We’re in Canterbury, the venerable and significant city, that – thanks to its not one, but three universities – hums with modern day life too. The mix of the young and the ancient brings a unique vibrancy. There’s so much history here, many modern day pilgrims and tourists visiting the cathedral and Roman remains, but also lots of young blood pulsing through the streets – students and tourists mingling with the residents thronging it with life. No wonder then that Cherry Tewfik and her husband Jonathan, who came here themselves as students, set up home here. “We met aged eighteen at what is now Canterbury Christ Church University,” explains Jonathan, “and have lived on and off in Canterbury ever since – we have had this house for forty three years now.”

After university the couple lived and worked in Kenya, when they first qualified as teachers. Cherry is no stranger to living abroad, having spent time in Uganda and Libya as a child, and they were both eager for adventure. They enjoyed their time in Kenya, but came back to put down some roots. “We came back, got married and then worked and lived in Malaysia for three years with the first two children,” explains Cherry, “then came back again and had two more.”
The urge to travel is strong with this couple, and Africa and the far East are always beckoning. Jonathan, a teacher and head teacher for many years, is now a teacher trainer and often travels to India and Africa – and he shows no signs of slowing down. “Travel and living abroad is such a joy,” he says. The house in Canterbury will always be their base, however, and it is also where they create much of their art. Jonathan paints and Cherry is a potter.

This is an attractive, semi-detached house – built around 1902, so officially just about Edwardian, but with all the hallmarks of the late Victorian: beautiful fireplaces throughout and plenty of original features including cornicing, picture and dado rails, and large windows.
Smaller kitchens, separate sculleries and pantries in Victorian houses can make them gloomy, the Victorians and Edwardians hid their kitchens and working spaces away from visitors and polite society. Cooking was for servants and was separated from the rest of the house in a rear extension, which often also had the back door, or tradesman’s entrance, so that the home owners weren’t disturbed. How things have changed – we now live in our kitchens and, for many of us, the back door is the main entrance. Unsurprisingly then, one of the first things Cherry and Jonathan did was to open out the back of the house, enlarge the kitchen and build a light-filled living area.

“It was all very ‘wallpaper’ when we moved here and not colourful at all,” says Cherry. “There was a scullery and it was dark and conservative. Light is so important to us, so we knocked through and built the conservatory.” She smiles, adding, “There’s still a bit of a light problem, but that’s to do with the massive Virginia creeper on the back of the house.”
The conservatory is mainly creeper-free, warm and light, used as both a dining room and workspace. Cherry’s pottery studio is at this end of the house and there are collections of pots – both Cherry’s and other people’s work – on display everywhere. It all happens in here, although the kiln for firing the clay is housed in a garden shed and the Raku work takes place outside. Raku is an ancient Japanese process, where the pots are taken from the kiln at high temperature (1000°C) and plunged into flammable substances, resulting in unique and often unexpected finishes.

“I work in porcelain, stoneware and Raku,” she says, “it gives a lovely crackle effect. Sometimes too much and then they break, but oh, the joy of putting them back together.” Cherry then uses another Japanese technique called Kintsugi – a form of wabi-sabi, which sees beauty in the broken or incomplete. The cracks are embellished with gold leaf and polished to become more beautiful – not despite the cracks, but because of them. “Nothing is wasted – a pot came back here from a gallery in pieces and I stuck it back together and burnished on the gold leaf and it looks better that it did when undamaged.”

Aside from allowing light into the interior, Cherry and Jonathan wanted to infuse it with lots of colour. “I was brought up in a house with a lot of wood chip and magnolia, so wanted colour. And in here we picked the colours from the Sumatran room divider when we decorated the kitchen – blues and green-blue and the brick tones.” Above the kitchen work surface there’s a horizontal band of plasterwork which ingeniously holds a life’s collection of artefacts and pebbles – “even our daughter’s tooth is mounted into the grout,” laughs Cherry.

It’s such an effective way of displaying the small, but significant bits and pieces – now we all know what to do with those boxes of keepsake beach finds and pebbles that we can’t let go of (but I’ll maybe hold back on the teeth).
More finds – mainly hollow stones – are displayed in a big stone bowl on the beautiful mosaic dining table, from Morocco which the couple bought in Alfriston. “The stone bowl was made by Gavin Roweth from the Wing in Wadhurst,” says Jonathan. “He made the sculpture in the garden.

They are carved in Portland stone, which is full of fossils, lots of gastropods – they’re conical and 150 million years old.” The sculpture has a timeless quality, redolent of a Neolithic stone circle. Hollow stones have a resonance – the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, who is famous for her pierced sculptures, felt, with remarkable insight, that the hole, or space was material and as important as the solid part of the work. This seems to chime with Kintsugi too – it is the spaces between that make the difference.

