As much as they were always tied to London, both the Stephen sisters craved the solitude and simplicity of country life. In 1911, they took a place called Asheham near Lewes in Sussex. Virginia and Leonard continued to use this house as a weekend get-away until 1919.

When war broke out in 1914, Vanessa and Duncan (with Duncan’s lover Bunny Garnett) went to Wissett Lodge in Suffolk where the men did farmwork to maintain their status as conscientious objectors. When they needed a new situation in 1916, Virginia recommended Charleston, which was only four miles away from Asheham. The house was roomy and the farmer there needed help. That autumn, Vanessa, Duncan, Bunny and the two boys moved into Charleston. (Clive spent the war at Garsington with Ottoline, but was a frequent visitor to Charleston with his lover Mary Hutchinson).

In 1919 the Woolfs were given notice at Asheham, and so that autumn they moved to Monk’s House in nearby Rodmell, only two miles from Vanessa’s home.

The sisters liked the distance between them – not quite next door but very nearly. Before telephones were installed, they often sent messages back and forth by post not unlike we’d use email today. Virginia was a great walker and often walked to Charleston, where she was always a welcome visitor. Whether in London or Sussex, their lives were closely entwined from birth until death.

~~

The road now is very busy. We pull over at an unlikely intersection, and the bus driver tells us sometimes he must wait 10 minutes for an chance to pull out again. So we have to wait for a quiet moment and then dart across the highway between the zooming cars.

It’s a long walk up the driveway, past tangled clumps of low trees. There’s nothing to indicate we’re on the right road, and I remember how much Vanessa valued her privacy. That obscurity was one of the reasons she chose Charleston. Farm buildings are scattered along the road further along. We’re walking vaguely uphill. Eventually we come to a fork and opt hopefully for the right turn. Again walking gently uphill, we see ahead a collection of buildings along either side of the road, arranged on a crest in the hillside. The land around it is bare, hilly, pockmarked with rocks, lone trees like sentinels on the contours.

We cross a little cow-bridge and step around the muddy tractor wheel tracks; among other things Charleston is still a working farm. To our right is the pond where they swam and punted and painted under the arching arms of a willow tree. The buildings ahead to our left may have been farm buildings at one time; they have the look of it. But now they’re the shop, the loo, the tourist appendages we recognize.

We’re just in time for a tour of the house. It doesn’t look so big from the road. It looks sensible and strong and sits with its back right on the drive, so that we step from the driveway right over the threshold into the kitchen.

The tour commences here. We’ll follow the path of a typical day at Charleston Farmhouse, and that day would begin with Grace Higgins, the family’s faithful cook and housekeeper, lighting the range at 5am and beginning the day’s activities. The room is dominated by the table we recognize from Vanessa’s painting and the huge range. I drink up the details of the kitchen’s layout and configuration, noting the ornamental decorations, the painted panels of the cupboard doors, the painted tiles behind the sink and stovetop, the blue and white serving plates displayed over the range which, we’re told, were from Hyde Park Gate. Quentin contributed light fixtures hanging from the low ceiling. They look like upside-down collanders. (Everywhere it seems the more eccentric additions seem to come from Quentin. His touch always includes a sense of humor.)

Standing there, I see the kitchen as a warm place with children darting in and out, laughing voices, busy activity, bowls and rolling pins and knives on the table or children sitting there with books or under the table with toys, a cat asleep on a chair, a dog barking outside, perhaps Duncan sticking his head in the door with a sheepish apology about spilt tea or the knock of a delivery man at the door. Despite her many unconventional attitudes, Vanessa wasn’t liberal about servants. She only came to this room once each day in the morning to discuss the day’s menus and plans with Grace.

When they first arrived in 1916, the farmhouse had no electricity and no hot water – in fact, it had no water at all: the pump was frozen. They hauled water in buckets from a nearby spring. Those first winters were bitter, and their battle against the cold was relentless. Roger Fry came up with creative alterations for the fireplaces to throw out more heat. They pumped water to fill the cistern and heated water on the range. Grace spent the early hours of each day heating water and carrying jugs up the stairs. Like ordinary country people, they used chamber pots in their bedrooms at night and otherwise used an outdoor earth closet.

And though the house feels sturdy and thick-walled like a hillside fortress, the buildings are exposed to the wind and weather with little to buffer them from the elements. It’s easy to imagine the cold wind blasting against the house naked against the bare hills. No wonder it was cold.

We go past the back door now into the dining room, which occupies the corner facing out onto the driveway and the pond. In spite of the windows, the room feels dark and small, the round table nearly too big for the space. They painted the walls in a charcoal-grey checkerboard pattern. The surface of the table was once painted in brilliant colors which have now faded. The inside wall is a recessed alcove under a huge mantle nearly the length of the room. This area is big enough for two chairs straddling the fireplace.

