An antique basin, a laundry rack, a beautiful old brass bed: Max Rollitt’s Yavington Barn has been a Hampshire hotspot for some time, but the way he adapts the elegantly rustic building into a journey through time bolsters its worthiness as an all-out pilgrimage (as does its location in South Downs National Park, which the English designer notes is “an oasis of calm, outside the hullaballoo of London”).
Seizing upon the old grain barn’s “fantastic scale,” he fashions his antique offerings into a masterful sequence of spaces: one might wander through a large Georgian drawing room and into a long gallery by way of a library, to a room that feels more like “a traditional antiques shop, stuffed with all sorts,” he says.
Along with furniture, there are ceramics, lighting, and old textiles, “just interesting elements from history,” he notes. “It’s inspired by places I’ve been, but to a greater extent by people I’ve met. We take our inspiration from the generation of Robert Kime and Christopher Gibbs, but make it work for the way life is lived now.”
