Beauty is in the eye of all beholders

For the great and the good seeking exquisite furniture and art, Rupert and Jessica Brown are the go-to father-daughter duo, discovers Mark Palmer

‘He is entirely lacking in any sense of his own importance, despite being called a latter-day Grinling Gibbons

Pop the name Rupert Brown into Google and up comes a professor of social psychology at the University of Sussex, an investment banker who has been ‘instrumental in the evolution of derivatives’ and an American insurance broker. There’s no sign of a bespectacled man in his seventies, whose workshop is in a former threshing barn next to his thatched farm house on the Wiltshire/dorset border. This is both extraordinary and completely understandable.

It’s extraordinary because this Rupert Brown is arguably the greatest living craftsman in the country, whose clients read like the combined pages of Who’s Who and Burke’s Peerage. It’s understandable because he doesn’t seem to have a commercial bone in his body and comes across as entirely lacking in any sense of his own importance—despite being described as a latter-day Grinling Gibbons.

‘I have been very lucky,’ Rupert claims. ‘Work seems to have kept coming in by word of mouth and some of my clients have come back again and again.’ At this point, Jeannie, his American wife of more than 50 years, pipes up: ‘He doesn’t really belong to this century.’ Aesthetically, perhaps not, but the rest of us are fortunate that in reality he does, especially when you discover the manner in which he goes about his trade.

If I were running English Heritage, I would give his workshop Grade I-listed status and insist that anyone with a penchant for flatpack furniture books in for a visit. That’s if you can find it, of course. He and Jeannie live down a single-track road on Cranborne Chase, between Salisbury and Blandford Forum. They’ve been there since the early 1970s, his ‘office’ changing little over the years: it’s a treasure trove of homemade tools, including some 200 chisels (which he recognises by their handles, not their blades), an army of mallets and hammers, a legion of plains, saws, screws and nails of every shape and form.

piles of wood are stacked everywhere, together with one or two mechanical machines and some inventive work benches (such as one adapted from what used to be a gynaecological bed). A narrow side room is filled with metal strips, from which Rupert makes all his own locks, handles and brass strapping. Even the fire that keeps him warm in winter, burning sawdust, is his own creation.

on leaving Haileybury in the early 1960s (‘I didn’t go on to university, much to my parents’ chagrin’), Rupert toyed with the idea of becoming an architect, but, he says, ‘I didn’t have much time for the RIBA exams and was already making things’. Completely self-taught, he made ‘things’ including beds and kitchens in a shed in the garden of his first marital home in London, before the move to Dorset, where he began to pick up commissions for furniture.

He works on one piece at a time (join an orderly queue), sometimes taking a whole year on a project, such as the 12ft-high fourposter made from walnut, with marquetry on the headboard depicting scenes from the client’s estate and limewood vine leaves climbing up the pillars. That was quick compared with a desk he made for Lord Salisbury, which visitors to Hatfield House can see in the window of the King James Drawing Room. on the desk’s front panels, members of the Salisbury family through the ages are depicted—all in 17th-century dress.