The romantic Wiltshire farmhouse of ingenious miniature makers Mulvany & Rogers
Kevin Mulvany and Susie Rogers have spent the past 30 years constructing and decorating exceptional buildings. These have included Hampton Court, Buckingham Palace, Versailles, Hogwarts and the Albert Hall, not to mention rectories, manor houses and mansions belonging to private individuals. Under the name Mulvany & Rogers, they work not on the full-size structures but to a scale of one inch to the foot, producing exquisitely detailed faithful miniature reproductions of houses and their interiors. However, in 1996, when they first moved from London into this 350-year-old farmhouse on the edge of a village near Bath, it was a terrible squeeze to get the Brighton Pavilion with its onion domes and chimney minarets into their new sitting room. ‘We had nowhere else to put it while we worked on it,’ recalls Susie. ‘Luckily, it is long and low, so it just about fitted.’
The couple had relocated with their three children, all under the age of five. ‘We fell totally in love with this romantic old building but we underestimated how much work it would require,’ says Susie. ‘We started by building a studio behind the house the day after we moved in, and then blew the remainder of the budget on getting gas piped up the lane and sorting out the electrics. The kitchen was a Baby Belling cooker in a bedroom and we did the washing-up in the bath. We were busy filling up skips for months.’
Thirty years on and both house and garden have matured beautifully. The roses the couple planted clamber in pretty profusion up the front of the house and over the summerhouse, the reclaimed panelling in the library looks as though it has been there forever and one of their children’s bedrooms has become an attic den for a visiting grandchild.
Though the renovation of the house was tough going, the original layout of the 17th-century farmhouse, with its overlaid Georgian façade of honey-coloured Bath stone, remains undisturbed. Two rooms on either side of a central hall and the same above, topped by smaller attic bedrooms – along with extensions at the back and to one side, dating respectively from the 1950s and the 1980s – had already swelled the building from one room to two rooms deep, allowing for another couple of first-floor bedrooms and three bathrooms. Kevin and Susie’s only structural alteration was to knock three rooms into one to create a kitchen stretching along the rear with a dining room at one end, connected by double doors to the sitting room.
The decoration, too, has stood the test of time, much of it looking deceptively fresh despite it being almost three decades since its application. The Nina Campbell wallpaper in the main bedroom, the hall painted a rich red and the creamy paintwork of the sitting room panelling – which, Susie says, has acquired a faintly rosy tinge over the years – all being cases in point.
What you might not guess is how much of the charm is homemade. Some things more obviously – like the side table in the hall that was inspired by their miniature of Hampton Court – and others somewhat unexpectedly. When working together on a replica building, Kevin is the architect and Susie takes charge of the interior decoration. It turns out that their skills as miniaturists scale up and that the same division of labour applies. Kevin built the bookshelves that wrap the library walls and Susie painted them. ‘We took their design from a doll’s house we made for charity in the 1980s, with rooms by different interior decorators including Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, and created full-size versions for our house in London. We brought them with us, but the ceilings here are much lower, so we had to cut them down. Somehow, the proportions still work,’ says Kevin.
He also constructed the kitchen, adding panelled doors and cornices to off-the-shelf carcasses, and made the footstools in both of the sitting rooms. Susie was responsible for the ebullient hand-painted chinoiserie mural in the downstairs loo. ‘I locked myself in and did it freehand one evening when we first arrived, because I was feeling overwhelmed
by the scale of the renovations everywhere else,’ she explains. ‘I intended to paper over it once we were settled, but then the tiles went in and it just stayed.’
Ascending the central staircase to the first-floor bedrooms, you find more homegrown inventiveness. Every room has lampshades made by Susie from pretty fabrics: ‘All favourite bits and pieces I have collected and stuck onto plain card shades.’ The main bedroom is presided over by what they jokingly called ‘The Great Bed of Mulvany’ because it is unfeasibly wide. This was put together by Kevin. He extended a Victorian bedhead and constructed a canopy using sections of Gothic cornicing, painted and gilded by Susie.
Their three children – one now a florist, one an architect and one an interior designer – have inherited the couple’s artistic genes and there are paintings, drawings and interesting items made by them scattered round the house. Their grandson’s contributions are the Lego turrets that adorn the radiator cover in the hall and the chimneypiece in the sitting room. The whole house is a testament to family creativity, and the tradition looks set to continue.
Mulvany & Rogers: mulvanyandrogers.com
Dean Hearne1/11Among the artworks on the wall behind are a 1920s oil of a bather by an unknown Russian artist and a portrait of the couple’s daughter Isabelle by her brother Max.
Dean Hearne2/11Displayed on a table beside an armchair in an Iliv spot fabric is the Neo-Palladian temple front of a miniature garden pavilion room crafted from wood and plaster by Kevin and Susie.
Dean Hearne3/11A French 19th-century landscape hangs over the desk that belonged to Kevin’s grandfather, on which stands an antique Chinese figure that was his great-grandfather’s, carved from a twisted root. Susie painted the Chinese vase dummy board that echoes the ceramics. The chair is part of a 19th-century canapé set.
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Dean Hearne5/11An old Nina Campbell wallpaper is the backdrop for a bed made by Kevin and gilded by Susie, with a headboard in a gingham from The Stripes Company, bed hangings in GP & J Baker’s ‘Wild Flower’ in green and Jim Lawrence reading lights. The basin unit in the bathroom is painted in Edward Bulmer’s ‘Naples Yellow’.
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Dean Hearne7/11Watercolours of Chinese ceramics are framed by Susie’s hand-painted willow-pattern mural. The tiles are modern versions of Delft designs in the loo downstairs.
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