A Home with a History: a rare books dealer and a filmmaker open up the wings of their exuberant Arts and Craft home

“Darling, we’ve never eaten a fish off this – we must!” Simon Finch is calling across the dining room to his wife of two years, the filmmaker Martha Fiennes, having reacquainted himself with one of a multitude of idiosyncratic objects in their “violently idiosyncratic” house. The object is a French wooden platter topped and tailed with silvered-metal salmon features, and that memorable description of Voewood – an extraordinary Arts and Crafts confection near the north Norfolk coast – was provided by Nikolaus Pevsner, for whom it evoked the work of Gaudi.

What the architectural historian meant is apparent as soon as you arrive at its deceptively compact entrance, which bristles with what seems like an excess of Tudor-style chimney stacks. This, it turns out, is only one side wing of the building designed by Edward Schroeder Prior and completed in 1905. ‘Wing’ is exactly the word: the architect, who had begun his career as a pupil of Norman Shaw, gave Voewood a ‘butterfly’ plan, with a large central mass flanked by two splayed wings – bringing in an amount of light that isn’t usually associated with Arts and Crafts houses.

The full “butterfly effect” can be seen from the back, where the house opens out onto a formal sunken garden. Prior excavated flint and stone needed for the house and garden walls from the site itself, takes the Arts and Crafts principle of using local materials for construction to the extreme. From this viewpoint, there’s an almost fearful symmetry to Voewood, as if an alien spaceship had landed here disguised as a country manor. Yet shift your position any which way, and you find yourself looking at a building positively revelling in asymmetry. It reads as a series of visual tricks. Meanwhile the surface of the house, with tiles, brick and flint arranged in various patterns and decorative bands, resembles an exquisitely embroidered textile.

Nearly three decades after he first saw Voewood, these are all details that continue to fascinate Simon. A dedicated thrower of parties who is partial to a bit of Vivienne Westwood, the 69-year-old is not most people’s typical idea of a rare books dealer. As he likes to phrase it, he has traded in everything, “from the First Folio of Shakespeare to the wilder shores of the counterculture”. His latest catalogue, titled ‘From Tyndale to Trans’, includes a long scroll printed with the manifesto of Bart Huges, a Dutch enthusiast of trepanation.

HQ is now a delightfully Grimm-esque cabin in the woods here, but Simon was, as he puts it, “doing quite well in London,” and fancied taking on the restoration of a country house when he came across the sales particulars for Voewood in 1998. While he hadn’t been looking for an Arts and Crafts building specifically, his background predisposed him to admire the movement’s aesthetics. “I’ve been a book dealer all my life, so inevitably ended up buying Kelmscott Press books – all the Morris stuff – as well as admiring the Wiener Werkstätte and what came out of Japan, Christopher Dresser…” He tells the story of how he came to see the house, with his son Jack and a puppy in tow. “We were halfway back to London when I realised I’d left the puppy behind. I came back and thought, ‘Fuck it, I’ll put an offer in.’”

In a neat link with Simon’s own business, the original owner, Reverend Percy Lloyd, was the son of publisher and newspaper proprietor Edward Lloyd. His popular “penny dreadfuls” included rip-offs of Dickens, and the very first story to feature Sweeney Todd. He founded his own paper mills, and it was thanks to the fortune he made that his son, Percy, was able to commission Voewood. 

Within just a few years of its completion, however, Percy Lloyd sold up. “His wife didn’t really care for it,” Simon explains. “It was on a turnip field, there was a hospital for TB nearby, it was a little bit bleak. It became a boys’ school, then it was requisitioned in the First World War, and then sold to Leicester Health Authority in 1919.” By the time Simon bought it, it had been in use as a residential home for decades. To begin the process of returning it to the private home it had been so briefly, he spent two years stripping out its institutional accretions – inhospitable kitchen, dispiriting en-suites, a lift in the double-storey hall, a “horrible” 1960s sun lounge, and many, many partitions. Most of Prior’s beautifully crafted oak doors had been replaced with fire doors, so Finch had these remade by local joiners, who worked from old photographs.

When it came to decoration, Simon says, “I could have gone really Shaker on it and done the whole purist Arts and Crafts thing in a very restrained way. That was an idea, but then I thought, I like buying stuff too much.” In the midst of a particularly busy time in his career, as well as another building project in Los Angeles, Simon enlisted the help of a friend, artist and textile designer Annabel Grey, to flesh out the bones of the house with colour and texture.

