A tumble-down Tudor house in Oxfordshire has been rescued and revived with a modernist treatment. Alex Tait journeys through the time tunnel

Ceramicist Joanna Oliver and her husband Rob bought The Old Queen in 1991 from Joanna’s grandmother Edna, who had bought it in 1950. As the name suggests, it was once a pub and Rob still finds himself digging up Victorian beer bottles brewed in Watlington, a couple of miles down the road. Even a farming village as small as Britwell Salome would have had three or four pubs, ranging from the bigger roadside inns to the more spit-and-sawdust bars. The Old Queen sat somewhere in the middle. The South Oxfordshire village is still built around a busy farm, with Britwell Hill behind it rising up into the Chilterns.

The Old Queen is actually two “queens” nestling alongside each other. The left-hand building is built in the brick-and- flint vernacular of this part of the world, three stories rising up to a neat, clipped gable roof. Her older, right-hand partner sits perpendicular, built around exposed beams with a flourish of herringbone brickwork on the second floor. In fact, more than 400 years separate the two buildings – the old one was built in the 16th century, the new one as the 20th century came to a close. Joining the two halves is an oak-framed porch with a sharply raked roofline that stretches up towards the chimney breast. The building(s) sit in just over an acre of garden, an orchard of apple trees to one side as you approach the house, Joanna’s studio on the other.

Back in 1950 only the older queen existed. The timbers were poking through the crumbling walls, and it was a small miracle that it was still standing. Joanna’s grandfather, Stephen Hellicar Oakeshott, who worked for ICI, stole the concrete yearbook from his employer and proceeded to mix up industrial grade concrete which he used to shore up the house before tagging on a single-story extension with a flat roof. But after this initial damage limitation, not much more was done to the property over the years. When Joanna and Rob took it on, the guttering looked like a rollercoaster and the roof was sagging under the weight of the tiles. Slowly they stripped everything back to the essence of the Tudor building, taking down the side extension and starting from scratch, building the new queen.

The pair have fused old and new with enormous skill. They were able to take a huge beam from the old side and use it to span the ceiling in the new kitchen, automatically giving the room a sense of history. The flagstones are actually old pavement slabs but look as if they’ve been there for centuries. An unexpected collection of wooden spoons span the beam over the Aga. It began with a single gift and has been added to over the years, now a wall of hardwood utensils. An oak staircase was added in 1992, made from a tree that came down in the Great Storm of 1987.

A cascade of ceramic lampshades hangs from the high-ceilinged hallway, while boards from the same tree lead you into the bedroom. Here you get to see Tudor technology at its finest. The beams would have been fashioned away from the site, almost like a prefab, and then brought in and slotted together. They still show the “assembly instructions”: three carved lines on one beam match up with three carved lines on another; four lines to the four of a separate beam.

Downstairs in the sitting room a huge dark oak beam spans the enormous fireplace, still a very Tudor vibe, and then suddenly you’re walking through a glass-walled and glass-ceilinged passageway – a little like a spaceship portal – into an entirely separate building. This looks like a standard brick-and-wood barn building on the outside, but inside it’s more like being in a modern art gallery with its white concrete walls and a hefty mezzanine floor. The walls are covered with contemporary paintings from Joanna and Rob’s collection. The huge Kevin Sinnott painting of a mother and son looking down onto the chimneys and roofs of Bridgend, where Rob grew up, takes centre stage. Any gaps left by paintings are filled with books.

Tucked under one apple tree in the garden are three slabs of stone, one for each of their children and each one the height of the child when Rob turned 50 – Jack was seven, Ben four and Alice two. That was 25 years ago and he’s tempted to repeat the gesture now. Joanna’s studio sits on the opposite side of the garden. Her ceramic-ware is beautiful in its simplicity and brave use of colour; the Britwell Blue jostles with bright oranges and charcoal grey. Her style is ever evolving and in recent works she has used a ladle to add the glaze, a traditional Japanese technique.

“I’m taking something very old and giving it a chance to reach out to the modern day.”

A good metaphor for the house too.

This article is from Idler #108.

Subscribe to the Idler here and get 12% off the shop price plus a FREE copy of Idle Thoughts by Tom Hodgkinson, worth £8.95.

Subscribers may comment. Please add your idle thoughts using the box below

A Drink with the Idler: NEW DATE

“A Drink with the Idler” returns on 16 April, when the writer Michael Pollan will be talking to Tom Hodgkinson about one of life’s deepest mysteries: consciousness. That’s Thursday 16 April at 6pm. Find out more and book tickets here.
It’s FREE to subscribers – otherwise £7.50.

Michael Pollan’s A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness is Idler Book of the Week 6-12 April. See “Related Items” right.

How to Live Like a Stoic

The March/April 2026 issue of the Idler (#108) is available in Waitrose, Smiths and TG Jones.

Click here for your nearest stockist.