MY childhood was spent among books and architectural drawings. The latter were those of my grandfather, the Classical architect Raymond Erith, and the former were those of my father, who was a bookseller, so it is perhaps no surprise that I now live surrounded by both.
This house is in Winchester, where I moved 15 years ago to become a director of ADAM Architecture. At first, the house was rather empty and simply decorated in muted colours. To make it a bit more homely, I started buying furniture at local auction houses, mainly from Andrew Smith at Itchen Stoke near Winchester, Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury and Bellmans in Winchester. I found, to my surprise, that it was possible to buy late- Georgian tables and chairs very cheaply and my house soon filled up with brown furniture.
The next things I started to collect were pictures. I had made linocuts at school and had a couple of large architectural linocuts by Quinlan Terry, who had taken over my grandfather’s practice and in whose office I had trained when I left university. I also love the work of a group of linocut artists in Great Bardfield in Essex, perhaps the best known of whom was Edward Bawden. I was very lucky to find several linocuts by Sheila Robinson, a pupil and later a close friend of Bawden’s, which I bought from her daughter Chloë Cheese about 10 years ago.
This story is from the April 01, 2020 edition of Country Life UK.
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This story is from the April 01, 2020 edition of Country Life UK.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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