A Home with a History: an enchanting antique dealer’s shop and home, painted in nature's colours

Catherine Waters is a collector and storyteller. Every object in her shop is placed so the customer can see and feel its unique qualities – a rarity in a world driven toward excess and facsimile. The shop stands out with its beautiful window display; a trailing, delicate installation of wispy Old Man’s Beard, lichen-stippled twigs and morsels of dried moss drape across the top of the windows.

Inside, the high ceilings encase an enchanting space that brings the outside in, with sculptural stalks of dill flowers, an intricate fallen pigeon’s nest, and dried sprigs of heather from the moors. A large internal window looks onto the shop from an elegant, curved stairwell, borrowing light for the living space upstairs.

Once Catherine and her partner Dan, a restoration builder and specialist woodworker, crossed the threshold of 22 North Street, they immediately felt connected to the building. “We couldn't believe our luck when we found this place. I fell in love with it on the first viewing – the space, light and the sound of the chattering jackdaws in the chimney,” says Catherine.

She explains that during the mid-19th century, George Langler, a saddler and harness maker, lived and worked at the shop next door. “He bought and pulled down the property on this site to build a new shop and home to accommodate his wife and seven children.”

Since then, the building has housed a butcher's, a fireplace shop, and an artist’s gallery whose brushstroke traces can still be seen in flourishes on the beams upstairs. What’s clear is that it is, and always has been, a place of work and home intertwined.

The building has three floors, and we journey up the swooping stairwell from the shop to Catherine's living space. The sash Grade-II-listed windows overlook the grey-stone town hall, topped with an ironwork weathervane that swings slightly in the summer breeze. The street below is filled with the soft sounds of friendly residents calling ‘hellos’ to each other. Others pace their way up to the moors, a short stroll away, where Catherine and her family spend much of their time.

Catherine and Dan have worked continuously on restoring 22 North Street for almost six years, and they like to show the inner workings and idiosyncrasies of the fabric of this space. A precise rectangle cut out of the plasterwork above the sink area in the bathroom shows the intricate lathework – a lattice of sinewy harp strings.

When restoring the building, they revealed small stories of those who walked the corridors before them. “Under a floorboard upstairs, we found a collection of a child's things – some old clay marbles, a bobby pin and an old lead toy sheep. You can also make out an etching of a signature in my daughter's room.”

A striking, early 19th-century curved white and glass cabinet sits by the window in the corner of the sitting room, displaying some of the couple’s precious and unusual finds. This piece of furniture became a symbolic totem found by chance in a salvage yard. “We found our cabinet of curiosities on our honeymoon – Dan found one half and I the other in different parts of the yard. We share a deep love of honestly built things,” she smiles. “One of Dan’s favourite projects is to build handcrafted cabins and structures, and I love that he re-purposes old sash windows he's collected on his travels.”

A long antique bath looks towards a narrow window overlooking rooftops and out to the hills. “Dan took out the 1980s glass-tiled bathroom and plastic bath that was here, and we replaced it with a Victorian cast iron bath from nearby Ivybridge,” says Catherine. “We'd underestimated just how heavy it was to carry up two flights of curved stairs, and it took Dan and three others the best part of a day to get it in place, one small step at a time.”

Catherine gathers much of her inspiration from the natural world, and she loves her garden just as much as her home’s historic interior. “The garden walls are much older than the house, which serves as a reminder that this plot has been lived on by people since at least medieval times, partly due to the narrow front street and long burgage plot at the back,” she says. “It’s been suggested that there was a tinner’s yard for processing tin ore from Dartmoor at the bottom of our garden too, a practice which dates to the 12th century.”

It’s important to her that this outside space can grow wild, bursting with poppies, brambles, scabious, fennel, and wild carrot, with lush ferns unfurling in the light. She recalls her late grandad: “He knew all the names of the wildflowers and butterflies, and each bird by its song. I loved to be there alongside him, soaking it all up.”

At the height of lockdown, Catherine became inspired by colour too. She met Francesca Wezel of Francesca’s Paints via a fellow antiques dealer. “I called the paint company and discovered that Francesca was running this tiny business, fulfilling the work of three people alone, under really stretched circumstances, yet she still took time to talk to me.”

Their friendship bloomed, and together they created the Dartmoor Collection – an environmentally-friendly collection of purposefully muted colours. Some of the shades now colour Catherine’s own walls: ‘Witches’ Whiskers’ features in the main living space – inspired by a green lichen used medicinally for hundreds of years, while ‘Hare’s Ear,’ which is named after a distinct orange-pink fungi found on the moors, washes the kitchen walls. 

The shifting colours and seasons of Dartmoor have a firm hold on Catherine and enrich both her home and business. Today is full of vivid blue skies, with drifts of passing clouds, but the time of year that sings to her is the end of summer. “There’s a time, just nudging into autumn, when I think the landscape looks at its best. There was an evening last year when I was lucky enough to catch the soft coral pinks of the sunset, the fading mauve of the heather and the various shades of bracken. These are the colours that really speak to me and that I want to live amongst, forever really.”

To order from Catherine’s Dartmoor Collection, contact: info@catherinewatersantiques.com

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