Photographer Simon Upton has focused his lens on countless lovely rooms. Since his first commission for WoI, fresh from college in the early 1990s, he and his camera have travelled the world. He’s lived in Sri Lanka, Kenya, Italy and the USA. So where does someone who could work anywhere eventually hang his hat? And how does someone with such a rich visual database decide what sort of house to buy and how to adorn it?
Fourteen years ago Simon and his American wife, artist Anne Becker, ‘decided not to be city people’ and bought a former vicarage in Devon. Instead of a half-hearted gesture towards the rural idyll they chose to go all in: a house on the far edge of a small village. It is a good 15 minutes’ drive from their stone gateposts, squeezing along the gullies of ancient lanes, before you hit so much as a dotted white line, let alone a shop. ‘We wanted [our daughter] Matilda to have the country childhood we both had,’ says Simon.
And like all sensible people, however visually well-nourished and sophisticated, what they have made here is a home – a comfortably capacious one, with a garden and land that reflect their loves and lives: horses in the field, chickens and vegetables in the walled garden, dogs jumping with the excitement of a new arrival, apologies for ‘mess’. A tour of their 20-acre domain reveals a discreet bank of solar panels, rainwater collection, a woodland grove, a greenhouse with lemons, pomegranates and avocados, a forest garden, a manège where 14-year-old Matilda practises her jumps, and fields where sheep graze. Outbuildings include stables, Anne’s studio and Simon’s den, where he keeps fishing rods and ‘far too much other stuff’.
For a professed lover of English classicism, the property is notably informal. ‘We settled on this area – too far from London for commuters, but with an interesting community thanks to nearby Dartington Hall,’ says Simon. ‘When we found the house, it was the trees and the walled garden more than the architecture that made it irresistible.’ Originally a farmhouse, the building was enlarged and given a more formal façade in 1760 when the local vicar moved in. About a hundred years later, a subsequent clergyman further aggrandised it with a wing set at right angles, its gable a large triangle at the end of the earlier façade. The mix of styles is charming and low-key, a cottage-in-the-woods set against a dark backdrop of towering cedars and Scots pine.
‘We think that first vicar must have been a bit of a recluse,’ says Simon. If you walk past the stables, and round the back of the walled garden, there are panoramic views towards the sea, the crenellations of the village church tower appearing above trees in the near distance – a long walk for any member of the congregation to find the reverend out of hours.
The informality of the architecture continues indoors with its furnishings. ‘Anne is wonderfully irreverent when it comes to decorating,’ says Simon – an attitude apparent the minute you walk through the front door, where she has painted a single section of wall a deep indigo blue to dado height topped by a rhythmic, freehand frieze of little white dashes. Bits of branch nailed to the wall act as hooks for straw hats above a bench with a ticking cushion where Pixie the whippet likes to recline. On the opposite wall, an 18th-century console with a top of Chatsworth marble supports an African stool crowned by found feathers and twigs furred with lichen, while above them a huge circular mirror, its gently convex glass as speckled as a curlew’s egg, throws its reflection. ‘It’s a road mirror from Eastern Europe,’ says Simon. ‘We liked them so much we bought another one, which is in the library.’
Add in a sculpture of Ganesh over the door into the big front-to-back kitchen, framed collages by Nan Swid, a Charlotte Perriand wall light and a door curtain with its strip of Congolese kuba cloth, and you have an introduction that neatly sums up the playful, relaxed and unaffected contrasts that typify their decorating style.
The second road mirror is framed by a doorway to the right, where sofas clothed in sheepskin rugs flank the fireplace. This, their ‘only smart room’, is wrapped with bookshelves made by local craftsmen from Devon oak, the wood an echo of the wide boards they installed throughout the ground floor to replace the concrete that lurked under fitted carpets.
A door to the right of the fireplace leads into the Victorian wing and the old drawing room with its higher ceiling and bigger window. If the house offered any opportunity for formality, this was it. Instead Simon chose to paint its walls himself with enormous, bulbous ferns, inspired by their collection of antique prints of that plant. The cornice and the painted over-doors and pediments have extra bounce thanks to rows of ping-pong balls he halved and nailed in place. ‘This was Matilda’s playroom – we call it the games room – so they seemed appropriate,’ says Simon. As is the white table-tennis table – a chic version with pedestals. ‘We use it when we have a dinner party – about once every ten years,’ says Simon.
Most rooms are as much Anne as Simon, with her large paintings and family furniture from her flat in New York. On the landing are panels of an American screen she inherited, and bedrooms are rich with textiles gathered on their travels. Artwork by Matilda is also framed on the walls. But Simon’s office, behind the games room, is pure Upton: marble busts, horses, dogs, antlers, kente cloths and a dash of Modernism. It’s a heady, intriguing mix, and proof that you can happily hang your decorating hat on several different pegs if you do it with aplomb.
Visit simonupton.com
A version of this article appears in the August 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers.
Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
