Life in a Tudor home
Linda Duriez, The House That Moved, Exeter, Devon
My bridal shop, Pirouette, has been in "The House That Moved" since the early 1990s. It's on an interesting Tudor square, and it gets its name because the house was moved in 1961, during the construction of the inner-city bypass. At the time, it was an amazing feat for a building to be moved lock, stock and barrel. It took two days and was on national television.
It's not necessarily the most viable space for a business because it gets bigger as it goes up – the ground floor is tiny. The beams are original but all the plaster was renewed when they moved it. The good thing with these old timber frames is that they are rock solid – English oak from that era is now so hard. The tiny leaded window panes have also been replaced, but kept in style. Maintaining them requires a window cleaner with a bit of nerve. None of the windows are the same size.
The floors slope in places and none of the walls are straight, which drove my husband mad when he put in the wardrobe rails – he made them all at home and then when he brought them into the shop, nothing fitted.
The house tends to be cold in the winter, but once it warms up, it retains its heat well. In the summer we have fans on, but it's fine. My back courtyard has the old Roman wall of the city as one of the walls. It's lovely to sit out there in the summer.
Until 1961 the council rented it out as a residential property. So I still have people who come around and say, "Oooh, my auntie Sue lived here", and so on. I met someone who had raised six children here. We also get a lot of schoolchildren coming along as part of their history lessons. Sometimes there are flocks of them outside with their teachers.
I've been in the wedding business now for quite a while, and I'm getting the girls who used to sit outside and draw the house for school come in and say, "Well I'm back – I've come for my wedding dress."
The brides love the house. It's so beautiful. My background was in vintage, and my business is so linked to the shop I would hate to be based somewhere modern.