By Francesca Peacock
Most devotees of interior design would like to think that their pursuit is an art form. For one house for sale in north Wiltshire it is indubitably true. Here, the charming interiors act as a gallery backdrop for the works of art inside. The owners are art dealer James Holland-Hibbert — of Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert in London’s St James’s, a long-established gallery for modern and contemporary British art — and his artist wife, Sarah Graham.
Together they have filled their 18th-century village house with all manner of works of art: landscapes by William Nicholson, etchings by Lucian Freud, textiles from the couple’s travels abroad, and beautiful large botanical pieces by Graham herself. The overall effect is less a staid, sterile museum than a wonderfully eccentric, artistic family home.
Holland-Hibbert bought the house 15 years ago, before he met Graham. “James did the bones, I fleshed it out,” Graham tells me. The house didn’t require much structural work: the Grade II-listed building is still intact in its original symmetrical form. Looking like something out of a Jane Austen adaptation from the front — where wisteria grows around the sash windows — its proportions are classical: high ceilings and large rooms spread over two floors, with many of their original features. One discovery Holland-Hibbert says he made in the early renovations were the “original elm wood floorboards”, found “under thick carpet”. Now restored, they add more period detail.
Inside, the downstairs reception rooms are painted in pale pink (main image, above) and green: tones that offset both the couple’s predilection for antique brown furniture — “a house without brown furniture is rather soulless to me”, says Graham — and the artworks on the walls. These pieces — pinned butterflies, rolling landscapes, antique maps — are continually changing; a result of what the couple say is a “symbiotic” relationship between their artistic jobs and their love of decoration. They’re always “taking pictures down . . . and then another one goes up”.
But, as Holland-Hibbert tells me, if artworks make the journey from the gallery to the couple’s home, “they very rarely leave”. I ask Holland-Hibbert if there are any pieces that feel particularly tied to the house, and he points out three Edward Burra landscapes, which hang downstairs and in one of the bedrooms. Though depicting a different county — the Sussex Downs — the rolling hills still “reflect the local rural landscape”. But the couple point out that all the art feels special: “there’s a story attached to every object”.
Upstairs, the house has four large bedrooms. The master en suite was originally a bedroom before the couple repurposed it. The bath sits in front of the large sash window, and below one of Graham’s dramatic paintings of the natural world: a huge beetle with its antennas curved above its shell like a ballet dancer.
The couple have also turned their creative approach to the 1.9-acre garden. Walled on all sides, it “feels very protected and welcoming”. With some redesigning and replanting, the couple have given the space “rooms” — passages of formal and less-formal planting, topiary, and floral borders — which break up the expanse, and allow it to work for all the family. The couple spend time here with their two children, aged 11 and 12, and tell me that it works well as a family home.
When I ask Graham and Holland-Hibbert what they will miss most when they move, it isn’t the perfect interiors they mention, but the house’s feel: the “perfect symmetry” and the “comfortable layout”. For all its period features and grandeur, the house just “really works”.
Photography: Knight Frank
