Sarah Vanrenen gives a Wiltshire farmhouse a rich reinvention full of ideas to copy
When we first moved into this old farm manager's house on the Wiltshire border, my second daughter was six weeks old. Minus the two dead ravens we found on the top floor, the house was a stripped-back bare and brilliant shell. Sleeplessness had made decisions about colour even more drawn out than usual (I can spend a good three weeks debating a pool ball red against a crimson flash on a good day) but the builder Boris, a friend's husband, had had enough. “We're doing this colour in here!” he said pointing to one of the infinite splodges on the wall, “this one in here!” and so on and on. What we filled the house with was easy – every kindly family member opened their barn, their storage container, their cellar, their loft, and we pilfered like quick-fingered magpies.
For around 15 years it had worked perfectly, this mashed-up collection of happy overflow, this peculiar mix of 18th-century oil paintings from Belgium and a cut-up book of Manolo Blahnik shoe drawings that I had stuck into position with double-sided tape in IKEA frames. This was not a stuffy house for stuffy people; it was for little girls to wear fairy dresses and muddy boots, it was for our best friends to gather round the kitchen table and cook up vast vats of chilli con carne while we laughed and drank and smoked and played cards and spoons and washed our workaday skin off ourselves.
After a while, of course, the cracks began to show. Windows were coming off their hinges. My mother's four-poster, with slices in the canopy we had embraced previously, began to truly tear like a sail on a doomed ship. Walls started peeling, and moths had a full bacchanalian feast on one of the carpets. The point was to make the house work for us, not us for the house. But she was grumbling, and she had a point.
We started with big plans. “We'll knock down this kitchen wall”, we thought, “let in the light. We'll open up the cellar and convert it into some nocturnal den. We'll tear out those old baths we always meant to.” But all of this totted up to rather a lot, and there would still be the old cosmetic stuff crying out for help, such as our beloved Howard chair with gaping rips in his arms and horsehair yowling out of them. So, we abandoned the big work, and focused utterly on fixing what was in front of us.
At this stage, I now had three daughters and two jobs. It wasn't something I felt I could do properly and thoughtfully on my own. But I trust no one. It took me another six months to find the perfect person, and it turned out she had been right under my nose the whole time. Sarah Vanrenen had been someone I'd known for years; we had stomped around London in our 20s, and I would still bump into her from time to time. In the meantime I absorbed her Instagram feed like a child sucking up a single strand of delicious spaghetti. Her colour combinations were so good, the way she always uses chest of drawers as side tables, so cool. How funny then to find her studio, no exaggeration, was four minutes down the road.
We now had eight weeks to do the work, and a very particular pot of loot to cover it. “Don't worry” said Sarah, “I've just brought out a new range of wallpapers and fabrics, if we can use some of them on the walls and curtains in this house, and I can then photograph them later for my portfolio, then let's say we have a deal”. Her new creations were beautiful, in any which colourway you looked – I couldn't have been happier. More than ten months later, and budgets akimbo, Sarah not so much. Poor Sarah.
In the last stages of the refurb it became clear that in fact what doesn't necessarily survive the next decorative round in the ring are all the old lampshades that are either heavily dented, or ripped to shreds. Sarah has a fine line in the most beautiful lampshades conceivable. Her studio is chock-full of them, all repurposed saris from India like delicious patterned sticks of rock. It is not impossible that I spent as much on lampshades as I did on the entirety of the rest of the project. And for this, I feel a modicum less guilty. Sweet lord, those exceptional lampshades…
Despite working with visual people every day of my life (photographers, art directors, picture editors, graphic designers) I don't think I have ever come to such quick and easy resolutions as I did with Sarah. I don't think I ever said no to a single idea she came up with. Suddenly there was this dark yolky yellow oozing round all the corridor walls, different in every light. There were huge red and white circus striped curtains set against a deeply patterned lime green wallpaper. None of it made much sense on paper and yet it all worked so well. Even when we were rehanging pictures and she suggested moving a print of a rose that my childhood guardian angel had given me from the local antiques market, I trusted her opinion completely. The rose went into its new pride of place here, and we gathered a bunch of other rejected roses around it. Suddenly we were hanging stuff I didn't even like, and thinking it was fantastic. Once I worried that a green sofa hadn't quite hit the mark, and she just told me to hold fire until the rest of the room was in there. It was very liberating, this feeling, like taking your hands off the handlebars of your bike and freewheeling all the way down the hill in the sunshine.
The house has new light and new colour and new pattern and new joy washed over it from the top of its head to the tips of its toes. The way we use it has changed. The eldest children take it over on their own with friends and cook and run ragged in the fields. My husband tends to the garden, cutting back the lilac and pruning the blousy roses that tickle the window panes. I like being here on my own to go on big five hour walks with my dog and then sit staring at the world's smallest and yet most powerful fire when I need it to give me some solutions to problems. And I like very much to look around and see the living lives of stuff – all the people who have come and gone and whose bits and pieces speak to me across time and space. I particularly like looking at Sarah's work, the blast of cool, clean wind that whipped the house up off its hinges and landed it again with a whole fresh energy about it.
