{"id":10074,"date":"2022-04-18T12:00:58","date_gmt":"2022-04-18T10:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homesandantiques.com\/?p=28469"},"modified":"2022-04-18T12:21:11","modified_gmt":"2022-04-18T10:21:11","slug":"sarah-jane-axelbys-art-filled-18th-century-barn-conversion","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/homesantiques\/rss_feed\/sarah-jane-axelbys-art-filled-18th-century-barn-conversion\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarah-Jane Axelby\u2019s art-filled 18th-century barn conversion"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Serena Fokschaner\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Monday, 18 April 2022 at 12:00 am<\/p>

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At the start of 2020, Sarah-Jane Axelby\u2019s prospects were bright. The former publisher was immersed in an interior design course at KLC in London. A colourful new career beckoned. Then came the pandemic and Sarah-Jane, who has Crohn\u2019s disease, was forced to shield at home in Buckinghamshire. Panic set in, before her customary pragmatism took over. \u2018Our internet\u2019s so bad that it made studying online impossible, so I had to think again,\u2019 she says. \u2018I\u2019ve never let my condition run my life. I didn\u2019t want to look back at this mad time and think I\u2019d achieved nothing.\u2019<\/p>\n

Putting the course on hold, Sarah-Jane, an art school graduate, resolved to set herself the challenge of \u2018a sketch a day\u2019. The subject matter was obvious. The weatherboarded, Grade II-listed home she shares with her husband and two children is picturesque enough to fill several sketchbooks.<\/p>\n

Her first sketch was of the living room. The piece reveals art-strewn walls<\/a> and colourful furnishings captured in ink, softened with layers of watercolour and pastels. When she posted the work on Instagram<\/a>, it met with a flurry of likes. Designers, home-lovers and the scions of stately homes took note of her intimate roomscapes. Emboldened by the appreciation, Sarah-Jane, an adroit online networker, began to paint other interiors that caught her eye on social media. Within a week, she was dispatching paintings to clients across the world. Out of necessity, a new venture was born.<\/p>\n

Sarah-Jane was initially surprised by the interest. \u2018Room portraits are old-fashioned, but there\u2019s definitely a market for it,\u2019 she says. Lockdown, she agrees, made us find solace in smaller pleasures: dahlias spilling over a hand-painted vase, table settings<\/a> lit by soft candlelight. Immutable, unchanging things. Her glimpses of private, domestic worlds feel similarly timeless.<\/p>\n

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Her own home is equally inviting. Framed by low Chiltern hills, the 18th-century barn<\/a> had been hamfistedly converted in the 1980s before she began to restore its bucolic imperfections in 2014. She ripped out \u2018orangey-pine\u2019 cladding, revealing original beams and undulating plasterwork. The next step was to add the sympathetic oak-framed kitchen<\/a> extension at the back. Like an artist tweaking a composition, she was there \u2018every day, in my dungarees with my clipboard\u2019 supervising every detail of the project. She sanded the pegs in the beams for rustic effect, picking out the reclaimed floor tiles and sprinkling esoteric finds, like the colourful Victorian Christmas lights dangling from a bottle-drying stand. Now, she proudly tells me, there is \u2018not a sharp edge in the house\u2019.<\/p>\n

Like those gently curved corners, it is also the antiques<\/a> \u2013 the jolly gluggle jug, the Delft candlestick<\/a> \u2013 that make Sarah-Jane\u2019s artworks so appealing. Her own home has plenty of these. \u2018I\u2019ve been collecting things since I was a child,\u2019 she says, producing a tall jar of marbles. Collecting and creativity are in her DNA. One ancestor, Henry Corbould, designed the Penny Black. Sarah-Jane\u2019s mother was an antiques dealer<\/a> and she remembers how the family cottage in Wiltshire was so crammed with \u2018beautiful things in various stages of restoration\u2019, it would sometimes be hard to open the door.<\/p>\n

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Sarah-Jane has inherited her mother\u2019s magpie eye for pretty pieces unearthed at junk shops or auction. But she is no hoarder. Instead, her skill lies in the way she integrates her finds into the decoration. Inspired by the displays at Liberty, she had the shallow shelving made for her collection of blue and white plates<\/a>. In the sitting room, she \u2018bejewelled\u2019 a steel pillar with a row of stuck-on aluminium patisserie moulds, like studs on a rockstar\u2019s belt. \u2018I found them at Scott\u2019s in Margate; it\u2019s one of my favourite shops. They appeal to me because they\u2019re quite tactile, and there\u2019s something beautiful about the patina<\/a> of metal.\u2019<\/p>\n

Sarah-Jane has made her garden studio feel like a modern outbuilding, adding doors and beams painted in duck-egg blue. Ceramic jelly moulds<\/a> on shelves gleam, like a decorative frieze, against the Arts and Crafts wallpaper. \u2018Singly, they\u2019re not that interesting, but because each one is a different shape, when you put them together, they sing.\u2019 Rather like one of her paintings.<\/p>\n