An Extraordinary 1700s Estate In The English Countryside | House Tour

Hello Homeworthy, Virginia and Charlie. Welcome to Seno Hall in Norfolk. Come on in and have a look. You're watching Homeworthy, where we believe every home has a story. Hello, I'm Virginia Temple Richards and we are at Seno, in beautiful rural North Norfolk at the moment, about 20 minutes from the North Norfolk coast. It's very rural and very rolling. Everybody thinks that Norfolk is very flat but this bit of Norfolk is not flat. Anyway, so that's where we are today. And I'm Charlie Temple Richards, married to Virginia and welcome to our house. We'd love to show you around. The reason why we're here is because Charlie's mother was the oldest of four cooks who lived in the house and she moved away when she was married. Her younger brother, Thomas Cook, lived here for most of his life until he moved out 23 years ago because he didn't have any children and he thought we would be the perfect people to take over, Charlie being his nephew, and we had children, young children at the time and he thought that the house would have a good future with young children being in the house and making it their home. I should mention that up until that point we'd lived in a fairly normal house in a row in London and coming to live here was really quite a change in life, quite a change for both us and our children. Our children find it exciting in different ways. Our eldest daughter thought this is really grand and exciting, I'll invite all my friends around and we'll show off a bit. Our second daughter was a bit nervous about the scale of the house and all the dark corners but our son just loved every minute of it, so many things to discover and play with, so we all reacted in different ways. I think for us we just took a deep breath knowing we've got a task in front of us in making it, bringing the house up to date and suitable for a family in the beginning of the 21st century. Here we are in the entrance hall of the house and this is part of the Georgian house, so although it's been refaced both inside and outside by the Edwardians, this is part of the original Georgian house. There are one or two quite fun things to show you. Over here there are some skates and climbing boots and we have to talk about climate change where the skates are concerned because there's a lake in the park. Tiny boots, climbing boots and skates and skates and there's a lake in the park and Charlie's mother used to skate every single year. The lake would freeze over and we've been in the house 23 years and we've been able to walk on the lake once. The other thing that's fun in this room is the great grandfather clock and this was made by Maples, the famous store in Tottenham Court Road in London from which furnishings came. It's the most enormous thing and it's tuned to a Whittington chime which is unlike the chimes of Big Ben. It's some rather wonderful music. It will probably interfere with some of our shots as we go around the house but the boom of the strike of the hour can be heard right across the house. This is really rather fun and we've got quite a few of these, a collection had its own fire brigade just after the turn of the century and there's a wonderful livery which we can't show you today because it's in a night house but all the firemen wore this and they wore breeches and wonderful knee-high leather boots and waistcoats and tops with special livery buttons so that's really rather fun and actually I love collecting hats and you'll see all over the house from our travels you'll see all over the house lots of Africa, turban from India, anyway so it's just rather a fun thing when we go travelling we collect lots of hats and it reminds us of our travels. Come on into the drawing room which is through here. This again is part of the Georgian house but it's been relined, it was relined by the Edwardians and all this plaster work is Edwardian and it's in the style of Adam so George Skipper who took on the commission for this house thought that it should be Adamised. This little side table here is in the original photograph of the room when it had been the house when it had been completed in 1906 and there are a couple of other things which we'll show you but own the carpet is original that was made for the house and I tell you about this painting this is rather fun this painting this is the painting of my great-grandmother the wife of Bert Cook, Bert being the man who built the house. What's amusing about this painting is that we find it in a night house facing the wall and we thought that's a bit odd you know a family portrait in a night house facing the wall and then I thought back that my grandmother her daughter-in-law is quite a fiery person I've got a feeling I knew who put that painting in the outhouse would be her daughter-in-law but didn't want our mother-in-law beaving downhill. The other portraits in here are old family portraits from the Temple Ridge side of my family rather than the Cook side like that and another painting which is quite what portrait is quite interesting is this actually down here this portrait of a forebear whose name is William Kilburn and he was famous as a designer of calicos and wallpapers at the beginning of the 19th century indeed there's an album of his calicos and his designs in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and you can go there and ask to see this great album. I should tell you about the blinds when we arrived in the house there were heavy curtains with floral pelmets and I felt that it really wasn't the right mood for the room and I wanted this plasterwork it's very lovely plasterwork to be revealed so thought the blinds would be the best thing and these blinds are actually our curtains from our London house which we had modified and I found these pelmets in an outhouse and they were much broader so we found somebody locally to reduce