A view inside Brimslade House, Browse and Darby Director Charlie Bradstock's Wiltshire home. Click link below to view full article on World of Interiors.com.
Article by David Lipton
Photography by Alixe Lay
Amen to Hat
Brimslade House in Wiltshire, with its sagging eaves and terracotta-clad exterior, relieved by a staccato pattern of elegant white Georgian windows, is the very model of a minor country house. Charlie Bradstock, who lives here with his wife (also named Charlie – rather like he-Evelyn and she-Evelyn Waugh) is a director of the elegant St James’s gallery Browse & Darby, which has specialised in 19th- and 20th-century paintings since the 1940s, so his fine collection of art is to be expected. But while Bradstock, rather like Waugh, may act the consummate country gentleman, his real interests also lie beyond the bounds of the predictable. For the whole house, from flagstoned ground floor to the wobbliest floorboard of the upper attic, is overflowing with all manner of headgear. Hats are Bradstock’s passion and, if not downfall, they at least create a potential predicament.
‘It drives my wife mad,’ Bradstock professes about his hat-purchasing habits. Given the already sizeable collection, and a phone set up to receive notifications from several auction houses about prospective lots, his wife’s concerns are understandable. Where to put them all? The answer is easy: everywhere. They are arrayed on walls and along wooden beams, they fill window recesses and are piled on tables – essentially any surface that will take them. Not to mention the adjacent storage unit that houses the surplus. While Bradstock denies that his acquisitive habit is compulsive, he does own examples from all over the world, from Alaska to Australia. ‘We’ve been wearing them since the Neolithic period,’ he explains, ‘and the head is a very important part of one’s body: it’s the seat of intelligence, emotion, wisdom, judgement, action, power and status.’ So, quite apart from their rich history, there are simply a lot of titfers to go round.