Ep. 485: Ben Pentreath's New Book

24:32Charlie McCormick:If you're in an early Georgian house and the walls are painted bright blue or bright green, that was a real bling status symbol. it was just showing off as to how much money you had to put those sorts of colors on the wall. A bit like Renaissance paintings. I mean, back in the 16th century, blue in a 16th century or 15th century Italian painting. That was just showing off. It was like, I'm really rich because it was the most expensive color in the world to use. So that's why the religious Mary is always dressed in a blue cloak. It's kind of a status symbol. um hey ho we're gone like really off piste but if i'm thinking about colors for me i actually don't think about it that much i'm just like what's my mood what's the atmosphere but then what i like to do is to have a few ideas and live with them for as long as possible and sometimes that's really hard if you're professionally decorating sometimes the house doesn't even exist at the point where you're being asked to think about choosing the schemes and colors to be ahead of construction.

25:42Charlie McCormick:And even if it does exist, it's hard in a way because when you're doing it for somebody else and you're visiting site, you're having to make quite quick choices based on short periods of time. You know, you're there for a day or you're there for a few hours and you're there in a particular light. Whereas the gorgeous thing about living in a building and then letting your choices evolve over time is that you can pin up. I mean, I actually don't normally splodge paint straight on the wall and normally put it on a sheet of cardboard or a sheet of paper so that you can pin it around and move it around and see how it feels in different corners of the space because it always changes.

26:22Charlie McCormick:And you can live with things and see what's nice in the evening, what's nice in the morning. And then you just kind of come up with a natural sort of idea as to what's best. How do you, is there any right or wrong to that process? I don't think there is. I've learned over many years that color is a very personal thing. I mean, there are definitely, you know, there are rights and wrongs or rules of colors. There's those period rules that I was just describing. But actually, there's no particular right or wrong. I had a client once, I remember I kind of got into her house for the first time for a site visit, and I was just kind of walking around feeling what I was feeling, thinking what I was thinking.

27:09Charlie McCormick:And I sort of had quite a strong feeling that her hallway would be pretty nice if it was painted a blue color, for example, a rich, warm blue color. People often think that blue is a cold color, but it doesn't have to be cold at all it can be a really warm color if you get that if you have a brighter tone and i was trying to advocate this and she just looked at me and said i'm really sorry i just don't like blue let's not do blue then it's kind of like let's pick yellow let's pick you know there's no

27:42Ben Pentreath:particular right or wrong that's so odd though because i feel like everyone likes oh no i agree with that you know me blue's the last color i choose yeah not everyone yeah and then i think

27:53Charlie McCormick:also we go through i mean colors colors have that moment don't they i mean instagram doesn't help but you know there are colors which go in and out of fashion um i'm suddenly using yellow more than i ever did in a long time i mean having said that i did have a bright yellow kitchen for years but i'm using shades of yellow which i hadn't hadn't hadn't done for a while but anyway hey ho um let

28:16Ben Pentreath:Let me ask you about...

28:17Charlie McCormick:Next question.

28:19Ben Pentreath:So, okay, we talked about this a little bit when we discussed, you know, when you were on last time. But when you moved into the parsonage, you were really more of a practicing architect. But now you do a lot of decoration with your firm. So I was curious if your approach to decorate or like did the parsonage teach you decorating? Or perhaps did you sort of use the parsonage as a, like, experimental?

28:49Charlie McCormick:It was all very unplanned and unintentional. No, you're absolutely right. When I first moved there, I was really involved purely in architecture. And most of my architecture in those days was actually to do with the town planning side. I think we, I remember we talked about before a lot, you know, the creation of these new towns and settlements. and um and yeah i was not a quote-unquote decorator in fact i mean i'm still not a quote-unquote professional decorator i've never i've never worked for another decorator um and i've never spent a day training to be a decorator um i i my decorator friends are still shocked at how little i know in fact some of my really lovely colleagues in the office are shocked at how little I know about, you know, names of curtain headings or how to, you know, upholster or blah, blah, whatever it might be.

29:45Charlie McCormick:It's a little, okay. So, but then actually decoration is something which I know that it's become a massive profession or these days, everybody likes to call it in England, at least it's an industry. You know, we work in the decoration industry, which I'm always like, really, is it really industrial? But anyway, um it's a business isn't it decoration but um i don't think that you need to have a formal professional training to be a successful decorator necessarily like actually what is it that create i mean in the past in in recent history there was no such thing as like courses in interior design.

