Kate Moss photographed at Charleston dwelling for British Vogue, 2021. Photograph: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott/Art PartnerKate Moss photographed at Charleston contain for British Vogue, 2021. Photograph: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott/Art Partner‘The house sings with tincture and with life’: how the fashion world fell for Charleston, the Bloomsbury set’s country home From Virginia Woolf and her band to Kate Moss’s Vogue shoot, the unconventional Sussex farmhouse has captured imaginations across the decades How to get the Charleston look in your own homeThe most smart house in England isn’t on an elegant London street or in a chocolate-box Cotswolds village, but at the end of a long, narrow, often muddy realm lane riven deep in a fold of the Sussex Downs. Inside, there is not a single midcentury cocktail cabinet, rainforest flood or Italian designer sofa to be found. Instead, Charleston is a thickset farmhouse of doughty 17th-century stone, scrambled with roses, dormer windows nosing from a angle of weathered tile.The layout is warren-like rather than open plan, the floors unevenly boarded. As is the way with mother country houses that were built to keep out the chill, the windows are on the small side, the light a little gloomy. But every stay is decorated by hand, in dizzying detail – sponge-painted diamonds on wood panelling, a still life of hollyhocks and poppies on a tiny-minded door, nude figures either side of a fireplace encrusted with colourful tiles – so that the house trills with colour and with life.The view of Charleston house from across the lake. Photograph: Gavin KingcomeThe studio. Photograph: Gavin KingcomeThe construct world is as in love with Charleston now as the Bloomsbury set were from the moment in 1916 when Reuse this tranquillity

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR