Renaissance Man

Alastair Hendy – writer, chef, photographer, shopkeeper and architectural restorer – has carved a life out of his obsession with the below-stairs aesthetic and meticulous attention to detail

Words NANCY ALSOP

Alastair Hendy is a man about whom superlatives are dropped liberally and whose career has been so multifaceted that he defies pigeonholing with aplomb. Neale Whitaker, one-time editor of Vogue Living, once eulogised: ‘Bearing in mind that a word doesn’t exist to describe what he does, and in a publishing world that prefers its talent to have one definable skill, Alastair Hendy, the writer-cum-cook-cum-stylist-cum-photographer-cum-designer could best be described as a human magazine.’

Today, he continues to work as a photographer; has scooped a myriad of covetable awards for his food and travel writing; and offers style consultancy to brands, including M&S and, formatively, Carluccio’s (where he also worked as a chef) in the 1980s. ‘I wear many hats,’ he says. ‘Life should be like that – one feeds another, and creativity is broadened, boundaries becoming more fluid the more you do.’ But despite his dizzying existence – lived between Shoreditch and East Sussex – it is as the man who breathed life into a formerly ramshackle Tudor house in Hastings, his hometown, that he has earned a truly captivated following, as well as thanks to the world he has created in AG Hendy and Co Homestores.

‘I saw this house on the market, a house that had been on my radar over the years,’ he explains. ‘It was really just for a nose around, as I’d no intention of buying a beamy nooky-wooky Tudor house. In truth I’d always thought them a bit naff, as my experience had been of the pub variety, decked out with horse-brasses and all woodwork slapped with black paint.’ Yet it was the first, and the last, house he looked at. ‘My London flat is large spaces, concrete and steel, and this was the opposite: intimate rooms, wood, lime-plaster. It spoke to me straight away, as there were direct similarities: an honesty of materials, of structure – a parallel narrative.’

Quite contrary to the vogue for buying period houses and then kitting them out with modern conveniences, Hendy did precisely the opposite: to remove contemporary interlopers and restore faithfully what had been buried under 500 years worth of tinkering, rebuilding and amendment. It must, I venture, have been both thrilling and daunting. ‘I was totally unfazed,’ he counters. ‘I love a new challenge. You do have to go through years of deconstruction, mess and mayhem, before the ‘set-dressing’, the easy bit, happens. After the completion of major structural repairs, came the removing of the ugliness, the jarring additions, and to putting in the things that reflected the true character of the house. The narrative took hold, and it became more autobiographical, drawing on memories of childhood, challenging the conventions of traditional Tudor restoration make-overs.’

The key, he advises, when it comes to such a monumental labour of love is to be wilful. ‘Never believe that the ‘expert’ is right or knows best, or indeed understands what you want; keep your vision on track; and remain curious. One visitor on an open day remarked to her friend “It’s been done up, but not doneup”. Yes! I thought. That’s exactly it. Another – which made me laugh – was when a plumber took a call outside the house to report back to his boss, not thinking I could hear every word, saying “It’s like something you go see on a school trip”. Bless him.’

In truth, although grating modern additions have been stripped away, the house remains markedly more luxurious than its original incumbents would have found it. ‘We have electricity, running hot water, baths, central heating and – wait for it – under-floor heating in the kitchen,’ assures Hendy. ‘The pleasure of the past occupying the present is the pleasure of illusion. The house is a living skeuomorph, it mimics the past and fools many into believing they’re stepping into a Tudor times when they are so not. There’s not even a stick of Tudor furniture. Because it doesn’t have any obvious modern trappings – it feels unworldly, unrelated to today’s living. Yet it’s totally in sync with everything we need and crave. Bar a telly!’

It is a creation that has garnered a legion of fans, some of whom regard a stay as something bordering on pilgrimage, particularly at Christmas, when Hendy hosts open days, at which regulars return year after year, keen for their annual fix. The house is, I suggest, something more than the sum of its aged parts; it is the creation of narrative that makes it really magical, not dissimilarly to Dennis Severs extraordinary Spitalfields home. Hendy agrees. ‘Severs was a storyteller. I think I too am a storyteller. David Bowie, my childhood hero, was a storyteller – each album took on a new persona and told a new story. I think I do that with houses – live, breath and reinvent myself with each project. It’s all make-believe but done with meticulous care. You feel connected to and wed with the past and story you’ve concocted. Everyone loves a dream.’

Hendy’s busy brain, however, was not content with one restoration project; when a shop in Hastings Old Town that had been badly neglected and criminally ‘modernised’ with laminates and linoleum was going cheap, he saw potential. After a painstaking and expensive renaissance, in 2011 he opened A G Hendy and Co, a homeware store which, incomparably, makes something beautiful of the below stairs aesthetic, selling exquisite brushes, pans, and domestic implements for the home. ‘There’s a poetry in the everyday,’ he explains. ‘The unashamed elegance of the domestic has been my go-to all my life: from the scrubbed tables and creamware of belowstairs in country houses – not forgetting their drab painted cupboards, shelved pantries, exposed pipework and batteries of scullery sinks. I am told I go too far, and get scalded for admiring the utilitarian of Hitler’s bunker – all concrete with galvanised conduit, 1940s work lights and metal desks. But it works. As a child I’d visit St Francis asylum in Haywards Heath – to talk to the patients – and took in the Victorian institutional architecture; my boarding school was Victorian and I spent much time in its large kitchen, cooking the staff supper at the age of 10. I’m below-stairs born and bred. Give me an old tap and a massive sink and I’m in heaven.’

The less is more approach combined with the historical is, he says, minimalism grownup. His shop is a living nod to the past, the yearned-for traditional family-run department store. ‘It is a bit like a storybook. Its dust jacket is the dark frontage and windows, opening into paragraphs of rooms that weave a narrative. Seeing customers place their purchases on the counter for wrapping, it’s as though they’ve been on a journey and these are their tales.’

There’s much more than just products for sale, like a 1930s Handy Hints page for a monthly illustrated practical tip on how to make light work of chores and repairs, their make-do-and-mend philosophy a breath of fresh air in today’s throw-away world, and encapsulating all that is charming about Hendy’s meticulously, beautifully created world, whose slogan – ‘A G Hendy & Co for goods that cannot be hoped for elsewhere’ – could not be more apt.