Focus on – the drawing room

My favourite room (along with all my other favourite rooms…)!

The drawing room (before the Vine Hanging was moved!) (NT)

The drawing room is one of the biggest rooms of the house and one you would only see as a guest of the Beales’ if you were a friend rather than a social acquaintance.

Many servants wouldn’t see any of the principle rooms of the house, only the housemaid who was responsible for clearing the grate and laying the fire and making sure the room was clean and dusted. If you were the kitchen maid, for instance, you wouldn’t have seen any of the family rooms.

As with all our rooms the drawing room is a combination of Beale family items and later additions, mostly from Arthur and Helen Grogan, the first custodians who brought their Arts and Crafts collection to Standen to furnish it.

An old photo of the drawing room (NT)

The current layout of the drawing room was inspired by this historic photo. You can see it shows a curtain at the end of the sofa to create a cosy nook. We also know that Mrs Beale’s chair and light were always in this spot, with her workbag (which is a modern creation!) hanging from it.

My favourite things in this room include the Vine Hanging, which was embroidered by Mrs Beale – unsurprisingly taking her around 6 years; the De Morgan bowl which was a 25th wedding anniversary present to the Beales from their children – which also inspired the Grogans to collect more De Morgan pieces for the house; and the magnificent Morris & Co. Merton Abbey Mills carpet. The latter you can appreciate even more now thanks to our Eyemat.

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Freezing them out: how we deal with pests…

Here we have a blog by our newest conservation assistant Rachel. She’s previously worked at Scotney Castle and has been covering a role here at Standen since July. It’s hard to believe she’s only been here since then as she’s a great part of the team!

With only 3 months left as a Conservation Assistant at Standen, it’s pretty shameful that I haven’t contributed to the blog but my excuse is that it’s been a busy 6 months.

To prove this, I thought I’d explain one of the tasks that I have done to assist the House Team in order to protect Standen’s collection. I’ve chosen one that I’d never done before this week because I enjoyed it and think it’s pretty interesting: freezing objects to destroy insect pests.

A few weeks ago, Kay, Standen’s Facilities Assistant, and I were asked to inspect and clean the display cabinet in the Butler’s Pantry and its contents. The cabinet is rarely opened so you might think it would be unnecessary to clean inside. However, although the doors are kept shut, they are not air tight so a bit of dust had got in but more significantly so had a certain kind of pest – carpet beetle and their larvae, woolly bears.

The Butler’s Pantry cupboards (NT/Rachel Finch)

Woolly bears sound cute but they’re actually the larvae stage of carpet beetles and eat keratin found in natural fibres so are a real threat to our collection, especially textiles, at Standen. The larvae shed old skins as they grow and it is usually these, along with the damage they cause, that indicate an infestation.

Have a look at them here…

During our survey of the cabinet, Kay and I found enough woolly bear cases (plus one fully grown carpet beetle) to require action beyond a thorough vacuum.

Carpet beetles cannot survive below a certain temperature so an effective method of killing both the larvae and adult beetle is to freeze the items on which they have been found. The length of time it is recommended to freeze objects depends on the temperature of the freezer: 3 days at -30, or 14 days at -18 then 48 hours to defrost followed by another 14 days exposure. We use the latter method at Standen due to the temperature of our freezer.

This week, Fiona and I prepared the objects for freezing treatment. Carpet beetles target textiles in particular and although we had not found evidence of the pests on all of the textile items in the cabinet, we decided to freeze them all to be on the safe side.

To freeze the items we removed them from the display and wrapped them in acid free tissue followed by polythene.  It was important at this stage to remove as much air as possible from the packages before sealing them with tape to prevent any water ingress which could lead to dye leakage. For awkwardly shaped items a hoover can be used to suck the air out; we used this method for the chauffeur’s hat.

The hat in the cupboard

All wrapped up and having the air sucked out!

