A Private View: a joyous Georgian manor that acts as a repository for art, work, love and family life

Barming Place has as Kentish a background as they come, finished in 1768 for a family of successful fruit and hops farmers. At one point, it was the only house in the domain – a paradigm of the Georgian red-brick, with just a Norman church for a neighbour. “It’s the archetypal English Georgian house,” says Robert, “the kind of house they based doll’s houses on.” Now, the village is a little more developed, “But in summer we’re so secluded, surrounded by a cathedral of trees and so close to the river, which is the natural border between urbanised and rural Kent. Beyond the Medway, it’s just fields and farms, all the way to the coast.”

In the six years Robert, whose work is currently on view at Charleston House’s Lewes outpost, and his wife – also a poet, as well as an actress and filmmaker – have lived at Barming Place, they have imbued its formerly decrepit rooms with an air of genuinely eccentric charm, pairing distempered walls with candy-shop colour palettes and umpteen Italian chandeliers. There are art studios and writing spaces, a music room for jam sessions and a miniature theatre – which Robert has painted as the Bay of Naples – for the children in the garden, strides away from a somewhat less tempestuous swimming pool of heavenly Hockney blue. Nearby, Robert’s own monumental poetry installations tip everything briefly towards the sublime. It is a house made for enjoyment and creativity, a place for a happy, fulfilled life, as the words emblazoned on the walls of the music room – ‘Ars Labor Amor Vita Ars’ – remind any fortunate denizens: ‘Art, Work, Love, Life, Art’.

That pool, Robert says, is what he shall miss the most, along with the light shows staged by the afternoon sun through the western façade’s original Georgian glass windows. But another restoration project now beckons. “The house was featured on the cover of House & Garden last year, which felt like a huge honour, but I think that once we had achieved that a part of us both thought, ‘Job done, what’s next?’” Robert says. “It really has been the most fun we’ve ever had. The magic of this house is the way, as a modern family, you can live in it, work in it and be on holiday here, all at the same time. We’ll miss it terribly but we’ve caught the restoration bug now.”

Robert Montgomery: “We lived in London before we moved here, in a Georgian house on Lillie Road that made us fall in love with Georgian architecture, so much so that we decided to take on a restoration. We knew we needed to keep a link with London, so, with a compass we drew our commutable circle around the city – and this was simply the most beautiful house we found.

“It was in quite a dilapidated state, undecorated since the 1960s. It has been sliced in two at some point, to incorporate a prep school in half the house, so there was a lot of work to do, but the exciting thing was that it had never been modernised. Almost every single pane of glass is from 1768. There’s even a Georgian washing machine, called a copper, in the old scullery. It’s the only one I’ve ever seen outside of a museum.

“The house has a Grade II* listing, which means it’s a house of particular historic importance and it needed a lot of care. The local heritage officers were massively enthusiastic and helpful as they understood we were investing a lot of time and money in restoration. We had a lot of work to do: reinstating damaged lath-and-plaster walls, restoring and repointing brickwork and protecting some very fragile hessian wallcoverings, but most importantly we reinstated the original Georgian footprint. The arches in the main hall had been walled over into smaller doorways, we uncovered those and restored the original open arches. At that point, the architecture really began to sing and the house was washed with light.

“I studied art history and was taught that modernists such as Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier were the masters of light. I thought that was a modern thing. But the truth is absolutely to the contrary. The Georgian architects – who had only daylight to work with – were the true masters. You only need to see the sun streaming through the elegant fanlight windows that sit on both the front and rear façades of this house, or the way the light plays through the leaves in the garden and hits the wall of the dining room, to understand that. The light show in the afternoons when the sun moves through the original Georgian handmade glass is incredible – almost orchestral. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. If you hold a compass you realise the formal front of Barming Place faces due east, and the back faces due west, so the Georgian architects were really playing with sunlight and the passage of the sun through the day.

“When it came to colour, we studied Edward Bulmer’s great book on Georgian paints, going to the brighter end of the Georgian colour palette and using Bulmer’s wonderful lime-based paints. We wanted to bring a bit of a European mood to this very English house. That idea was very much informed by my wife’s Italian heritage, so there’s a blend of English architecture with Italianate touches, though I feel there is something fundamentally European to this house, in the way it is open to the gardens. The music room, which was added in 1820, is in a way almost a giant garden room, opening on to terraces.

“We have some wonderfully old trees in the garden, including a 400-year-old holm oak, thanks to a previous custodian, who was a bit of an amateur arborist. We’ve also got an Australian gum tree, ginkgoes, Scots pines… In summer, with all of them in leaf, it feels like we live in the woods. Because of them – and with the help of our brilliant gardener Allen, whom we inherited with the house and who has looked after the grounds here for 40 years, my wife and I have become amateur gardeners in the Kentish tradition: we have a wild cherry orchard, as well as a flower meadow. It’s all on an acre and a half of land, so you have a Georgian manor house without the millstone of a huge estate.

“The pool is a big part of life here. From Easter onwards my wife and I work in our studios until four, when the kids come home from school, then we all go for a swim. We eat outside every day we can from April until November, making the most of the long afternoon sun. When you're by the pool in the summer you could really be in Tuscany. Again, it’s all about the light. We will miss the very special light here enormously.”

Robert Montgomery: The People You Love Become Ghosts Inside of You is on display at Charleston in Lewes, Southover Road, Lewes, BN7 1AB until 12 April