VIVE L’ENTENTE CORDIALE
Vintage French meets classic English in a weatherboarded house on the edge of the Kentish Weald
Vintage French meets classic English in a weatherboarded house in Kent
When you’ve moved house as many times as Gloria Stewart, you can walk into a new one and immediately place everything – furniture, rugs, paintings – in your mind’s eye. “It’s second nature now,” admits Gloria, whose artistically decorated homes have featured more than once in Country Living during her long career dealing in antiques and textiles. The latest is a slice of weatherboarded Georgian terrace in the pretty Kent town of Tenterden, a short walk along the tree-lined high street from where she used to have her own brocante shop.
She and her husband found it 18 months ago, having rooted themselves back into English soil after more than three decades restoring houses in France. On the end of the row, with its front door hidden around the side rather than opening onto the road, the three-storey building sold itself to Gloria instantly because of its light, open-plan feel: “And it was so perfectly restored, we realised we’d barely need to change anything except to build in more storage.”
It’s a very up-and-down house, she says, with lots of stairs, but the flow of one space into another, with floors of French oak and reclaimed stone, means it never seems small or claustrophobic. The dining room – with Gloria’s collection of vintage faience plates wall-hung above a grey-painted brocante sideboard – leads straight into the sitting room, where a sunny bay window looks onto the street, providing a perfect spot for a three-drawer walnut chest. It’s the first piece of furniture she bought in France more than 30 years ago and the first thing she positioned here. The kitchen, in a slightly newer extension at the back, is furnished with painted Fired Earth cabinets and open shelves of bare wood that match the overhead beams. Bi-fold doors open up the far wall onto a balcony looking over the garden – “which is exactly how I’d have designed it myself – a formal layout of gravel and beds bordered by topiary”.
The previous owners had installed underfloor heating, so there were no radiators to spoil the lovely Georgian lines or obstruct the placing of furniture, and they had even tanked out a basement laundry room: “This was wonderful because I hate washing machines in kitchens.” That combination of contemporary efficiency with period elegance, the unspoiled sense of the building being ‘of an age’, as Gloria describes it, was the perfect balance – especially as it also presented a chance to downsize and declutter, shifting the distressed French style of her previous homes towards something more traditionally English. The immediate effect is still pretty and light, and there is plenty of pale-painted furniture, but there’s also a simplicity about the oak pieces and traditional pottery she has added to the mix and the rough, exposed brickwork of the chimney breast that runs up through all three floors.
Many of the curtains have come with Gloria from France (“I drag things with me from house to house”) but she has also discovered
a new enjoyment of classic English designers such as Colefax and Fowler. And she loves using fabrics by Nicole Fabre (a friend of hers) and Chelsea Textiles: “They just go with everything, English or French.” There are paintings by contemporary English artists, including Fred Cuming RA and Stella Parsons, among the vintage prints and pictures on the walls, and discreet new cupboards have been built into alcoves and corners instead of the capacious French armoires Gloria would once have chosen for bedrooms and landings. “Where it felt slightly too modern, we took it back towards Georgian,” she says.
The very bright white walls they inherited have been toned down with Farrow & Ball paints: Farrow’s Cream in the kitchen, Matchstick everywhere else: “Except the guest bathroom, which is Cooking Apple Green – the only place I veered off the neutral colour chart.” They also added a classical-style fireplace in the sitting room to suit the elegant shape of the bay window. But in the dining room, a graceful Swedish-style table – found in a local junk shop and already painted a gentle grey-green that perfectly matched her sideboard – is happily paired with a set of contemporary upholstered chairs from Oka.
Upstairs, the bedrooms are divided between two-and-a-half floors. In the guest room, on the first landing, the bed is framed by a Swedish wooden pelmet and simple gingham curtains. The tiny French sofa, upholstered in a vintage monogrammed sheet, had to come in through the window because it wouldn’t fit round the bend in the stairs. Up a few more stairs, a little bathroom is divided by the building’s original wooden posts and beams to provide space for a shower as well as a half-length claw-foot bath. The main bedroom, on the floor above, has a wonderful sense of calm, with cream curtains – antique French sheets again – flanking the deep sash window and a pretty carved chair standing next to a hand-painted Swiss chest of drawers.
But Gloria’s favourite place is the extra top-floor bed-sitting room, where she comes to read or work. The drop-down desk of the slimline bureau (bought locally to replace a French one that was too tall for the ceiling height) is spread with notebooks, watercolours, embroidery and other creative projects. The shelves above have space for ceramics, candlesticks and the little wooden figures she collected as a child on visits to her German grandparents. In a house full of light, this is the lightest room of all, with views over rooftops and gardens to the countryside beyond (perfect walking country for Truffle, her 15-year-old Jack Russell-cross-fox terrier) and wonderful skies and sunsets.
The house is beautiful all year round, says Gloria – and especially in spring, when the trees along the street are in their fresh new greenness. She’s been here through all four seasons now, and her marriage of cross-channel styles, in this very English setting, seems to suit each one perfectly.