30:33Charlie McCormick:Like John Fowler and David Hicks, the great mid-century British decorators, none of them had a formal training in interior decoration as a course or anything. They often had a great sense of historical understanding. So that's really important, I think, understanding history of design and history of furniture, history of interior architecture. Um, but a lot of it is quite visceral, comes from your heart. And, um, so I moved into Dorset. I've always had a really strong interest, a personal interest in furniture and objects and colors and all of that. So I was in play and enjoying myself kind of playing around with, you know, creating a little house.

31:26Charlie McCormick:Uh, that was a fun, it was a really fun project. And then, um, I was writing this blog with, you know, it was all quite early days of websites and stuff like that. And I had my little shop, which I'd set up with a friend in London, very accidental, the story of the shop. Um, but that's happened. And we had had a web designer and he was like, he's the brother of a really good friend of mine. And our web designer guy was like, oh, you need to have this thing called a blog. And I was like, what is a blog? And he was like, oh, it's a web log, you know, and you keep a little diary and it's a way of kind of generating interest on your website.

32:05Charlie McCormick:So I set up my little blog and it's still going, you know, 18 or 19 years later. It's kind of like, you know, people say to me, are you good at keeping a diary? I'm like, I hate keeping a diary in this. And he realized I've actually kept a diary for the last 19 years. It's a different form of diary. It's not writing down in my little notebook every evening. And it's very intermittent, but it's all there. So I was writing that, and then I had a particular way of writing. And an early supporter of the shop, I say supporter, that's a really nice word for customer. An early customer was a lovely editor.

32:43Charlie McCormick:Her office was around the corner, and she used to pop in quite a lot and buy things. And then she was reading the blog. And then she's an editor for a publishing company. She was in those days at Ryland Peters and Small, my first publisher. And she got in touch with me and said, Ben, would you like to write a book? I just love the way you write. And I love the way you talk about things. And that was my very first book, which was called English Decoration. Still in print, which is great. About 15 years later, which, you know, not many decoration books are in print for that long. So it was kind of fun.

33:14Charlie McCormick:And So it all led one thing into the other. The fact that I'd moved into Dorset led into the kind of, and the blog was already happening at that time. And the fact that all of those things were happening together led to me being asked to kind of write this book. and then I wrote this book and I punctually called it English decoration and that actually is what uh if you want to look at it in in a linear way probably created um a professional decoration career for me um because suddenly people started buying this book and reading it and calling me saying oh I really like the way you're writing about interiors would you like to look at my house and I was like okay this is great and of course the massive scam of the whole book it wasn't intentional like I was I tried to be honest about this but was that it was really just a book of of you know the only house in it that I had decorated it decorated was my own house in Dorset and our little my little flat and my tiny little flat in London had a brief appearance and um all of the other houses were just lovely old houses which belonged to friends of mine I I just persuaded 15 of my friends to open up their doors to a highly intrusive, lovely photographer to come in and take photos of their bedrooms and dressing rooms and their bathrooms and all of this sort of stuff.

34:40Charlie McCormick:And, um, but I think, uh, I mean, I never once claimed that any of this was my own work, but it spoke to a way of approaching decoration, which I think I've stayed quite true to all the way through, which is not to be too done up and too specific about things, if that makes sense. Like, just don't worry too much about all the kind of fine details. Because ultimately, that is not what makes a successful interior, in my view. It's got to have a sole. And that is not done through matching a piping to another piece of fabric. Like, we can all do that. You know, AI could do that, frankly, just color match really intelligently, um, and put schemes together.

35:33Charlie McCormick:Scheming, like, scheming kind of color, you know, taking a set of curtains, a set of fabric and a curtain or whatever it might be. yeah there's a color palette in there and then you can say right we'll do the ottoman in this match one and this like we'll do the piping to match this and that it's that's not what the soul of a room is about in my view so that's how i started decorating yeah

36:02Ben Pentreath:so where i mean you you mentioned earlier that you felt like the soul was in the things and the and the emotion what memories people it's it's it's all to do with

36:13Charlie McCormick:You can have the most beautifully decorated room, which we've all been in, which are utterly characterless. They've got no character, no sense of humanity, no sense of life. And it's life which it's all about.

