News from Norfolk

The thing about taste is that it is necessarily subjective — which is a fancy way of saying that, unfortunately, most people get it completely wrong most of the time. So when it comes to selecting, renovating and dressing a house, it’s important to develop, as soon as possible, skin as thick as that of a particularly tough, hard-living rhinoceros of mature years. Otherwise, the wrongness of other people will soon become a source of anxiety, perhaps even alarm.

If you’re in the market for an old house, friends and relatives may chip in with helpful advice. Part of this, admittedly, is because fantasy house hunting is, to a certain sort of London-dwelling property enthusiast, what actual hunting is to country people. Which is to say, it’s a pleasure to be embraced as an end in itself, where the chase counts for more than the kill. Read the rest of this entry »

‘Your house was the worst place I’d ever seen in my life’ our indispensable site supervisor reminisced to me, long after the fact. ‘None of us had ever seen anything as damp as this place. We all literally thought you were crazy to have bought it.’

‘I thought exactly the same’ agreed our urbane, unflappable dry rot consultant. ‘It stank. It was disgusting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worse place either.’

Let us put this in context. Our site supervisor has worked for many years for a family firm of builders who have worked on some of the most interesting Grade I and II* buildings in East Anglia, sacred and secular. Our dry rot consultant is not only an experienced surveyor and scourge of serpula lacrymans, but one of our nation’s most profound thinkers on issues of building pathology and conservation — and a very diplomatic, tactful man at that.

So when I say that our house was once damp, I don’t mean that unaired linen felt just the tiniest bit damp to the fingers on cold autumn mornings. Read the rest of this entry »