Inside a Fully Renovated Regency Farmhouse Secluded in the Yorkshire Dales | Design Notes

Interior designer Jonathan Reed welcomes House & Garden into their Regency house in the Yorkshire Dales, which he has taken from a dilapidated farmhouse and transformed it into a warm and welcoming home for himself and his artist husband, Graeme Black.

“This is definitively not the sort of house I wanted to live in,” says Reed as he walks us through his Regency home set in the rural river valleys near Wensleydale. Watch the full episode of Design Notes, as we tour Jonathan and Graeme’s 19th-century farmhouse.

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[tranquil music] – This is definitively not the sort of house I wanted to live in. This very plain, kind of regency framework is not necessarily my thing. The great dream when you spend a life designing houses for other people is to build a house. This national park is entirely protected. You cannot build a new structure. So the compromise was how to make this house, how to use that as a canvas for creating a more interesting outcome. We’re in Raydale, which is an offshoot of Wensleydale. The landscape is bold and dramatic. The house is designed as proper foursquare regency. It’s a house of two distinct atmospheres. The front of the house being formal, the rear rooms of the house were created for the use of servants. And the result is that architecturally there’s two distinct feelings. It was sort of inevitable that I would end up back in Yorkshire. I grew up on the moors 40 miles away from here and that happened slowly having had a cottage here for a while. So having convinced Graeme, my partner to join in the first adventures, then I had to get him to come to terms with the fact that we were going to go even deeper into the wilds. This house, whilst it wasn’t built from scratch, was taken back to its barest bones. I like a more robust house. I love a stone flag floor. I like a heavy oak beam. And this house had none of that. How to interject that robust feeling was one of the great challenges. Very easy just to say it’s a house full of beautiful things. For me, the challenge was creating a house that stripped of those things, still had a sort of beauty and that comes from the walls, the floors, the ceilings, the use of glass. Those are the things where you build in detail. One of the great tragedies of the way that we are led by planners and conservation bodies is that we are supposed to recreate the past. No one talks about the mark of today. What are we leaving behind? So this is the original entrance hall to the house. We have come to the conclusion that the mural, which is original to the house and is listed, was probably built as a marketing poster. Regency people coming to the countryside to observe the countryside for the first time. So this man who developed this house, who built this house was probably quite an early visionary. This was a house built for pleasure. It was not built for graft, it was not built to farm in. The house is a bit of a repository for this collection of studio ceramics. Some of the earliest pieces that were bought from a early Sotheby’s sale of the contents of Bernard Leach’s own studio. And that’s an incredibly strong piece with the Tree of Life motif, which is a Buddhist motif and it’s all sgraffito. So this is carved into the surface. The whole floor is flagged in local stone and it’s the original. So when we put this back down again, we had a gap that we needed to fill. In excavating behind the game ladder we’d found an old mitten of China that had been discarded over the 200 years history of the house. And so I came up with the idea of mosaic and found a local mosaicist. There’s another part of the snake disappearing under that chair. And in the opposite direction is a mouse running away from the snakes. This is the sitting room, the most formal living room of the house. We use it mainly in the evenings. All the walls are lime plastered and lime washed, which creates this fantastic dry surface, chalky surface, which does amazing things with the light. If there’s a continual thread in the house, it is wood in all of its iterations. And sitting in front of the window is this amazing desk that was made by Rudolph Steiner, a piece of furniture like this, which could only be made by somebody who really knows what they’re doing. Trees form part of virtually every work of art that is in the house. Other works that were commissioned for the house are also about the landscape in some way. And this is a map of the estate. So these are the fields and land of the estate with the house in the center and the woods. Commissioning things that are very site specific is an opportunity to mark time. It’s a thing of now, it’s a thing for here. Creating a kitchen in this kind of four square regency plane kind of background allowed us to create a kitchen that doesn’t necessarily feel like a kitchen. The main cabinet here is a cabinet that was made by Charles Rennie Macintosh. It was part of a butler’s pantry. The way that you can tell that a designer had a hand in this, the door locks align even to this door where you would never put a lock three quarters of the way up a door because it would bow. Mr. Macintosh wanted his keys aligning. The corner sink area is tiled in tiles that were made from the Leach pottery, but these are all decorated with curlews. That was really just a response to the fact that the fields around here used to be full of curlew. Sadly, the demise of the curlew is a really significant problem here. When the house was built, there was not a window on the southerly elevation. Desperate for light, we thought that actually the room that we really needed to create was a kind of room that felt a little bit like it was more in touch with the outside environment. We hang out here summer and winter with the wood-burning stove being an essential. This red color that crops up throughout the house is really a nod to kind of traditional iron oxide red, which was used in all