A Private View: rare as gold dust – an impeccably restored Huguenot house in Spitalfields

“People move here and then get hooked on it.” Barra Little is giving me a tour of the five-storey Georgian townhouse that has recently come to market. By “here”, he means Spitalfields, and by “it”, he means the unusual sense of community spirit and conservational drive this pocket of east London inspires in its denizens.

For Barra, a Galway-born lawyer who grew up in the US, that has encompassed not only several consecutive “doer-uppers” here but also becoming a trustee and erstwhile chairman of The Spitalfields Trust, which has worked tirelessly over the last half-century to save buildings like this one from the developer’s wrecking ball and other calamities. (Barra’s biggest project on behalf of the Trust has been to reacquire 19 Princelet Street, a Huguenot mansion-turned-Jewish synagogue due to open to the public next year as “a place to reflect on migration over the centuries”.)

Number 3 Fournier Street, where Barra lives with his partner, James, their two young boys and a black labrador named Ralph, is “one of the ‘big four’ great houses of Spitalfields” built in around 1750 by one of the community of Huguenot silk weavers and merchants that first settled the area in the late 17th century. Ascending the freestanding staircase to the first-floor drawing room with its original panelling and dentil cornicing, I feel as if I’ve been here before – not only because these Spitalfields houses share a very particular vernacular, but also because this particular house has been featured not once but twice in The World of Interiors. In those outings it belonged to the designer Marianna Kennedy and her husband, Charles Gledhill, who had bought the house in 1996 in a derelict state but, crucially, with many of its original features intact, or lying hidden behind plywood.

While Barra and his partner have made subtle updates and “flipped the house around” – reintroducing a kitchen to the basement and adding bedrooms and a new bathroom on the top floor, where the kitchen used to be – they have also preserved much of what they inherited from their predecessors, right down to the fish in the courtyard’s water trough.

A long-standing board member of The Spitalfields Trust herself, Marianna worked with skilled craftsmen to restore pine floors, lath and plaster and reinstall fire surrounds (the drawing room’s is a Batty Langley design), and mixed her own paint for walls, ceilings and woodwork using traditional pigments. “That’s a gesso of hers that we recently renewed,” Barra says of the drawing room’s ceiling. “It’s incredible because the blue is so vivid, and it changes with the light. We didn’t alter anything in this room except the furniture, because the colours are fabulous.”

Another unchanged room – and one that has set many a heart aflutter among Instagram-scrolling interiors buffs – can be found one floor up. The master bathroom’s expansive tub, with its Carrara-marble surround made by east London stonemasons, seems a monument to the art of luxuriating. What’s more, as Barra points out, it “must have one of the best views in London” – namely Hawksmoor’s masterpiece Christ Church, whose northern flank runs along this end of Fournier Street. (The view of this architectural gem from the tub is only surpassed by that from the eyrie-like rooftop garden, where you can admire the baroque details of the belltower up close – or a resident hawk feeding its young.) And for any bather nervous that the architect’s ghost might have too good a view from the belfry, a latticed window screen remains in place, along with Roman blinds made of bookcloth.

Bouncing light around the space, the bathroom’s Venetian plaster walls were done by Ian Harper, who returned recently to renew the finish. He is one of a handful of specialist artisans who have worked for decades on Spitalfields buildings, both private homes and at Dennis Severs’ House round the corner, and on whom Barra has been able to call for most of the work they’ve done here. “You become friends, and then because you all know the neighbourhood you know where there’s a detail you want to get just right; so you can say for instance, I want that window from No 14, or that bracket from No 27 [one of the Trust’s first restorations], or the way that stair turns doesn’t feel quite right – and they’ll know exactly what you mean.” Nor is maintaining what’s already here a problem, Barra says. “You only need that little black book and the house kind of looks after itself.”

Barra Little: “We first came to Spitalfields from another part of London. My office was going to be based nearby, so we decided to buy a one-bed flat on Folgate Street. We moved in, carried everything upstairs, then came down to explore the neighbourhood. A guy next door [Mick Pedroli] was closing the shutters of Dennis Severs’ House, he saw us and said ‘You’re new here’ – which nobody ever did where we lived before – and then gave us a candlelit tour of the house. Then we met Martin Lane, who introduced us to everyone else, including Sandra [Esqulant] from the Golden Heart pub – and so it just became a really enveloping community.