them to exactly the right size and a very very wonderful gilder who gilded them in a very subtle way and actually I think that I think it works really well and the yellow actually works very well with the with the silk on the wall although rumour has it that the silk is was green and it's faded out to this yellow but actually this yellow is wonderful you know preferable to green really. One of the characteristics of this room is it's very light which in terms of Victorian Edwardian design is probably rather unusual because they got the electric lights and rather thrilled with the electric light they didn't see the need in Victorian Edwardian times for a lot of light coming in but the Georgian sash with those give a lot of light to this room. We've got our three children in here when they were I mean they're now in their 30s but when they were our son was two or three and our two daughters who were six or nine at the time and we had them drawn in pastels I seem to remember they had to sit in front of cartoons didn't they we had that we had the telly set up and they just watched cartoons actually they have a slightly glazed look on there on their faces but actually they're they're really charming portraits so it's rather fun we come in here and we remember them when they were adorable sweet little things. Another favourite item in in this room is this hat here now this is actually um we understand oh it's balanced on a washing up bowl or a pudding bowl so be careful and the story of it or we find ourselves on holiday in India with our children and in an antique shop in Old Delhi and we were thinking of buying some tiny item for a few rupees and our middle daughter appeared around the corner at this antique shop wearing this and we looked at each other we said we have got you've got to have it unfortunately the owner of the antique shop also got that message so it's quite a hard bargain. I think it's Tibetan isn't it? It's Tibetan it's a ceremonial crown and it's semi-precious stones it's very heavy but it's antique it's really yes it's really very beautiful and probably never actually worn probably just for display but that's great fun and a particular favourite. Come with me we'll go into the heart of the house into the inner hall. So this is the inner hall um the heart of the house and this area was transformed by Skipper the architect because um this would originally have been a small hallway with perhaps a back parlor and another room and there was a circular staircase just in that corner over there. Skipper wanted to make something much more grand and so he took out the stories above and so we go straight from the ground floor to the height of the roof outside with this incredible staircase which is based on a staircase at Cassiobury. Cassiobury house in um architects always borrow things borrow ideas from other houses um so uh this hall is characterized by a wealth of detail if you were to come and have a look at and this bit of woodwork over here over the fireplace um what we've got here is somebody carving um just over 100 years ago but very much in the style of Brinley and Gibbon with a wealth of detail brute game in the middle. Another thing that's quite fun is this tapestry which you can see around the top of the the hall and if we have lights action there we go lights um the tapestry is quite amusing really because it's not actually a tapestry at all it's painted on Hessian and my great-grandfather bought everything from Maples this great shop in London and it was possible to buy this hunting scene by the yard which is exactly what he did. My uncle when he moved the house in the 1970s moved the fireplace which is quite a big job to amazing a very significant change to make and the result of that was that the tapestry of the of hunting used to follow a sequence the beginning of the hunt and then going to hunt the meat chasing the fox catching the fox going home and the result of moving the fireplace was that the tapestry had been replaced out of order so you start off by killing the fox then being able to to the meat it's all in the wrong order. But we should also say the reason for having canvas of hunting was because when this house was embellished or rebuilt by George Skipper in about 1900-1905 this house was all about hunting and shooting parties that was what happened here and Sandringham was down the road and so the inspiration for living in a big house was hunting and shooting and the house was filled wasn't it with house parties and of course Bert Cook, Tom Albert Cook came here to play and as you say that the Prince of Wales had made shooting fashionable with Sandringham and big shooting parties and that's probably why he came to Norfolk and built Seno rather than going to another part of Lots of references to hunting and shooting which we'll see when we go around the house. Looking up the stairs here at the wonderful stained glass and the murals on this on the staircase which were painted in the 1980s and Charlie's uncle and his three stepchildren who lived here. The painter was a man called William Barlow who was actually a set painter set designer in London in the theatre world and he came here and had rather fun painting these buildings. The original house is a 1760 house and when Charlie's forebears bought the estate and moved here in 1900 employing a local architect to extend the house it became an Edwardian house so what you see is an Edwardian house and what we didn't want was fashion 21st fashion to dictate it needed to be comfortable but it needed to feel organic so for instance in this room we haven't repainted it and it's that there's a wonderful patina of cigar smoke from the 1950s and 1960s and we thought if we stripped it back and painted it it would look quite bling and really like a hotel room and too fearsomely white and the silk on the wall is contemporary so it's 1900 and again it's you know quite sort