When Jane McCall was 22, a relative took her to Charleston Farmhouse, the East Sussex country home and studio of the Bloomsbury Group artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. In an instant, her outlook on life changed.
“My mother had just died and lots of my life wasn’t making sense,” recalls McCall. “And I went into this house where they’d painted on the walls, painted on the chairs, on the tables. There were no conventions. My life at that point felt like such a jumble, and what I saw resonated.”
Now in her late fifties, McCall’s early brush with the Bloomsbury Group went on to shape the way she lives and works. Co-founder of the Charleston-inspired lighting brand Bloomsbury Revisited, for the past four years she has lived in her own unconventional house, down a shady lane on the East Sussex/Kent borders; a black and green wooden-clad cottage that she has carved out of a former café and decorated in the same free-spirited style of her artistic heroes.
The walls and furniture, reused, recycled, picked up at junk shops and antique markets, have been decoratively hand painted; a downstairs bathroom is papered with Victorian sheet music, and everywhere are paintings and ceramics created by herself, friends and family, in this ever-evolving artwork-in-progress. “It has been like creating my own doll’s house,” McCall says.
On a midsummer’s morning, it’s an idyllic setting, with the market garden that lies in front of the house a fulsome green, the waters of the boating lake in the distance sparkling, a daring robin flitting around the outside terrace and near-perching on McCall’s shoulder.
Until 2020, the building, a former tractor shed built as recently as 2010, was a popular café that sold very good cakes. McCall used to help out there on occasion. But its pretty setting and delicious baked goods made it a victim of its own success. Eight hundred visitors one Mother’s Day were the final straw for the neighbours.
The owners decided to give in and sell up, offering it first to McCall who was, at the time, in a fix. At 54, divorced, with grown-up children and unfulfilled by the window shutters business she was running, she had sold her home to set off travelling around the world when the pandemic hit. “It wasn’t what I was planning,” she says, “but the café was too good an opportunity to miss because it had so much space.”
With enough land for a small studio to be built and an imported 150-year-old Lithuanian barn currently in development as a further studio and potential Airbnb, space has certainly been an upside. But at first, the property itself was barely liveable. With three industrial kitchens downstairs and a further one upstairs, no heating, stone flooring throughout and a Perspex weather screen protecting the terrace, it was resolutely a café. When McCall moved in, “it literally had all the cups and saucers still on the tables”.
Today, the tables are gone, save for one that she has kept on the terrace. The Perspex screen has come out and she has painted the window frames a distinctive poison apple green. Upstairs, in place of the pastry kitchen, there are now three bedrooms and a bathroom. Downstairs is largely open-plan; a studio area to one side opens to visitors in June, and a sitting room at the other side has a large sofa facing a wood-burning fire, the only heating source in the house.
In the centre, a kitchen features cupboard doors painted in red, green and blue and a black slate work surface, one of McCall’s few pricey investments. The stone floor has been covered throughout with poplar boards reclaimed from a hospital, sanded and limewashed to bring a lighter feel. Hole-ridden plaster walls have been covered by painted wooden panelling.
All the joinery, including a set of folding bathroom doors that cleverly incorporate cupboards for storage, was devised and made by the artist and carpenter Sarah Van der Gucht. “Every woman should have a female carpenter as a friend,” says McCall, who has painted them in forest green and rust red with a repeating moon motif.
It is the hand painting that gives the house its unique, fairytale feel; McCall’s loose, looping brush strokes of repeating flowers, leaves, branches and birds flow across walls, doors, dressers and cupboards, done whenever the mood takes her.
“The Bloomsbury Group didn’t labour things. They just did something quickly, and then they painted over it. If I feel like it, I’ll paint over this scene,” she says, pointing to the first wall she painted, a pattern of pigeon-like birds on branches.
She laughs when asked if she had decorated previous houses with the same bohemian flourish. “No! Because I lived with a man and there’s no way a man would have said, ‘Yes, paint all over the magnolia.’ But now I live on my own with a dog and I can do what I want.”
It is McCall’s way with a paintbrush that lies at the heart of Bloomsbury Revisited, the business she founded in 2020 with Jane Howard, a friend and neighbour of long standing. When McCall was asked by Philippa King of Curious House Courses to run a lampshade-painting course, Howard, who had worked in PR, marketing and sales in London before becoming a beef and sheep farmer, went along too and saw the business opportunity. “I just knew she had real talent. I thought with Jane painting lampshades and me selling, we could do something,” says Howard.
McCall thought success unlikely. “I was 54,” she says. “And by that stage I didn’t think I’d ever earn a living from painting. But I agreed to give it a go.”
When the country fairs they’d planned to sell at closed during lockdown, Howard set up a website. Business took off via Instagram. McCall’s striking designs in the recognisably Charleston colours — dusky blues, burnt oranges, smoky aubergines and artichoke greens — make for statement pieces; the Acorn, Hound (starring McCall’s lurcher) and elegant reclining nudes are all particularly popular. “Lampshades turned out to be a good idea because people don’t just need one lampshade, they need them in every room,” says Howard.
Fifty per cent of the business today is bespoke commissions. Orders for hand-painted designs have come from Olga Polizzi for her hotel The Star in Alfriston and Annabel Elliot, sister of the Queen, for the shop at Highgrove and cottages at Balmoral. Requests for bespoke nudes are very popular (not from the royal family). “We have a big gay following that seems to love them,” says Howard. “People get very specific about the pubic hair . . . ”
The other half of the business is limited-edition lampshades painted by McCall and printed on the canvas. They are sold on the website and stocked in select outlets, including the shop at the Courtauld Gallery (the gallery has one of the biggest collections of Bloomsbury artists outside Charleston).
On August 1, the brand is updating its collection with 10 new designs available in three different sizes. While still retaining the Bloomsbury style and colours, McCall has pushed away from the strictly Charleston-inspired work to take in their influences from other European artists, museums and architecture. “Clive Bell was in Paris at the same time as Chagall and Picasso, so I’m now looking at things like that,” says McCall. “One mark might have come from the John Soane house; another from something [they might have seen] in Greece.”
Back in her house, McCall is contemplating next taking her paint brushes to the as-yet-undecorated dresser near the wood stove. “Once you get really into the theory or ethos of Bloomsbury, it sort of takes over. It makes you question why we are so conventional in our homes. We all decorate them like sheep, but if you just decide to tear those ideas up, life can be so much more satisfying,” she says. Magnolia, beware.
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
Read the full article here
