A seaside home that is the base for the multifaceted creative life of its owners
Nick Ivins and Bella Pringle are masters of reinvention. For 11 years – from when their oldest daughter was a baby – they lived in Sussex in the prettiest red-brick Georgian farmhouse. They had a vegetable garden, which was as picturesque as it was productive, and bees, rare-breed pigs, quail and chickens. Like characters in a Thomas Hardy novel with a happy ending, they lived a life of old-fashioned rural charm.
They made an income – of the sort eggs, honey, beans and bacon could not supply – by hiring out their home as a location for film and photography, and Nick continued his previous career as a photographer by specialising in weddings. Such was the visual appeal of Walnuts Farm, its gardens, fields and animals, that they hosted some 40 shoots a year. Then, three years ago, they sold up, lock, stock and rural idyll, and moved to a tall, elegant 18th-century townhouse by the sea in Lyme Regis.
‘We’d always thought of Walnuts as a 10-year project,’ says Bella. ‘As Flora came to the end of junior school, we started to hunt for another smallholding. West Dorset was one of several areas we considered, as it had good state schools. We spent a weekend camping on a farm and saw about 15 properties, all with land. Nick knew Lyme because he used to visit for holidays as a child and suggested we have lunch here. We viewed this house on a whim. The moment I stepped into the hall, I felt I had come home.’
Nick was not so keen. While Bella grew up in London, where her father had a gallery in Cork Street, and returned there after a degree in art history at Warwick to work as a project editor at Dorling Kindersley publishers, Nick was a countryman through and through. ‘I was brought up in Kent and spent my childhood fishing, in between visits to Tate Britain,’ he says. ‘After art college in Canterbury and Kingston, I worked on a farm, then went to agricultural college in Cirencester.’ When they met, Nick was living in a tiny cottage in East Sussex, while Bella owned a chic, minimalist flat in Battersea. ‘Nick used to collect me from the station with two ferrets and a lurcher in tow,’ she says. In 2002, they married and Bella sold her flat. ‘So this time round, 14 years on, it was my turn to choose where we lived,’ she says. ‘I knew I could be happy here. It’s a small town, but there’s a lot going on and this house is like the London terraces I’ve always loved – the interior reminds me of Spitalfields, where we got married.’
Without livestock and gardens to maintain, Nick would have time to fish and paint and could use the fourth-floor attic room, with its wrap-around sea views, as a studio. Bella, meanwhile, had plans to make the house work for them, just as Walnuts Farm had done. Halfway up a hill, a steep climb from the shops, above the curving harbour wall known as the Cobb, 15 Pound Street is one of a pair, dating from circa 1790. Next door is Belmont, a detached Georgian villa lived in by the novelist John Fowles until his death in 2005 and recently restored by The Landmark Trust. With its pink façade, iced with neoclassical masks, friezes and urns, it was once the home of Eleanor Coade, who had a successful company making moulded architectural decorations in the stone substitute she invented.
What visitors to Belmont lacked was somewhere to get a cup of tea. So, in September 2017, to tie in with the house’s annual open weekend, Bella served refreshments, including homemade pink damson ice cream, from her kitchen. Guests poured in and also bought antiques, jewellery, art (including work by Nick) and pottery on show throughout.
So began the idea of Nick and Bella’s Artists’ Open House events. They opened that Christmas, with a snow machine wafting snowflakes over a towering tree in the front garden, and again at Easter, when the first-floor drawing room became a Seaweed Salon, offering pressed seaweed and seaweed prints by Molesworth & Bird. Their Marine Artists’ Open House – with more Molesworth & Bird pieces, sea-inspired paintings and drawings by Nick, vintage pond yachts, jewellery and other nautical-themed delights – was timed to coincide with Belmont’s open weekend and the Mark Hix Food Rocks event last September. In April this year, it was transformed into The Garment Maker’s House, with bespoke tailoring by Kat Bazeley of BlueBarn.Life. Its walls, freshly painted in white, were the canvas for large-scale figure outlines by Nick, and a small tree in one room acted as a hanger for linen toiles of Kat’s jacket designs.
