At their Wiltshire manor house, Lucinda and James Bruce have been inspired by family history and a love of entertaining to create a very special country home in classic English style with a touch of joie de vivre
FEATURE COSMO BROCKWAY PHOTOGRAPHY JAMES MACDONALD
Houses are often found by serendipitous chance and one classic example of this is the story of how Lucinda and James Bruce came to live at their Wiltshire home. “We had been renting an estate cottage as a bolthole in the early days of our marriage,” says Lucinda. “My husband, James, had always loved the ‘big house’, but never did we imagine that the chance would one day come to call it our own.”
The ‘big house’ in question is a William and Mary manor, deep in a Wiltshire valley, on the site of an old Roman settlement. The classic Palladian facade, with its quintessentially English charm, gives a clue to legendary inspiration. “It is thought to have been influenced by Inigo Jones,” says Lucinda. “It is mentioned in Pevsner’s Wiltshire, a bible of period architecture, and Dame Vivienne Westwood coveted it once upon a time,” she finishes with a laugh.
It is somehow hard to imagine the late ‘queen of punk’ residing in such traditional rooms, although, Lucinda remembers with an ironic smile, the interiors were not always such a beacon of understated elegance. “We came here in 1999 and suffice to say, the decoration was not entirely sympathetic with the architecture,” she says. “It was a remnant of 1980s ‘ragged and dragged’ decor. There were acres of shiny damask and flouncy pelmets. We had an initial moment of ‘What on earth do we do with this?’, but, very quickly, I relished the challenge of bringing it back to its original form.”
To help turn their plans into reality, Lucinda and James called on their friend, architectural historian John Martin Robinson – an inspired choice according to Lucinda. “He offered us brilliant historical guidance, as we were faced with this lovely large house that needed a makeover but also to be made personal to us.”
A trained interior designer and art curator who studied in Paris, Lucinda approached the redecoration with an intuitive eye that has allowed the sleeping beauty to be revived. “I wanted to create a sense of symmetry, which was sorely lacking. Above
