A Home with a History: record producer and musician Guy Chambers’ tuneful take on a Sussex dower house

The village of Firle in Sussex has a curious magic to it. The light, the way the South Downs rise up from it and the fact it has everything a village needs strung along a single road: a pub, village shop and church. “This house shares that magic,” explains record producer and musician Guy Chambers, the owner of this seven-bedroom part Georgian, part Victorian dower house, which he bought in 2020 after three years of renting a cottage at the other end of the village. “Perhaps it’s something to do with the fact that there’s a ley line going between the house and the church,” he adds with a grin, gesturing to the latter which glows in the distance.

Or perhaps it’s due to the fact that the house itself is something of a magic trick. For while the weathered limestone floors and random patchwork of dormer windows speak of a house that has remained the same for hundreds of years, it’s in fact quite the contrary. “Almost everything is brand new,” says Guy. “It was a big leap of faith when we bought it because, apart from the front façade, there wasn’t really anything original to go off,” he adds.

Largely spread across three floors with a sitting room and kitchen on the ground floor, three bedrooms on the first floor and a further three in the attic, the house had become a bit of a riddle, with a jarring rear extension and two dark staircases. The solution? To rethink just about everything, from remodelling the rear and removing an incongruous extension to adding a new open-plan kitchen, two staircases, bathrooms and a new main bedroom on the first floor.

Crucial to this vision is Rabble Architecture, a design studio based between Sussex, Devon and Greece and run by three friends, Will Anderson, David Jones and George Mitzalis, who take an “all round” approach to design that sees them turn their hand to everything from architecture to wallpaper. Will forms the Sussex arm, living in the village and working as a designer for the Firle Estate, and Guy enlisted his help after seeing the work he had done locally. “All our work is focused on character – on finding it and then exaggerating it to give buildings personality,” explains Will, who worked on Guy’s house in close collaboration with David.

As chance would have it, Will happened to have his own connection to the house: his grandparents had bought it from the Firle Estate in 1960. His grandfather – a modernist architect named John Schwerdt – replaced a crumbling part at the rear with a Bauhaus-inspired single-storey extension.

Unlike the front of the house (an interesting jigsaw of Georgian and Victorian architecture that is protected by its listed status and the Firle conservation area), the back of the house has continued to evolve. By the time Guy bought it, it was a hotchpotch of architectural styles. “We decided to take away all the additions and listen to what the house wanted,” recalls Guy. The result is a sweeping catslide roof – a style typical in Sussex – which is punctuated by five dormer windows that bring light into the two upper floors. “Our mission was to make it Sussex with a capital S,” explains Will, with obvious glee. “The windows are like Russian dolls – big, medium and small – and we knocked one off perfect alignment so that, in years to come, people might wonder what came first,” he adds.

Every single change has been carried out not just with great sensitivity by brilliant local builder Simon Farey, but also using sustainable materials: hempcrete for the new extension, wood fibre sarking board for the new roof, lime plaster for the walls inside, wool for insulation and paints hand mixed from alabaster and lime by local colourist Simon March, who runs Colorville. “We were on a mission for everything to be as natural as possible,” explains Guy. An air source heat pump was installed in the basement and now heats the house. (Will spent hours finding aesthetically pleasing radiators that were compatible with the system.)

Key to resolving the riddle of the layout was coming up with an alternative to the two boxed-in staircases. Will’s solution was to design two new pulpit-like, open staircases inspired by church design. “Guy loves green, so we had them painted in ‘Invisible Green’ by Edward Bulmer, which makes them pop,” explains Will.

The kitchen presented another conundrum. Though large, virtually all the wall space is taken up with windows and doors. “We wanted it to be a big open space with an Esse stove at either end, but the challenge was how to carve it up,” recalls Guy. Their solution was to design an assortment of freestanding pieces that resembled furniture, which were all made by Old Town Kitchen Co. in Hastings and painted in delicious tones – gravy brown, kidney bean red and milky tea cream. “We measured and copied details from old coffer chests, church altars, bread cupboards and doll’s houses,” recalls Will, pointing out the fridge that masquerades as a giant oxide-red doll’s house.

The bespoke round kitchen table is one of Guy’s favourite pieces, featuring a miniature Firle Tower mounted on stretchers shaped like Firle Beacon. “I’m not precious about much, but I am about that table,” says Guy. “The design is based on a table that I saw in Berdoulat in Bath, which designer Patrick Williams allowed me to copy, and we had it made locally by furniture maker Alfred Newall,” adds Will. “A lot of what we do is borrowing – we’re magpies,” he explains.

In fact, this is a large part of what makes the house so intriguing – the web of inventive references that feed into every element. In the sitting room, the television is hidden above the fireplace within a cabinet designed to resemble a carriage clock when closed and an old church triptych when open. Upstairs in the attic, the blue on the woodwork in two of the guests’ bedrooms takes its inspiration from an old school in Orkney that Will came across, while the rooms themselves were designed to be a bit like a doll’s house set with a sweet, interconnecting bathroom. And then there is the little loo, as well as the sofa and armchair in the sitting room that all feature a pattern that Will designed, which incorporates 25 buildings in various states of repair across the Firle Estate.

Responding to the local vernacular was crucial to the vision for the house. The four wide doors running along the extension, for instance, are the same width as the village church door, while the recording studio in the garden is a take on the old green Baptist tin tabernacle chapel in nearby Barcombe. “What we wanted to create was too big to be a shed and too small to be a barn, so it was about creating something interesting and low key enough that it felt right for a conservation area and the village,” explains Will. Guy’s plan is for the tentatively named ‘Sonic Temple’ to perform the functions of recording studio, as well as a club and venue for intimate gigs.

The house is peppered with decorative flourishes. From Guy’s youngest daughter’s room in the attic, which is papered top-to-toe in a Nicholas Herbert design, to the sitting room that glows in a warm orange limewash inspired by the colour on the walls of Benedict Foley and Daniel Slowik’s country sitting room. “We copied the colour combination they had used by painting the television cabinet in a similar turquoise to the one that their linen press is painted in,” explains Will. And then there are the 620 painted Delft-inspired tiles from Douglas Watson that make for a rather wonderful showering experience in the bathroom. “Emma had the idea for those after finding a photograph of something similar,” recalls Guy. “She studied architecture and was the driving force behind so many ideas here,” he adds.

“It’s been a tremendous journey to get the house to this point, but it has a really good feeling about it now,” Guy reflects. What he, Will and David have created is something that feels original and fresh, but also entirely right for its rural setting. That’s where the real magic lies.

Further Reading

Rabble Architecture

Guy Chambers on Instagram