#and replumb the whole upstairs

[freckleslikestars]

Okay, someone please settle this argument I’m having with my dad:

Someone has hung a basket of their things (in this case face cloths and scrubbies) with those Command removable hook things (you use a double sided sticky thing and it gives a really strong hold) in the shared bathroom. Because you take longer and hotter than average showers, one of the hooks keeps falling off and so the basket falls down. Do you:

A) inform the person whose basket it is that it’s fallen down and the hook needs replacing, but other than removing the basket from the other hook so it doesn’t fall and damage the sink it’s over, do nothing else to interfere

B) inform the person that it’s fallen down and offer to rehang it if desired, but if you can’t remember how it was hung/don’t think you can do an appropriately satisfactory job at rehanging it, you don’t touch it and leave it to them

C) don’t say anything and rehang it incorrectly and wonkily, and then when the other person points out that you did it wrong and you should have just left it to them, kick off and insist that the other person is being ungrateful.

[dartmoorsfinest]

Inside Josh Widdicombe’s home with butcher shop tiles and a £6,000 bath (The Sunday Times, 10.11.24)

The comedian’s interior designer wife, Rose Hanson, has restored an 1860s house with copper pipes, vintage finds and lots of books.

[NON-PAYWALL / ORIGINAL]

The comedian Josh Widdicombe and Rose Hanson, his interior designer wife, have restored a 19th-century former artist’s house in the village of Mullion, on the Lizard. The star of Channel 4’s The Last Leg is in the process of writing gags for his 2025 stand-up tour. Called Not My Cup of Tea, because he gave up alcohol last year and now drinks eight cups of “builder’s tea” a day, the show will be a catalogue of gentle gripes on topics from motorway services to children’s party bags. He says inspiration strikes during the eight-hour drive from where they live in Hackney, east London, to their Cornish home, when he has the captive audience of Hanson and their kids, Pearl, seven, and Cassius, three. Traffic jams on the A303 are evidently fertile ground for middle-aged grumbles.

We are speaking during half-term, and the final stage of the renovation — the landscaping of their three-quarter-acre plot — is in ear-splitting full swing. A sauna has already been installed and by the time the diggers depart there will be a fireplace and outdoor kitchen on the patio, and a natural swimming pool in the garden. To a backing track of excavations, the couple, both 41, explain that they picked this glorious spot because Josh grew up in Haytor Vale, near Torquay, and his parents still live nearby in Devon, while Hanson (whose mother, incidentally, helped to create Zippy, the puppet from the 1980s kids’ show Rainbow) remembers Cornwall fondly from childhood holidays. “It felt like a natural place for us to look,” she says.

The 1860s house, called Moorlands, previously belonged to a local abstract artist, Barrie Cook, whose works are in the Tate and the Government Art Collection. “He’s got Wikipedia. So he’s legit,” Widdicombe says. “I don’t know much about art but if someone’s got a Wikipedia page, that’s quite a big deal.” Along with the rambling building, they took on the expectations of Cook’s family. “We had quite a strange day of meeting the whole extended family after we’d bought the house,” Widdicombe says. “They just wanted to know that this place was going into the hands of people that would care about it and treat it well.” The couple have done the Cooks proud, with a sympathetic top-to-toe restoration and a reconfiguration of the layout to meet the demands of modern family life.

They bought Moorlands in October 2022 for under £850,000 and are likely to spend the same again on renovations. Work started in January 2023, knocking through walls upstairs and between the sitting room and dining room on the ground floor. Six months later, the old extension was demolished and by November every single window in the house had been replaced. “They’re basically identical to the windows that were here, but they’re not falling apart,” Hanson says. They took the property from five bedrooms and two bathrooms to six bedrooms and seven bathrooms, overhauled the electrics, got rid of the oil tank and replumbed with help from a local company called The Braze. “It’s like an incredible work of art with all of these amazing copper pipes,” she says.

