Our Story
Our Story
It began with a house everyone told us not to buy
Before we bought Simonswood Hall, we asked a structural surveyor friend to come and look at it with us.
His advice was fairly unequivocal: we should go and lock ourselves in a dark room and not come out until we had realised what a terrible mistake buying it would be.
We bought it anyway.
And, to be fair, he had a point.
Simonswood Hall is a Grade II* listed house built in 1687. By the time we found it, it had been abandoned and was virtually derelict.
This wasn't a case of replacing an old kitchen, choosing some paint colours and calling it a renovation.
The building itself needed saving.
What we actually bought
Water poured in through the roof and through the windows.
Many of those windows consisted of little more than single panes of glass held in place with putty.
There was no working heating and no working electrics.
There was dry rot, wet rot and evidence of an historic woodworm infestation in the old timber beams.
Parts of the building sat partially below the surrounding ground level, with a 17th-century structure built without the kind of conventional foundations we would expect today.
And then there were the walls.
Walls you could crumble in your hands
Simonswood Hall is built from sandstone, and at some point in its history much of the building had been repointed using modern cement.
It was completely wrong for the stone.
The cement was harder than the sandstone surrounding it. Instead of allowing the old walls to breathe as traditional lime mortar would have done, moisture became trapped and the stone itself deteriorated.
In places the sandstone had become so badly damaged that you could literally crumble parts of the walls in your hands.
A huge part of the early restoration therefore wasn't about adding anything new.
It was about painstakingly undoing inappropriate repairs and giving the original building a chance to survive.
And then there was the chimney
The chimney presented another problem entirely.
Historic metal clamps within the structure had corroded over time, leaving part of it unstable and dangerous. Sections had to be carefully dismantled and rebuilt using enormously heavy pieces of sandstone.
Even getting the stone up there became a project in itself.
We needed a telehandler capable of lifting that weight of sandstone to the required height — but it also had to be small enough to physically get onto the site.
Finding one took months.
That was fairly typical of restoring Simonswood Hall.
Nothing was straightforward.
One problem would reveal another, and a seemingly simple job could turn into weeks or months of figuring out how on earth it could actually be done.
Restoring a Grade II* building
Then, of course, there was the fact that this wasn't simply an old house.
It was a Grade II* listed building.
Restoring it meant navigating planning, conservation requirements and Historic England alongside the physical work itself.
Decisions had to take account not only of what would make the house safe and habitable, but of what was appropriate for a building that had already stood for more than three centuries.
The aim was never to make Simonswood Hall look new.
It was to make it liveable again without removing the history that made it worth saving in the first place.
Two years of putting it back together
We didn't have a bottomless restoration budget.
Big Al — all 6ft 7 of him — works as a stage manager and spent much of those two years away with touring bands, while I stayed here and project-managed the restoration.
His height has also made life in a 17th-century house particularly entertaining. There are parts of Simonswood Hall he simply cannot walk through without ducking — perhaps inevitable when a man built for modern doorways moves into a house built in the Stuart Era.
For around two years, life revolved around builders, stone, lime mortar, water ingress, timber, planning, machinery and solving whichever problem the building had decided to reveal that week.
Before we could worry about beautiful interiors, we needed walls that stayed standing, a roof that kept the rain outside, windows that worked, heating, electricity and a house that was actually safe to live in.
Slowly, room by room and problem by problem, Simonswood Hall began to come back to life.
Six days before Christmas
Two years after buying the house we had been strongly advised to run away from, we finally reached the point where we could move in.
It was six days before Christmas.
The house wasn't finished — old houses rarely are — but for the first time it was somewhere we could actually call home.
After everything it had taken to get there, only one thing seemed to be missing.
A dog.
Then came Angus
Because apparently the natural thing to do after spending two years rescuing a 17th-century Grade II* house is to introduce a Great Dane to it.
Angus arrived, and life at Simonswood Hall changed again.
Sofas became dog beds.
Hallways became racetracks.
Carefully arranged interiors acquired one extremely large blue focal point.
And the realities of trying to create a beautiful home while sharing it with a giant dog became just as much a part of our lives as the house itself.
The Developer & The Dane
Somewhere between restoring an old English house, our love of richly layered interiors and life with Angus, The Developer & The Dane began to take shape.
What started as our life became a community — and eventually a shop.
The Developer & The Dane brings together the things we genuinely love: eclectic British interiors, original artwork, furniture and homeware with character, distinctive gifts, country living and, inevitably, dogs.
Not because every room needs a dog motif.
But because we believe the most interesting homes aren't show homes.
They're lived in.
They're layered over time with artwork, books, furniture, textiles, old things, new things and objects with stories attached to them.
And very often, there is a dog asleep somewhere they weren't supposed to be.
For beautiful homes and the dogs who share them
We don't believe you should have to choose between loving beautiful interiors and actually living in them.
Simonswood Hall has never been about perfection.
Its crooked walls, ancient stone, strange proportions and centuries of history are what give it character.
The same philosophy sits behind The Developer & The Dane.
We like homes that feel collected rather than coordinated, distinctive rather than formulaic, and comfortable enough for real life.
Beautiful homes. British country living. Dogs, naturally.
The story is still being written
Simonswood Hall is still evolving.
So is The Developer & The Dane.
There are rooms still to work on, stories still to tell, things still to create and — if Angus has anything to do with it — probably quite a few things still to repair.
But that's rather the point.
A good home is never really finished.
And neither is a good story.