The most fashionable house in England isn’t on an elegant London street or in a chocolate-box Cotswolds village, but at the end of a long, narrow, often muddy country lane riven deep in a fold of the Sussex Downs. Inside, there is not a single midcentury cocktail cabinet, rainfall shower or Italian designer sofa to be found. Instead, Charleston is a thickset farmhouse of doughty 17th-century stone, scrambled with roses, dormer windows nosing from a slope of weathered tile.
The layout is warren-like rather than open plan, the floors unevenly boarded. As is the way with country houses that were built to keep out the chill, the windows are on the small side, the light a little gloomy. But every room is decorated by hand, in dizzying detail – sponge-painted diamonds on wood paneling, a still life of hollyhocks and poppies on a wooden door, nude figures on either side of a fireplace encrusted with colorful tiles – so that the house sings with color and with life.