36:35Charlie McCormick:It's all meaningless without people enjoying it and sitting on the sofas and spilling a glass of wine on the floor and all that stuff. those are the bits where your dog eating the chair leg or something like that that's that's

36:46Ben Pentreath:the fun part the character yeah okay well how would you suggest though to someone who is starting i feel so like so so few people probably do start from scratch but if someone was starting from scratch yeah moving into a new house and they have very little where would you say they begin like if if you if you're starting a room and you don't and you're i mean not starting with a scheme what is the kind of jumping i mean in the most in the most practical sense you've got to start

37:16Charlie McCormick:with really practical things haven't you like you need beds you need bedside tables you need bedside lamps right that's kind of right number one then you need a nice kitchen table and chairs and stuff like that and you probably want a sofa and then you kind of nah obviously that's really like putting it out in absolutely pure black and white um what where do i start with if you've got a completely blank canvas and um they don't you know if you or i mean if we're decorating for ourselves. If you're anything like me, you're carrying the baggage of your life. Like it's unusual that you're making a completely clean start.

38:05Charlie McCormick:I, from time to time, will have a client who, for example, has bought a new house and it's, let's say it's a holiday house, or let's say they live in the country and they've lived in the country for years and then they're buying a little flat in London or something like that. There are occasions where I'm working for a lovely American guy who's bought a flat in London and he doesn't have any furniture in London. He's buying a flat for the first time in London. So from time to time, you do have these completely blank palettes. Now, if you're working with a client as a decorator, you're interrogating kind of, there are various practical things about how the room flows and how does it all work.

38:46Charlie McCormick:And I think if you have if you have decoration that isn't actually robustly functional and comfortable it's ultimately gonna fail like it needs to be comfortable and a nice working place to live nobody wants to live in something that looks beautiful but it just doesn't work so you're so you're partly looking at things from that kind of rather black and white aspect and then obviously if you're working if i'm working for a client i'm trying to tease out things that they like things that they don't like and then and then you're trying to read the energy of a of a room and say well you know it wants to have maybe this atmosphere or or or another and we often tease that out by preparing quite a nuanced series of images for individual spaces which might be saying do you like this or do you like this?

39:39Charlie McCormick:You know, presenting choices. If you're doing it for yourself for the first time and you're trying to think that through, I think there is some merit in that approach of like gathering images that you love. I keep a little scrapbook. I mean, in days gone by, it used to be a physical one where I'd be tearing pages out of magazines. These days, so much of our imagery is digital that it's actually, you know, I'm not on Pinterest, I can't stand Pinterest, it's a really bad algorithm, it just spews up what you've already seen, it's like more and more and more of it. But certainly, you know, things on Instagram, I mean, it's overwhelming, but it's interesting, and you do see things that you think, wow, yeah.

40:29Charlie McCormick:But what I find is I can't, I have no memory for a digital image at all. So what I do, my trick is to screenshot everything and then every, and I keep my screenshots of pictures. And then every now and again, when I don't have anything else to do, which is not very often, but like probably once or twice a year, I just do a massive printout of all of my screenshots. and then they snip them all out, get rid of all of the Instagram logos and the captions and the little hearts. And I'd write on the back, you know, if it's a building that I've caught a glimpse of, you know, right where the building is, or if it's a photograph, like who the photographer was, or if it's a room, like maybe if I know that if it's named who the decorator was or something like that, I'll just kind of put a little note on it on the back.

41:13Charlie McCormick:And then I pin it on the wall of my office. And it suddenly moves from being a digital thing that you just instantly forget, like in one ear, out the other ear, you know, kind of in one eye, you've forgotten it because there's so many images out there. It's something which you can live with and enjoy. And I think that's a nice way to start, to find your personal style in a way. And it's very personal. And it's like, how do you pick a pair of trousers or how do you choose what shirt you're gonna wear or anything? There's no, I mean, people say there's rules, as I say, but there aren't really. It's about what makes you happy.

