A Room of One’s Own: furniture designer Matthew Cox hosts a candlelit evening with friends in the wonkiest room in his house

In Lincolnshire’s storied town of Stamford, praised by the likes of Sir Walter Scott and John Betjemen as one of England’s finest stone towns, lies a glorious house, built at the tail end of the Stuart period but with the burgeoning sensibilities that would come to define Georgian architecture. It is lived in by Matthew Cox and his partner in work and life, Camilla McLean, who together run Matthew Cox, a furniture and antiques company that produces considered pieces designed to be as “essential and beautiful in 100 years as they are today”. Matthew invites us in for a candlelit evening in his dining room – a space that encapsulates both the man and the business, the formal and laidback, the past and future.

When Matthew and Camilla first started looking for a home in Stamford, they had an early glimpse of what life might be like in the grand late 17th-century house they now call home. “The dining room had a slight gap in the curtains, so we could see what it was like from the outside. The light of the room glowed enticingly from across the street …” he recalls.

He might not have known it then, but this was a particularly auspicious sign, a suggestion of what life and work would morph into in the home. The dining room, the oldest space in the house, is what Matthew calls a “really human space” – it is both a family room and where furniture is shot for his namesake company; where board meetings happen, and where, last year, the team (which now totals 25) held their Christmas party. Its authenticity, versatility and, above all else, pared-back beauty is a brilliant distillation of Matthew Cox – the man and the brand.

Stamford is also a natural home for the business. Matthew grew up here and so, after years of working as an antique dealer in London, decided to move back to this remarkable Lincolnshire stronghold of handsome Georgian architecture – preserved due to various twists of fate and history, such as the town’s mainline being bypassed by the arrival of the railway in the 1830s, a lack of industrialisation, and the relationship between the town and major local landlords, such as the Cecil family of the nearby Burghley Estate, which helped protect the area.

“Stamford attracts antique shops and the kind of people who want that heritage,” says Matthew. “There's a lot of classically inspired architecture here. I've learned to appreciate it more in later years, but it was there throughout my childhood. My parents serially did up period houses in Stamford, so I’ve lived in almost 20 homes in the town and there was always a room or two in the house that my father sold antiques from. Their goal was to put things back – to make them as original as possible. I didn't really know anything other than old things and originality being the ultimate goal. So the more original an antique could be, the more sympathetic the restoration, the better it was.”

During his stint as a dealer in London, Matthew began to adapt furniture.The Oxburgh table, which is named after Oxburgh Estate and its glorious Tudor hall, is central to Matthew’s dining room, and is an ode to his London days. “I did a lot of repurposing of architectural things when I was an antique dealer,” he recalls. “The Oxburgh table came about because I'd seen an 18th-century refectory table that had a very shallow Tudor arch – it wasn't the kind of thing I could afford as a young dealer, but it was the kind of thing that was really in vogue on Pimlico Road. So I bought similar ones, adapted them, and sold them on.”

The table has been an important player in Matthew’s work and home life. The “wonkiest” part of the house, the dining room is also among its most striking; originally the hall, it is now an embracing space framed by original panelling and a stone inglenook fireplace. “I enjoy when the architecture is allowed to be the architecture – design shouldn't mask or fight it,” says Matthew. “We’ve used pieces to punctuate the space, and the panelling creates natural frames which help dictate where to place things. When we light the room with candles, it creates the same glow from across the street that drew us to the house in the first place …

“I'd never lived in such a prominent historic house,” he continues. “I see ourselves as custodians, really. I love when people are looking at it from the outside and we can say, ‘Would you like to come in and have a look?’ I think in the dining room in particular, the formality has been softened by time – it’s a very down to earth place.”