My Favourite Room

Well, I had lots of ideas for this: restaurants and galleries and even a railway station in need of preservation, but I am not going to pretend. My favourite room is still the room in the first house I bought 40 years ago now, on the very edge of south Suffolk, facing east towards Holbrook Ness. I thought then that I had found domestic perfection. It is not hugely big, about 22 feet by 15 feet, and a box, really, but it would have been the centre of a working farm, so it has a pamment floor of the same yellow bricks that Suffolk explorers will recognise from churches in the area. There is a slight step down from the dark hallway (added in the 19th century and later restored and improved), so I guess that the original owners in the 17th century would have walked straight in.

As you enter, there is a large brick fireplace and stack to the left. We stuck a stove in there. I love that stove, too. We are in the middle of the countryside. The wind carries particulate matter away, up the big chimney (down which Little Owls sometimes venture and get into the parlour on the other side) and out to sea. I cannot comprehend the desire to outlaw such vital elements of country existence. Above your head are beams which in the 18th century were enclosed in simple beaded, painted panels. On either side of the one nearest the kitchen is a message, painted on tin. It reads ‘Stutton Bounds in this beam 1836’. Cross under the beam and the message is ‘Holbrook Bounds in this beam’. The house straddles the two parishes. The signs are the reason the place was listed when the farmhouse fell into dereliction in the Sixties.

We furnished it as simply as possible, with benches and two Irish hand-made chairs, around an old deal pub table. (The latter suits it so well that I bought and installed it six months before we owned the place).

Apart from a stuffed eel that I bought in Hay-on-Wye and a sailor’s shell valentine, which now seem to have become collectable, there are two Regency-era pastel portraits on the wall above a 1920s ‘dairy cupboard’. The likenesses came from a dealer in Westbourne Grove. He told me he thought they were of Suffolk origin, but I think they are Dutch – only because I once crossed the North Sea on the ferry I can see from the bottom of the garden and saw many similar in Utrecht.

It’s that window on to that garden that makes the room, though. A large, crooked sash affair, built into a plaster oblong front installed in the 18th century, it ushers in the Constable skies and the prospect of a swelling Suffolk field-scape, dotted with oaks, that sweeps down to flat Holbrook Bay, and another similar set of farm buildings on a promontory in the far distance.

In the foreground is the garden we made over 30 years. We no longer live in this house. Guests rent it as a holiday home, set in eight acres of gardens, and we live next door.

Award-winning actor Griff Rhys Jones is also President of the Victorian Society.

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