sorts of agricultural construction. The walls are in scratch coat lime plaster, which is part of the process of a regular lime rendered wall. But I stopped it halfway through ’cause I was in love with this very strong texture. I drove the plasterers mad by having them stop all of that texture, 50 millimeters away from every opening and every doorway and window, which wasn’t a very easy thing to do. The outdoor kitchen is a sort of necessity. We have to cherish every moment that we get in the sunshine here in the Dales, and it is protected from the prevailing wind and affords this really spectacular backdrop to spending time with friends here. It’s an amazing view. That’s the curlews. Can you hear? That’s the noise of the Dales. So this room was the original kitchen of the house. It always had a very different atmosphere would end JR 20, GB 18, which wasn’t the age at which we met, but it was 2018 when the lintel was installed. We call this the pub because we don’t have a decent pub locally that we can go to. And if we did, this is the atmosphere that we would like to be sitting in. So this is a Mouseman table. The Mouseman is a Yorkshire oak furniture maker. Each of the pieces of furniture is signed with a three-dimensional carved mouse, but in the case of the table, it has the only moving mouse. Detail is absolutely everything. In fact, a house is an amalgamation of all of the choices that you can possibly make. In this house, I think there are lots of unexpected details that are only really visible once you start living in the house and using the house. They’re not obvious, but as you live in the house and as you use the house, you suddenly realize that pretty much everything has been considered in some way. When we found the house, the bank side used to run directly into the back of the house. So we cut the land back here and exposed all of this limestone pavement that runs through the back of the house. When we first moved here, we realized that the idea of creating a garden that needed gardening was going to be far too much to take on. We decided that everything around the house needed to be entirely naturalistic and more representative of the landscape as a whole. All of the drystone walling around the back of the house is new, constructed in the same location as the collapsed walls. And then throughout we’ve planted all of these ferns and allowed the moss to come to the fore. Across the whole estate, we have rebuilt 1.2 kilometers of dry stone walling. The back of the house nestles in and really feels like it’s enveloped by nature. What’s remarkable is how quickly it has settled back into the landscape, how nature has kind of returned and and accepted the house. This waterfall has been here as long as the house has been here, I believe. There’s a natural stream that comes from a spring in the woods above the house. But it’s an amazing thing to have this constant sound of water. This is maybe one of my favorite rooms. It is where functionality drove design. When we were building this room, I found the cabinets and needed to raise the roof by three inches in order to not cut the cabinets down. These are things that you wouldn’t normally do for a client where time was of the essence and you know, decisions had to be firmly made. When doing something for yourself, you can be a little bit more flexible. One of the joys of this room is that custom made tiles. These were made by Richard at Royal Tiles. So his challenge was to make tiles that wrapped around the corner and that when fired didn’t distort completely. So all of that opening hasn’t got a cut or mitered edge. The stair is original and in fact, it hadn’t lost anything apart from one of these spindles. It was taken out and restored, repolished, and put back in again is kind of a typical Georgian early regency stair hall with the arch window. My partner, Graeme Black, is an artist. We’ve hung the first of the series of tapestries that Graeme’s been working on, which are developed from paintings that he created. There are 200 colors in this work alone, which are all hand matched to the original artwork. When it comes to colors in the house, everything relates back to what is outside the house. And that could be like this, a bright yellow cashmere blanket. But actually outside for the month of June is a field of yellow buttercups that are the same color. I find that somewhere you will find every color you need out there. Another piece that was commissioned for the house is this rug. The girl who wove it, this is her interpretation, the blocks of woodland with the rusted roofs of field barns, the dry stone walls, and eventually the sun setting in the west, which is directly in that direction. This is Bernard Leach, his interpretation of a bellarmine, which was a, an early 16th century German form of a container. This one he made for himself and is stamped with his own personal logo, BL. Here is Philip Eglin’s interpretation of the same form, but in this case he used contemporary containers, waste containers, so Heinz 57, McDonald’s. This the refinement and here kind of taking it forward, the arrangement of this room is I wanted to put the basins in the middle of the space and I wanted to be able to face the light. The challenge was therefore, how to get the plumbing in and out of this piece of furniture. The cabinet is early 1920’s. Each panel is book matched from the same slice of wood. The thought that went into the arrangement of the individual panels and the patterns that the grain makes is just something that you only understand when you spend time looking at the piece of furniture. And the beautiful, very subtle handmade hinges and locks are fantastic. Inspiration doesn’t come from opening a magazine or flicking through imagery on the telephone. Being able to search through your own Rolodex of atmospheres and places and materiality and craftsmanship that you have seen, and use that as pointers to how you resolve your own creative problems. It’s a very practical process for me. [tranquil music]