after something so beautiful is a real privilege.”
‘I wanted to make something incredible and special, and for it to be everything it could be’