It recently dawned on me that I am a fully blown property snob. Naturally,
location is important – I would always plump for the shoe box in South
Kensington (and have done), as opposed to somewhere sprawling in south
London – but it is more a potent sense of history that satisfies my uppity
leanings. If a house can’t offer a rich talking point – a London blue
plaque, perhaps, or some architectural whimsy – then I’m afraid it is too
common-or-garden for me. I blame the parents (I usually do), because the
homes I grew up in were worth their conversational salt.
Our first, in the village of Combe, Oxford-shire, was built by the sculptor
Sir Hamo Thorny-croft (1850-1925), and the gardens, a series of connecting
“rooms”, were laid out by his friend Gertrude Jekyll. When I was seven, we
moved to London and my parents found the perfect Holland Park pad. They knew
they were going to buy it before they stepped inside because, in a great
coincidence, the plaque outside denoted it as Sir Hamo’s Victorian villa. We
were cock-a-hoop to live in both his homes, even though I seemed to spend my
entire childhood on the M40 as we shuttled between the two.
It was hardly surprising, then, when I was looking for my own home five years
ago, that only something unusual would suffice. As I was set on living in
the eye-wateringly expensive Hambleden Valley (location again), a beautiful
stretch of countryside in the Chilterns with easy access to London (the
dratted M40 again), I knew my budget would stretch only to the proverbial
hen run. The minute the agent took me inside a converted folly, all on one
floor (it’s like a wacky bungalow), in the grounds of a big estate outside
Henley, and warned me, “it’s a rather eccentric property”, I knew it was for
me.
I walked through the kitchen into the hexagonal room – the original folly,
once the summerhouse to the main mansion – and I was already offering the
asking price of £550,000, with an immediate lockout clause. The property was
tired and dated, in need of a decoke and brush-up – appropriately enough, as
the rectangular drawing room was once the coking station and pump house to
the main house, designed by Wren in 1684.
It’s a bonkers place with which I’ve fallen madly in love. As it is Grade
II-listed, I couldn’t do any large-scale structural alterations, but with
the help of my mother, Audrey, who was an interior designer, we redecorated
it in country-modern style.
As most of it is only one room deep, it is rather like living in a large train
carriage. Its saving graces are the high ceilings and expansive views, which
offer a crucial feeling of space. We added a cornice to the drawing-room
ceiling for a more authentic feel and put a picture rail in my bedroom to
make the ceiling look lower.
The kitchen had an old oil-fired Aga (a sure way to haemorrhage cash), so we
just added a butler’s sink and painted the pine units. We sea-grassed
throughout the three bedrooms, kitchen/dining room and drawing room before
turning to thepièce de résistance:the hexagonal folly itself.
It originally had three mismatching doors of different sizes: a heavy wooden
one out to the porch and two others, one leading to the kitchen, another
into a guest bedroom. There is often an element of fakery in the
construction of follies – for example, the sham ruin that pretends to be the
remains of an old building, but was constructed in that state. We had two
hidden doors made, which, by continuing the moulding and skirting board, are
almost invisible. My favourite room is the guest bedroom off the hexagonal
space, which usually raises a gasp: few expect such a spankingly modern
bedroom, with a risqué wet room, off such a classical space.
The ornate plastering in what is now our tele-vision room (the previous owners
used it as a dining room) was done by a pupil of the Dutch master woodcarver
Grinling Gibbons. Gibbons worked closely with Wren on St Paul’s Cathedral,
Hampton Court Palace and Kensington Palace, as well as, in 1690, on the
drawing-room ceiling of the house in whose grounds I dwell.
Gibbons invented the trophy panel, a free-standing carved tableau somewhere
between a painting and a sculpture, which his pupil copied beautifully above
what was once the main entrance to my summerhouse folly, with trade-mark
garlands of daisy flowers. Horace Walpole wrote of him: “There is no
instance of a man before Gibbons who gave wood to the loose and airy
lightness of flowers, and chained together the various productions of the
elements with the free disorder natural to each species.”
There are great benefits to living on a large estate, and chief among them is
not having a huge garden, but having the feeling of owning a very grand one.
We have access (roaming rights) to the delightfully dilapidated Capability
Brown grounds. (He was commissioned to landscape the park in 1771.)
Since living here, I have become more finely tuned to the shifting seasons.
This is partly because my large windows invite masses of light, but more, I
think, because the historic grounds and mature trees have touched my soul. I
became a single mother shortly after moving here and now my daughter, Daisy,
aged 4, and I adore and appreciate our surroundings.
Living in such a place is not for everyone, however. “Someone who lives in a
folly shows a balance of introversion and individuality,” says Robert
Holden, a psychologist who has written extensively on the subject of human
happiness. “If people are immediately drawn to such properties, It’s as if
they’ve lived in similar situations in another life. It’s like people who
are instinctively drawn to the river. It’s not logical, it’s a comfort
thing. It’s something you simply have to do.”
Sounds kooky, but it makes perfect sense to me. “The merit of follies is that
there is no real point to them,” says Alistair Brierley, an architect who
works on residential and commercial projects. “They are useless pieces of
structure, pleasure pavilions. Someone who now chooses to live in one is
making a statement. They are saying, ‘I am wacky, I am different.’ Or,
maybe, ‘I am having a personality crisis.’ A lot of architects sneer at
follies because they look down on the picturesque, but I like their
quirkiness and rich vocabulary. They give you the right to think outside the
box.”
Think you would fit well in a folly? Good luck in finding one. Like my own
home, most of Britain’s best and most eccentric versions are located on
large estates. Some, like Broadway Tower, a mock castle in the Cotswolds
dating from 1794, have long since been turned into tourist attractions.
Others have been taken over and rescued by charities such as the Landmark
Trust and the Vivat Trust, which let them out as upmarket holiday
accommodation.
Some follies do go on sale – although it is usually a matter of buying a more
conventional house with one in the grounds. In Cobham, Surrey, for example,
Savills is selling the Belfry House, built by Charles Hamilton, one of
Britain’s foremost creators of follies, who was responsible for nearby
Painshill Park. The house, which is Grade II-listed and dates from the
middle of the 18th century, is curious enough, with a belfry protruding from
its roof, but it also has a small brick folly in the garden. It is on sale
for £1.75m (01932 586200, www. savills.co.uk).
In nearby Epsom, Hylands, a Grade II*-listed three/four-bedroom Georgian house
with a wide, sweeping double-flighted staircase, on sale for £1.395m, also
has a folly – albeit a rather more handsome one, with York-stone floors,
dry-stone rear wall and Ionic columns, overlooked by a large terrace.
(Hamptons; 01372 734950, www.hamptons.co.uk). Surprisingly, perhaps, the
curious structure was built just three years ago by Thomas Wiggins, its
interior designer owner, who was inspired by National Trust buildings he’d
seen. “It’s situated under a 300-year-old yew tree around which nothing
would grow, so I decided to build a folly there – I wanted something
whimsical,” says Wiggins. “It’s just a place for entertaining – I use it for
dining and just to get out of the sun in summer.”
As for my own folly, I recently had it valued. The surveyor said that it was
almost impossible to put a price on my oblong box – although the one he
finally came up with was about double the purchase price. If I have had a
personality crisis, I couldn’t have enjoyed it more living in such a
wonderful (and lucrative) little abode.
Daisy Dooley Does Divorce by Anna Pasternak is published by Vermilion at £7.99
