THE thing I most love about the garden is that it has a magical quality. It had a very remarkable feel to it, even when I first took it on. I had noticed this atmosphere as a child when we used to visit the farmer who lived here.’
Interior designer Harriet Anstruther acquired the collection of dilapidated buildings and overgrown yards—a former livery and stables—close to her family home in West Sussex 25 years ago and has transformed it into a seductive, deeply comfortable haven. To get there, you disappear ‘down a lane, off a lane’ and find yourself arriving at a rambling, steep-roofed hamlet, a perfect small estate with the central two acres of groomed gardens edged with expanses of wildflower meadow, the whole embraced by sheltering woodland.
Ms Anstruther spends three months a year working under dazzling blue Los Angeles skies in California, US, and is clear that a passion for rock music infuses her work— especially Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love, which is ‘quiet, but powerful, bold, but beautiful’—but her heart is deeply rooted in the English countryside. ‘I grew up in woodland. We didn’t have a television as kids, so we spent all our weekends wooding with Papa, clearing and building bonfires and planting saplings.’
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