This is where they started their days with breakfast, newspapers, making plans, chatting and laughing. Everywhere you look, everything is painted, decorated in that Omega Workshop style. Backs of chairs, cupboards, sideboards, mantlepieces, panels of doors. The colors have faded over the years, but still infuse a room with cheerfulness. They decorated the draperies, the wallpaper, dishes, pottery, ceramics, even the fabric of the furniture.

We pass the front door now and climb the stairs, are escorted through a series of rooms. We’re told who used which rooms, but the tour’s storyline moves around in time over a period of 50 years. Different people slept in different rooms, rooms were added, changed, people came and went. The rooms are not large, but are functional and often plain apart from the painted decorations and dazzling paintings hung everywhere. Each room is dominated by Vanessa’s and Duncan’s work mainly, but also the work of the other painters they admired and collected. It’s tempting to linger in each room to examine what’s on the walls, but we must press on.

Much of the second floor is arranged as it was when Clive Bell moved to Charleston fulltime in 1939 for the duration of the Second World War. Vanessa took pains to make Clive feel at home. His bedroom adjoined the Green Bathroom, with his own library next door. He also had his own study on the main floor. (Clive’s study downstairs was once the schoolroom for Quentin and Julian. On that frigid Christmas Eve in 1918 when their sister was being born upstairs, the boys got carried away sacking Rome and smashed the lower door panel. When replacing it later, Duncan painted an acrobat in mid-air, which to me seemed fitting.)

Clive’s bedroom had been Quentin and Julian’s bedroom when they first arrived. When he moved here, Clive brought his own furniture with him from Gordon Square. His bed is tiny; the guide said it was in the French fashion. Both his bedroom and library are lined with shelves of books, most in French. His room contains a blue carpet he brought with him from London and a strange wooden reading table with an arm to hold the book.

The Library is a dark room with walls painted black, filled with bookshelves heavy laden with books. This room had been Vanessa’s bedroom until 1939. Along with the many paintings hanging in this room is Duncan’s portrait of Vaness done not long after Virginia’s death. It’s the portrait of her I find most arresting – she looks like a sad queen. Also this room contains the lovely bust of Lytton Strachey by Stephen Tomlin.

Next to Clive’s bedroom is a door marked “Maynard Keynes’ bedroom” – but Maynard slept there three decades before Clive slept next door, and so we must mentally jump back to those cold days during the Great War, when Maynard used Charleston as his weekend country home. He wrote great things here, of course, made a name for himself, but he also loved to pry out the weeds between the flags outside with his penknife. The room looks out on the pond at the front of the house and in the summer was smothered with white clematis.

Duncan’s bedroom is the corner room looking out onto the pond and driveway. It is a cheerful room with white walls and colorful decorations. I am struck by the portrait of Adrian Stephen he kept there. A small table in front of the window is painted with a man riding a dolphin. I had to look up this story when I got home. It comes from Herodotus. Arion was a famous harper and singer who made a great fortune travelling about, but when he was sailing back home, the ship’s crew decided to murder him and take his money. To avoid death he dove overboard, where a dolphin saved him, bore him up above the waves and carried him safely back to land. “Dolphin” was Virginia’s lifelong nickname for her sister, and Vanessa indeed bore Duncan up throughout his life. It also brings to mind Duncan’s many lovers from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks. Vanessa had good reason to worry about him; he could never hang onto money and he was never far from harm’s way.

Up the narrow stairs, we come to Vanessa’s studio. She’d shared Duncan’s studio downstairs for many years, but eventually wanted more privacy and so made the necessary alterations to create a lovely, bright studio upstairs. It’s divided into two rooms now, the first housing a fleet of computers, obviously the house’s office. And so you pass this jarring anachronism going into the room with the broad high windows. The guide tells us how Vanessa would retreat up here if unwelcome visitors (such as Lydia Keynes) arrived. We had only a few seconds to look around, and so I have no time to form an impression other than, “This is where she hid from life for those last 20 years of her life.”

We go down the stairs again to the ground floor to the room called the Garden Room. Its French doors open directly out into the beautiful garden, and in spite of the room’s inviting nature, you’re naturally drawn to those doors to look out into that gorgeous walled garden. This was a storage room for a long time, but eventually grew into the drawing room for the adults. This is where they sat after dinner, arguing into the night or reading to one another. This is where they gathered around the wireless during those long nights of the war. It’s a charming, cozy room with a fish rug and two lovely ladies flanking what had been a mirror over the mantle but is now a painted basket of flowers.

Now we move into Vanessa’s bedroom, the room where she died. She chose this room, in what had been the larder, for her new bedroom when Clive moved upstairs in 1939. She added the French doors that look out onto the garden. I looked around eagerly, wanting to know what she kept closest. Above her narrow bed is a large portrait of Julian. Portraits of young Quentin and Angelica in fancy dress. A sensible small desk where she wrote letters. In a corner behind a screen is a private bath she added, one of her few luxuries. By a door is a self-portrait of Duncan, done when he was young, when she first fell in love with him.