Vacuum packed and ready to be frozen (NT/Rachel Finch)

Once the items were all sealed in polythene with their identifying details and the date clearly marked on the outside, we took them to the chest freezer in the Stable Yard to be frozen.

Fiona in the chest freezer (NT/Rachel Finch)

We placed the smaller items in hanging trays and raised the rest above the bottom of the freezer to allow air circulation.

Everything packed and ready to be frozen (NT/Rachel Finch)

At the end of 2 weeks we will carefully remove the items and allow them to defrost for 48 hours before refreezing them for a further 2 weeks.  After this we will un-wrap them and hopefully find nothing, meaning they were pest free when they were placed in the freezer, or some dead woolly bears/carpet beetles.

In the mean time we will remove the remaining items from the display case and spray it with a water-based insecticide to kill off any insect pests left inside.

How we use blue fabric to monitor light

You might have seen these around the house. They’re called blue wool dosimeters and we use them for keeping an eye on how much light exposure the house gets over a year. In February we have to collect them in and send them off to be analysed.

A blue wool dosimeter in situ in the north bedroom (NT/Victoria Witty)

They are rather low tech, but very clever. They are made of picture mount and pieces of specially dyed (blue!) wool, the latter which is known to fade at a certain rate when exposed to light.

What you may see around the house

How we construct the blue wool

We use them to see how much light falls on certain objects or rooms over a whole year. As a registered museum we need to try to keep to museum standards of light exposure to our collection:

• highly light sensitive rooms/objects = 150,000 lux hours
• moderately sensitive rooms/objects = 600,000 lux hours

Blue wool dosimeters allow us to see how much cumulative light the house and collection has been exposed to over the year and if we need to adjust how we show the house.

Results of the blue wool dosimeters from around the house 2015-6 (NT/VW)

The back of a blue wool dosimeter – important information for when they are analysed (NT/VW)

You can see below that the aperture is smaller than the piece of fabric so when they are analysed there is something to compare the faded area against. We need to make sure that the dosimeters aren’t moved to make sure they give the most accurate information they can.

This is what it looks like after a whole year out, just before we send it off to be analysed (NT/VW)

Sometimes, as they are wool, they get munched by pests – wool is a favourite food of carpet beetles and their larvae, woolly bears…

We try not to let this happen! (NT/VW)

What goes on in January?

The house opens differently in January for lots of reasons! We’re not as busy as usual so we take the opportunity to open in other ways.

Opening up in the morning (NT/Victoria Witty)

We run special Behind Closed Doors Tours which go into not usually seen parts of the house. You get to go down to the cellar and up to the water tower and we have some extra time in the main part of the house to get some of the deep clean done in awkward areas.

At work in the Billiard Room (NT/Victoria Witty)

We also use January opening to get any building or decorating work done – this year we had the painters in to decorate the Morning Room Corridor.

Painters in the morning room corridor (NT/Victoria Witty)

We use special water based paint and the colour is mixed specially for us by our specialist decorators. The colour comes from investigations into original paint colours

Samples of paint mixed specially for us to match the paint colours in the house (NT/Victoria Witty)

This year, following the success of our Winter Tree and exhibition round the house we also have a special Kaffe Fassett exhibition. It’s in the house in our exhibition rooms, open from 12 to 2.30pm (last entry at 2pm).

Come along and see what we are up to!

 

Happy New Year! To-morrow is another day…

Happy New Year! We hope you’ve all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year. It’s probably been our best Christmas ever, with over 7000 visitors coming over the two weeks either side of the big day.

We’re now in 2017 and I thought that an embroidered fire screen that we have upstairs in the house would be appropriate for the first blog post of the year.

May Morris fire screen c. National Trust/Jane Mucklow

It was embroidered by May Morris who was the second daughter of William and Jane Morris. She was born in 1862 at Red House in Bexleyheath and learnt to embroider from her mother Jane and aunt Bessie Burden.

She studied embroidery at the precursor of the Royal College of Art, the National Art Training School. Unusually for the time she took part in her father’s business with his encouragement and ran the Morris & Co. embroidery department, starting when she was only 23.