The house is like a stage set, which is appropriate not e just because Nick has a third career as an actor – on top of artist and photographer – having played the lead in a local theatre production that went on tour. For each event, the house changes character. There were twiggy nests and tulips suspended in swags from the ceiling for The Flower House at Easter and giant mistletoe pom-poms, wood fires and candlelight at Christmas. Nick and Bella have variously conjured Kettle’s Yard simplicity, Dickensian cosiness, poised modernity and the period serenity of a Vermeer. Soundtracks and scents complete the experience.
When they host supper clubs with chef Cass Titcombe, of Beaminster restaurant Brassica, the ground-floor sitting room, next to the kitchen, and the main bedroom and drawing room, on the first floor, are converted to make three private dining rooms. It is a chance to meet Dorset artist makers such as Cameron Short of Bonfield BlockPrinters, chef Gill Meller and his wife Alice who co-owns lifestyle shop Ryde & Hope in Lyme, as well as other locals and visitors interested in fine food and interiors.
What is easy to forget, as you savour the smoked cod’s roe bruschetta, or ponder the purchase of a painting or handmade coat, is that Bella and Nick, and daughters Flora, 14, and Peggy, 11, also live here. When not shared with friends and strangers, the house is a stylish, comfortable home. ‘We stripped out carpets and painted, but didn’t do much else,’ says Bella. The rooms are sparely furnished with antiques – some inherited, some bought at local auctions – and there is no clutter. ‘The house has to be flexible,’ says Bella. ‘The only rooms that don’t get changed round are the girls’ bedrooms and the bathrooms on the third floor.’
The house is as versatile as Nick and Bella have proved adaptable. ‘We have metamorphosed from country smallholders into seaside-town dwellers,’ says Bella. ‘Starting afresh in a new skin feels very invigorating.’ They have certainly embraced their new life fully. Bella joins a group of women who swim in the sea all year round and Nick rows in one of the gig teams that are a feature of coastal life in the West Country. ‘I don’t think anyone should lead just one life – we’re all Renaissance beings,’ says Bella.
For information on Artist Open House events and to purchase Nick’s paintings, visit walnutsfarm.co.uk. For Wild Weddings photography, visit wildweddings.co.uk
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Michael Sinclair11/35Supper clubs by local restaurant Brassica are held in the first-floor room that is otherwise Nick and Bella’s bedroom.
Michael Sinclair12/35The Georgian townhouse is next to Belmont, the former home of novelist John Fowles. An oil of a pastoral scene and Hogarth engravings add decorative detail to walls in Farrow & Ball’s ‘Salon Drab’ in the parlour/breakfast room.
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Michael Sinclair21/35Bella putting together lookbooks for the couple’s photography business, Wild Weddings.
Michael Sinclair22/35Nick painting Skin – an abstract of an animal hide – with his Cobb Harbour series displayed in his attic studio.
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Michael Sinclair24/35Since moving to Lyme Regis, life has taken on a coastal focus for Nick, Bella and daughters Flora and Peggy.
Michael Sinclair25/35The family enjoys clifftop walks with whippet Blink, and Nick finds plenty of inspiration down by the harbour.
Michael Sinclair26/35Nick's ink drawings on Little Greene paint charts include seascapes, bathers and boats.
Michael Sinclair27/35Bella swims in the sea all year round.
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Michael Sinclair30/35Bella, Nick and Blink in Lyme Regis shop Ryder & Hope with its co-owner Alice Meller.
Michael Sinclair31/35Bella with Janet Tristram of Bonfield Block-Printers looking at fabric swatches for Janet’s coats.
Michael Sinclair32/35Kat’s barn at Blackdown.
Michael Sinclair33/35Nick selecting a jacket with Kat Bazeley of BlueBarn.Life, who collaborated on The Garment Maker’s House event.
Michael Sinclair34/35A linen toile of her ‘Beech’ design.
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