BACK FROM THE BRINK

A creative couple’s vision has transformed a derelict village stores in Dorset into a unique home and ideal base for their block-printing business

How a derelict Dorset village stores was transformed into a unique home and base for a creative business

On his way to work, laying hedges in West Dorset, Cameron Short would pass a large Georgian house on the sloping high street of Thorncombe, a pretty village edged by hills and woods. The former village stores, it had been gutted by fire in the late 1970s, and lay derelict and boarded up ever since, with its owner not inclined to sell. “You could see that it had massive potential,” Cameron says of the property, most of which is 300 years old, although its core dates back to the 1600s. “I would daydream about it, but I never thought that I would actually end up living here.”

At the time, Cameron and his family were renting a small cottage in the area, having moved from London in 2009 to build a life away from the demands of the advertising business, in which he had been a copywriter and art director. His wife, Janet Tristram – a printmaker, originally from New Zealand – had been working in a fabric shop in Soho’s Berwick Street. “I wanted to give our baby daughter Ethel the rural upbringing I’d enjoyed as a child,” recalls Cameron, who grew up on a farm in Hampshire. “Luckily, Janet also feels at home in green surroundings.”

As they both shared an artistic background, the fresh start offered the prospect of joining forces creatively on a new project. Since coming across an article in 2005 about the artist Marthe Armitage and her block-printed wallpapers, Cameron had been keen to learn the craft himself. An award in 2012 from the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust finally enabled him to train with Armitage at her studio in Chiswick one day a week for a year – while doing manual labour on the other days to pay the bills.

By 2013, the couple had three daughters (Ethel, now nine, Zola, seven, and Nell, four) and were beginning to outgrow their cottage home. When Cameron’s mother called one day, saying she’d