They loved the fact that the garden backed on to a wooded hill and nature reserve It gives the house a wonderful rural feel

They loved the fact that the garden backed on to a wooded hill and nature reserve “It gives the house a wonderful rural feel,” Deirdre says. “It’s deliberately stark and almost industrial, like a warehouse, but as soon as you get through the front door it’s a different story. It can seem a bit imposing from the front,” admits Roger Trapp, the current owner of Six Pillars, a modernist masterpiece in south-east London’s leafy Sydenham Hill. I go in there occasionally with the cleaner and there are lots of mouldy cereal bowls; you can’t see the floor properly.I got rid of the old brass bed in our bedroom.

It has a little bucket armchair, which I re-covered in French chintz.I try to make peaceful places around the house for us to be together, and on the landing there’s a sofa, suggesting a place where you might sit down and read. Usually, though, there are cats or dogs asleep on it.It often seems that living in Norfolk is crazy, but each time I get out of the car I’m so glad.The new Emma Bridgewater autumn catalogue is out now:tel 020-7371 5489; www.emmabridgewater.co.uk. I hung a 19th-century Proven? quilt on a curtain rail to make it look a bit less basic. At the foot of the bed there is a chaise longue with clothes flung all over it.The main bathroom is tongue-and-groove panelled and has a double-ended bath high under the window, so that you can look out to the garden. Although it was very pretty, it was hugely uncomfortable, and I swapped it, quite to Matthew’s horror until he slept on it, for a new huge king-sized bed from a John Lewis sale. She has littered the walls with magazine cuttings of fashion models or rock stars, as well as faces of her friends taken on photocopiers It is very messy in a wildly creative way.

They started off with sweet Victorian prints and lots of books and now are terrible teenage dens with fairy lights, pictures of Kurt Cobain and dartboards on the walls. I like the children doing what they want, but Elizabeth has really let rip. She has colonised the old playroom downstairs as her bedroom and has a four-poster bed that she bullied Matthew to drag in for her from the barn. The coat-lined stone-flagged passage is wallpapered with huge-scale ordnance survey maps that we plan routes with.

I don’t really have a style, but the house is full of furniture and pictures belonging to my mother and grandmother, along with stuff that we have bought more recently in markets or junk shops. What really matters to me is that it feels like a family home. The house is very much about having friends and family to stay Hospitality is important. This is why I make everyday china because it symbolises those and moments in the day when you stop fussing and sit down together.The landing upstairs is painted a surprising pale violet – the same colour as my office downstairs, where I have a painting by Julian Trevelyan of a rhinoceros against a purple sky – chosen because the violet colour on the walls suited it very well. There’s no electricity, just a cranky chandelier, and it’s too far away from the house to hear the telephone.