By March this year the lights and heating were on. Hanson sourced the oak flooring from Dartmoor firm Coppice and Crown. The most striking change was the replacement of the old sunroom on the first floor. “The upstairs conservatory was quite amazing. But it was just completely impractical because it was absolutely boiling, and there was quite bad damp in the room below. So we got an architect involved and designed two double bedrooms with en suites, and a beautiful formal dining room underneath.” Hanson repositioned the kitchen at the front of the house, where the family would benefit from the glorious garden view. By April 24, every room in the house was finished, and they had their first guests to stay.

Now they intend to spend six weeks of the year enjoying their seaside getaway, and let it out in between family visits. So how do they live when in Cornwall? Hanson lifts weights in her home gym and plans to learn to surf at the nearby Dan Joel Surf School. “I hate stuff like that,” says Widdicombe, who can’t swim. “I like a walk. I like running on the treadmill, but I don’t like anything that takes me outside of my comfort zone, ideally. The reason to be on holiday is to relax, not to do anything that makes me stressed.”

He doesn’t mean to party, either. It’s a part of the world notorious for celeb spotting, with notable locals including fellow comics David Baddiel and Morwenna Banks, but the couple plan to lead a quiet life. “We don’t really have parties because we’ve got young children,” Hanson says. “And the people who come and stay have young children too. I mean, we’re lucky if we all get downstairs again after the kids’ bedtime at nine o’clock.” The wildest evening at Moorlands so far was, Widdicombe says, “The first week we stayed, we had four couples and eight children in the house, and we managed to get six kids in the bath at once.”

The tub in question, in the family bathroom, is a £6,000 Rockwell, from Water Monopoly, which Hanson describes as “an extravagant purchase”. A magpie who is constantly acquiring vintage treasures, she added inexpensive second-hand touches to complete the decor. “We found this amazing little yellow bathroom cabinet that just kind of makes the whole room pop. I’m a real hoarder of second-hand fabrics from eBay and I’d got this vintage Pierre Frey fabric patterned with tassels and gems, which we made into a blind.”

Asked how much of the design is her husband’s idea, Hanson is quite clear. “He doesn’t have any say. I don’t even run anything past him, except budget. There are times where there are things that he would really like. When we moved into our first house, Josh really wanted a bread bin that said ‘Bread’ on it. So I made that happen. Then there was [a request for] a hot water tap. So fine. Yeah, you can have your hot water tap.”

Widdicombe has no complaints. “I’d rather someone else who knows what they’re doing takes the lead,” he says. “I know what I’m good at and I don’t think Rose is ever going to give me notes on my stand-up. And in the same way, I’m not going to give her notes on this.” Hanson responds: “You’re basically the dream client.”

Before they moved in together, the comedian’s taste was based around displaying his music collection. “I lived in a rental property in Turnpike Lane [north London] when I was in my twenties and I didn’t have much money. I had a wall of about 600 CDs.” Now his focus has switched to books as decor. “I buy a lot of books and I’m a keeper of books. I hate it when someone says to me, ‘Can I borrow that after you’ve finished reading it?’ Because I think, ‘No, I want to put it on my wall.’ It’s like you’ve killed a deer or whatever, isn’t it, and you want to display it? If someone says that, I’ll buy them a copy of that book rather than give them my book.” So, excluding the library in his study, and keeping her hands off the hot tap and bread bin, Hanson had carte blanche to decorate the house to her taste.

She brought in her friend Charlotte Tilbury, a designer who had worked on their London home in Victoria Park, Hackney, and moved to Devon during Covid. Halfway through the works, the two women decided to start a business together and make Moorlands their first joint project: Penrose Tilbury was founded. “It’s not like work,” Hanson says. “It’s like going and hanging out with your mate and drinking rosé.” It wasn’t all wine and design chat, she corrects herself. “The hardest things to find were bathroom tiles. We did a collaboration with Original Style who made a bespoke pencil-black tile for us that we just couldn’t really find anywhere. Then the Daily Mail did a story — they must have got some pictures from our Instagram — and somebody said in the comments that our bathrooms look like a butcher’s shop. I was quite pleased with that. That was sort of the look I was going for.”

The next visit will be for New Year’s Eve, when the couple will be inviting friends for an ultra-low-key gathering. Hanson says: “We might have a glass of wine after we finish bedtime at nine o’clock.” And there will be plenty of PG Tips.