When Andrew Buchanan first peered through a weathered gate into the unkempt grounds of a handsome villa in Folkestone’s historic Bayle neighbourhood in 2007, he wasn’t hunting for a home. “I’d just come down from London to visit my sister in Sandgate, the next village along,” he says.
Spotting its “incredible overgrown secret garden” and a “for sale via auction” sign in the window marked the beginning of an 18-year love story between Buchanan — an interior designer who spent a decade working with the renowned Joanna Wood — and the ground-floor apartment of Priory House, a grand 18th-century harbourside property with views over the white cliffs of Dover. Turning to his mother (who was visiting from Buchanan’s native New Zealand) and partner at the time, the painter Stephen Richardson-Pope, Buchanan said: “Oh my God, we’ve got to get this.”
Buchanan’s ground-floor apartment in Folkestone (border terrier not included in the sale)
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A view of the Bayle neighbourhood, with the harbour and Channel beyond
The couple were living in a one-bedroom flat in Chelsea that was “just off the Kings Road. We’d hung up our dancing shoes and it was time to start pretending to play grown-ups,” Buchanan says.
Perched above the English Channel, Priory House was built in 1725, then enlarged and remodelled in the 1880s for Colonel Charles Napier Sturt and his divorcee wife, Mary, “landed gentry living in social exile”, according to Buchanan. “The divorce was splashed all over the New York Times,” he says. Their architect, Sir Robert William Edis (who added the ballroom at the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk), bashed it into a single seaside villa with the house next door. By the 1920s it had been carved into flats and the central staircase taken out.
When Buchanan and Richardson-Pope returned the next week, the owner invited them into the 2,150 sq ft flat for a snoop. If its bones were breathtaking, the condition was appalling. “Everything below the dado was painted fire-engine red, with bright red shagpile carpet everywhere,” he says. “In the dining room, Yorkstone crazy paving was attached to the wall with chicken wire.”
Completely smitten, they offered the owner £30,000 over the asking price to sell immediately; she refused. So, with a cash deposit borrowed from Buchanan’s mother, they bought it at auction, saving it from a developer’s planned strip-out. “I’d just started a job with Bill Bennette, the South African interior designer, and couldn’t get out of work,” he says. “Mum and Stephen were sitting next to the developer who wanted it. Afterwards he told them, ‘I’ve never known anyone to want something so badly.’”
Before
The tatty living room before Buchanan worked his magic
After
The living room (above and below) now. It has direct access to the garden
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MARCÉL BAUMHAUER DA SILVA
Battling rampant damp, dry-rot fungus, deathwatch beetle and woodworm, the couple lived “like students” while saving up for a full renovation. They huddled by the open fire in the former library (now the dining room) for warmth. With no radiators, only an electric panel heater, at their disposal, they also “gaffer-taped the door closed to keep the heat in. During storms, wind would gust through the doors, so we staple-gunned a 9-tog duvet across the archway to stop the draughts,” he says. “We had a real laugh.”
• Read more expert articles about property renovations
They immediately went to work on the garden, equipped with a chainsaw and lawnmower from eBay, plus help from Buchanan’s mother, who earned herself the nickname “Penny Bulldozer Lumberjack”. Together, they cleared, replanted, laid the stone terrace themselves and built a big deck. “The biggest splurge was buying another piece of land so we could have a vegetable garden — and building a greenhouse,” Buchanan says. Today there is an abundance of established fig, apple and pear trees, a monkey puzzle, 30ft Phoenix palm and beautiful borders stuffed with David Austin roses, peonies, agapanthus and euphorbia, plus a lawn large enough for croquet. “Happy people don’t have dead grass,” he adds.
Buchanan had figured out the future layout before the auction. They planned to move the kitchen to the front from the darker part of the house. “To make that work, we needed to connect the kitchen and drawing room,” he says. However, this would include cutting into the ornate panelling in the drawing room. Cue a three-and-a-half-year wait for planning permission. Once they’d obtained that and the coffers were sufficiently full, the bulk of the works began in 2012 over a ten-month period.
