Garden Lighting Uk

Wells cottages give you real life in a fake period home

Buildings evoke music. A stately home summons the sweeping strings of a symphony orchestra; a glass-fronted piece of modernism brings Dave Brubeck jazz to the ear. And if you go down to West Chiltington in rural Sussex and see the higgledy-piggledy collection of cottages sprinkled around the common there, you’ll surely catch strains of The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.

These 70-odd cottages – several of which are for sale – are Wells cottages, named after their architect, Reginald Fairfax Wells, and their back story has all the charm of a fairy tale. Born in 1871, Wells was a sculptor and a potter who, in the Twenties, also had a go at house building. Had he been in tune with the period he would have built some sleek, white, Art Deco creations but Wells was too much of an individualist to do that.

Instead, he built these facsimiles of 17th-century dwellings. His fakes were first class. He used bricks of irregular size covered in whitewashed slurry to make the walls look old. The cottages had thatched roofs, small rooms and tiny windows, just as they would have done 300 years previously. He sometimes took his quest for authenticity to extremes. These homes had no electricity; cesspits outside; and the water came from wells in the gardens.

The local people, unsurprisingly, thought that Wells was crazy. Indeed, they found it particularly amusing when the thatch on the homes occasionally caught fire. However, the cottages were snapped up as holiday homes by his bohemian friends in London who thought a weekend roughing it in the countryside chimed perfectly with their Arts and Crafts philosophy.

The cottages have remained popular since then, though subsequent generations have added mains services and updated the interiors in ways that would make old Reginald, who died in 1951, spin in his coffin. Yet the thing that cannot be changed about a Wells cottage – the thing that makes them sought after – is that each is an original design.

Take the cottage belonging to Dudley and Barbara Room in Fir Tree Lane. Unlike every other home on the common this is two cottages on a single plot.

“Wells built what was described as a 'guest suite’ in the garden,” says Dudley, 73, who has owned the house since 1999. “It was really a wooden annexe and the only 'guests’ there were mice and spiders. But I spent £46,000 on insulating it, installing a new shower room and redecorating. My mother lived there for eight years, then our son, Alan, had it.

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