The Power Of Patience

The architect George Saumarez Smith describes how he created a home by slow evolution, rather than revolution

- George Saumarez Smith

The walls of the dining room are in Morris & Co’s Indian wallpaper design. The blockprinted table cloth was bought in Delhi

MY childhood was spent among books and architectural drawings. The latter were those of my grandfather, the Classical architect Raymond Erith, and the former were those of my father, who was a bookseller, so it is perhaps no surprise that I now live surrounded by both.

This house is in Winchester, where I moved 15 years ago to become a director of ADAM Architecture. At first, the house was rather empty and simply decorated in muted colours. To make it a bit more homely, I started buying furniture at local auction houses, mainly from Andrew Smith at Itchen Stoke near Winchester, Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury and Bellmans in Winchester. I found, to my surprise, that it was possible to buy late- Georgian tables and chairs very cheaply and my house soon filled up with brown furniture.

The next things I started to collect were pictures. I had made linocuts at school and had a couple of large architectural linocuts by Quinlan Terry, who had taken over my grandfather’s practice and in whose office I had trained when I left university. I also love the work of a group of linocut artists in Great Bardfield in Essex, perhaps the best known of whom was Edward Bawden. I was very lucky to find several linocuts by Sheila Robinson, a pupil and later a close friend of Bawden’s, which I bought from her daughter Chloë Cheese about 10 years ago.