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Magazine Article
Country Living July 2005
HOUSE OF ROSES
Surrounded by a sea of scented roses, Danaë Brook’s elegant home echoes the glorious hues of her favourite flowers while bringing a flavour of France to rural Essex.
In the heart of Constable country sits a rather distinctive house, built in a style more commonly found in the French countryside. Many years ago my husband’s father farmed mushrooms here and the family lived in the old Tudor manor house a field or two away. When, in 1971, they decided to sell it and the outlying barns and cottages, they held on to most of the land and made up their minds to build a new house, inspired by the elegant hunting lodges they had grown to love while living in the south of France. Architects were commissioned to design a house that would fit into the landscape: it was to be long, lean and light, making the most of the quintessentially English setting, while also drawing on French influences.
A straight gravel drive, lined with pleached limes in the French style, leads you to the front door. Just one-room wide, with a corridor running through it, the house has the look of a conservatory, with beautiful vistas from every room. Huge French windows on either side of the front door open straight onto a terraced courtyard with a breathtaking view down to the tributary of the Stour and a 13th-century church.
When my husband’s mother died in 1998 and left him this house, we realised we would have to come up with a way of keeping things going. She had always cultivated ravishingly beautiful roses in her formal garden – scented, old fashioned and blowsy – and these provided the inspiration for our business. We now grow the same roses on a much larger scale and sell the freshly cut blooms to florists and brides all over the world.
Before we moved in, the character of the house had already been established – painted in fine French detail that had once been richly textured and was now a little faded. Over the past few years, though, our business, Country Roses, has had a certain influence on the house. It now sits amid beds full of thousands of roses, which we cut to bring inside, imbuing every room with their wonderful scent and colour.
The hues of the roses echo the shades of the walls, even though each room has a very different decorative scheme. My mother-in-law had exquisite taste and chose expensive silk wallpapers for almost every room. Some we have peeled off and replaced with paint because the motifs hadn’t survived, but the vivid coral and yellow wallflowers still work well with the furniture in the bamboo room, and a blue and grey floral print has been retained in the children’s room.
Elsewhere we have simplified the decoration by painting walls instead. As you enter the hall, the unusual limey-yellow paint picks up the light whether there is sun or not, and at the top of the wide sweep of the staircase, the upper floor with its three bedrooms and airy bathroom holds light like a glass bowl. There are window seats in each of the bedrooms which overlook the rose fields and a willow grove.
Wanting to make our own mark on the house, without changing its character too much, we decided to return to its roots. We found a furniture auction house, just west of Paris, which specialised in flooring from Versailles and other grand establishments. Bidding in French was a hair-raising experience, but we came home with a parquet floor for our bedroom – to complement the original parquet in the hall and drawing room – and terracotta tiles edged with oak for the kitchen which, together with the buttery yellow walls, give the room a mellow glow. A Lacanche range is great for cooking whether it is just the two of us or we have a house full of children and friends.
As the weather warms up, the courtyard becomes an extra room: fringed by wisteria, and later lavender, it is next to the formal French rose garden, watched over by a dovecote from which white fantailed pigeons swoop and swirl against the blueness of the sky. Sitting out on a balmy summer’s evening, the air filled with the scent of thousands of roses, you could almost be in the south of France – the inspiration for it all.