‘The house sings with colour and with life’ / How the fashion world fell for Charleston, the Bloomsbury set’s country home

Kate Moss photographed at Charleston house for British Vogue, 2021.
Photograph: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott/Art Partner

‘The house sings with colour and with life’: how the fashion world fell for Charleston, the Bloomsbury set’s country home

From Virginia Woolf and her circle 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 home

Jess Cartner-Morley

Saturday 12 August 2023

The most fashionable 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 country lane riven deep in a fold of the Sussex Downs. Inside, there is not a single midcentury cocktail cabinet, rainforest shower 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 slope of weathered tile.