of torn and weathered in places where the sun's got to it but really I suppose what I'm trying to say is we let the house dictate and wanted to live with the patina and let each generation have its say so you know there is decoration that represents each generation that's lived here it might be worth just mentioning an amusing sort of approach how you view a house when you move into it it changes it's dynamic in the relation to this particular room which essentially speaks Georgian it's very light with tall big sash windows and a tall a tall ceiling the first morning we moved in here from London we opened the door and came in and looked at the tatty silk on the wall and thought we'll have that down and get that painted looked at the tatty paint I thought we've got to get rid of that and smart up the paint closed the door went out couldn't find the money to do anything about it until we came back about two years later when our reaction was of course completely different we opened the door and thought to ourselves what a lovely patina on the paint isn't that lovely silk let's try and preserve it so one's views are and one's feel for a house are dynamic but I think it's probably what you just said is rather key that the house is a very powerful house and so we couldn't make it into anything other than an Edwardian house and we both have sort of Georgian sensibilities and we love Georgian style which is more restrained and more pared back and classical but the house we really love the house now it's very eccentric it's very ebullient and we've learned to go with it and embrace it and it's been a bit of a thing like light fittings yeah some of the light fittings Edwardian light fittings being essentially Georgian people we thought were pretty horrid when we arrived however now we go around some of the great Victorian stations in London and look at the light fittings there see the echoes there of the light fittings here and say look at that isn't that wonderful so again you know and they were craftsmen the Edwardians were incredible craftsmen and everything they did they did beautifully um yeah it might be worth saying something about the the architect of the house who is a chap called um George Skipper and he was a 19th century born in the 19th century and um he essentially worked in Norfolk and built various significant buildings in Norfolk notably in Norwich his hometown um Betjeman said of Skipper that um as Gaudi was to Barcelona so was Skipper to Norwich so he was the go-to architect of the of the region um when my great-grandfather uh Thomas Albert Cook came here to develop the house and I think he more or less gave Skipper an open check and said off you go get on with it I think Skipper was restrained in what he might have done because Edwardian architecture can be very varied and spectacular I think he was restrained by the um classical proportions the Georgian house which played on some of his classical inclinations I would say in terms of his design of the house um but what you see both inside and outside is pure Edwardiana and I think a very good example of it people like to come and have a look at uh Senno I think precisely because it's rather unusual and it's also still in private hands and a lot of Edwardian buildings have been turned into institutions schools and so on or demolished or demolished um uh yeah you know in the 1950s 60s 70s huge number were demolished and yes it's very it's got a lot of classical references and so it's it's lighter and and more playful than a lot of Edwardian buildings so this is the library which is a wonderful winter room we light a fire and this is where people play cards and monopoly and word games this is a sort of the exit away from the snug and telly and yeah um lots of drinking games um it's a it's a very very nice winter room we don't use it much in the summer but it's got this wonderful vaulted ceiling which is a copy of a Jacobean ceiling of course again Edwardian but lots of lots of references to different periods other than the Edwardian period well notably of course this extraordinary um door case this is based on uh indeed it's almost a copy I believe of a door at Port and Castle in Oxfordshire and I think Skipper as architects do snapshot in borrowing ideas from different places it's extraordinarily ornate if you notice there is a at the bottom there are little uh arches with um mythical animals these great columns and a lot of a cardboard woodblock and it will be counted in the room and of course on top there's the monogram of Thomas Albert Cook TAC who yes built the house and it's a copy of the Whispering Door at Port and Castle um where do we make the interest to me is this carpet the carpet is the original carpet and um it's very thick and lovely and warm to walk on but the most extraordinary thing is that our children over the years with various parties have poured literally gallons of wine into this thing yeah and it just doesn't show it doesn't show it seems to soak it up pour it in and it soaks up I might mention also this painting over here this painting shows my great-grandfather who built the house so this is Thomas Albert Cook driving the coach and carriage driving was a great passion of his and here he is driving um four rather wonderful skewboard horses um the little boy here is my grandfather who lived here and part of his father and so there is new and I think that um painting demonstrate demonstrates a huge sort of sense of confidence and I have arrived we're talking about things decorative if people are interested in things decorative when we arrived here these curtains were literally in shreds and I thought well are we going to start again um or are we going to just embrace this very mid to late 1970s vibe um there's hessian on the wall which is typical of the period so we thought let's keep this so we re-lined um and I found some wonderful fabric um with some