This house is built as a huge piece of theater
It's a power play
It's grand
It's got all sorts of
bonkers notions that run through it
This house is designed to impress, clearly
It's designed to surprise
You come through a much smaller room
and then you enter into this columned wondrousness
Now, modern architecture
doesn't seek to play those games
It doesn't seek to impose that sort of grandeur on people
It's one of the great beauties
of this country, that staircase
It looks quite over the top
but at the same time, quite simple
I think, really, I took my lead from that
so I have a balance of under-aching and over-aching, if you like
Pure and impure
The axes of the views are incredible
You're just continually given these pictures, really, I suppose
I like tables
a lot more than I like sofas
so this house has a lot of tables
I can work at it. I read a newspaper at it
I can have breakfast, lunch and dinner at it
I can live at a table all day, really
perfectly happily
I love the English country house, if you like, as a notion
from a very early age
through right or wrong
I think that what attracts me to an object is its character
its patina, the life that it's led
I'm not frightened of things
that have been broken and glued together
Time gives an object soul
and that I find very attractive
I'm very against plasticizing and new-ifying old objects
I mean, have you seen the Sistine Chapel?
Ghastly
The organ has been there since the house was built
I mean, the records show that it was put in contemporaneously
The acoustics in the rotunda are absolutely extraordinary
If you stand in the middle of the ground floor and sing
it has the most remarkable effect
It's just the sound goes right through you
It had been a school akin to St Trinian's
This was the end of the line
If your children had been expelled from six or seven different schools
then this was where they ended up
It's got the air of naughtiness about it
which I like
I think boys were being hoisted up through the windows
crawling through the undergrowth
To me, home, it's certainly where people congregate
and have a good time
When you're looking at rooms that I do
simplicity is what you walk into
but then there's a bombshell of stuff that comes along with people
It's a canvas that you paint in different ways
in different forms at different times
The space
the emptiness, the silence
is all
is all that I love