The kitchen, above, and adjoining breakfast room, below
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MARCÉL BAUMHAUER DA SILVA
The early years were lean but also joyful. “We’d give each other bits of the house as gifts,” Buchanan says. “One Christmas, Stephen got a set of £500 three-hole Lefroy Brooks taps; I got the hand shower for the bath. For his birthday, he got the thermostat control for the shower.”
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Until moving to Kent full-time in 2020 Buchanan worked in London midweek, with weekends dedicated to DIY in “Folkey”. In the dining room they uncovered a beautiful fireplace hidden behind asbestos boards. When the chimneys were swept and fireplaces reopened, they tested the flues with a smoke bomb. “We ran into the garden and cheered as the green smoke drifted out of the chimney,” he says. In the 40ft x 18ft drawing room, with its restored original ornate wood panelling and geometric plaster ceiling, the couple discovered a completely intact block parquet floor. “Each of the parquet blocks was taken up, numbered, set aside and cleaned,” he says. “The [rotten] floor joists were all replaced, and the parquet relaid.”
They chose French cement tiles for the entrance hall, reclaimed from a 19th-century chateau (“Stephen found them on eBay”) . “We had been purchasing lots of little bits of furniture, including a Howard & Sons sofa that we bought at Lots Road Auctions for £250, covered in Claremont Cunard velvet,” he says.
The upgraded dining room used to be a library
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The dining room’s geometric plaster ceiling; one of the apartment’s ornate fireplaces
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Several smaller rooms were joined to create the new sea-facing kitchen, designed by Buchanan and built by local cabinet-maker Thoroughly Wood, which features Visual Comfort Hicks pendants. A Wolf cooker was out of the couple’s budget, so they bought something similar (but cheaper) from the Italian brand Steel Cucine, as well as a matching “side-by-side fridge with ice maker and extractor hood. The island counter top is one large piece and took seven men to carry it in. I picked up a sample of stone [granite] at a trade fair early on. I had it priced at the time — it was an absolute fortune, in the region of £7,000 — and we thought we would never be able to afford it. Fast forward three years, the same stone was installed [Stephen had picked it independently].”
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They installed a 5-amp circuit in the drawing room because they didn’t want any overhead lighting, instead opting for pink silk–lined lampshades, which “make everyone look beautiful”. The couple spent years commissioning and collecting art to fill the spaces, including an abstract painting by Gustav Hjelmgren in the drawing room. They splurged £250 each on dark bronze door knobs throughout, handmade by the English architectural hardware company Frank Allart. On a previous job for Bennette, Buchanan’s attention to detail with hardware led the client to call him the “King of Knobs”.
There were plenty of steals, too, including Belgian antique doors from an old sweet factory, found online for £500, which fitted “to the millimetre” between the entrance hall and the dining room (the originals had been replaced by modern monstrosities).
The drawing room
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One of the three bedrooms; the view from the breakfast area in the sea-facing kitchen
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Buchanan set up his practice, Andrew Buchanan Design, in 2018. “Being in Folkestone [full-time] was the best thing I’ve ever done in terms of quality of life and lifestyle,” he says. “There is a great hub of people seeking a similar lifestyle now — a slower pace, while being able to access London easily. I remember joking in the early days that I would go back to London midweek for a rest and the weekends were full of gardening and parties.”
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After nearly two decades, Buchanan is ready to move on, and the flat is on the market with The London Broker (thelondonbroker.com) for £1.2 million. “Stephen and I are no longer together,” he says. “We’ve been the custodians, now it’s time to pass the baton.”
Buchanan plans to remain in Folkestone, taking bracing dips in the English Channel with a local crew nicknamed the “nipsters”. However, another project is already on his mind. “It’s time for a change,” he says. “I studied brutalism and mid-century architecture, that was my core love. I’m not very far away from 50 and I want to build that mid-century house now.”