A Private View: keeping the Famous Five dream alive in a storybook cottage in Oxfordshire

The BAFTA-award winning composer Ben Foster admits he might have overdone the soundproofing in his studio at the Old Bakehouse. There are neighbours, yes, but realistically, it is more likely to be the faint sounds from a children’s storybook that disturb his music: sheep bleating at the bottom of the garden; horses ambling past the sleepy junction that the house sits on; the reassuring rumble of an occasional steam train. “All you can see is rolling hills and all you can hear is a car an hour, you’re not going to be annoying anyone …” laughs Ben who – with his violinist wife, Nina – moved from north London to this corner of Oxfordshire nearly a decade ago.

Their eldest son was not yet one, and it was the well-worn tale of sleep-deprived parents yearning for more space. “We fancied living somewhere with peace and quiet where our son could have freedom, and so we started to spend our weekends driving out from Belsize Park to explore the Hambleden Valley,” Ben remembers. The Old Bakehouse was at first discarded as too small, but the fairtale façade cunningly hid a warren of rooms. “I remember standing upstairs looking out from the bedroom and saying to Ben: ‘This is magical’,” reminisces Nina, marvelling at the mist hanging over the field at the back of the house.

Two more sons followed and the Famous Five-esque early childhood that they’d dreamt of for their boys unfurled: cycling to the nearby forest school nursery and scaling the silver birch treehouse they had commissioned in the garden. “It’s a life that we didn’t know as kids – I grew up in Liverpool and Nina in Sheffield – but even as adults, we found it charming,” says Ben.

As a new chapter of urban life in Oxford dawns and the house comes on the market, Ben reflects on their decade in the countryside: “There’s a real trope about moving to the country and having a vegetable patch – but even if you do it on a very amateur basis, there’s a joy to seeing that one tomato that’s survived, or to make a fence from what you find in the forest. It’s surprised us, how much joy you – and the kids – can get from that way of life.”

Ben Foster: “This feels like a house that is meant to be passed on. You feel aware of its previous owners. One of Hitchcock’s favourite actresses Jean Marsh (who co-created and starred in the 1970s series, Upstairs, Downstairs) lived here. We’re both in the television industry, and so it felt like an incredible place to live for a while. Nina has played her violin and we’ve recorded a lot in the studio, so it feels like we’ve made the best of it.

“The hazel wood opposite has been there for 200 years. In the 18th century, when it still functioned as a bakehouse, the owners of the house would have cut hazel to fuel the fires. There’s an agreement that the owners of the house can still look after it today, and so our boys have had their own forest to play in. When you’re in the woods, it’s as though you’re actually not in the 21st century at all, you might still be living 200 years ago.

“When we moved in, we ripped up the carpets to reveal the original stone floors, and we took out a couple of false ceilings so we could expose the beams. We just wanted to get back to the bones. Because the house is so old with its timber frames and wall panels, we think it can take any style of furniture. We have Eames pieces and shop fittings from Retrouvius. It all works …

“We’ve both done a lot of touring around the world with our music, which means we’ve been lucky enough to stay in some great hotels which have given us inspiration for the interiors. Every time we went to a really nice hotel with a lovely bathroom, we’d think ‘Oh, one day…’ For the bathrooms here we looked at pictures of every Aesop shop we’d ever seen across the globe and copied what they had. We wanted something utilitarian, functional but beautiful.

“We used to paint the front door different colours for fun, but eventually we stuck with this green. I picked up a flake of paint that had fallen off the window at the pub in nearby Hambleden – a very typical Chiltern village – and we copied that.

“There’s an amazing auction house in Leamington Spa called Elephant House Auctions which had all kinds of crazy fairground pieces. We have this amazing laughing sailor who rocks when you put a penny in. Rather than going down the traditional route just because it’s a house in the country, we like things that are surprising and fun. And there are some things that might remind us of a tour – Nina has a Jamie Hewlett sketch from the time that she was in his band Gorillaz. The kids have grown up with this sensibility as well, which in a way is a good thing, but in a way it’s not. They don’t like to throw stuff away and are becoming collectors like we are. Some might call it clutter, but to us it’s treasure.

“Until lockdown, when I was in my early 40s, I’d never really thought to properly look at the planets and the stars until one of our sons got a telescope. I was working on the music for a documentary about the space station at the time, and from the windows of the Old Bakehouse we could see Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. It made me realise that living in the country really makes you think about things that I hadn’t considered before. Life has different chapters, and we might have moved on to the next one, but our time here won’t leave us.”