A Georgian house on a Cornish estate revived for modern life
Britain's country estates have never been the sole domain of the people who owned them; there have always been tenants and agents and visitors coming for events. In the modern world, this is just the same, even if some of the traditions have changed slightly. Boconnoc in Cornwall is a treasure among British estates, has a history dating back to the Domesday Book, a sprawling 18th-century house at its centre, and an extensive landscape centred around a tributary of the River Lerryn.
Interior designer Sarah Fortescue is the latest generation of her family (they have owned Boconnoc since 1771) to take part in the running of the estate and ensure its survival. More than ever, the beauty of the estate needs to be available to everyone in the 21st century: the glorious main house can be rented for private stays, retreats and weddings; the grounds are used as a filming location; and the other houses on the estates have their tenants as they ever did. In order to make all of this feasible, over the last decade Sarah has taken on the considerable project of redesigning the interiors of the main house, the holiday cottages of the Stable Yard, and this house, the Stewardry.
The Stewardry is the most considerable of those properties, a seven bedroom Georgian house overlooking ancient woodland and sheep pastures in the river valley below. As the name suggests, it was once the home of the estate's steward, but over the course of the 20th century it housed previous generations of Fortescues. Sarah's father grew up there, and the last time it was decorated was under her grandmother around 50 years ago. "It was time for a renewal," explains Sarah, "both in terms of the decoration and the layout. My grandmother certainly had an eye for colour, and, like me, enjoyed a strong wallpaper, but it was ready for a new chapter by the time I got to it. And then it was a bit of a warren of small rooms, so I wanted to enlarge the rooms and create more fluidity of space."
The work began with major renovations–replacing the roof and rebuilding some chimneys–but the most important spatial changes were intended to create a smooth, open flow on the main floor. Sarah removed a service cupboard between the kitchen and the breakfast room, took down a wall between the hall and breakfast room, and adding graceful double doors between the drawing room and anteroom, where there had previously been only one narrow door. The house is now rented in its entirety to a private tenant, but Sarah decided to make it as versatile as possible, and cleverly configured the space so that it could offer a self-contained one-bedroom flat and a separate three-bedroom space as alternatives to the full seven bedrooms.
Spatially, then, the house had arrived in the here and now, and Sarah could turn her hand to the reinvigoration of the interior. The large, airy rooms could take plenty of colour and pattern, with blues, greens and pinks forming the keynotes of the decorative scheme. "Warm pink runs the whole way through the house," she says. "It's cool enough in the summer yet warm in the winter." Those gracious Georgian proportions were the perfect backdrop for some of Sarah's own brightly coloured, botanically inspired fabrics and wallpapers. Most striking is her new 'Chinoiserie Grandiflora' paper in emerald in the drawing room, with a pattern reminiscent of the magnolias and camellias that fill Boconnoc's gardens in the spring.
Throughout the house, the aesthetic walks a fine line between modern and traditional, with some rooms leaning a little further in one direction or another. The anteroom, which adjoins the drawing room, is distinctly Georgian in feel, with its gilded overmantel mirror and marble bolection fireplace. "This room has its original cornicing and pilasters intact," notes Sarah, so it leads you to a more traditional design." At the back of the house, where a 1980s extension opens up the space, things feel a little more contemporary: a stylish kitchen is decorated with playful wallpaper by Ottoline Devries, while a tiny sitting room where Sarah remembers playing as a child is now a smart pale green space with lamps by her cousin Archie Mackie of Original House, who used to play there with her too.
Both in its decoration and layout, the Stewardry is a lesson in how to do a rental house well. Set in the ancient landscape of Boconnoc, it is both in touch with its past and firmly rooted in the present day. Lucky the tenant who gets to sit at those windows and look out over the countryside beyond.