All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.

At home with our food editor in her historic Devon hall house

At her home in Devon, House & Garden's food editor Blanche Vaughan lives a life dictated by the rhythms of her garden and the seasonality of the produce she grows

The house had been a labour of love for Hugo, carried out over two decades. Two big name decorators had already had a hand in its design before Blanche moved in. The late Robert Kime, a friend, assisted with the layout, furniture and lighting. Robert sourced the bed in the main bedroom, a copy of a Lutyens design, and the Moroccan lantern that hangs in the lightwell of the staircase. In the sitting room the sofa, ottoman and fabrics are all recognisably his.

Next came Camilla Guinness, who ‘cosied the place up,’ repainting the sitting room, adding bookcases, rehanging pictures and adding a new layer of fabrics, rugs and comfortable places to sit. The keystone of the house of course is Hugo’s rotating gallery of artworks. ‘Things come and go,’ laughs Blanche, indicating the framed flag over the fireplace, plugging the gap left by a painting recently sold. In the living room alone hangs a Grayson Perry, a Lucian Freud, a Peter Blake, and two botanical pictures by Endellion Lycett Green.

(left) A portrait of a woman by Ishbel Myerscough hangs next to an Andy Pankhurst (right)

Dean Hearne

In the snug, the botanical art is grouped together. On the wall at the end of the room hangs a Sarah Graham, and Ishbel Myerscough and a Nestor Fitzgerald.

Dean Hearne

Blanche has gently added her own taste to the mix, papering the snug in a green grasscloth by the designer Totty Lowther, and turning the veranda into a conservatory with a table for informal dining. Blanche’s kitchen is warm and unfussy. She isn’t the kind of cook who goes in for gadgets, her only concession being the KitchenAid and her bean-to-cup coffee machine. The most important part of the room is her larder; ‘I like food stored at larder rather than fridge temperature and space to put the juices, jams and preserves that we make from the garden.’ There is also honey produced by the couple’s bees, with leftover wax being turned into handmade candles (‘Unbelievably time consuming to make, but they smell absolutely delicious’). But her most impactful changes have been in the garden, now lined with borders newly replanted by the garden designer Catherine Fitzgerald, with an extensive vegetable garden, greenhouses and an orangery currently under construction. The views from the house over Dartmoor are staggering, the lawn rolling straight on to a panorama of moorland and sky and no other buildings as far as the eye can see.

Tom Griffiths

'I first visited with a friend of mine after an agricultural show that goes on a couple of fields away every August. I met Hugo for the first time and he invited us for tea here afterwards. It wasn’t his good looks or humour I fell for. It was the fact he knew how to decorate a house! I immediately loved this area, how rural it still is. But apart from the farming there's an artisan side. Lots of local people are making delicious food, growing or crafting wonderful things. There is a great sense of creative energy here as well as beauty.'

House & Garden: A Year in the Kitchen