The phrase ‘lovingly restored’ doesn’t quite do justice to the magnificent home of Charles and Romilly Saumarez Smith. Bought in the late 1990s from conservationist charity the Spitalfields Trust, it’s a Grade II-listed Georgian building that, when the couple first chanced upon it, had not been lived in since the 1870s. “It was a completely unreconstructed 18th-century house that had not been modernised in any way,” says Charles, a writer, curator and art historian. Getting the house to its current state, he says, involved a lengthy renovation process, in which Romilly, an artist, bookbinder and jeweller, worked closely with the Spitalfields Trust to bring new life to the space while retaining as much of its original fabric as possible.
Contrary to standard contemporary practice, the couple did not involve an architect in this process. Instead, a team of builders, joiners, carpenters and other craftspeople worked on the house piece by piece, much as they would have when it was first built, in the early Georgian period. At the same time, Romilly found ingenious ways to reinterpret the house’s character and atmosphere through its richly textured interiors, in which carefully curated artworks from all eras are offset by antique furniture, a rich colour scheme and patches of wall that have been left deliberately unfinished, to reveal every layer of the building’s history. Below, Charles and Romilly tell us more about how they transformed this imposing example of 18th-century architecture into a contemporary home tailor-made to suit the evolving demands of their life and work.
Romilly: “This house gives me great visual pleasure all the time.
“When we first moved, I decided I would approach the house in exactly the same way that I do my own work, not really worrying what anybody would think of it. I made the house in the same way as I would a book or a piece of jewellery.”
Charles: “It’s nice living in a house that hasn’t been modernised. What Romilly did was to keep as much as possible of the original atmosphere. But she didn’t go about it in an archaeological way, she went about it in a creative way, using modern things, like the hanging lights made out of film canisters in the drawing room.”