edging and our curtain maker was able to keep the fabric and put new life into these curtains so um lots of repurposing very pleased with that I must point out a detail over here in the on the fireplace which um is quite fun and first of all down on the half you'll see a spaniel and probably would be used in shooting retrieving the shot pheasants and a spaniel at the stone and then of course this rather wonderful and rather sugary dare I say um Edwardian saying this is your home seek no other why would you leave just before um it was Edwardianized and the first photograph shows you um the essentially the 1770s house and what you can see there is two bays three bays two bays on the other side and a small single story extension there um what of course did was to take that as the core of the house and build on substantially down here and we'll see when we go outside how much bigger he made the house um this next photograph shows you um the same building the 1770s house from rather closer up at least slightly to one side and indeed this photograph also from the western side shows the 1770 house which was subsumed into the Edwardian house Skipper was restrained by what he had here in the sense that he was obliged to make a an Edwardian house with what we might describe as Georgian undertones this is why but we could also um show you the photograph of this room just when it had been completed in let's put it here um in 1905 1906 yes here is the very room um this is what this room looked like in 1906 so as you see same fireplace all the woodwork and ceiling and the same carpet um and we've got this table elsewhere in the house but very little has changed um it's very formal there's another shot here of the same room a little absorbent carpet stands out yes but with all the chairs around the edge of the room very formal not a very sort of inviting place to sit but it was used as a library and probably these are the same books in the bookcase with some editions of ours come with us and we'll go and look in our small dining room which is fun because it has an interesting family portraits come this way so this is the little dining room and what's fun about this room i think really other portraits we have here a small portrait which is which shows uh Thomas Cook the founder of the famous travel business in my view it's a terrible picture but it is a contemporary of him and for that reason it's rather fun um over here on this wall we have his son who is perhaps the man who really pushed the business of Thomas Cook to become the great thing that it was um so he was born in about 1840 and died in 1880-90s and he was the man who invented for example the traveller's check or was known in those days as the circular note it's rather astonishing that if you think um in 1880 you could use a Thomas Cook traveller's check to pay for your hotel in Canberra, Delhi, Paris, Toronto, San Francisco an astonishing thing when you think that actually when we got into the 20th century it's not until after the second world war it became possible to use money reasonably easily abroad so he was the man i think who really drove the the growth of the business through the 19th late 19th century you see in this picture um sitting with his back to the Nile and uh Thomas Cook came to dominate um maybe take the flowers away so that you can see on the Nile in the 19th century to the extent that when General Gordon in Khartoum was besieged the British government employed Cooks to take the British army to Khartoum to go and rescue Gordon. They arrived a day late famously but that wasn't Cook, it was I think actually Glasford the prime minister who prevaricated didn't really want to save Gordon who he viewed as an adventurer having fun in the Sudan. So um that's John Cook uh his son we're now on to therefore the grandson of original Thomas who's over here this is Frank Cook and Frank and his brother Ernest were the two who built Cooks right up through into the early 20th century. My great-grandfather Bert Cook sold his third of the business of Thomas Cook to his two brothers to finance the building of Senna and he came to Norfolk to play and this is what he spent his fortune on. Another painting just quick to mention this portrait of Virginia which was painted in about 2001 and um it was painted by a delightful Russian painter called Eugenia, Eugenia Gruzdev and um this shows um Virginia as I'd rather put it. I very much wanted a portrait of the girl I married. I had to duck. Pre-wrinkles is what you said. I had to duck as the handbag came swinging around but anyway we got it. We had a lot of friends in common in London and um one year a gang of us decided to go to Venice and everybody dropped out except for Charlie and I and I thought oh goodness well he's a very nice guy and I suppose we've got a lot of sightseeing to do and um yeah and the rest is history um so we've been married actually 40 years we've been married 40 years and uh we lived in London for the first 10 years of our marriage. Yeah yeah yeah 10. Your career was at Sotheby's, mine was in investment management um all in London so coming to Norfolk I grew up in Norfolk as a child so I felt I was coming back home um but for Virginia this was passport country you know how on earth are we going? We're going north of the M25 the motorway around London. It was alien to me and also neither of us have been brought up in big houses. Charlie's mother who was brought up at Senno but she and her husband lived in a farmhouse down the road. I was brought up in London mostly I started my life in Hampshire but mostly in London in a an ordinary London house so suddenly to arrive in a big house was a huge it was a huge shock both in terms of the space and for me the value system of living in rural Britain and the things I was expecting that were expected of me some of which the mantle of which some some of which I took up some of which