Boldre Bridge House

New house built in 1891 for Lewis Shedden (1853-1904) in the meadows of Spouthouse Farm. It was originally called Craigwen and was built by Walter Perkins. After Shedden’s wife Emily died in 1899, Shedden no longer wanted to live there and Perkins gave it to his son, Walter Frank Perkins (1865-1946) and his wife Elizabeth as a wedding present. They moved in in 1901 and the family lived there for 70 years.Frank’s daugher, Mary Hopkins, wrote ‘Considerable additions were made to the house about 1910 and again about 1920, when its whole appearance was altered. When I first remember it, it was an ugly, red brick Edwardian villa, with much white-painted exterior woodwork – rather like the doll’s house in Beatrix Potter’s “Two Bad Mice”. As it stood in the middle of a field and the trees round it were newly planted it was rather raw and bleak but very light and sunny. The front door was then on the west side of the house where the bay window is now. That half of the drawing room was then the hall. There were four reception rooms, eight bedrooms and the first bathroom in Boldre, which people from all over the area used to visit prior to installing one themselves. Our first nursery was what is now John’s dressing room; but the nursery moved as the family increased and, from the age of six, I had a room to myself – now the bathroom at the top of the stairs.The house was furnished with a curious assortment of ponderous old oak which my father had collected as a bachelor and brought back from Brittany on his honeymoon, some valuable Japonaiserie brought back by him and, later, by my grandparents, from Japan, and the William Morris art nouveau-type furniture characteristic of a young Edwardian menage.Each morning my father drove with his young groom, Tom Figgins, in a dog-cart ... to Brockenhurst station where he entrained for his office in Southampton. When he returned in the evening he used to bring us grapefruit, pomegranates and tortoises – things we had never seen – and he used to carry us up to bed in turn.’