A house above the Mendips

The house sits at the top end of a lane that leaves the centre of Bruton beside the King’s School, climbs through a beech wood, and emerges onto a south-facing ridge above the town. On a clear April afternoon in 2026, you can see from the kitchen window across to the Mendip escarpment some twelve miles away. The owners, who have asked not to be named, bought the house in 2002 and have been working on it, slowly, ever since.

I parked at the gate and walked down. There is no drive — the house has never had one — and the path crosses a corner of orchard before reaching the back door, which is the door everyone uses. The front door is locked. It has been locked, I am told, since they moved in.

A kitchen that doesn’t pretend

The kitchen is the room you arrive in. It runs the width of the back of the house: a long single space, stone-walled, with two windows looking south and a deep stone sink set against the north wall. The floor is wide oak boards, scrubbed pale. There is a single piece of large furniture in the room — a refectory table, ten foot long, oak, with the wear of two decades of use — and along the wall opposite the windows a painted Welsh dresser holding plates.

There is no kitchen island. There are no upper cabinets. The cooker is freestanding. The dishwasher is concealed behind a single oak panel that doesn’t quite match the rest of the room, which I appreciate; it would have been worse if it had matched.

“We came in with too many things,” she tells me, putting on a kettle. “We’ve been taking them out, more or less, ever since. The house got better the more we took out.”

This is, I think, a sentence I want to write down. I do.

The arrangement of rooms

There are four rooms on the ground floor, arranged around a small central hall. The drawing room is at the front, the kitchen at the back, a study on the south-west corner and a small north-facing sitting room — which they call the cold room — opposite. The drawing room has a stone fireplace that is original and a Howard sofa that is not. There are no rugs. The floorboards are painted a deep grey-blue, slightly chalky, slightly bare.

The walls are limewashed in different shades of the same off-white. The owners explain that this was not a decision so much as a series of failed attempts to match a single tone — each room ended up with what was left over. The effect is good. The light moves through the house and finds different surfaces to settle on.

I spent some time in the cold room. It has one north-facing window, a small upholstered armchair, a low table, a single watercolour of a cow above the fireplace. The cow is small, naive, undated, signed only with the initials E.M. It was bought at the school fête in 2014 for three pounds. They have refused, several times, to have it valued.

The table

It is, finally, the kitchen table that holds the house. This is not an exaggeration. The whole architecture of the ground floor seems to bend towards it: the dresser faces it, the cooker is set perpendicular to it, the chairs are placed irregularly around it and never quite tidied away. Breakfast happens at this table. So does most of supper. Most of the post is read at this table, and most of the year’s notebooks have been written at it.

When they say they bought it in Frome for £180, I ask whether they would sell it. She laughs and says no — not for any sentimental reason but because no other table would do, and they have stopped looking.

The room, I think, would not be the room without it. Walking back up the lane, I was thinking about that and about how the work of a good interior is not the addition of beautiful objects but the careful weighting of one or two, and the patience to leave the rest empty.