A Private View: A playful Georgian home richly decorated with colour over caution in rural Wiltshire

A cottage garden filled with scented roses and fat peonies frames the deep Bath stone walls of Albion House, which occupies a corner plot on Post Office Lane in the village of Atworth. Entering via a wide, welcoming door, visitors step onto an array of hand-painted tiles – a clue of the creative cornucopia to come …

Albion House is the home of Charlotte Crowther (who is the daughter of British actor Leslie Crowther), her ex-husband Adam Calkin, and their four children. Both creatives, their idiosyncratic embellishments read like anecdotes from every chapter of their lives. “The design was entirely organic,” Charlotte explains. “Most of the furniture we built or made by Adam; all the rugs and antiques have been picked up on our travels in France. There was no thought-out design plan; it just unfolded over the years to become a very vibrant house.”

Their adventure began in the early 1990s: “The whole building was an antique shop when we first saw it,” Charlotte recalls. “There was no central heating and we couldn’t get residential planning permission, but we decided to keep our fingers crossed and buy it anyway because the space was so fantastic.” The leap of faith paid off. “Everybody comments on how joyful and fun the house is – and that’s what I love most about it.”

Albion House was built between 1720 and 1740 and is thought to have started life as the village shop and post office. It later served as a coaching inn and there are small clues that suggest it also functioned as a farmhouse. Outbuildings in the garden (which have provided the couple with “so much scope to play with”), a hay hatch in the floorboards of the main bedroom and hooks in the ceiling all hint at its former use.

Today’s custodians have been faithful to the building’s heritage, keeping many of the original details intact. Work began in the kitchen where a wall was removed to let light in and connect it to the dining room. (The beautiful original flagstones have been preserved.) “We made the kitchen the centre of the ground floor,” Charlotte explains. “Everything pivots off it.” 

The kitchen has been unconventionally furnished with freestanding pieces designed and painted by Adam and antiques gathered from their travels. A painting of a giant red paintbrush spans a central stone beam – a constant reminder that creativity lives here.

The kitchen connects three adaptable living spaces. To one side sits a rhubarb-and-custard striped snug with stripped pine floorboards. A dinky interior window – a detail from its life as a post office – remains in situ. At the other end of the kitchen is the living room. Originally the shop floor (with red and black chequered tiles to prove it), this currently functions as an office and studio space. The ceiling, which was left untouched, is framed by intricate Georgian cornicing that Adam rescued from a skip.

A second family room houses their glossy grand piano. “We added a window here, and French doors into the garden, which flood the room with light,” says Charlotte. They all contributed to the hand-painted floor tiles underfoot: “I love this floor; there’s this sense of it being very unstyled and playful.”

 Atworth is swaddled by green fields and curvaceous hills, and the views from the first and second floor are soothingly verdant. A hand-painted mural on the wall of the landing (the original iteration of ‘Adam’s Eden’, a wallpaper commissioned by Lewis & Wood) beckons nature inside, whilst tiny painted footprints tread across the floorboards from the bathroom, a pictorial memory of their daughter Maddie.

“I like secrets and surprise places,” explains Charlotte, who grew up in the world of theatre. “I like the theatricality of playfulness, the way things are cobbled together and the chaotic joy of living here.” Surprises feature heavily on the upper floors: a wardrobe in one of the bedrooms is recast as a Punch and Judy booth complete with gold braiding and pelmet, while faux delft tiles enshrine a stone fireplace. In the ensuite, the walls are festooned with swags of trompe l’oeil, the floorboards etched with geometric tiles. Panelled doors hide the shower, and a vintage wooden armchair complete with padded seat conceals the toilet.

A sweeping azure sky anoints the ceiling of a vast attic bedroom, hidden behind the doors of an innocent-looking wardrobe that is entered via cricket ball doorknobs. A second attic bedroom features two pretty box beds. Broad wooden floorboards patinated over hundreds of years are untouched on the first and second floors, the natural beauty of the grain enough. 

“I know we’ve stamped our personality here, but we didn’t want people to feel like this house was rarefied or precious,” explains Charlotte. “We wanted it to be full of colour and people. The house absolutely loves a buzzy atmosphere. You can feel how it warms up with people in it.”

And though it is etched with myriad memories, there is still a stalwartness to the stone walls and wooden floors that presents endless possibilities: “There’s space to work from home, or set up a studio,” Charlotte suggests. “It could even become a shop again. There are many iterations, but it has been wonderful raising our four kids here. And I’m sure it will remain an absolutely joyous family home.”

Further reading

Find out more about Adam Calkin’s work