And so we pass into Duncan’s studio, and there is his comfortable clutter, his easel, his paintings, his chair next to the fireplace. The room feels as if he might have been there only a few minutes ago. He just put down his paintbrush to go answer a phone call or greet a caller at the door. The room was added in 1925 in what had been a chicken run. It is shabby, cluttered, comfortable, dominated by a huge male nude on an easel.

Now we step out into the garden. It’s bounded on one side by the house and the three other sides by a high stone wall, incongruous against the emptiness of that landscape. The garden’s flowerbeds are bounded by reflecting pools and statuary, benches and arbors. The flowering foliage creeps up around the edges of the borders and boundaries, but it’s well cared for. A central lawn was used for theatricals. Beyond the walls there’s more: orchard, greenhouse, vegetable garden. And beyond that, the empty downs. You wander around the garden, around one corner, down a path, and again lose your bearings.

Regaining the house, we turn right and pass Vanessa’s bedroom windows, pass the Garden Room, and come around to the front of the house, looking out onto the pond. There the ghostly figure of a woman stands beneath a large tree and seems to survey the pond. No, it’s one of Quentin’s sculptures. Nearby, another sculpture called the Levitating Lady appears to float in mid-air.

Charleston is a artist’s house. Nearly everything has been given the touch of a paintbrush. Everywhere you see portraits, paintings of sitters, paintings of painters painting. The garden was designed (also by Roger Fry) to be painted. Everywhere you see art: Quentin’s sculpture, pottery from France, rugs from Turkey, from Italy, from Julian’s time in China. Their chosen metier, their adventure was to create art from the ordinary, to decorate the plain and functional, and Charleston was their ultimate creation, their most glorious piece of art.

Much as I loved the place, I left Charleston that day feeling queerly unsettled. The house is full of life, the garden full of color, the whole place still vibrates with energy. But always at my elbow I felt Vanessa’s unrelenting sadness. She managed a remarkable balancing act through most of her life, keeping the one essential, Duncan, near her but never really possessing him. She never lost her fear of losing him.

Unconventional as she was, Vanessa always had an alpha male: Thoby, to some extent Clive, then Maynard, Roger Fry, Duncan, then Julian. Roger was far more than ex-lover; he was her mentor, her companion in creativity, her spirit guide. When Roger died, she transferred a lot of her feelings from him to Julian. Nothing can compare with a mother’s pain when her child dies, no matter what the circumstances, but Julian was more than a son to her. He was to be the real hero in the story of her life. When he died, something vital inside her died, and she spent the rest of her life inhabiting her days but not really living life. Painting became a place to hide, and so did Charleston.

Reflecting on it later, I sense that Charleston is a house of mirrors, of deceiving appearances, of the tension of polarized opposites delicatedly balanced, never tipping too far one way or the other. It’s like the painter’s use of trompe l’oeil enlarged to fix their world. The house is much bigger inside than it looks from the outside, and as you go from room to room you lose your bearings. The layout feels haphazard, from the many years of alterations and additions. The furniture you step around might be something from a junk shop or it might be a priceless antique. You see a Picasso or a Poussin… no, it’s a copy Duncan made -- before he sold the original.

The relationships at Charleston were Bloomsbury relationships: an undercurrent of tension and competition beneath a surface of affection, color and creativity, often verging on incestuous, like one big dysfunctional family. These relationships were often delicately balanced between startling honesty (“Semen?”) and shocking deception (Angelica’s parentage). Much as she loved Virginia, it was only after Roger’s death that Vanessa told her sister they’d been once lovers. Her famed serenity masked the terrible fear of losing Duncan, which lasted all her life.

Despite their unconventionality, there were definite limits to Bloomsbury’s free thinking. Vanessa and Duncan confronted this when their daughter Angelica married Duncan’s ex-lover Bunny Garnett, who’d been present at her birth and predicted as much. Difficult as it was to accept, that unlikely marriage resulted in a houseful of lovely granddaughters that filled Vanessa’s later years with laughter and love.

And so, whatever else changed around them, Duncan and Vanessa were the constants at Charleston. They maintained this precarious balance somehow, with grace, with respect, with love. They tried to be true to themselves and to one another, and I admire them so much for trying, no matter how they fared. Ultimately, Vanessa and Duncan were faithful to one another. They came there during the First World War and stayed there the rest of their lives. Vanessa died in 1961. Duncan lived there until just before his own death in 1969. The others came and went; children were raised, left, and returned with their own children. Though Duncan and Vanessa also had a winter home in France for a time and a flat in London, Charleston was their home for over 50 years.