Tat London Journal

Yes, “a train ride away” doesn’t narrow it down much, but most of these jaunts take under two hours — a small price to pay to see some of the finest houses in the land. You can’t say fairer than that. If you’d rather stay close to home, go to Ham House. It’s an extraordinary place, right on the river, where the air still smells faintly of the seventeenth century.

There’s something truly special about stepping into an artist’s studio. It’s not just a workspace — it’s a world filled with energy, ideas and raw creativity. You see the paint splatters, half-finished projects, sketchbooks, tools and personal rituals that don’t always make it into the final piece. And that’s what makes it so powerful.

I’m trawling Rightmove, as usual. I have to say that Nottinghamshire isn’t currently serving up the most inspiring housing stock in my price range. Cities built in the Industrial Revolution and battered by WW2 bombs or unsightly ring roads don’t tend to have an abundance of bucolic charm. I divert my search to Herefordshire, or Suffolk, or the Highlands and Islands. I over-dramatically lament. But as a Midlander born and bred I am allowed to being impishly mean, because hidde

For those of you who have been reading the Tat Blog for some time, you’ll be well aware of our affiliation with the designer Georgie Stogdon. That makes it sound like a paid partnership, but fear not dear reader, it is no such thing. Instead, it is a friendship that has been going strong for fifteen or so years.

London never ceases to surprise me. Having lived in West London all my life, you'd think my curiosity might have eventually led me to Osterley House. But no. Somehow, I missed it.

There aren’t many occasions when Tat gets a scoop. We’re not exactly set up for it—budgets are hardly a word we deal in. And I don’t mean that in the flippant “who needs a budget?” sense. I mean we rarely have the means to chase the stories we’d love to. Luckily, we have a handful of excellent contributors, and every so often, we stumble upon a house or a story that hasn’t yet graced the pages of a magazine or newspaper. When that happens, I feel a quiet sense of pride.

Before I let Liberty take you to the Golden Valley, I must hold my hands up and admit I’ve been sitting on this article for some time. Liberty — a woman of her word — wrote this for Tat after I visited her not long after she bought her red-brick beauty.

I’m hardly in the habit of refusing a good house story, particularly when the house in question is quite this handsome. So when Alice got in touch to say her marvellous property had just come to market, I naturally insisted she write something for the Tat audience.

Is there anything better than walking through London on a sunny day? Not a scorcher, just one of those quietly golden afternoons we've been graced with lately. Even my scruffy corner of Shepherd’s Bush takes on a sort of accidental glamour in the right light. So, when I set off across town, I already had that familiar London lurch of joy in my chest. I was heading to Walthamstow, spring in my step, with only the faintest idea of what I’d find. A few days earlier, Helen had m