A Home with a History: The slow evolution of a soulful home belonging to a pair of patient antique dealers

“Nothing is off limits” is a phrase antiques dealers Jorge Perez-Martin and David Gibson often use when describing the sorts of pieces they source for Brownrigg, their renowned Tetbury antiques shop. But it is a mantra that is equally applicable to the renovation of the couple’s house, a dreamy limestone villa that sits handsomely on the side of a green and hilly valley not far from Stroud. For this is a renovation that has evolved over eight years and – given Jorge and David’s enthusiasm – it could well continue for as long as they live there. Parts of the house are as close as they will ever come to being finished, and some parts are still a long way off. “We’re in it for the long haul,” says David, with a smile. The only thing that was strictly off-limits was taking everything back to bare bones and starting afresh. “We wanted to preserve the building’s history,” says Jorge, speaking like a true antiques dealer. The pair are at pains to respect the soul of the house and to allow it to develop slowly around the pieces they collect – everything from a 19th-century cast-iron bathtub, with a distinctive zinc canopy, to an 18th-century chinoiserie bureau and terracotta flooring found in Serbia.

The couple bought the house 10 years ago, well aware of the labour of love that they were about to embark on. The house was a bit of a warren, with an early 18th-century core and 19th-century additions (including a small family chapel), as well as a 1960s extension that was something of a blight on the eastern side of the property. But the bones were good, with an elegant 1830s late Regency part giving the house a quiet grandeur and accommodating the formal rooms, including the drawing room and dining room on the ground floor, and bedrooms, a dressing room and bathroom above. Right at the start, Jorge and David decided they would not tinker with the room sizes, and so other than turning a few existing rooms into bathrooms, they have worked with the layout they inherited. Walls were stripped, revealing past schemes that were left in all of their distressed and peeling glory. “It’s these scars that give the house such soul and patina,” says David, who recalls having to often ask the builders to stop midway through their work when just the right amount of original paint had been unearthed. That, of course, is the benefit of living on-site through a renovation project, rather than taking shelter elsewhere.

The jarring 1960s add-on was demolished, and the gaping hole left in the side of the house filled with an expansive glass wall that now floods the library with light. This room is filled with some of David and Jorge’s favourite pieces and is one of the few in the house to have white walls – although if the gentle bickering that feeds their creative process is anything to go by, I sense this could be due a change in the coming years. The colour and the texture in here come in through treasured furniture, antiques and decorative objects, collected over the past 30 or so years – a green faux malachite 1960s column, an ornate early 19th-century gilded mirror, a pair of sheepskin armchairs by Danish designer Birte Iversen, and framed 20th-century seaweed specimens. It is a diverse collection, but then that is what Brownrigg – which was founded over 25 years ago – is all about. “We liked the idea of this room being quite modern and crisp,” explains Jorge. “But we’re also pretty brave when it comes to using colour,” adds David, accounting for why much of the house is a feast of vibrant patterns and rich tones. “We chose colour palettes in a way that most good decorators would be horrified by, taking each room separately and not thinking too much about the house as a whole,” David explains. I think this is perhaps a bit of good English modesty, because the rooms have a wonderful sense of flow, taking you on a journey from the unexpected to the sheer joyful.

A vaulted twin bedroom falls somewhere between the two: plush and jewel-like and papered in the raspberry-toned “Pine” – a design by their friends, local wallpaper and fabric brand Whiteworks. “The paper kicked the whole room off,” explains Jorge. Soon followed the antique brass and chrome twin beds, which the couple bought eight years before: they stripped off the glossy white paint, polished them up and cloaked them in green velvet. A mid-twentieth-century Spanish painting found the perfect spot above the fireplace, while a pair of hand-painted lampshades by Alvaro Picardo knit all the layers together. “I loved the fact that the English country house is traditionally so eclectic, and we wanted to embrace that,” says Jorge, who moved from Spain to England when he was in his early twenties. Sitting in the corner is a key country-house ingredient – a Howard & Sons armchair, which Jorge had reupholstered in Carolina Irving’s blue and gold ‘Paisley Velvet’. “Sometimes I’d just like to come for a little thinking time in here,” says Jorge. Next door is a candy-pink bathroom. “I think I just got on with that without telling Jorge,” jokes David. “Yes, it’s a colour I would have found way too girly a few years ago, but I love how bright it feels,” Jorge admits.

Pattern plays a big part in the house’s decoration. For an attic bedroom, they opted for a yellow check for the walls and ceiling, and papered the adjoining bathroom in Gastón y Daniela’s vivid ‘Papel Pintado Amazonia Original’, a paper that Jorge had had his eye on for a few years. It is a brave, but perfectly executed choice, which at first might seem quite punchy but soon feels very soothing thanks to the 19th-century zinc bath, antique washstand and mustard armchair invitingly positioned in the corner. “We tried to do every room like it was our own bedroom,” Jorge explains. “No guest should feel as if they have been allocated the duff bedroom and we wanted them to feel they had a space to escape to for some me-time,” adds David. “The thing with this house: it might feel quite large, but we have tried to design it in a way so that we still use all of it on a regular basis.” Greens feature prominently throughout the house, cropping up in the kitchen and pantry, and on the walls of the downstairs loo, which is papered in ‘Hunters’, another jolly design from Whiteworks. It’s eccentric and quintessentially English, transforming the miniscule space into something quite magical. Equally transfixing is a green guest bedroom, where a wall of distressed original paint, exposed by the builders, sets a palette that includes Farrow & Ball’s ‘Saxon Green’, handstitched cushions from Paula Bailie and ‘Coral’ wallpaper from Cath Kidston’s Joy of Print. “That paper reminds me of the sea at home and I knew we’d use it somewhere the moment I first saw it,” explains Jorge.

In other rooms, specific antiques, unsurprisingly, guided how the decoration would evolve. Jorge and David are not the sort to immediately head to a conventional bathroom supplier, and so it was something of a waiting game when it came to sourcing a bath. The fact they had to get Listed Building Consent to create a bathroom in one of the loveliest rooms at the front of the house bought them some time, and a few years into the renovation, just the bath came along – a spectacular 19th-century cast-iron bath with a zinc canopy by Doulton. “That was the starting point for the whole room and pushed us to create something really special,” Jorge explains. They called on specialist decorative painter Magdalena Gordon to work her magic; she set up camp for weeks, coating the walls in a delicious red tortoiseshell inspired by a 17th-century bargueño desk and turning the ceiling into a coffered trompe l’oeil spectacle. “I didn’t want something that we’d seen in so many magazines,” Jorge explains. “It would never have been part of our plan in our first year here, but it takes patience for rooms to come together,” adds David. “It’s also the benefit of not trying to make decisions about decoration at the same time as thinking about replacing a roof or making structural changes, when things like tortoiseshell walls might seem like a silly indulgence.” The bathroom now serves the dual purpose of a snug little sitting room and has something of the Grand Tour about it, with an assortment of marble urns and columns, an 18th-century English mahogany library chair, a 19th-century French Empire Gueridon table and a terrific art deco bronze chandelier.

Both Jorge and David admit that their house is an exercise in patience. “We’ve really tried not to compromise,” David says. This is a house built around the things that fill it – pieces, as all dealers and collectors will know, that cannot be found at the click of a mouse but take time to come along. It is considered decoration at its very best, where no detail has been overlooked and where rooms have been allowed to evolve bit by bit, rather than being the work of a rushed renovation. It’s precisely how it should be and the privilege that they feel at being part of it is palpable.

Further reading

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New English Interiors: At Home with Today’s Creatives by Elizabeth Metcalfe is published by Frances Lincoln (RRP £28)