“If you lived here you could make it absolutely divine,” wrote author Virginia Woolf to her sister Vanessa Bell in 1916.
And divine is how artists Bell and Duncan Grant made Charleston, the East Sussex home of the controversial and influential Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers.
The house became an experimental canvas for the decorative arts, with handpainted walls, wallpapers and door panels, brilliantly coloured furniture and textiles, while rainbow-hued lampshades adorned bases made from chunks of old telegraph poles.