If you wanted, you could buy embroidery kits from Morris & Co.,  with the pattern printed on a linen ground and silks provided to embroider it yourself. The V&A even have a half finished kit in their collection.

She combined Jane and Bessie’s skill for embroidery with her father’s design abilities, producing beautiful embroideries and designs. Later May was involved with the Royal School of Art Needlework – now the Royal School of Needlework.

Best wishes for 2017 and hope to see you here soon!

Twilight Christmas

For the first time this year we are opening the downstairs of the house into the evening just before Christmas.

The staircase hall

It’s an opportunity to see the house in the dark, with the electric lights just as the Beale family would have known it, along with all our cheerful seasonal decorations.

We try to get the hall fire lit!

We’re open into the twilight tonight and tomorrow if you’ve not yet been! Our very own Standen Choir will also be singing.

Mrs Beale getting into the festive spirit

Christmas 2016

The cottage

We’re well into Christmas at Standen, so if you haven’t already been to visit us here are a few photos to whet your appetite!

Ben’s Christmas tree of light

Kaffe’s star

Pompompoms

Don’t forget we have some wonderful tapestries and knitting by Kaffe Fassett around the house, and he also designed our Winter Tree in the courtyard.

Bikeyarnbombed

Crocheted chickens

More yarnbombing!

You can also see we’ve been yarnbombing round the place – all crocheted by our volunteers.

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And finally, just because it is Christmas doesn’t mean we are letting our standards drop…

Sarah dusting the turkey

 

Focus on – the morning room

The morning room is one of my favourite rooms. It faces south and east so naturally gets the morning sun. It was the ideal place for the ladies of the family to get out of the way of the servants so they can clean and not be disturbed.

Bright and sunny can cause us a few problems though – we have lots of things in the room which are sensitive to light. We’ve recently put new blinds in that are a mesh kind of fabric that cuts out a lot of the light but also can be seen through to outside.

It’s the only room in the house that has fabric hangings on the walls in this way – a bit like medieval houses had tapestries on their walls. The hangings up at the moment are reprints by Morris & Co. from about the 1970s, but we have a small scrap leftover from the originals that has been made into a cushion.

The original colours and scale of the Daffodil fabric hangings in the morning room

We get asked a lot what is underneath them – it’s just plaster and lining paper! If you visited last year you might have seen it as we’d taken down the hangings to allow the wall to dry out as we’d had a leaky downpipe outside.

We have also fairly recently replaced the sacrificial carpet on the floor – the old one had been down for a very long time and was developing some fairly extensive holes from all the feet walking on it.

The morning room with its old carpet

We wanted to ensure that the replacement carpet was similar to that which the Beales had in the room, rather than just any old carpet. Luckily we had a volunteer who was working with our family archives for her PhD and she, alongside our curator, were able to identify the style of carpet the Beales had. If you look in the photo below you can see the geometric border of the carpet.

This photo of two Beales in the morning room was very helpful indeed

Our curator was then able to go to carpet suppliers and specify exactly what we were looking for.

After we got the carpet we realised that we’d not only got a carpet very similar to the Beales’ original, but, looking at their receipt, had also managed to buy it from the very same place!

What to do with the carpet?

It’s November and we’re running our usual focus on conservation weekends with demonstrations and an exhibition.

As we cover up the Larkspur bedroom we have a small carpet we need to store for the duration. As you might guess, we have a very particular way of storing carpets – and this is how…

Hearth rug from the Larkspur Bedroom

We can’t fold it because textile weakens on the creases over time and can crack, so we have to roll it.

To roll it, first we turn it over – so much easier with a small carpet – when we rolled the carpet in the drawing room it took 6 of us to turn it over!

Temporarily folded into thirds to turn over

Checking the direction of the pile

Hand made carpets are made vertically so they have a distinct direction of the pile – they feel smooth as you run your hand down it. Turning the carpet over and rolling from the top  down means we open the dense weave of the pile helping dust and ingrained dirt to get out.

