This has taken a while to compile, searching through all the hundreds of pictures I’ve taken since we started this project took the most time. There will be a video too soon, to give you a bit more of an insight into how this room came together - it’s easy to forget just how grim this space was before - so this is a handy reminder for us.
We moved in to a half empty house, many of the rooms still had furniture in them, pieces that the family no longer had space for; old armoires, washstands, one beautiful gilt framed mirror. Many of the cupboards were still full of things - dusty hardback books with gold edged pages, trashy French fiction with dog-eared covers and wrinkled spines, probably leftover from a long-ago beach holiday, old pieces of mismatched china, exercise books full of homework, an enormous number of little sherry glasses. The things no one wanted.
We had agreed that we would take whatever was left in the house after the family had taken anything of sentimental value. We knew that the furniture from our house in England would only fill a tiny corner of the salon, so we were happy to have whatever was left to get us started. And so, we got the treasures and the junk.
It might have been sensible to sort through it all at once, to empty every cupboard and clear every shelf. But in those early days we just wanted to settle in and start making the big, rambling house into as much of a home as we could. We squeezed our things into the empty spaces on the shelves, nestling our life alongside the leftovers of the previous family.
They were our things now we supposed, we owned every cobwebby one of them, strange objects we didn’t quite know the use of, books we couldn’t read, glasses we didn’t need. We were nervous about throwing anything away, just in case it was suddenly remembered and someone came back to claim it. I imagined the awkward conversations in a language I couldn’t speak, trying to explain that I had indeed thrown away the school exercise book from 1977, and I couldn’t bear it. So we just left things where they were, or boxed them up and moved them to a different cupboard.
The boot room had a set of ramshackle shelves along one wall, made from old bits of timber and floorboards bolted into the wall. On the shelves were boxes of light bulbs, a basket of shoe polish and brushes - one stiff, one soft; there was a tangled badminton net, some 1kg weights from an old set of scales and a few rusty tools. We let go of the badminton net and piled our shoes and boots onto the shelves, popping our shoe polish in the basket with the rest.
There were no coat hooks, just an old piece of rebar hung under a shelf as a make-shift clothes rail, we squeezed our coats onto a few wooden hangers, until picking them off the floor constantly became too unbearable and Tim put up some hooks on the opposite wall. The wall was plastered with a spikey artex that scraped your knuckles if you were at all absentminded about hanging up your coat. Dragging you back to the present by tearing at your skin as you reached for the hook.
Opposite the shelves, there was a door that led to the bottom of the back stairs, and behind it, at the foot of the stairs, was an old log store full of crumbling wood. The stairs were always icy and dark, a door and wall at the top blocking them off from the light and warmth of the sun that streams through the window on the landing. For four years the only thing that changed in the boot room was the size of the children’s shoes scattered across the floor. It was dark and cold and always a mess.
We took down the doors and walls at the top and bottom of the stairs in the winter of 2022. Opening up the stairs and letting the light and warmth flood in. As the wall at the bottom of the stairs came down we found that the supporting beam was rotten at one end and the wall had been set into the tommette tiled floor, leaving us with a rubble filled trench running across the room. We propped up the rotting ceiling beam with an acro prop and swept out the trench. Then we ran out of winter. And so, the acro prop and the trench became yet more obstacles to work around, until finally two years later we had the time and budget to start work on a proper boot room.