I I didn't but it was uh it was a steep learning curve for me and also I'd had a actually wasn't completely full time but a part-time job I'd had a full-time job at Sotheby's and then a part-time job at Sotheby's with children so I was used to going to work and coming here um life changed because I had to work on my own once we Charlie was at work in Norwich and I was overseeing builders here with a huge amount of building work that had to happen and restoration work over the first five years and so I was managing that on my own not going into an office so being here on my own and then with our events we have um a few weddings here and we have photo shoots and we have people to stay um quite a lot of Americans to stay actually we love um we love having them to stay very we meet interesting people so yes that was the business that you developed wasn't it yes so so it's yes and running that on on my own here was a it was a huge change from going into an office every day I in the meantime was still going to an office and having an office life the main thing of which was of course it was warm in winter and cool in summer because we had education and I couldn't talk about other those two things the heating no you've got you've got back and find me very grumpy wearing several layers in the kitchen where we've got a wood burner and an auger and that was really the only sort of bearable room in the house in terms of temperature wasn't it mittens I've even worn mittens um layers and layers yeah thick socks this long corridor is rather gloomy because it doesn't have any windows to the outside but what's fun about it are these little paintings um all the way down in the arch all of which um show sporting scenes um hunting here but in box I'm no doubt I've got fishing going on here and then on down here we have some shooting of one sort or another going on and these were painted by a man called William Neatby and Neatby is particularly famous for the extraordinary tile work and designs which you'll see if you were to go to the food hall of Harrods um where there is the most spectacular tile work um that was all designed by William Neatby so he painted it but come on in we're and this is uh the big dining room which is uh where Easter Christmas the big events take place and we have great fun laying up the table we've laid it for 12 actually because we've got a group from the United States coming for dinner which is lovely we're much looking forward to that but the table can extend and seat 26 and uh yes so it doubles in length but um this we don't use this very often this room but it's it's it's wonderful high days and holidays family events weddings etc that's where it all happens at Christmas because we live in a relatively large house the rest of the family think where should we go for Christmas I know Senate spot yeah so my Christmas we were 22 for three days so all our meals have been here except for the cook except for the poor cook you things which are interesting in this room are perhaps again some rather fine carving of a dead game again redolent of the great carver Gwyndolin Gibbons um and the chap who carved this was a Norwich carver who particularly sought to copy Gwyndolin Gibbons the other thing for the fun are the alcoves that end and that end um these are things by a chap called William Murray in fact there's a date 1911 I think he's 1908 1908 yes um and he was a jobbing artist in Norwich and what's fun about this I don't know whether we can get a shot of it what's fun about this is that it's very relevant of Leighton House and um the Beryphonite style very much of that time and again they show sort of mythical subject right over here there's a painting which is not contemporary but this shows the original Thomas who founded the business of Thomas Cook hard at work in his desk it's rather a nice painting but it was made in the 1930s from a photograph so it doesn't have the the vacity perhaps of a live paint um other people in this room um this is actually my grandfather called guess what Thomas Cook um and he um was master of the glazier's company in London and he's wearing the glazier's company uh medal in the middle and this row of medals on his chest are all wartime medals um and he was in charge of fire brigades other things that are of interest in this room are down here we have a portrait of my one of my temple forebears and if you look closely at the picture you can see that um he is leaning on a stick now the stick is actually this very thing here and it's not just a stick across the top here what looks like a handle is in fact a very small pellet and because he looks a bit of a dandy I have a suspicion that he might have rather enjoyed going to somewhere like Brighton and sitting on the seafront there and use his topkiss as it were spot the talent and being and one more item to mention would be this great banner and this banner was presented to the man in the cartoon here and he is a richard temple scholar of bombay and chancellor of the equipment checker for india although he was actually called the first finance minister and the the banner um was used in a great derby I think to celebrate one of the jubilees of queen victoria probably silver jubilee I would imagine and it shows the temple family crest and the wallpaper originally this room was decorated we think in silk matching the curtains the curtains are sort of 1940s 1950s I think and there was some filming here in the 1980s just before we moved in shortly before we moved in anyway this wallpaper was designed by coles for the film and charlie's uncle who lived here didn't want it replicated anywhere else so he said once you've used the block destroy the block so this wallpaper is unique which is rather fun that's worth saying the reason why um we wallpaper in this room seemed a good idea was because during the war the second world war um the army were militia in this