Perfect Ten: the stories that stole your heart in 2022

What good taste you have, dear readers! While we know it’s been a pretty bumper year over here on the Almanac – even if we do say so ourselves – our archive shows that you’ve enjoyed your vicarious visits of homes and gardens across the country as much as we’ve loved putting them together. And looking at the list – from a passionate collector’s plaster-cast filled townhouse in Bath to Pearl Lowe’s seaside retreat, by way of a cosy Cotswolds cottage to Nigel Slater’s heavenly London garden – we’re hardly surprised.

Join as a we reflect on an extraordinary year – before checking the top ten listings of the past 12 months too…

They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes, but Nigel Slater – the cook who writes, the writer who cooks – proved the exception to the rule. We visited him in the summer, shortly after the RHS Flower Show when his hedges were due their annual “Chelsea Chop” – though Nigel admitted to always being saddened by the trim. “I like a tangle. It’s nice when the garden feels slightly abandoned. I’m happier when things are woolly than when they’ve just been clipped.”

Taking in the glorious shrouding greenery, we were inclined to agree. But getting his garden to this stage wasn’t straightforward, as we learned. In fact, when Nigel bought the place in 1999, there was nothing but a barren lawn here. After some prudent advice from both Monty Don and Dan Pearson, however, Nigel’s garden has become a haven (thankfully now fox-free), a place to escape to, to work in and to enjoy. It’s at its best – and Nigel is at his happiest – “when nature takes over,” he says. “And while I’d love to say that this is all curated chaos, really, it’s just chaos.”

Who could fail to be charmed by the clucking marvellous menagerie we encountered when visiting Leah Lane’s home in Surrey? Not you lot, evidently. Leah, who lives with her husband, two children, flock of ducks, some Suffolk hens and two Russian blue cats, is beloved by her Instagram fanbase – she goes by @mymulberryhouse – for good reason, though it’s only in part for the pets…

Leah’s house is a fine, early Georgian red-brick, with a handsome porticoed façade and sophisticated rooms. It wasn’t always thus, however, as we learned. When they bought it, the place was a wreck, abandoned and tumbling down. Over time, the couple has slowly and cleverly coaxed it into a home fit for today. “I like things to be elegantly knackered – especially in old houses,” said Leah, of her astute mix of eBay finds and charity-shop scores, charming chintz and hand-painted furniture. It may have taken time to get to this point but, it was worth it. “Something I’ve learned over the years is the importance of taking time to decorate. After all, your tastes can change. I think my style is only just settling.”

Designing a house that’s as welcoming to your friends as to yourselves after a long week’s work is a savvy thing to do, if – like interior James Mackie and his partner, gardener Arthur Parkinson – you believe there’s nothing more soothing to the soul than a kitchen full of companionable chatter and a couple of clucking chooks outside.

“It’s a house that embraces you,” James explained of the 17th-century cottage when we paid him a visit, something he leaned into when it came to decorating – something that took years. “The spaces themselves did need a great deal of work, but it was important to know how to approach them. They’re small, so working out how to use all of the space was important. Every square inch needed to have some point of interest.” The idea, he told us, was to create “a series of jewel-box rooms, taking as their reference the age of the building and the local vernacular architecture”. And, like jewels, they catch the eye endlessly – a prettily patterned paper here, a well-placed picture there.  “Though I keep moving things around. I’m sure I always will.”

Given we’re so used to reading stories of love at first sight when it comes to buying a home, it was refreshing to hear Gemma Moulton talk about her experience of finding her Hackney flat with her husband. When she first viewed it, the East London Cloth founder didn’t find herself head over heels. To the contrary: she hated it. For while it had lovely bones, “it was just too odd”, with its unexplained extra walls and raised floors.

Yet, a week later, Gemma found she couldn’t get the Victorian split-level spaces out of her mind. It seemed the flat’s potential, despite its peculiarities, had dawned on her. By the time we visited her earlier this year – four years later – Cupid’s arrow was well embedded in the curtain-maker. The couple’s sensitive renovation saw them negotiate the apartment’s listed status, building their own kitchen furniture and laying their reclaimed parquet themselves (“Not something I would recommend to anyone! It was hell”) – and their labour led to love. “It’s really grown with us, this flat… I can’t see us ever leaving.”

The streets of old Shoreditch are like catnip to Inigo. Despite their years, rows of brick-fronted homes remain redolent of their Huguenot history – a sense only heightened by the snippet views of nearby city skyscrapers. So when this former silk maker’s house on Padbury Court came on the market with us in 2022, we were eager to chat to the couple selling it, wellness entrepreneurs Charlie Gower and Jules Miller, who, like us, had fallen for the area’s atmosphere and variety. “I love how you see the diversity of the capital from our window,” said Charlie when we visited.

What had drawn them to the building itself, however, was its past. Charlie told us they had even applied to have its name changed to Silk House in homage. That said, they had their work cut out when they moved in. The house, though barely touched, had been slightly updated in ugly ways, while other mod cons were lacking. Wanting to preserve its local heritage, the couple wisely enlisted the help of Dan Cruickshank, an architectural historian with a specialist in Huguenot buildings. Following Dan’s advice, they reinstated the panelling and, leaving the schemes pale and relatively plain, left the spaces to do the talking. “When you have a home with these types of features,” said Charlie, “you don’t have to put too much effort into making it beautiful.” No wonder it got snapped up so quickly.

