Visitors to the market town of Lavenham in Suffolk either love it or hate it.
Some visitors are wowed by the multitude of 14th and 15th century houses
that lean precariously over the narrow streets and town square while others
are horrified by its twee perfection and seeming lack of authenticity.
Lack of authenticity is not an accusation you can level against the Great
House, a rather good restaurant with rooms in the town. However, the
authenticity is more rural France that rural Suffolk. When you walk in the
door of the Great House, you feel as though you have been transported to
N’importe-Où-Sur-Loire. The urge to go back outside to check you are still
in Suffolk is almost irresistible.
What really strikes you is the whiff of strong French cheeses that assails
your nostrils. Bleu d’Auvergne, tomme de Savoie, runny brie and stringent
Beaufort are among the 30 or so cheeses that Régis Crepy, the owner and chef
of the Great House, fossicks for on his regular trips to the homeland.
The décor is simple French rural while the staff, albeit suitably French, have
none of the arrogance that you often find in similar-looking places in
France.
A restaurant with rooms the Great House most certainly is. You walk through
the door straight into the heart of the restaurant. The rooms, added after
the restaurant had been going for a year, are accessed from a creaky
staircase. Just take a right by that cheeseboard.
On the walls as you go up are pictures taken by former resident Humphrey
Spender and his brother, the poet Stephen Spender, who also spent time in
the house. In the 1950s, the house was the home of Christopher Bush, author
of the Ludovic Travers detective novels (all 63 of them) and the author of
the so-called Breckland Novels under the pseudonym Michael Home.
The five rooms upstairs are all different – one features a Jacobean four
poster – but all sit somewhere between the traditional English and French
country house styles. There’s plenty of heavy, dark furniture, oak beams as
thick as your torso and watercolours of English stately homes and churches
on the walls. Room 2, where I stayed, is delightfully rambling and included
an enormous wardrobe the size of most people’s spare rooms and a writing
desk, a nice touch in these days of email. A cafetiere with ground coffee, a
decanter of sherry and a bowl of fresh fruit are welcome touches.
The room’s bathroom, down a narrow corridor and a couple of steps, could not
be more different. Its maritime theme could have come straight from a hotel
in Biarritz – cornflower blue wooden panelling and a clutch of shells in a
glass cabinet on the wall.
Outside the window is Lavenham’s market square, lined with grand Tudor
buildings that reflect the town’s status in the 14th to 16th centuries. At
this time, the town was one of the richest in the country thanks to its wool
merchants and the production of blue broadcloth.
The Great House is of this time, built by a family of weavers, although a
Georgian façade was added in the 18th century.
Lavenham’s decline since the Middle Ages means that many of the buildings,
unlike the Great House, have remained “unimproved” unlike in so many other
English market towns. The town enjoyed a renaissance in the mid 19th century
with the opening of England’s first sugar beet factory but Bury St Edmunds
(with its very visible sugar factory) has long since taken precedence.
Despite the feeling that you have walked onto a film set where the facades
might topple over if you pushed too hard, Lavenham has plenty of interest.
Take a look at Shilling Old Grange where Jane Taylor wrote the children’s
nursery rhyme Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star or walk down Barn Street to see
the Old Grammar School where England’s finest landscape artist John
Constable was a pupil. In the folder in your room, you’ll find several maps
helping you to explore the area. There are a couple showing walks – one of
45 minutes and another longer one taking in the farmland surrounding
Lavenham and the village of Brent Eleigh.