house and there were lady soldiers here who apparently caused a terrible flood the bathrooms above came down the silk and destroyed it effectively so it had been hanging in tatters for like 30 years before the luck of having this film come along we had to pay for one we do have filming here sadly they never seem they were they put the house back as they find it but very sadly they don't seem to now have the budget to re-wallpaper with really expensive curls wallpaper like this so you know they get out a duster and a broom and try to leave the house as they find it another detail which is quite fun is um this fireplace which has on at the top of it one of these rather sort of sugary um Edwardian which really Edwardian says they say what they say what they say let them say in other words really I'm going to do my own thing and please leave me to it which I hope is probably exactly the attitude by great-grandfather Thomas Albert Kirk when he built the house and came here to play this is the north end cloakroom which is quite entertaining because it's a wonderful bit of Edwardian design come on in tremendous tile work uh in all directions and um now these are these are original ski boots aren't they and skis we've got these ski boots are from the 1950s I think as are the skis and anybody who's a skier will know that skiing on skis of that length is quite charming and they're wood and they're made of wood and there's some roller skates too oh poles and the poles yeah nice ski poles lots of roller skates for you as well but we love all this memorabilia and we find it in outhouses you're trying to find interesting things that represent previous generations and there is still so much more to find we just don't have the time really but there is still so much like that one of the so this is the sunny fire brigade I didn't know I'm going to manage to go into this jacket it's also very very dusty and dirty oh it's wonderful the buttons and everything oh and there's some farmer's boots as well but there are some farmer's boots so there's the axe but it has been it's been really interesting going through the outhouses and salvaging and one of the things we salvaged was the light fittings when we moved in we replaced a lot of melamine and plastic light fittings with original metal light fittings those were things we found but it's quite fun because they're the original basins and the original taps here nothing's none of that has changed so this is where we live which is obviously it's a wonderful light bright space and we worked with exactly the same area but I think as I mentioned earlier it had brown and white glazed tiles and all the sort of units had frantic yellow and green striped and stippled and dragged surfaces heavily varnished so really the necessary thing was to make this light so we brightened it up and made this wonderful central island and everybody sort of leans up against this island and the agar of course over here is the original 1970-79 agar so we had to work with that the agar is always the heart of the house this is where all the great conversations happen important things the big decisions are all made here with the mugger team discussing and important to us is to be able to both eat close to where we could and then be able to sit and read the papers and have a tv which is what we have through here in our little snug and the the sort of artifacts and paintings the things we have in here are the things that we've collected that we love um contemporary pictures actually that was painted by you Charlie wasn't it except for the two plans which are part of George Skipper's original plans for the house all the pictures are contemporary and Norfolk except for the jolly nude at the end he's not a Norfolk artist but all the other paintings are Norfolk artists and they are our choice when you inherit a space like this of course you inherit the contents and you have to go with the flow it's rather nice for us to have a space in the house when we moved in we found all this glass at the back of a dark cupboard and it's from the 1930s and we think that it was brought to the house as a as a present for a long stay from somebody and it comes from Czechoslovakia and I thought I live in here I you know do all the cooking and live in here this is that we really like to have a look at this and so we lit the cupboard and we've lined it up we don't use it but it's it's very beautiful we discovered it in a box in the cellar entirely unloved so come and have a look at our snug which is where we this is wonderful because it's an integral part of the kitchen so you know we can be on our laptops we can cook we can eat we can watch telly we can live in this space and we can shutter up the rest of the house to protect the fabrics and so on so we we shut all the shutters we lock the doors and we we use this space so it's like a sort of huge flat isn't it really and we don't we don't have to move from here and again all the all the paintings on the wall here are paintings that we've collected and all contemporary almost without exception contemporary Norfolk artists a wood burner that is key to morale in the winter having that roaring away giving everywhere warmth very nice and the snug when we moved in this was Charlie's uncle's office and it had dark bottle green office carpet tiles and light strip lighting hanging from the ceiling chocolate brown wallpaper chocolate brown wallpaper and we thought we've got to use this as the extension to our kitchen it's where we're going to live we had to take them back to plaster and the colour of the plaster was so wonderful I thought how can we replicate that and we find a farrow and bore colour which replicates it's called setting plaster and so that was the colour for this room and it shows off I adore pink as you probably see and it shows off all our paintings very well we love this room and I find some fantastic