41:50Charlie McCormick:And I think an awful lot of my role as a professional decorator is actually being a little bit like a shrink and teasing out what people think they want to do, but are too scared to try it, if you know what I mean. and then I can be the helpful person who's saying that's a really good idea. Or sometimes they say, actually, if I were you, I really wouldn't do that. But you could still do it if you want, but I would travel cautiously on that front.

42:18Ben Pentreath:Right, so you're almost giving people the permission structure to follow their interests.

42:23Charlie McCormick:Yeah, exactly. And everyone is terrified about making expensive mistakes in decoration. And the problem with decoration is that an awful lot of it is expensive. you know upholstery or you know getting a really fancy set of curtains made oh my god it's expensive and so you're cautious about it so then that steers you in a certain direction towards something that could be a bit bland or anonymous sometimes because you're terrified it and it's a bit like how we all um speak these days you know with with everybody is um is i mean maybe with good reason Everyone is terrified of offending people. So then we end up saying, I mean, other than your president.

43:07Charlie McCormick:Some of us aren't terrified enough, maybe. Yeah, exactly. Some moderation would go down well from time to time. But, you know, there's a sort of fear of saying anything for, you know, because you don't want to. But actually, it's kind of fine to, particularly in the realm of interior decoration. let's dick off politics in the realm of interior decoration it's fine to uh do things that you're the only person who likes it it's yours it's not you know you don't have to please everyone so i i'd vote you know diving in headfirst yeah yeah that seems like such a challenge to

43:48Ben Pentreath:to be able to design on self-consciously but yeah really you just have to not worry about

43:56Charlie McCormick:it too much, don't think about it too much. I'm a definite believer in the fact that you can overthink decoration. I think that the workability side of it, the function, the black and white drawing side of it, like your kitchen design or how the bathroom is laid out or how a room is going to be structured and anything to do with architectural alterations to a house or planning, like you cannot overthink that like you really the more time and thought you give to those structural issues the more resolved and the better it will get when it comes to decoration which colors fabrics you know all of the ingredients of a room i genuinely believe you can overthink it you can worry about it too much and decoration is like painting it's like you it it's or it's it's actually like cooking it is something which you need to develop confidence in um so that you know when to leave alone and when to say that's great that's enough and some of the most i mean like if i'm being modest some of the rooms which i'm really most happy with at all of all i i didn't give that much thought to it was just a process where we said let's do this let's do this oh that goes well with that bingo you know i do love the way you show that though in

45:29Ben Pentreath:your photography because and i think we talked about this in your previous book i think we did before because of the shark island we did the shark island and then somebody else on a different

45:39Charlie McCormick:podcast i can't remember who it was was like why did you leave a plastic bag in one of the photos and I was like, what? I had no idea. I'd left a plastic bag in one of the photos, but I had. None of us had ever noticed it. Quite funny. Anyway, but yes. For anyone who doesn't know,

45:55Ben Pentreath:you photographed your last book. And did you photograph this book?

45:59Charlie McCormick:We did completely. And that was, and then Charlie obviously did lots of the photos of the garden as well. Yeah. And this book would have been impossible to shoot with an external photographer because so much of it was just about capturing a particular moment. And, you know, there are lots of shots, I mean, of the interiors, um, in particular, but, but also of the garden, you know, particular moments of the day, particular, um, seasons or, or whatever, but little shots of kind of like, you know, when we were having things like, I dunno, like our farewell party, when it was time to leave, I just literally a minute before door, everybody walked in through the door, I just snapped a photograph of this beautiful table that Charlie had laid with all of these beautiful cakes and cheeses and the candles were lit and the champagne was open and ready to pour.

46:54Charlie McCormick:If we had staged that as a kind of room scene, you know, for the professional photographer to come down in a two-day period, you know, that month and take photos of us doing everything. I mean, it would have still been really nice but i think it would have had a different feeling and um and it there's a curious absence in the book as well compared to i mean you know if you want to be um a bit mean about our book i guess it's kind of like what you would generically call a lifestyle book you know um and one of the things about all lifestyle books uh written about people like me or charlie or whatever in their houses, you know, decorators in their house or Charlie in his garden is that they are filled with photographs of me or Charlie kind of like doing stuff.