The conservatory leads directly out into a lovely mature garden, but the sunniest spot is nearer the end. “The sun trap is the best place to sit, but it was always muddy, so we had the circle made – and the builders’ brickie Wayne Poole allowed us to fill in the centre – Jonathan did a fish and I did a circular mosaic of sound stones.” A perfect link to the sculpture.

There are lots of pots in the garden too, some that Cherry has made and several that they have brought back with them from their adventures. “We’ve collected wherever we travel, coming back with huge pots on our laps on the plane. Some of the pots we brought back from Malaysia happen to be five hundred years old. We were just attracted to them by their shape and sense of age.”

These vessels are safely inside in the sitting room at the front of the house, where all Victorian sitting rooms (parlours) are positioned, the room dominated by the fireplace. In Victorian days the original fireplace would have been weighty and ornately tiled, but now there is a practical wood burner in here and a simple white painted slate surround. The wall around the fireplace is painted a warm, almost terracotta, red, the rest of the room and above the picture rail is white, which makes the room feel at once light and airy, but still warm at the same time, and accentuates the high ceiling and cornice details. Accent colours – green, orange and blue – are found in the soft furnishings.

“The pots pick out the colours that we chose for the room,” says Cherry. “It was all accidental,” she adds, but accidental to a skilled artist tends to be intuitively right, rather than the way more random accidental combinations might work in the hands of an untrained eye. It is colour co-ordination, but also volume control – as in how much (but also how loud), which comes from a honed aesthetic and an innate sense of how to put things together.

The plain white background allows the artworks – they are big fans of Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Howard Hodgkin, among many others – and the antique mirrors on the walls to shine. “The eighteenth century mirrors were left to us by an eccentric old friend that we once lodged with,” says Jonathan. “They were antique dealers and worked in South Ken. They left us their mirror collection and two lovely little cherubs.” He pauses, adding, “A measure of the lovely people we’ve met all through our lives.”

Among the paintings and prints on the walls are some by Jonathan, mainly still life, “Where we’ve been to France searching for mushrooms, lumpy vegetables and pears with holes in them, that sort of thing,” he smiles. The couple sell their art in various places – Linden Hall Studio in Deal, Lilford Gallery in Canterbury, Linda Blackstone in London, Wing Art Gallery in Wadhurst and also West End House Art Gallery in Smarden, in fact many local galleries, but they will also be holding their annual Open House event during the last two weeks in October here at the house.

Their daughter, Esther Miles (also a talented artist) surprised Jonathan on Father’s Day with a wonderful roll of wallpaper that they have hung in the upstairs loo. She made and printed her own lino cuts featuring British birds. “It’s quite an education going in the bathroom – you can test yourself on the birds,” he grins. Moroccan influences are found in the bathroom next door, where the basin is a blue and white bowl, the look completed with two tin cut lanterns from Marrakech, that “look lovely lit by candles in the evening.”

The bedrooms feature all the original fireplaces and plasterwork details, and are wonderfully colourful, but not in a way that would stop you sleeping. The main bedroom is painted in ochre yellow – a great colour to wake up to in the morning. The yellow is set off by white woodwork and again, white above the picture rail and across the ceiling. Simple wooden shutters match in well with the louvred wardrobe doors and bring a considered simplicity to the room, minimally accessorised with a few small bowls and Cherry’s colourful necklace collection. A portrait of Jonathan by artist Mark Pulsford (markpulsford.com) is propped up against the fireplace.

The travels that Cherry and Jonathan have been on are reflected back in the objects and artworks around their home. An inspirational philosophy seems to shine out from all four corners and a great positivity – with colour, with form, with life. Travel, have adventures, drop a few pots and make mistakes along the way, because the mistakes and the broken pieces, when stuck back together and carefully burnished with gold bring added strength, beauty, richness and joy. Jonathan and Cherry have created a home and a philosophy of life that stands as solid, functional and beautifully embellished as a Victorian building, but with added light and colour. The last word goes to Jonathan, it’s not a mantra, but says a lot about who they are. “We are still travelling, still collecting.” Amen to that.

Address Book

To find out more about Cherry Tewfik’s
ceramics, throwing lessons and forthcoming exhibitions, see cherrytewfik.com

Lilford Gallery lilfordgallery.com
Linda Blackstone lindablackstone.com
Linden Hall Studio lindenhallstudio.co.uk
West End House Art Gallery westendhousegallery.co.uk
Wing Art Gallery wingartgallery.com