ART, LIFE & STYLE

Farleys House in East Sussex, former home of surrealists Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, rivals Charleston for artistic inspiration, with rooms filled with photography, paintings and colourful murals, and a guest book signed by some of the most celebrated artists of the 20th century

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Deep in the green lanes of East Sussex, there's a rambling country house set in a glorious garden.

Inside, its walls are covered in magnificent murals. Every shelf, niche and surface holds a trinket or treasure - tiny figures sculpted from the wire top of a champagne bottle; knuckle dusters (brass for day, silver to wear with evening dress), vintage Vogue covers... The guest book lists a roster of renowned 20th-century artists, who worked, played and loved here. The gallery in an adjacent barn puts on exhibitions of contemporary art. Perhaps this sounds familiar, but this isn’t Charleston, that other famous artists' house, just a 15-minute drive away. This is Farleys House and Gallery, former home of photographer, war reporter, cook and model, Lee Miller, and her husband, the surrealist artist and co-founder of the ICA, Roland Penrose. The couple moved here in 1949, when Lee was 42 and had already created the images that made her famous - models in the Blitz, solarised portraits produced with Man Ray, surrealist landscapes of Egypt, the horrors of the concentration camps, a defiant selfie in Hitler's bathtub.

Farleys was a refuge in a country still reeling from the effects of war and rationing, but it wasn't a retreat. Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, Joan Miró, Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington were just some of the guests who stayed here. 'They would arrive and Lee would hand them a shovel, so they could help dig the vegetable beds in the garden,' says her son, Antony Penrose, who curates his parents’ legacy with the help of his daughter, Ami Bouhassane. He remembers biting Picasso on the arm (and Picasso biting him back), and his mother using one of the artist’s precious ceramic jugs as a gravy boat. They are still archiving more than 60,000 of Lee’s negatives found in the loft after her death.