47:47Charlie McCormick:Okay. So, you know, Charlie would be digging or kind of like whatever I'd be, you know, wandering around with a bunch of flowers or whatever it might be. That's, that's the, that's the generic format for that type of, for that type of book the the one person who is never in the book is um is either of us because we're taking the photos if that makes sense so i'm not in the pressing click and then running around and standing there pouring the lemonade so there's a curious absence of um us living the kind of lifestyle in the way of those rather posed, um, shoots, you know, that lifestyle books, uh, tend to, um, steer you down.

48:34Charlie McCormick:But the difference is that we've been able to snap every single little moment of life. Um, and obviously the pets, you know, the dogs and the cat are kind of weaving their way through the whole thing, um, because they're on the other side of the lens. And I hope that it will have a richness, a sort of complexity, or a kind of mismatch that a lot of very packaged of that type of book just don't have. Because you can pick up those types of books and know that the whole thing was produced over four or six episodes of photography and quite often they bring somebody in to then write about the house and this and that and it's never very personal and we've tried to keep it more in that sense of like a diary really of our time there and that's exactly what it is it almost

49:33Ben Pentreath:feels like a scrapbook of your time living yeah yeah exactly yeah that's what's so magical it's

49:39Charlie McCormick:a nice way of thinking about it actually yeah yeah it is actually it was real yeah yeah it was

49:45Ben Pentreath:really real yeah yeah that comes through and i think sometimes what you're saying is that it's impossible for it to make it feel real because it's not because you're having someone come do it but the way that y 'all executed the book helped the realness and the authenticity shine through on the page which is what is so wonderful about it that's a weird thing isn't that if you're a if you're a um i don't know anything about what i'm about to say but if

50:14Charlie McCormick:you're a molecular scientist and you're observing under a microscope, you know, super powerful microscope, how atoms are behaving in a given condition, just the fact that you're observing them changes their behavior. Like it's a real, it's a problem of molecular science that if you try and start to see what things are doing at the molecular level, if you're looking, they behave differently because you're there kind of thing you're okay so now we're getting into quantum designing yeah we're into quantum design but it's a it's a it's a thing isn't it it's sort of like there is a i mean as you know from the last book i taught myself how to take very basic photographs i mean by the way kids photography is not complicated as i tell everyone the processing of the photos is complicated.

51:07Charlie McCormick:Like that's a dark art and it's a technical skill that I will never learn. But like just taking photos is not that hard. I urge anyone with a visual interest, buy yourself a camera and just start going with it. It's kind of fun. And it, um, I mean, when I was doing my big book about all of the different architectural projects, again, it meant that I could capture moments where there's no way I would have persuaded a photographer to get out of bed at 3am to drive to a site for sunrise and then leave and go somewhere else, you know, it just wouldn't have worked. But it meant that it was a lovely way of, I mean, obviously these days we've all got our iPhones, so we're just capturing everything the whole time.

51:47Charlie McCormick:And actually iPhones are incredible. They're getting more and more powerful.

51:55Charlie McCormick:So it anyway it has got i hope it's got an authenticity to it which doesn't feel too packaged or polished if that makes sense it does okay i have to ask you about your new place because okay the book

52:09Ben Pentreath:wraps up you've yeah you've left the parsonage and you give us a little bitty teaser yeah exactly yes yes but we want to hear more and well absolutely on instagram but yeah it's pretty magical.

52:24Charlie McCormick:It's amazing. I mean, so the whole story of the parsonage, you know, came to an end. I won't say abruptly, it's not the right word, but, you know, we'd been living in this magical place, which I described at the beginning of this little chat. And to be honest, all of us there thought that it would just last forever somehow. And then this wonderful family, the Williamses, who owned the estate, just for various reasons really, decided with their kids, they had four children, but they decided that their time of looking after it all and being in charge was coming to an end. Fundamentally, the children didn't really want to take it all on.

53:11Charlie McCormick:And we're entering a difficult phase in England where if you are a landlord, as they were, of 40 houses, so not nothing. They had increasing responsibilities to be making the houses hyper energy efficient and all of this sort of stuff, which for them was quite overwhelming to think about. And so, as I say in the book, and we talk about it a little bit, they made this decision to sell the whole estate. And that was the moment that Charlie and I decided that we wanted to move and try somewhere completely different. And you can either look at life, you know, when it comes up with an unexpected, you know, avenue, I won't say it was a blow, but it was tough in a way because we loved it there so much.

