The writer Olivia Laing on falling in love with a house

When my sister and I were small, we played a game in which we tried to describe our perfect house – sometimes an Elizabethan pile, sometimes an art deco flat in Highgate, but always old and with a distinctive character. We didn’t live in places like that. Our houses were newer and more flimsy. We moved often, travelling through a dozen addresses over the course of my parents’ marriage break-up and subsequent misadventures. Though there were beloved as well as hated houses, nowhere ever felt like the storybook vision of home, where people stayed in place for generations and no one ever packed a bag and went away for good.

The habit of shallow roots continued into adulthood. I rented until I was forty, in Brighton, New York, Cambridge, trying to build my fantasy of home in sublet flats or six-month shorthold tenancies: painting over the damp and planting gardens on borrowed ground, until the inevitable eviction notice arrived. When I finally got married, I moved into my husband’s house in Cambridge and immediately started campaigning for the country, ideally Suffolk.

We first saw our house at the very beginning of January 2020. From the outside, it looked absurdly beguiling, like a child’s drawing, with three neat rows of sash windows and enormous Madame Alfred Carrière roses either side of the front door. We sat in the café over the road and admired the box topiary, shaped like giant French fancies. We’d seen dozens of houses by then: beautiful old houses that had been neglected too long or had the heart ripped out of them. We weren’t going to get overexcited by a Georgian façade.

Any hesitation fell away the minute the door opened and we saw the long hall running right through to the garden. I would happily have bought it then and there. The house was wonderfully liveable without being at all over-restored, a credit to its owners, who had gently nudged it into the 21st century without losing any of its faded, faintly raffish charm (the stripped yellow bathroom walls was a particular stroke of genius). There was a larder and a pantry, a potting shed, a greenhouse, even a Tudor cellar. It appeared to have manifested exactly from my eight-year-old specifications.

Lockdown put the move on hold, and we didn’t arrive until the summer. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt as excited as that first night, wandering the empty house, unwrapping Staffordshire figures and slotting them into place. It felt like home immediately, not least because within a fortnight we’d not only unpacked every box but shelved the books and hung the pictures too. Things inherited or collected over years seemed instantly to belong and we bought very little: a farmhouse dresser to make up for the absence of cupboards, a few rugs and a lot of giant country house curtains, a whole faded garden of chintz.

MAY WE SUGGEST: Artist Sarah Graham's London home and studio

We did a minimum of decorating, too. Part of the house’s charm is that so many different people have lived in it over the years, and the marks of their presence haven’t been erased. One of the top floor rooms still has its 1950s wallpaper, block-printed with ribbons and bows. There’s a rickety ladder up to the attic floor, used by generations of maids. Between the 1960s and 2010, the house was owned by a garden designer who’d first trained as an architect. He opened the old house up, cutting light wells everywhere, and building the elegant staircase with its lovely chinoiserie banisters. I suspect he also put in several of the seemingly Georgian fireplaces, with Delft tiles showing Biblical scenes of angels and lions.