Gloobles: gloobles.com | Salt Lick Creative: saltlickcreative.com
Dean Hearne1/12“A different angle on the entrance hall. These Moorish Yellow coloured walls from Papers and Paints run throughout the house along every corridor from ground to top floor. It's a kind of dark fried eggy colour and it's amazing, changing from sunshiney to burnt bananas according to the light that falls on it.”
Dean Hearne2/12“The chairs here are my stepmother's, I believe they came from Switzerland. I don't know what possible wood they could be made out of, but each one is as heavy as a Volkswagen Golf. They are covered in cushions from Dunelm. The walls are painted Invisible Green by Edward Bulmer, and the print is by the brilliant feminist ceramicist and artist Pollyanna Johnson.”
Dean Hearne3/12“I'd always loved the way Sarah Vanrenen would use chests of drawers as bedside tables. So smart. And they root this whole room which is otherwise a cheeky but improbable mix of her Indiennes Jewel wallpaper in Green, and strawberry and cream stripes. The headboard is Pierre Frey, and the Bruges linen from Pret A Vivre. The red trimming is Samuel & Son, and the lampshades again, made out of Indian saris, are from Sarah.”
Dean Hearne4/12“A very important person in my life who helped bring me up kickstarted the decoration in this room by giving me a print of a rose from the local antiques market. I followed suit, buying all sorts of flower prints, and collecting others people didn't want - they're kind of unfashionable - but together they are wonderful. The printed linen curtains are Lilac by Sarah Vanrenen. In other words, when I bathe, which I do a lot, I do so surrounded by a beautiful garden.”
Dean Hearne5/12“The staircases in the house run down the centre of it and I wanted the wood painted white so that instead of this unlit part of the house feeling dark and foreboding, they would come across like the backbone that they are, a bone-clean run of vertebrae. The parrots on the wall here are prints of Edward Lear's; before he lost his eyesight and reverted to writing poems like The Owl and the Pussycat, he was a very respected naturalist painter, particularly of birds.”
Dean Hearne6/12“I have a lot of books. But I try and spread them out so that my husband doesn't panic when I return from bookshops with even more books. It's not dissimilar to the tunnel diggers in The Great Escape who would distribute the earth discreetly around the camp, a few bags of soil here, a few there. If I'm quick and discreet about it, he won't notice. The poster is from my clever friend Adam Ellis.”
Dean Hearne7/12“I have to stop myself putting wallpaper on ceilings. I grew up in a bedroom with wallpaper on the ceiling. But I think for some people it's too much, and I want people who stay in this room to feel calm and not like the pattern is going to eat them alive. This is Sarah Vanrenen's design, Isabelle in blue and yellow. The curtain material is something we found in a bin bag in storage and gave it a whiff of new life. And the stripy yellow lampshades are from Alice Palmer. Looking at this photo, it makes me think we should have covered the ceiling actually. I think the room could have handled it. And so could the people who stay here."
Dean Hearne8/12“I loved this wallpaper design of Sarah's, Curly Sue in green, and writ large, added to the fact we painted the woodwork green, it became quite 50s and trippy. The curtains are that much loved Bowood from Colefax and Fowler, and the lamp and shade are by Pooky. Draped over the headboard of what was my childhood bed, is a piece of material I found a bit tattered on the Goldborne Road, but the pattern is of passion flowers. And I've always had passion flowers wherever I've lived, I feel very sentimental about how space-age and flamboyant they are.”
Dean Hearne9/12“I have three girls, and when they became teenagers, I felt the need to be bold in manoeuvring them out of childhood wistfulness. And, of course, as more and more friends came to stay, it made sense to add more and more beds. There are four in this room. Even though some of the people who sleep in them are now in their 20s, they are popular and come in very handy.”
Dean Hearne10/12“I lugged the material for these curtains home on my shoulder from an interiors sale around 20 years ago. It nearly broke me. When we refreshed this room we looked to find a wall colour to match and Sarah came upon Cactus Green from Papers and Paints. But none of the rest of the greens in the room - the pool table my husband found on Ebay, the chair Sarah found locally - synchronise at all. Which is perfect. Just fling in some of Sarah's zig-zaggy red lampshades and cushions and be dazzled with those instead.”
Dean Hearne11/12“This is my eldest daughter's room. Out of shot is her double bed. And then there are three singles in here too. I.e. the room can sleep five. And often does. The chair, as almost all of the chairs in the house are, were covered by my brilliant friends Nick and Joanna Plant.”
Dean Hearne12/12