54:05Charlie McCormick:And we loved the house and the garden and Charlie had poured his soul into the garden. And, you know, my mom was buried in the church next door like we really had our roots there and but you can either look at life where you just kind of um feel sad or you can go great this is a whole new opportunity and we just decided that we'd go down that route rather than the morning the kind of you know what was going on and so we we had those two little houses which you'll know from the previous book up on the west coast of Scotland, the Bothys, which we loved and were hard to get to from Dorset. So we thought, great, we'll move to Scotland to be closer.

54:44Charlie McCormick:It's a long story, but we ended up, after lots and lots of house hunting, finding a house in the middle of nowhere. And it's just one of those things which, when you find the perfect house, it's speaking to you, you're speaking to it. It's a bit like falling in love with somebody. It's just irresistible. Whatever the issue is, we're in London, they're in New York or whatever it is, you overcome all of those things. This house is in a little island in a group of islands called Orkney. Orkney is a group of about 70 islands off the northern coast of Scotland. And there's a big island, which has got about 20 ,000 people living on it, called Mainland, confusingly.

55:38Charlie McCormick:It's not Mainland UK, but it's just Mainland Orkney. And our island is a population of about 200 people, and it's called Rousey. and the house we bought is called Westness and it was built in the mid 18th century. It's a very, very beautiful house with what's really exciting is it's got a 10 acre garden surrounded by walls with amazing trees. So Charlie is just so happy because he can create this incredible garden now over the next, you know, decades to come, you know, it's not going to happen instantly and we're by the sea and we just absolutely love it here and as i say we've been looking for we you know we knew that we lived in this house which was special and we really really loved it and then to try find something as good but different you know so we weren't just replicating kind of what we already had it was a it was it was a challenge in a way um but these things have a habit of falling into place at the right time.

56:44Charlie McCormick:We were about to go down a different route. We were going to build a little house at our place in Argyle, where these two little botthies are. We finally got planning approval to build a house, and we were going to start construction. And we were quite close to pressing the button on construction. And Charlie was pretty uncertain that that's what we should be doing. And that is why I was still hovering around in England. It's called Right Move in America. I think it was called Zillow or something like that, where it's like all the properties are listed on a website. And every single morning that you can search by area and I would scroll out, I would sort of zoom down so that you'd have the whole of the map of the north of the United Kingdom, you know, the north of England, Scotland, all of the outer isles.

57:32Charlie McCormick:I would just draw a blob around them and you could draw a circle around an area and you click on and you see what new houses have come on the market that day. And it's a massive area. So it's about 10 ,000 houses every day coming on the market. But obviously, you're looking at the first few pages because that's where the unusual or the special, you know, the more expensive houses are. And one of these mornings, I was drinking my coffee and then I clicked on this tiny little thumbnail picture of the house. I was like, wow, this is so beautiful. This looks amazing. And then I looked at where it was and I was like, oh my God, where is this?

58:15Charlie McCormick:This looks odd. And I sent it to Charlie and I said, Charlie, this is looking pretty perfect, but it looks really hard to get to. And he just texted back instantly saying, this is the one. And then about a week later, we went to see it. And, um, it was, um, lived in by this really amazing old lady. She was 90 years old. She had been widowed. She'd been living there on her own for about five years. They had lived there for about 40 years. So she had been there for a very long time. The people before her had been there for even longer. Um, and we went to go and see it. We fell in love with it and that was that it was just that was that was it and then amazingly 10 days later she she was meant to be moving out and moving into a small house on the main on the main island of orkney um much more manageable you know her kids had persuaded her that she didn't really want to go she loved the house so much and she about 10 days after we had placed our offer and she had accepted it, she died in her sleep and she just didn't wake up in the morning.

59:24Charlie McCormick:And she didn't have to leave. It was kind of like... That's so beautiful in a way. It was actually amazing. It's like that is what we all want in our lives rather than having to go into your small house or end up in the care home or, you know, the hospital or whatever. Like it was actually perfect. And she was amazing. And so she had really cherished the house and that's one of the reasons why it's so fantastic. It's just completely unspoiled. But we do have to do quite a lot here. We're sort of doing boring things like rewiring and re-plumbing, and we need to do some re-roofing and new windows.

