Robin Mills met Chris Booth in Powerstock, Dorset
Born in 1957, the second of four siblings, my early years were in Southern suburbia. My father was ex-army and an engineer, and my mother a trained typographer. All four of us were born before my mother’s 30th birthday. I was weaned on tales of doodlebugs and Anderson shelters. We soon moved to a handsome Elizabethan home overlooking the Weald of Kent, where I went to Dulwich College prep. We wore boiler suits and chased a chap named Stirling to try and stop him netting butterflies. He was inevitably nicknamed Stirling Moth.
One day in about 1967 my father arrived home in a Land Rover, piled us all in and we woke up on a farm near Crediton in Devon. Having only read a ladybird book on farming, he reinvented himself as a farmer. Brave but not untypical for the sixties. We children were in clover, with the river Yeo running through the farm.
Wherever we moved, my mother’s parents came too and my relationship with my cabinet making Grandfather, who had trained with Edward Barnsley, was one of the most influential of my life.
When I was ten, I spent a holiday in the Lake District with an old schoolfriend from Kent. My mother put me on a coach in Exeter and told me to get off in Maidstone. I am not sure I would have made it without the help of two old ladies, who found me sitting on an empty bus in Southampton. However, I like to think my passion for scouting and my collection of arm badges had helped me through.
In the Lakes I went to Holly Howe, home of the Ransome characters, my childhood heroes who we were to meet. I expected Roger to be my age and was mystified shaking hands with a lovely 50-year-old Armenian. My friend’s elder sister kissed me when playing spin the bottle. I was transported. We sailed Amazon on Coniston with the Altounyan children and I’ve been a passionate sailor ever since.
After two years, the farm went pear-shaped and my family moved to County Durham on the banks of the Tees. I was sent to board at Sevenoaks School. Not hugely academic, I was obsessed with the woodwork shop and spent all my time there. Dan Day Lewis was in the year above receiving letters from his sister saying ‘we’re all on drugs here at Bedales’. One night he ran away and didn’t return. Cool.
In the summer of 1976, I worked in my Uncle’s letterpress printing business in a barn near York. I loved the process of composing lead type through to the printed page, so I enrolled on a printing degree at Watford. It was all chemistry, not craft, and the unions wouldn’t let us touch the machines. One day I gave a friend a lift to Essex. He was working on an old three-masted grain schooner called the Esther Lohse. I boarded, looked around with enthusiasm and entered a tiny cabin. As I did so the boat settled on the mud, all the timbers moved and the door seized. The captain asked if I was OK. I was in heaven, stuck there for 12 hrs inhaling heady wafts of Stockholm tar and oakum. I became a shipwright and crew and never returned to Watford. She won the contract to film the Onedin Line, a BBC series in Milford Haven. We sailed close to the South Coast of England all the way to Gloucester docks. I was smitten by the majesty of the Dorset coast from the sea and a seed was sown. The actors weren’t allowed to sail the boat, so as crew we were dressed up, beards glued on and my moment came as a pirate. I had to lead the actors out of the companionway calling ‘follow me, me hearties’. No sooner had I emerged than the director called ‘cut… he’s not a pirate. He’s bloody public school, get him off.’ End of budding acting career.
Bitten by the desire to restore things, fostered by repairing the boat, a friend alerted me to Mark Dickinson in Northumberland where I served a furniture restoration apprenticeship for two years. We worked in many of the grand homes, and I restored and appreciated some of the very finest English furniture. Seeking a diploma, I enrolled on the furniture restoration course at West Dean College, having fashioned an almost perfect wooden cube as an entrance exam.
West Dean led to an apprenticeship restoring furniture at Jeremy’s in the Kings Rd. Despite Cyril, the talented resident restorer, who had been there for eons and wouldn’t tell you the time, I looked over his shoulder and learnt to French polish. I lived with Gijs, my best friend from school who worked in Cork St, and we spent a year at gallery openings hoovering up canapés. I particularly remember one in Wapping where we were served by eight naked pregnant ladies covered only in coloured handprints. Britart had arrived.
Jeremys dealt in fine French and English furniture and, fascinated by the French pieces, I went to Paris and found a job in a St Germain atelier with ebeniste Jean-Luc Meline. The French approach is so different. With our brown furniture in England, we worship the patina of age. In France its back to bling. Let the marquetry and parquetry sing, the ormolu dazzle. No appreciation of patina in Paris. I was fascinated how they protected their specialist trades. Marquetry to the marquetry cutter, ormolu to the gilder in the Faubourg, polishing to the vernisseur.
Returning to London after a happy couple of years, I set up Ballantyne Booth Furniture Restoration in Holland Park, in business with Cadogan Tate. English furniture was at its peak value, and if well restored was much sought after. A large Chippendale breakfront bookcase once came in from Beirut…. ‘please could you invisibly repair the line of machine gun bullet holes across the doors’.
There were many good times with a great raft of friends and I had my first daughter, Willow, with my lovely girlfriend Katrin. I was not cut out to be a London businessman, however. I decamped to Dorset and stumbled across Sort Barn, near Powerstock, and a workshop in the Round House at Wytherston. I’d arrived in heaven on earth. Gemma Best and Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, my landlords, found me clients and friends. Jo, who had worked with me at Ballantyne Booth, joined me at Sort and we married in 1988 in Powerstock church. We have spent the last 35 years raising a very happy family together: Jessie, Connie, Poppy, and Willow too, all still here in West Dorset. We moved as tenants from Sort to Holeacre at Mapperton, then to Browns Farm on the Crutchley estate, where I still rent a workshop and a cottage in Nettlecombe.
In 2014 I spent a couple of years in North Norfolk running a small boatyard at Burnham Overy. It was blissful repairing small boats. Boat repairs can be more satisfying than furniture, as they don’t have to be invisible. They are like war wounds that can be shown off. It was during this time I met Henrietta, my wonderful couturier friend. Meanwhile Jo had bought Sort where we had originally lived, an amalgam of small buildings and one of the jewels of West Dorset. I returned to Nettlecombe, resumed my furniture restoration, my love of cider making, and putting the world to rights around an open fire once a month on the full moon, a boat in Weymouth and the Powerstock cricket club, that I captained and groundsmanned for thirty years. Fortunately, my clients’ sentimental attachment to their furniture still keeps me busy. I teach a restoration course at the excellent Lyme Regis BBA, spend precious times with Hen in beautiful North Norfolk and generally fill my days helping my four gorgeous girls with their various projects. I help Jo and Crispin too with the wonderful Sort renovation and feel very grateful to Jo for establishing permanent roots for us all in this special spot.
I feel blessed to have lived on estates under the gentlemanly land stewardship of Sir Michael and the Crutchleys, all of whom have wisely and generously converted redundant farm buildings into workshops, where, thanks to their vision, I’m now part of a strong community of creative kindred spirits.
