The house that dares to be different

There’s nothing fusty about this colourful and quirky old rectory

We’ve had 35 years to make this place our own,” says Lucy Abel Smith, ushering me inside her Cotswolds rectory. It’s a rambling, comfortable place stamped with the art historian’s bohemian seal. When Lucy and her husband David, an engineer, moved here, the interior was “quite plain”. Now the opposite is true. Every wall is crowded with paintings. Sculptures on windowsills jostle for space with shapely ceramics, while triffid-like glass lights spread their tentacles across ceilings. “We like things to be different,” she says, her turquoise-streaked hair glinting in the spring sunshine.

Set in a peaceful valley in Quenington, near Cirencester, the house, which has been in her family since 1928, has grown “haphazardly” over the centuries. The kitchen sits in the 17th-century wing while the south front was added in the 18th century. A priest blessed with 10 children extended the house in the 1800s, and later, in the 1930s, the sister of Lucy’s mother-in-law bolted on the Arts and Crafts annexe. “It gave her something to do,” she remarks. Another relative left their mark by commissioning the influential interior designer Godfrey Bonsack to design the 1970s bathrooms with pink and amethyst baths. “Bonsack was the first to believe bathrooms should be comfortable and sexy, rather than just functional.

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from Home And Garden | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2HfE151
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