I can’t see a junk shop without going in and seeing if there’s something to buy,’ sighs Aleksandr Groves. It is, he claims, ‘my life’s disease, really’. Aleksandr and his friend Paul Oxborrow have found their heart’s promise in St Leonards-on-Sea, a place that was conceived as a suburb of Hastings, that ancient East Sussex sea town of craggy cliffs, 16th-century fishermen’s ‘net shops’ and picturesque cottages and villas.
St Leonards was originally built in the 1820s by James Burton and later embellished by his architect son Decimus. A generation or two after that, vast houses were constructed to accommodate the big, bustling families of the Victorian age.
One such house was erected in 1880 (a year before Decimus Burton died). Built largely of red brick, its windows hung with lace curtains in a design of giant ferns, and emblazoned across the entranceway with ‘St Benedict’ in wrought iron, it appears to have been left untouched for 150 years. There is even a fernery – a Wardian case of stained glass – standing against a front window, not unlike the one at 18 Stafford Terrace in London, the fabled home of distinguished Victorian illustrator Edward Linley Sambourne.
Yet this, like so much else here, is – astonishingly – of recent creation. Aleksandr and Paul have devised this fantasia out of a house that was converted into flats in the 1920s; they moved here in 1995, when it was still split into three. Eventually they took over more and more of the original structure, as fellow tenants moved on. In the early 2000s they decided to open it as an unforgettably quirky bed and breakfast.
When it was converted into flats, the house’s interior lobby was lost. ‘It was just open to the elements,’ says Aleksandr. ‘The front door had gone. So we took away a staircase and remodelled the doors and a very clever local stained-glass artist, Alan Wright, copied some Victorian glass and ran it all over that entrance hall. I wanted to try and make it look like it’s been there a long time. Using old things and combining them with that intention can usually create an atmosphere. That is what I want.’
In this entryway, Aleksandr put up an exuberant Watts wallpaper with crimson and deep-pink florid movements and a period ‘Adamesque’ dado. He added a high-Victorian brass chandelier and a marquetry cabinet from the Netherlands to display a set of winsome Meissen china.
Throughout, Dutch inlaid wood furniture from the 18th and early 19th centuries abounds. ‘I just always liked it really,’ says Aleksandr. ‘And years ago it was reasonably affordable... at least sometimes.’
A vast Victorian gong hangs in a mahogany frame, while the woodwork, doors, picture rails and skirting boards are painted in the same dark red-brown colour – an audacious step when they originally took it, but one that now seems to capture that later 19th-century town-house look to a tee. (And I, for one, thought that the doors and the painted glass were completely, miraculously, intact and original.)
When Aleksandr and Paul first moved in, they occupied the parlour floor. They were intrigued by the flimsy partition between the grand rooms facing the garden: a large arc between the rooms remained, seeming to suggest a long since covered-up opening. Studying the history of the house, they discovered that, although the rooms were originally designed to be single, about five years after it had been built, the Danvers family moved in and combined the two spaces.
The duo, in turn, have restored it to one vast drawing room. Aleksandr chose a Zuber wallpaper from the 1850s and a dado to match. There is, as he confesses, a ‘great hotchpotch [of papers]. It’s not historically correct – it’s just things that I’ve liked.’
Several years ago, they had the opportunity to acquire the ground-floor flat next door, and they knocked through. Paul was thrilled, because it allowed him to secure the full garden at last. Here, he has since created a walled potager with different levels, rose arbours, rosemary and vegetables. It steps down, through an ancient metal gate, to the romantic, iris-filled pond and the tumbled gardens that he had already created in their original property next door. Between the weathered metal portal and the timeworn brick covered in roses and wisteria, not to mention the garden’s vegetal abundance, it all seems as though it’s always been there. One would never suspect it was created so recently.
Inside, Aleksandr ‘wanted to play with the Aesthetic Movement of the 1890s’. He decorated in line with ‘that craze for all things Japanese at the end of the century. And I thought the black-and-gold furniture was just right. I’ve always liked it, but never dared buy it for the main house.’ They christened the addition the Holman Hunt Rooms, because a copy of that artist’s portrait of his son hangs on one wall. Aleksandr made the frame based on that of the original, which hangs in the National Gallery. ‘There was quite a Pre-Raphaelite connection with Hastings,’ observes Paul. ‘Burne-Jones and Rossetti were there.’
It’s all a long way from where it started. ‘The place had been completely modernised in a very minimalist and aggressive sort of way. Every piece of Victorian woodwork had been taken out – doors, skirtings, picture rails. There were no features of any kind. So it was... a challenge,’ says Aleksandr. ‘The main house had quite a few of its nice things still here, but that flat was completely Scandiwegian. So we had fun with it.’
In the garden, there is a minuscule Orthodox chapel. ‘When I first went to Russia in the 1980s, the church life there seemed completely dead,’ says Aleksandr, who converted to Orthodoxy (and changed his name from Stephen) some time after moving to St Leonards; a few years ago, he was ordained as a priest. ‘So to see it now so beautiful and so resurgent and such an influence on society – it was very, very wonderful. We have Russians and Ukrainians and lots of English people who are interested. So we’re a mixed community who actually get on really well together.’
The local area, too, is a vibrant medley – ‘of art and music and eccentric people’, Aleksandr says. ‘And it’s by the seaside!’ But the level of enthusiasm – the fact that ‘this house has been able to be welcoming to so many over the years’ – has still been a surprise. ‘It seems to have had an effect on people, and that’s wonderful’.
To contact St Benedict Victorian B&B, ring 01424 434973, or visit victorianbedandbreakfast.co.uk
A version of this article appears in the August 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers.
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