“She basically lived here for about two years,” he says – encrusting bathtubs, mirror frames, cabinets, even the loggia floor with cheerful mosaics. Simon would come back every few weeks to find, for instance, the walls of a bedroom painted with an intricate patchwork of gold-flecked abstract motifs – Gustav Klimt meets Omega – or, in the Africa-themed music room, tawny oversized moths hugging the corners against a background of elongated lozenge shapes repeated by the tiger stripes on an armchair.

As Edward Schroeder Prior might have appreciated, a lepidopteran motif flutters through the house. The creatures appear, along with various other insects, in display cases here and there, and Grey worked with textile artist Kirsten Hecktermann to create their most exuberant appearance: a pair of floor-to-ceiling velvet curtains appliquéd with large moths and butterflies composed of different fabric scraps. They hang in the dining room, part-concealing a decorative panel featuring Leighton’s ‘Flaming June’ – who would see, if she were awake, Frederick Hollyer’s photograph of William Morris looking pensively at her across a vast, lozenge-studded Arts and Crafts table Finch found in Aldeburgh.

In a nod to Norfolk’s tradition of using flint to face walls and houses, Grey marshalled Jack and his friends – and anyone else who happened to be at the house – to help apply sea-polished pebbles as well as shells to various surfaces. Another bedroom upstairs was covered in a bright garden mural by local artist Chloe Mandy – “her husband was my builder here”, Simon explains. In the bathroom next door is another delicate botanical intervention. “That’s actually by Johnny, who is my handyman and an accomplished artist.”

This has been, very clearly, a project of collaboration and conviviality, and it is in that spirit that Simon has continued to inhabit the house. While it can be rented for weddings and house parties (when he and Martha retreat to one of the nearby coach houses), Voewood has also been a regular venue for artistic gatherings, spontaneous or otherwise – there were even a few Voewood Festivals, which Simon started with literary agent Clare Conville, a friend from university. “Nothing ran on schedule, they were a financial disaster but they were great parties.” The atmosphere was captured one year by regular visitor Martin Parr, who turned his observations into a photobook, with help from Simon and the writer DBC Pierre.

It was into this universe that Martha stepped in 2018. “A great friend who lives ten minutes away asked me to stay for the weekend,” she explains. “She wanted to visit Simon for a possible work project, and said come along …” As Finch says of their mutual coup de foudre, “Martha had a super-bohemian upbringing, so she could relate to my bonkers world without too much of a leap of imagination.” When the pair got married in 2023, they had 250 guests at their reception in the restored garden.

Of what he has created at Voewood, Martha says: “Simon’s got such a good eye, and his sense of what could work is so broad.” She points out an area of the kitchen they call “Kitsch Corner”, where Simon quite literally has his ducks in a row – nine ceramic ones on a dresser – above a batterie of pastel-coloured teapots. “He just has this ability to put kitsch and beauty together – there’s that dynamic power in juxtaposition.”

Director of Onegin (1999), which starred her brother Ralph in the title role, and Chromophobia (2005), filmmaker Martha naturally has an interest in this editorial alchemy. But her more recent work has taken that interest to unexpected places. When we visit she is preparing to go to Cannes as a jury member for the Compétition Immersive, the festival’s new prize for work that incorporates technologies such as VR and AI. Her involvement is a result of two films she made, Nativity in 2011 and Yugen in 2018, which combine traditional filmmaking with generative computer coding.

Yugen, for instance, features Salma Hayek in surreal, dreamlike settings whose layers are selected at random and in real time in a perpetually self-generating display; no one image or sequence is repeated. The idea came, Martha explains, from the “fascinating process of sculpting the material you’ve shot. An editor will do something you weren’t expecting or feels random and you go ‘What was that? That was really interesting …’ So I thought, what if you handed that decision-making capability to a machine? Even I as the maker will take new meaning from the sequence it chooses.”

While the films have had various screening events around the world, most recently at London’s Coronet Theatre in February, there is currently, as Martha says, “no ecosystem for this kind of work. So you live in pioneer land.”

In a sense, this blending of the old with the cutting-edge is not so different from what was being done at Voewood and some of its Arts and Crafts cousins. The movement may have been primarily concerned with the handmade and traditional craftsmanship, but it wasn’t afraid to incorporate cutting-edge technology – witness the moulded-concrete beams used throughout the house, most strikingly in the music room: they have a beauty that is all their own. Pioneer land, indeed.

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