WUNDER-CRAMMER

 

INTERIORS

WUNDER-CRAMMER

Ever wondered how much you can squeeze into a petite end-of-terrace house where an open fire is the sole source of heating? Well, here’s your answer. Furniture restorer Guy Marshall’s mid-19th-century cottage in north Shropshire is all of one room wide and two deep and yet he has still managed to accommodate an abundance of mainly Georgian antiques, including a rather handsome four-poster. Brimful, certainly; but it’s also beautifully – ahem – Marshalled

 

By Ros Byam Shaw

Photography by Jan Baldwin

https://www.worldofinteriors.com/story/guy-marshall-house-shropshire-england?utm_source=pinterest&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dhpinterest&utm_content=app.dashhudson.com%2Fthe-world-of-interiors%2Flibrary%2Fmedia%2F359358433

15 November 2023

 

View of the living room where a portrait of William Pitt hangs alongside a fireplace

 Originally, a front door led straight from the street into the living room, where a portrait of William Pitt by John Hoppner now hangs. Just below it is Guy Marshall’s evening roost – a wing chair covered in mattress ticking. He says the advantage of the house being so small is that he can stretch out his legs and toast his feet at the fire, which is the sole source of heat in the entire place. On the tripod table in the foreground a Regency penwork tea caddy sits alongside a Bow porcelain figure and creamware cauliflower teapot, both 1760s

 

Ten years ago, in his early forties, antique furniture restorer Guy Marshall bought his first house, an end-of-terrace cottage dating from 1850 in a quiet side street of a town in north Shropshire. Plain and modest in size – its frontage to the street is little more than three-and-a-half metres across – it fitted his budget, and his three further requirements: ceilings high enough for his chinoiserie long-case clock of 1705, a bedroom big enough for his 1800 four-poster bed, and a usable fireplace. Guy didn’t like much else about it.

 

The double-glazed windows had to go, and he replaced them with single-glazed multi-pane ones. Up came the fitted carpet that covered the concrete downstairs and the chipboard upstairs. He disconnected all the radiators, including the heated towel rail in the downstairs bathroom, and dismantled the fitted kitchen. And he made a simple wooden chimney piece for the fireplace.

 

Tucked into the corner, beside a mid-18th-century tea table, a faux-marble Solomonic pedestal bears a plaster bust

To say the house can accommodate a four-poster and a tall clock might give the wrong impression. It really is as small as it looks from the outside. A side entrance opens into a hall not much bigger than a chessboard. Steep stairs rise to the left, the bathroom door to the right is firmly closed (he plans to rip out the modern fittings) and ahead is the kitchen built over the old backyard. Through an open doorway is the front room. At the top of the stairs another diminutive landing separates a box room, which might better be described as a walk-in cupboard, from the bedroom, which is entirely filled by the bed. That’s it.

 

After moving in, Guy met a lady in her eighties who had been brought up here with her parents and brother. The house had yet to be extended at the back. There was one room downstairs, one upstairs and a privy in the backyard. Her father worked as a cobbler in a windowless cellar below the living room. She cried to see its transformation from the cramped slum dwelling of her childhood. Her reaction is hardly surprising.

 

A painted-pine glazed cabinet houses a selection of 18th-century Leeds Pottery creamware and, on top, a toleware egg boiler. The cutlery tray in front is late Georgian

Inside this humble shell Guy has created a world of old-fashioned beauty, such that stepping through the front door is like opening a cardboard box to find it lined with Spitalfields silk. The two tiny downstairs rooms, slightly hazy with wood and hand-rolled cigarette smoke, are filled by a notably refined array of furniture, paintings, prints, rugs, clocks and china, mostly 18th-century, some rare, some damaged, all covetable.

 

Convenience is secondary to aesthetics. The kitchen has been invaded and more or less edged out of existence by a Georgian chest of drawers, a grandfather clock and a serpentine sideboard. What you might call the business end has been shunted into a corner, where it cowers behind a damask-covered screen: essentially a Baby Belling cooker on top of a fridge, directly above which hang four luminous, gilt-framed oil paintings.

 

Hidden by a velvet-covered screen, Guy’s kitchen consists of just two appliances: a ‘Baby Belling’ cooker – a present from a friend, the decorator Libby Lord – and a fridge. Above them hang a country oak wall cupboard and a selection of oil paintings

 

 The stainless-steel sink under the window is the last remaining stub of fitted kitchen, and is due to be ousted in favour of an antique Belfast job. Does he cook, entertain? ‘I heat up a pie when I get back from the workshop, but I have been known to cook pheasant for friends.’ At which point he opens the panelled door of his Georgian store cupboard – not to reveal the Marmite, Tabasco, brown sauce and packets of tea that are all it contains, but to show how its interior is lined with layers of 18th- and early 19th-century hand-blocked wallpaper.

 

In the adjoining living room two wing chairs loosely dressed in ticking face the fireplace – now the only source of heat in the house – which is flanked by a bureau and a bookcase. There are three tripod tables, four broad-seated dining chairs, a cellarette, a padded stool, a bust on a fat marbled column and the chinoiserie longcase, its top grazing the ceiling. A glazed corner cupboard is stuffed with blue-and white pearlware, walls are closely hung, and the various surfaces are arranged with a choice selection of Georgian china. Full, but not cluttered.

 

Found in pieces in a saleroom, the c1800 oak four-poster bed is now replete with hangings made from old velvet curtains, as well as an 18th-century portrait of a candlelit boy and a patchwork bedspread hand-stitched by Guy some 20 years ago

 

Every object, from a chaste creamware jug to a 1730 walnut chair with its unusually fine ‘cresting’ (more like it can be seen at Chatsworth), is placed for symmetry and balance, creating a rare feast for the eyes; rich without being indigestible. In the room above, Guy demonstrates a sort of back flip across the bed to reach the inlaid chest of drawers on its far side – edging round the posts inevitably knocks a picture crooked. He bought the bed in pieces ‘tied up with baler twine and covered in sheep muck’ and used antique velvet curtains to form the hangings and canopy. He also made the bedspread, a patchwork in large squares of old fabric. ‘I sewed that by hand, 16 hours a day for a week,’ he says, ‘to keep myself busy when I stopped drinking.’ The quilt is a nightly reminder of recovery.

 

A selection of Georgian engravings and mezzotints lines the walls of the tight staircase. With no space for fitted bookcases, this is made narrower still by the stacks of books piled on the right of each tread. Glimpsed on a chest of drawers through the bedroom door is a c1740 ebonised-pearwood bracket clock

 

‘I went through a rough patch,’ he says, ‘living in a series of bedsits and rented flats. I even lived on the road for a few years after I was expelled from boarding school. I had a copy of the poems of WH Davies in my pocket and thought it would be romantic.’ Although he rebelled as a pupil, it was his prep school, situated in a grand Georgian country house with some of its contents still in place, that sparked Guy’s love of antiques. ‘My father was in the army, so we lived in quarters with hideous military furnishings. I started buying antiques when I was 12.’ The habit remains, fed by Ebay and contacts in the trade who appreciate his taste, craftsmanship and respect for patina. ‘Even when I was homeless I needed a few nice things to lay out and look at – an old lighter, an antique cigarette case, a netsuke I kept in my pocket. Physical comfort has never been as important – another prep school legacy!’