It’s reassuring when one is reminded that people’s Instagram lives aren’t flawless. And our springtime chat with Genevieve Harris (aka @mrs_trufflepig) was one such moment. Genevieve, whose followers adore her for her weekly ‘Knick Knack Chit-Chats’, (in which she runs through her latest junk-shop booty) as much for her cottage-core shots of her Sussex home, was refreshingly down to earth. “Sometimes I’ll talk about making jam, sometimes the cake that just didn’t rise. I don’t want things to be perfect all the time – it’s not realistic.”

She was similarly pragmatic when she walked us through the renovation of her farmhouse near Rye. When she and her husband moved in, one whole room was caked in duck droppings, while the entire timber frame was rotting. “Looking back, I just think: ‘How could we have done that?’ But of course we did do it. We had to – mainly because it stank to high heaven!”

She’s since filled her house with treasures – “I love beautiful things. I love them” – but mostly second-hand. “Of course, buying new things is lovely, but having something with a story is, to me, infinitely more interesting. The same is definitely true of houses.” We couldn’t agree more.

Doing things by hand isn’t easy, but then nothing good ever is. Cameron Short and Janet Tristram know this better than anyone – and they’re enthusiastic about it. When they bought their house in Dorset, a derelict village shop, the artists had no desire to use an architect, instead relying on the skills of friends and Cameron’s own grasp of building. “We stripped everything back,” he explained, “and were careful not to throw anything away that was either beautiful or useful. We even left the previous incumbents’ signatures we found pencilled on the walls.”

The result – as testified by its inclusion in this list – was extraordinary. The house, which is also home to their independent printing press, is rich and layered. It looks as though it’s been like this for centuries – a consequence of the couple’s commitment to preserving and repairing rather than overhauling, and to their referential literary approach (Derek Jarman, Thomas Hardy and Robinson Crusoe all cropped up in our interview). After a year of working six days a week solidly on the place, the couple moved in. The formidable conservation officer was, Cameron told us, moved to tears. “She felt we’d restored the house so sensitively.”

Artist Peter Malone and his wife, picture restorer Helen, live among a cast of thousands – quite literally. Every floor of their tall Georgian townhouse in Bath was filled with plaster mouldings. Clever arrangements covered whole walls, lending a luminosity that suited the more shadowy corners of this 18th-century building. They were, as we soon learned, Peter’s passion. Point to any and he’d tell a story – whether it’s an antique or the plaster fish their daughter cast for an art project, using a slightly smelly gurnard – just as he could about any quirk in the house, from its uneven steps to the windowpanes that had to be replaced when the street was bombed in the Blitz.

Alongside the plaster, there were many other delights to behold here, however, among them a collection of sultry original Hodgkin prints and a jaw-dropping array of Ottoman tiles in the bathroom. For Peter and Helen, it became clear, both possess a remarkable eye for beauty. “Filling this place was a real effort, but we’ve done it over the last 20 years,” Helen said, of the way they bought things as they saw them, rather than shopping for them. “I’m interested in the logistics of interiors. In making things work. You have to live with your choices so you want them to be right,” added Peter. We couldn’t agree more.

The zeal of the convert is a recognised reality – not least when it comes to town and country, as Helen Ellery testified when she invited us round as she put it on the market. Helen bought her 19th-century parsonage in South Gloucestershire with a plan to make it her country lock-up-and-leave. “But I found that when I got here, I just didn’t want to leave.”

When she put it on the market and we paid a visit, it didn’t take us long to see why. Helen’s approach to decorating is simultaneously measured and immeasurably creative – something she brought to bear on its elegant rooms and gardens to create a home of utmost comfort, where outside and inside commune harmoniously. “I wanted to be sympathetic to the age and history of the house, but not in a fuddy-duddy way, instead through humour and colour.” Music to our ears, for there’s nothing we like more. Her palette throughout was confident and bold if not always bright – top marks for that dark-blue sitting room olive-green study – while elsewhere, modern interventions were handled carefully. The new kitchen, for instance, “needed to feel like it had been here forever”, which was she enlisted the specialists, Plain English.

As with so many of the people we speak to, Helen’s move was set to be bittersweet, for how could leaving behind a house like this be anything but? That said, she was sanguine, conscious of her status as a caretaker of an ancient artefact. “It’s time for somebody else to love and care for it now.” Hear, hear.

Oh we do like to be beside the seaside. As does Pearl Lowe, it seems, who this spring showed us round her shorefront retreat in East Sussex. Her approach to decorating – part vamp, part shabby chic, or “rock ’n’ roll romantic” in her words – seemed a perfect reflection of the fashion designer. Yet this light, bright beach house, in which her family spent lockdown, was a bit of a departure for a person more used to working with decadent velvets and heavy florals than gauzy linen and cream paint. “I have really gone out of my comfort zone here,” Pearl said, as she explained how she’d enjoyed leaning into the house’s coastal architecture, swapping her usual rich, textured look for open-plan spaces with lots of wood. “It was fun to push my boundaries.”

And, it seems, to explore another part of her personality. “Every place I do up is an extension of myself,” she told us. Which means, of course, that there’s plenty of Pearl in every part of this place (just look at those fringed lampshades). “If I had it my own way,” however, “I would have a pink house and lace everywhere,” she told us. But as every family knows, compromise is key.