1:00:01Charlie McCormick:So it's all of that stuff, which we're about to start on quite soon. And then having quite a bit of fun doing new things in the garden as well.

1:00:10Ben Pentreath:I have so many boring logistical questions, but is it... Yeah. Yeah, how do you do all the construction?

1:00:18Charlie McCormick:you gotta have well we've got a really lovely firm of builders and they are they're not on our island they're on the mainland so they come we've got a little ferry which goes back and forth 10 times so they come over on the ferry every morning we know exactly what time they're going to arrive we know exactly what time they're going to leave and um so they've started now they're doing their first little site setup and all of that stuff and they're just super lovely they They know everybody in Orkney. They're a really old firm of contractors, really high skilled, and they really understand old buildings.

1:00:52Charlie McCormick:And so that was the key. And they love the house. And they love Charlie because he bakes for them. He can't bake for them every day because he'd kill them. They would die. But no, they're really great and they understand it all. so and then yeah there are lots of questions so grocery shopping is yeah there's just a big uh good old-fashioned supermarket in the middle of town in the main in the little city actually so we have to take the ferry over there is a shop on our island it's open on monday wednesday friday and sunday afternoons yeah or run by nikki yeah which we can get anything you need in our little shop where there's a primary school um there is a doctor's surgery there's a post office you know there's all of those little kind of daily daily needs but for if we're doing a big shot we go over to um kirkwall is the main town it's actually officially a city because it's got a cathedral and then there's another lovely town called stromness so they've got really nice food shops um and then you've got a great vegetable garden so maybe charlie is growing a lot of veg Yeah, that's the one thing you can't easily buy in Orkney.

1:02:05Charlie McCormick:There's amazing, delicious meat from all of the local animals. And then there's wonderful fish. And there's amazing cheese. We've now got our chickens as well. He's hatched some chickens, so soon we'll have our own eggs. But fresh veg is hard to buy. Fresh organic veg. And so he is creating this massive veg garden. Is he going to set up a little farmer's market? like farmstead exactly that's the deal yeah that's coming you heard it here first yeah

1:02:38Ben Pentreath:because okay i was looking at your instagram and i was like okay that's a lot of vegetables so how

1:02:44Charlie McCormick:many salads are they having per day yeah we get through a lot of salad chardin it's a bit crazy we do actually eat a lot of salad but we are going to make a much bigger veg garden the house used to have a huge victorian walled vegetable garden which now is fairly overgrown with trees and we're he's chopping down all the trees and later on this year we're going to start clearing patches of that and getting that going and once we get that going then we will be providing vegetables to the whole island or to the whole of orkney yeah that'll be a big deal but it's going to be fun it's going to be amazing that's so cool it's it's i mean so cool our

1:03:23Ben Pentreath:listeners have to go follow well and you've created your own um there's a westness instagram right

1:03:28Charlie McCormick:i know we're bad at posting on that at the moment we we've i've um we've done lots of historical photos we've we spent a lot of time looking at um like research old photos of the house and the occupants and everything and i've just discovered a whole new batch of historic photos so there's We're actually about to start reposting on Westness on Instagram. And then if you follow me, then you'll get a lot of rousy stories. If you follow Charlie, he's a much more intermittent poster on Instagram. But when he does, they're very special.

1:04:06Ben Pentreath:Well, an amazing follow because this house is just, I mean, as was the parsonage, so insane.

1:04:13Charlie McCormick:The parsonage was amazing and we never thought we could excel it. But actually, this house is now, it is wonderful. And there's a whole story then in the book about how we've moved and all the rest of it. But that's going to have to be another book in about 10 years' time.

1:04:30Ben Pentreath:Yeah. Well, obviously, we'll have you back when that day comes. Oh, my God.

1:04:35Charlie McCormick:Definitely. I'd love to come back.

1:04:37Ben Pentreath:Do you spend winter there? Will you spend winter there?