“The red resin lamp in the hall is how we ended up in this house. I came here when it was Marianna’s showroom, wanting to buy my partner a lamp. It took me ages to decide, looking at the different colour combinations, then finally she was writing up the receipt and stopped and said, ‘I can’t sell you this lamp.’ It turns out James had come here and picked out exactly the same one for me. So she made a beautiful mirror for me to give to him. We became friends, and fellow trustees, and ended up swapping houses: Marianna and Charles bought our house on Elder Street, and she separated her workshop, which is now on nearby Wentworth Street.

“This house and the one next door were built around 1750 by a silk merchant named Peter Lequex. This story may be apocryphal but supposedly he had planned it to be a huge double-fronted house and was going to give it to his nephew; then he lost faith in him, and decided to split the plot into two separate houses, giving only this one to his nephew. Wanting a grander house, the nephew then had these dummy doors built into the party walls to make it look like a larger property. Our kids have been looking up spells to try and unlock these ‘magic doors’ that have never been opened.

“The ground floor acquired its shopfront in the 1870s, when it was a pawn shop [the lettering ‘W&A Jones’ is still visible above the door and was recovered by Jim Howett]. The front space was used for a scene in the film The Crying Game. Then it was a showroom, and we’ve turned it into a sitting room, with an adjoining dining room.

“Marianna worked here with Jim Howett, who had his workshop at the back of the house beyond the courtyard. That structure was built in the 19th century as a store for ripening green bananas that came in from London Docks. There are still huge banana trees growing over the courtyard. We converted the workshop into a guesthouse and hosted a Ukrainian family there until recently. Now that it’s summer and unoccupied we’ll probably start cooking in the kitchen there (extended for us by Dave Thompson, a brilliant Spitalfields joiner) and eating in the courtyard.

“The staircase down to the basement was enclosed at some point, so we got permission to open it up and have new banisters hand-carved to match the originals. Another great joiner, Des Simpson, worked on that. It’s nice to have the extra light as you go down to the kitchen. Then, downstairs, Berdoulat helped us with the design, including a glazed pantry/wine cellar. The glazing throughout the house makes such a difference to the openness and the light. We put antique York slabs over a breathable floor with underfloor heating, and lime-plastered the walls. There’s a hidden air system which regulates moisture and temperature, and it’s incredible how fresh the air is now. The big original stone sink is still in situ, surrounded by Delft-style tiles made by Simon Pettet [a ceramicist who lived and worked at Dennis Severs’ House, which staged an exhibition on Pettet’s work last year]. We’ve put a shower and loo in what was probably the old silver vault.

“Up at the top, where Charles Gledhill’s bookbinding workshop used to be, we made a new bathroom (having redone all the plumbing – the water pressure is now fantastic). After we moved in I was up there vacuuming, and I kept hovering up gold dust, because of all the gold leaf he had used during 20 years of bookbinding.

“The fireplace in the library on the first floor has a set of 17th-century manganese tiles, which is extremely rare in Spitalfields. They’re probably Dutch, and their Biblical themes relevant to an 18th-century Huguenot clientele. These windows at the back of the house also contain some of their original 18th-century glass, which is an incredibly rare survival.

“All you hear at the back of the house is birdsong. It’s incredibly quiet. And yet it’s been a great party house as well. We had a wonderful St Patrick’s Day ball last year. There was a live band in the drawing room, and all the neighbours were here, from people in their eighties to teenagers, and we had Guinness and champagne and smoked salmon. It was brilliant. Our last house was Mariga Guinness’s house briefly in the 1970s, and the Chieftains used to play at her parties there; so we were inspired by that. And Marianna and Charles had great parties when they lived here. It’s very important that the person who buys this gets all that – because there are lots of big houses in London, but something that has this sort of spirit and centrality to a neighbourhood is quite rare.”