A Home with a History: the radical reawakening of a sleeping beauty in Suffolk

Broadway Hall, in east Suffolk, is set in seven acres of landscaped garden. The hall is a fine 16th-century moated farmhouse with a crop of outbuildings, including studios, an annexe, gallery, workshop, games room and separate dining space. Pristine and quite minimalist, its interiors have been carefully smoothed and covered with an ivory-effect mix of distempers and limewashes. Suffused in light and spacious, it’s spartan yet comfortable, furnished with 20th-century classics: Le Corbusier, Bertoia, Conran and Knoll. 

It’s been home to Chris and Amanda Edgcombe since 2018. Together, they’ve worked hard to overhaul the place. Chris, an architectural photographer who’s worked with Richard Foster among others and who grew up with an antique dealer father, has an eye for detail. Amanda too: an abstract painter and printmaker, she was also a fellow in architectural glass at Central St Martins, garnering many commissions from architects. Chris also has a specialist interest in vintage hi-fi and runs a shop, Better on Vinyl, in nearby Framlingham that’s packed to the gunnels with the “black stuff”, atmospheric with memorabilia, memories and music.

As with the house, it was a Herculean task to coax a garden out of the land – all clay soil, thickets of brambles and fields of thistles – not least one designed according to some of André Le Nôtre, primary gardener to Louis XIV’s, principles. Now, five years on, an astonishing variety of flora have grown from just a small stock of seedlings. Such success is testament, it seems, to both the couple’s determination and their knack for creating a home – something they talk us through here. 

Amanda: “When I was a researcher for the architect Eric Kuhne, of Civicarts, I gained so much knowledge from the library of books he’d collected from across the world. There were titles on architecture and the story of landscape design, on crafts and art history. I remember one on the ways the tenets of the Renaissance were expressed beyond the canvas, through the creation perspectives and proportions. I found that particularly inspiring when creating the garden here.

“It’s been five years in the making. We moved heaven and earth to make it work, relocating trees and adding block planting. Trying to get it to make sense has at times felt like rearranging furniture or rehanging paintings. It has been a bit of a puzzle.” 

Chris: “The garden needed major changes from the start. It wasn’t just about planting and growing; we had to level areas and drain parts of the land, as well as do work on the outbuildings. We bought a digger to get rid of the solid walls of bramble – and we also had three fields of thistles to pull up. Having found roses within the bramble thickets, we replanted them into the hedgerows, which now have mock oranges in them too. The bees love them.” 

Amanda: “The idea is that it is both formal and wild. We’ve been quite French in our approach – not least by reshaping the landscape. My mantra for it all is ‘divide and grow’: dividing perennials constantly and regrowing them, multiplying our palette of plants and interweaving fruit and vegetables – strawberries, chives, artichokes, salvia and rhubarb – among them. We began with only 200 seedlings; now we have thousands of species of plants. Having texture like that is vital in a garden. 

“Like the plantswoman Beth Chatto, who created a gravel garden on an old car park, we have used former hardstanding spaces to grow veg and herbs. It feels almost Provençal. We’ve also planted six small-leaf limes to create a shady canopy.

“We’ve had to work on the richness of the soil here, something we’ve achieved by using woodchips made from an ancient leylandii that had to come down and returning them to the clay. It has been challenging work, but the rewards are clear – the earth is full of worms now and it’s very fertile.” 

Chris: “We’ve a lot of biodiversity now. We have recorded all the orchids indigenous to Suffolk here, and by the river there are herons, kingfishers and ducks. We also keep chickens, who are wonderful – even if they sometimes hide their eggs. And our pool is filtered and cleaned by the oxygenating plants we’ve introduced, which is great.” 

Amanda: “The proportions of the garden relate to the house. We’ve used shaped hornbeam trees to demarcate outdoor ‘rooms’, while structured hedging creates bosques – foresty habitats – around the wild grasses and meadows. We have also planted masses of trees – olive, silver birch, eucalyptus, cherry and crab apple to bring more texture and colour. I love the dark purple of the copper beeches. Like so many artists – Cedric Morris, for example – the garden informs my art and vice versa.” 

Chris: “I’m delighted to say we’ve kept a record of some of the landscape changes we’ve made. Our son, Rupert, has taken drone films for us; he’s a photographer and is heading to art school soon. He has a knack of taking an idea and making it something quite surreal and magical.” 

Amanda: “When we moved into this traditional Suffolk hall house, we chose a simple pale style for the interiors, which felt appropriate; we wanted to reveal its form, rather than cover it up. Upstairs, for instance, the wide Elizabethan oak floorboards had been coated in thick tarry varnish. With the beams, we looked to the local architecture of Lavenham, where we’d seen a great variety of finishes – some limewashed, some lightened, some left as they were. I bleached some of ours and they brightened to a much softer natural tone, which was exciting, and we mixed our own limewash for others. I have always mixed my own paints, as it allows you to be very specific according the light, which differs in every room.

“Pattern and texture have come through the reclaimed marble surfaces we found, which we’ve combined with contemporary patterned encaustic tiles and my own geometric etchings. I’ve hung vibrant silks and block-printed textiles in place of curtains, and I’ve painted smaller through-spaces in deep intense hues, in contrast to the bigger and more open rooms. Being an artist, I see this house as a canvas. You read all sorts of very prescriptive things about how to decorate, when really it’s just about lighting and being bold. 

“Our philosophy is to not only to buy special pieces, but also to work with what you have. And always have a plan! 

“When decorating the house, I applied the same formulas that I do to my art practice: the process of mixing distemper and putting it on the walls, for instance, isn’t unlike those involved with my canvases. Both involve me thinking about abstracted narratives and patina, both have multiple layers, both are about revealing hidden stories and marks.” 

Further reading 

Amanda Edgcombe is represented by Davina Barber and Contemporary and Country

Better on Vinyl can be visited at 3 College Rd, Framlingham, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP13 9EJ