1:04:39Charlie McCormick:Yeah, we've done two winters so far. It gets very cold, gets very dark. And you know, the sun goes down at about three o 'clock in the afternoon and it comes up at 9.30 in the morning because we're very far north. And it's fantastic. It's lovely. I love it. You get these crazy storms. It's good. We don't mind the winter. Lots of people up here don't like the winter. And then when we first arrived, everyone was like, oh, but you have to survive two winters. It's actually kind of fun the winter the flip side is at this time of year in the middle of summer i mean we've just had the solstice the longest day of the year but at this time of the year it doesn't really get dark like sunset is around about 11 30 and sunrise is at about three in the morning and if but if you wake up in the middle of the night it's still daylight outside like you could go out and read your newspaper in the garden at two in the morning it's really crazy um so i have an eye

1:05:39Ben Pentreath:mask yeah to sleep oh my gosh wild well thank you for sharing the book with us it's gorgeous and just thanks so much it's such an emotional read too which i loved it is yeah i had a whole list of questions and i haven't gotten to any of them but you know what we're just gonna keep this

1:06:01Charlie McCormick:episode to one episode yeah i think we should keep this one to one exactly otherwise everyone

1:06:06Ben Pentreath:You have a beautiful Scottish countryside to go enjoy. Yeah, exactly.

1:06:12Charlie McCormick:Yeah, exactly. Now tell me, do we have a decorating dilemma? I was reading my notes. We don't today. That's easy.

1:06:21Ben Pentreath:Yeah.

1:06:21Charlie McCormick:All the decorating dilemmas are solved anyway by just saying, just do whatever you want to do.

1:06:26Ben Pentreath:You're right. I think that was the best guidance of all right there.

1:06:30Charlie McCormick:Yeah. It just doesn't matter. Don't worry about what anyone else thinks. Least of all, any of us.

1:06:36Ben Pentreath:I'm also thinking that I've got some advice to just get yourself a Charlie. I mean, he sounds so remarkable. And he comes with all of his collections and gardening.

1:06:49Charlie McCormick:He's the most amazing. It's incredible. Yeah, life transforming. He bakes? He's the most amazing cook. Yeah, the baking. One of his most kind of like wanted recipes is for his sponge cake. covered in cream and raspberries, jam, and like, it's crazy. Anyway, he's finally releasing the recipe in the book.

1:07:16Ben Pentreath:It's never been written down before.

1:07:18Charlie McCormick:And I forced him to put it in there.

1:07:22Ben Pentreath:And it looks spectacular.

1:07:24Charlie McCormick:But he's also the most amazing gardener. And really, the book is about gardens and the seasons and the passage of time. And the garden is the thing which really flows through the whole book. um the house and the interiors we've tried to make it very practical as well like we actually tried to put in like lots of information about plant lists and you know these are his favorite tulips or the dahlias or kind of whatever it is like there's there's quite a lot of information and i did the same in the decoration side you know like actually this is the paint color this is where the fabric came from blah blah blah because so often you get those other books and And it all looks amazing.

1:08:02Charlie McCormick:And you're trying to work out what all the ingredients are. And you don't know. And it's kind of like really drives me mad.

1:08:10Ben Pentreath:Why don't I buy the book?

1:08:11Charlie McCormick:Yeah, exactly. You're not going to tell me. Anyway.

1:08:15Ben Pentreath:Well, thank you so much. Thank you so much. It's such a treat.

1:08:20Charlie McCormick:A year at the Parsonage.

1:08:22Ben Pentreath:You can find it on Amazon or wherever your local bookseller.

1:08:27Charlie McCormick:Go to your local bookseller, kids. We hate Amazon, but we all secretly buy our books from Amazon. But we actually do love supporting our local booksellers. And in England now, it's absolutely amazing because you can go to your local bookshop and order the book with them. And it turns up the next day or the day after, just like it turns up on Amazon. You know, but you're keeping a little local bookshop alive. And I really do actually love to give a shout out to proper local bookshops because they are the beating heart and the soul of any small town. and that is where you know the kids who aren't good at sport get to hang out that was me when i was 15 14 you know it's the bookshop and the art department that was it we'll speak in a year or two when the next thing happens whatever that is

1:09:19Ben Pentreath:and that's our show you can find all of the show notes on our blog howtodecorate.com slash podcast. To send in a decorating dilemma, email your questions to podcast at Ballard Designs dot net so we can help you with your space. And of course, be sure to follow us on social media at Ballard Designs. Don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode. And please leave us a review. We'd love to hear your feedback. Until next time, happy decorating!