fabric to go with the pink walls as you can guess we very nearly didn't paint it at all because the plaster colour was so good but the children complain that we're kleptos and they say when you die we're going to be left to sort all this out so every time they come home we find things have been put away in cupboards but you know when they go I put I put everything out again for me my favourite room has to be the winter garden not in winter when everything's put to bed in there and it's even colder than the house but we open it up in April late April and it stays open until late October and it's joyful as you'll see it's just filled with flowers pelargoniums campsis plumbago and there's a wonderful scent and we have palms and citrus and it's always joyful even on a rainy day it's it's a feel-good room and and and that is my if it's a room it's I suppose an orangery or a conservatory but it's my favourite room in the house and this room I love the light here too yeah I would add to that another favourite room actually is our kitchen where there's a woodburner where we really can be warm and that of course is where all the things of modern life yes the tv's there the newspapers are there the food is there yeah children are going to be there um so I think a winter's evening in our kitchen snug yeah love that with the newspapers in terms of other rooms I rather enjoy also the library particularly again in winter with a big fire in the curtains drawn the glass of port um and and blazing logs it's very homely and warm feel in there and being surrounded by books and history and paintings of the family and so on um there's a great sense of continuity and the feeling you're part of a long piece of history which has gone on for a long time and within that will go on for many years to come so this is my favourite room in the house I think um and it's it's a conservatory but its proper name is the winter garden and in fact it's not really a winter garden at all because in winter everything goes to sleep we cut back the pelargoniums we put them under this canopy um and cover them with fleece um so nothing happens in here and it's a closed space really until April but um the values of of the Edwardians who lived here was rather different because I think this was a space that was used in winter because you'll see there's a very very long radiator at the back of the winter garden which no longer functions um and there were hot water pipes underneath the grills here which let out some air to keep the beloved plants warm and happy keep the frost off of course there's no heating in the house but you know the priority was the plants but it really is joyful we just filled it with pelargoniums which just seem to to do their own thing I water them and feed them um and dead heads and pray I pray but um the story of the building of this room is quite amusing um my great-grandfather uh Thomas Albert Cook who built the house um set the architect off with the structure of the building Skipper and he went off on a world tour for a year to let the builders and Skipper get on with and he came back and asked Skipper to show him around so they went around the house what was being built and uh and my great-grandfather I gather thought it was all very good and he then turned to Skipper and said but where is the ballroom and you can imagine one of those pitch or foreign things no ballroom and so um Skipper was obliged to build this room um as a ballroom it would have been hopeless a ballroom but a hard cold floor very echoey it would never have worked a ballroom but I think my grandfather was happy enough not have used the ball instead a wonderful garden what we use it for now as well as for the family and just we eat because it's off the kitchen we eat here when we've got friends or family it's just and it leads into the garden but it's registered for civil ceremonies because we have a very small number of weddings at Seno um exclusive weddings um every year just a small number and this is registered for civil ceremonies so people can get married here they have their wedding breakfast here we have had dancing here and sometimes small weddings for 50 people they eat on trestle tables at this end and then they dance at this end or it can be a drinks reception um for weddings so it's it's it's been a wonderful space and actually Charlie and I've had some cracking parties in here um as well um and serve our children and serve our children sometimes with very loud music still going at breakfast time the following morning let's head up to the bedrooms we'll see one or two of the bedrooms anyway we'll stop on the way at a space that we call the rotunda which was where the original georgian staircase was but it's really you can't go and see a bedroom without seeing this because it's really rather lovely and this mural was painted in the 1970s and this is part of the original georgian plaster work with the family crest the family crests of people who used to before the cooks came here from the rotunda we're going to our bedroom now this is full of stuff that we've collected um every surface is covered but it's rather fun these curtains actually came from our house in london endless hats endless things that the children have drawn and a really big room yes but again it's the sort of lots of pink in here it's a tile bathroom and the these tiles are very fashionable uh at the time that the edwardian house has completed there's an interest in the in the middle east and the far east and it's always feels to me like a a hammam and um the watercolors on the wall are all painted by charlie's great great grandfather on on on his father on his father's side of the family and they're all of of of india and the middle east um what's now pakistan and uh fits very well very reminiscent or resident of william morris an original in this bit of the house you've got uh original edwardian light fittings