Listed Country Home
A historic house with Tudor and Georgian origins became the perfect home for Linda Duffin and Robert Paulley, and makes a stunning backdrop for their glorious cottage garden
Looking for a weekend cottage where they could host family gatherings and indulge in a love of gardening, Linda and Robert found their Suffolk home in 2009. Leaving London at the weekends in search of a suitable countryside retreat, they only viewed a dozen properties before finding a place that felt right.
Bridge House wasn’t strictly what they were looking for. ‘It was too big, too expensive, and needed far too much work doing to it – we still have the brochure with these comments scrawled across it,’ Linda explains. Despite the practical issues, though, they had fallen in love with the warm and welcoming feel of the house. Its rich history, spaciousness, and the semi-wild outdoor space proved irresistible, so they took a leap of faith and signed on the dotted line.
Still living and working in London at the time, they didn’t move in permanently until November 2011. While there was a lot to do to bring the place up to scratch, Linda and Robert also immersed themselves in finding out about their home’s history, from learning that timbers in one of the bedrooms showed there was once a ‘garderobe’, or small room, built onto another side of the house, through to its listed status principally due to two Tudor chimney stacks.
In the style of a classic East Anglian farmhouse, Bridge House sits at the end of a terrace of three, with a coaching-style arch between it and next door. ‘They were once part of the same property, which formed a quadrangle of buildings and outbuildings around a central yard,’ says Linda.
The house hadn’t been lived in for a couple of years and needed extensive work. Most of the windows have now been repaired or replaced with like-for-like, and sections of the roof have been repaired with pan and peg tiles sourced from salvage yards. Where originals didn’t exist, floor pamment tiles – such as those seen in the kitchen – have been laid. The key changes – done with listed planning consent – have been to turn the old kitchen and dining room into one large area, now a domestic kitchen and the hub of Linda’s cookery school, and to return what was once a doctors’ surgery back into a living area.
Reusing and repairing materi