The carpet is covered with acid free tissue

Starting to roll!

Checking that the carpet is being rolled evenly

We use an ordinary plastic drainpipe to roll carpets onto. It’s cheap, can be cut to size and easy to get hold of. It’s also fairly lightweight while being pretty sturdy, which is important when you think just how heavy huge carpets can be.

We wrap the drainpipe with acid free tissue and roll the carpet with tissue in between the layers to protect it (it’s easiest if you can find nice big pieces of tissue) and begin to roll.

The view from the business end

You have to stop every so often to check the carpet is rolling straight, so the edges of the carpet are supported – if your ends are unsupported they can be damaged over time. However, sometimes the edges of the carpet aren’t straight, so we support them with little sausages of acid free tissue.

Finished rolling

Now we use Tyvek to wrap it to protect it

Once we’ve rolled it we wrap it  – in this case we’ve used a non-woven fabric called Tyvek. The ends are tied or tucked in to stop dust getting in and we can put it away.

Finished and ready to store!

This carpet isn’t going away for long, just until spring next year when we will take down the conservation exhibition and reinstate the Larkspur rooms.

From the search terms – William Morris Wallpaper

It seemed like a fun idea to have a look at the search terms through which people come to our house blog. Today’s was what William Morris is famous for – his wallpaper.

And, as you probably know, we at Standen are also known for having lots of examples of Morris & Co wallpapers. Interestingly, some of the most famous Morris & Co. papers weren’t designed by Morris at all, even though they tend to get called William Morris designs.

Here is an idiosyncratic and completely biased round up of some of my favourites.

Fruit (sometimes known as Pomegranate)

This is in the Billiard Room alcove, which was created from a corridor which originally led from the Hall to the Gentlemen’s Lavatories. It has lemons, olive branches and pomegranates in it. Produced in 1864, it is one of Morris’s earliest and most popular designs.

The wallpaper designs were carved onto pearwood blocks to print by hand – each colour needing a different block. Sanderson now own many of the Morris printing blocks.

It’s listed as Pomegranate on our collections website

Trellis

The first paper William Morris designed – except he couldn’t manage the birds so Philip Webb, the architect of Standen, stepped in to draw them. Morris was so annoyed by his inability to draw the birds he practiced and practiced until he could.

My own favourite story about this is from May Morris, William’s youngest daughter. She remembered having Trellis on her bedroom walls as a child, and being thoroughly frightened by one of the birds who looked at her with a gimlet eye.

We have Trellis in a number of places in the house, but perhaps the most interesting is in the Morning Room and Dog Leg Corridors – there are three different types of paper here; the original handblock printed, 1970s roller printed and 2015 digital printed.

He does look pretty sinister if you ask me

Mallow

This paper is unusual because it was designed by a woman, Kate Faulkner. It used to hang in the Croxley bedroom where the green version of Poppy is now.

We  also uncovered a patch of it on the back stairs and, with the generous assistance of Morris & Co., are going to reinstate the paper up to the bottom of the water tower stairs. Find out more about the work here.

The remains of Mallow on the back stairs

Kate Faulkner was sister of Charles Faulkner, one of the original members of “The Firm” as Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. was referred to by the partners. She was employed as an artist and designer and designed other wallpapers, tiles and pottery. She also decorated other things like a piano in gold and silver gesso for the shipping magnate Mr. A. Ionides, neighbour of the Beales in Holland Park.

Golden Lily

A really famous William Morris pattern, but actually designed by J.H. Dearle, Morris & Co.’s chief designer from the 1890s.

Interestingly Dearle started as a shop assistant and, after Morris recognised his ability as a draftsman, went on to become a design apprentice.He eventually became Art Director after Morris’s death in 1896. You can see it on the Morning Room sofa – lots of visitors remember it from Sanderson’s 1970s reprints!

Loose covers on the Morning Room settee

Which of our papers is your favourite?