and this uh wonderful room which was decorated in i guess the late 70s early 80s uh with lots of cofax fabric and cofax wallpaper and we had a leak that came through to store we've got a there's a floor above this and the water came through the roof the floor above and into this room and it damaged all the wallpaper along this in in this bay and when we moved in in 2003 we managed to source uh the same cofax wallpaper it's got a slightly different hue but um luckily they were still making it so we could re-paper but we've kept the fabric we've just done a bit of stitching and repairing and mending but um it's rather fun it's part of the evolution of the house and actually yes it's wonderful we've got our children's dolls houses here um one in each bedroom people love staying in this room but it's a classic edwardian thing for a bedroom when it was your in your grandmother's day it was the morning room yes and it used the there was a table in the middle of the room and she'd organize everybody for the day the cook it was effective yeah she would sit in great state behind a table and boss people around tell all the maids and people where to go and work and discuss with the cook what's going to be used in that day yeah it wasn't a bedroom then but uh i think it became a bedroom in the 70s we go into this bedroom really because i want to show you the bathroom because it's just rather fun and it's large we had the idea that we'd try and make this into a four-poster bath in fact we ran out of energy in time we haven't done it yet it might yet happen but this would be just wonderful to make a four-poster bath but all all the paintings on the wall all these paintings are painted by your great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather of india and persia as it then was iran today um and lovely colfax wallpaper mad about this but it's um i've never had a bath in here actually but people who have bathed in here so it's really wonderful because you've got a sort of you've got a 180 view lying in your bath and actually if you look out of the window in that direction you can see the boat house which sits over the park lake and it's just a lovely place to have a soak we want to show you this bedroom because the wallpaper is original 1909 and we found a sample of it which is at the vna the victoria and albert museum in london and normally we have the blinds down and the curtains closed to try and protect it and we don't allow any children to stay in here with crayons or anything else no no children in here but um it is wonderful that it survived whatever that is 100 nearly 120 years probably worth having a look at it wonderful wonderful colors and and and in fantastic condition when the rest of the world is is chaos this is the p this is the place you can return to which is safe you understand it you put a lot of yourself into it the happiest times have but it's um it's where you come back to and you understand it it's your sort of safe space we really find out about what made this home i think and during the covid crisis when we were lucky enough to have um our three children uh back here with us and we were isolated in this house we had many months of just us the family having the most wonderful time it was awful for so many but i have to say our experience of it um all being able to work from home with our family was it was actually a very happy one and we know we were very lucky in that we were lucky although all of us had got covid um but we were we were very lucky the other times the happiest in this house i think are when our children filled up with their friends we did um hit the record once youngsters age 17 18 19 20 all staying here um we had a little music festival in the parkland out here and we had that that was the maximum we ever had it was great fun but um each of the children had i think i think we started off saying you can each have five friends to stay and that became 15 16 17 each yeah sort of eight dad you mind if i think i might be 10 followed by dad i don't know how many yeah they slept on the floor we found one of them with his feet in the fountain lying on one in the dog bed yeah um but actually it's joyful you know with all their sort of craziness and their music and and not treating the house with they treat it with respect and love but behaving in a sort of 21st century way and just filling every room with you know music and the craziness of youth and we love that and quite often we have you'll see our big dining room which is very formal and there were people who came to stay here who hadn't stayed in a house like this before and we used to find that one of the things we've got a great dressing up chest and we'd say okay tonight we're going to have dinner in the big dining room because we're 20 or whatever and it's got to be fancy dress and we have cross dressing and you know girls men in mini skirts and girls dressed as min pins and all sorts and and it's a diffuses the formality of the thing and and yeah we love it i can remember a particular moment which made me think this is home um i was working in norwich at the time in the summer evening and the i came back from work and was driving up the outside of the house i somewhere away from the house maybe three or four hundred yards and i could hear music and i stopped the car and wound the window down and the entire building all the windows are open top floor bottom floor everywhere and the building is going boom boom boom boom boom with music i thought yes that's good yeah this is home and that the children have made it their home i mean they they all live and work in london but they still you know they default they come back here and and they love it when they're here so goodbye homeworthy it's been wonderful having you here come and see us again thanks for watching be sure to go to homeworthy.com for exclusive content shopping guides and so much more