Inside Blanche Vaughan’s family home in the English countryside

[knife thudding]

The most pleasurable aspect of cooking for me

is just going out into the garden, seeing what's growing

and coming up with an idea of how to prepare it.

My belief is, you know, if you start with good ingredients

then you are three quarters of the way

to eating something delicious.

[bright music]

I remember going for lunch at the River Cafe

and thinking to myself, I love this so much,

this is what I want to do.

So off I went with my bundle of knives and my apron

and I worked for a week for free at the River Cafe

and they said, Come and have a full-time job.

I then applied for a job at Moro

and then I really wanted to go and learn

a slightly different type of cooking,

which was at St. John at their Smithfield restaurant.

What drew me to the kind of Moro/River Cafe style

restaurants was their sense of humanity,

you know, chefs got on well in the kitchen,

there was no shouting and we were able to just really sort

of appreciate cooking with wonderful food

and making delicious things and learning.

I became a food writer in a really nicely organic way.

The editor of Observer Food Monthly very kindly suggested

that I started writing for their online allotment blog

and it sort of went from there.

My name's Blanche Vaughan, and I am the food editor

at House & Garden Magazine.

The book is called A Year in the Kitchen.

I'm really excited to have been a part of it,

to have curated it and most of the recipes in the book

are recipes which I've written.

It's almost like a sort of diary of all the stuff

that I make at home or I cook for my friends or my family

or people coming over.

It's very authentic.

[bright music]

I live here with my husband, Hugo de Ferranti.

I kept my maiden name for work purposes, but, you know,

sometimes I call myself Blanche de Ferranti.

Hugo bought this house about 25 years ago

and then did quite a lot of work to it before he moved in.

The main part of the house would've been very old

and sort of gradually built onto over time.

[bright music continues]

I love cooking on the AGA, but I've also got a gas hob

and an electric oven.

So I've just got a prep sink that I bought

from Christopher Howe trying to emulate what they did

with that plain English kitchen and [indistinct].

It's nice and high and it's beautiful and wide so I can lay

all my vegetables out and clean them in there,

and then on the right is the herb garden,

so I can just pop out and pick herbs

as I need them for my cooking.

I've cooked in a restaurant where they used

to use a lot of copper pots and pans and I find

that they can duct heat really well

and also, they look quite nice when they're just hanging up.

The idea of being able to just turn

from your prep area to the stove is so useful.

I always have a kitchen aid, which I love,

but I don't like having too many gadgets

and accessories on show. [bright music continues]

This is one of the rooms that I haven't had much

of an impact or an input in,

not least 'cause I think Hugo did it really well

in the first place, mainly with Robert Kaim

and then Camilla Guinness came and redid the walls.

There is something at the end though which I did change,

which was a corner cupboard that was stuffed

with family photos that I turned

into a sort of bar with lights. [laughs]

There's pieces in the room that I love,

nice foliage botanical pieces by Delli Lycett Green,

there's quite a fun Peter Blake,

and there's a Grayson Perry, one of his brilliant maps,

and that's actually an old flag.

The picture that was there before that I really loved,

we actually sold.

My husband is an art dealer, so unfortunately,

things come and go.

[bright music]

I love really informal entertaining

with just a few friends gathered around

and me doing the cooking while chatting and having a drink.

I think it's important to be available for your friends

and guests as well as being able to do the cooking.

The chairs we got from Christopher Hodsoll,

the table is an of repertory table that Hugo got

from Robert Kaim.

This is a more sort of formal setup,

but Hugo over time had collected loads of lovely old linen

and I kind of like it when it gets a bit old and frayed.

The flowers are all from the garden,

I just picked them yesterday.

Sarah Raven showed me how to pick sweet peas on the branch

so that you get a bit of more length.

The table I bought from James Graham-Stewart

and the picture that's hanging above the table

has quite an amusing story.

The picture's by an artist called Amiconi, but the subject,

which is written beneath on a little plaque,

he's called the Marquis de Ferranti,

although it's no relation and Karl Lagerfeld saw it

in a sale in Paris and so he bought it for Hugo as a joke.

We've got some beehives and obviously, we eat the honey,

which I love, but then I've started using the leftover wax

to make my own bees wax candles.

They smell so delicious and also,

they burn with a really nice gentle light.

I think eating by candlelight is one of the nicest things.

[bright music continues]

So this part of the house was sort of altered a bit

by Hugo and so he opened it up to have a lightwell,

which has made a huge difference.

It's just a lovely free flowing space up here

with all the rooms coming off it.

There's two pieces up here by a great friend of Hugo's

and mine called Sarah Graham.

There's the colored moth and the graphite,

which fortunately, Hugo let me bring into the house

'cause it was something that I'd bought

before we got married.

[bright music continues]

So this is Hugo and my bedroom.

When I first came here, probably about 20 years ago,

I immediately loved this area and it really resonated

with me because I'd grown up in very hilly valley landscape

and I loved how rural it still is here.

I love our bed 'cause it's really high.

Also, Hugo's hung up quite a lot of the sort of older art

in here, particularly the figurative work

and there's a couple of really sweet sort

of family pictures, which are appropriate to have in here.

The fireplace is original.

The bathroom next to, I love.

The bath has that marble surround and has lovely view out

into the garden.

[bright music]

This is my daughter Alba's room, she's currently six

and we managed to find Hugo's grandfather's bed,

which is an old bed reupholstered by David Millenaire,

and there's a sweet little silhouette that we've hung

on that wall inside the bed, which is by Elliott Puckette,

and there's also a little picture there,

which is Hugo sleeping when he was a little boy.

It's a sweet small room and it's been nice to turn it

into a room for a child. [bright music continues]

With the bedrooms, particularly the smaller ones

like these two junior rooms here and here,

we thought it would be fun to have a bit of texture

and pattern on the walls.

This is a hand-printed wallpaper

and I found some small pieces of furniture

from an antiques dealer in [indistinct]

and I'm thinking of hanging up these two boroughs

on the wall.

It's always difficult to find the right pictures

to hang on wallpaper and I think with a small room

like this, you want quite a few smaller pictures

rather than the big ones that we've got in other rooms.

We've got bed testers in most of the rooms

and I feel that it just gives the bed a much more centered

and slightly more sort of luxurious feeling so it...

And cozier in a small room like this.

[bright music continues]

So the garden, when I moved here,

the borders were as they were,

but I wanted to make it feel like more of my own.

So wonderful garden designer Catherine Fitzgerald came

and has sort of replanned and redesigned all the borders.

This used to be a grass tennis court,

but we decided that we didn't really want to maintain it

so we made a pond there

and these are Gormley Bollard sculptures.

[bright music]

I really appreciate the sort of cyclical nature

of the seasons of ingredients popping up, appearing,

delighting us for that short period of time

and then a new cast of characters coming

in as the year continues

and I think that's what makes cooking interesting

and inspiring really.

[bright music ends]