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My first glimpse of novelist, poet, and award-winning writer John Tarrow was during the very first Dunmow BookFest. John refused to believe that Dunmow, a town without a bookshop, wasn’t peopled with book lovers who would welcome a book festival. Our conversation was enthralling as he talked about how Talliston House & Gardens and his books came into being. I couldn’t believe I’d been living so near for over 20 years and not only hadn’t I visited, but I hadn’t even heard about it.
Now that was to be remedied. Chatting to John towards the end of the festival, he invited me to take a tour, and we decided on a Housekeeping Tuesday so the house was peopled with the comings and goings needed to keep Talliston in its immaculate order.
So what is so special about Talliston?
Talliston’s garden
Well, for a start, it’s billed by The Times as ‘Britain’s Most Extraordinary Home’ – and from the moment you step into the garden, your eyes will be amazed, and you have no idea what to look at first.
Talliston is the product of John’s extraordinary imagination, which he’s honed ever since he spent his childhood stuck in his bedroom writing stories on an old Smith-Corona typewriter that he still owns. Wanting to buy a house, he settled on an ordinary, three-bedroom, semi-detached house, which was all he could afford in the delightful little town of Dunmow, Essex.
Little by little, through the power of his imagination, he conjured up rooms in houses in countries he’d love to live in and then began to transform each room to match his vision.
The Box Room
As we walked through The Labyrinth (the garden), which is a recreation of an old Essex Gothic Rectory of 1852, my eyes roamed up the stone stairs.
“I’ll tell you about those on the way down,” John said, ushering my husband and me into The Box Room, which is based on a late-1920s detective office in New York.
You can almost smell the cigarette smoke wafting around your head as you take in the authentic ambience. I’ve always wanted to write a crime novel, and my fingers were itching to sit down at the desk and pound out some paragraphs on that old typewriter.
And then next door is a small Scottish-style bedroom. John has called it The Haunted Bedroom, and with these connotations, I couldn’t imagine sleeping a night in here without being visited by a ghost.
And into The Boathouse (bathroom), a converted 1986 Norwegian lighthouse.
The Haunted Bedroom
Next, John pointed out that the staircase – just a white space with wooden steps when he bought the house – had now been transformed into Italian stone steps inside the Palazzo di Ombre in 1992 Lombardy.
The guest bedroom is courtesy of the 1977 Room of Dreams in Moorish Granada (Spain). All thirteen rooms are crammed with trinkets, knick-knacks and accessories relating to the room’s place and time, and you could spend hours just gazing around.
Taking a long look into the living room, which is a Welsh watchtower taken over by Victorian writers in the winter of 1887, at the other end is the dining room where Talliston visitors are served an authentic afternoon tea with original crockery and fresh tea goodies from a local Dunmow emporium.
As it was a housekeeping day, we settled for a homemade cuppa with bikkies. What was once just a concrete driveway is now a futuristic Japanese teahouse and Shinto vivarium with Art Deco styling.
Irish Courtyard
The 1930s Irish courtyard back garden is so tranquil and calm as we wander into Whiskey-Jack’s Lodge, the cabin home of a Trapper and his Cree wife in 1948 Saskatchewan, Canada.
John turned The Office into his writing room, and it’s here that he wrote his three bestsellers.
Aimed at young adults (but read by just as many adults!) The Stranger’s Guide to Talliston is a collection of extraordinary tales set inside a fantasy world of the house and gardens. John’s latest is The Talliston Grimoire, a guidebook charting the entire project. And the books were literally selling out at the BookFest.
Honestly, you just won’t believe your eyes. John and his talented band of craftsmen have taken 25 years to get Talliston to its finished state. I have never experienced a house tour like it, and now that John is putting Talliston into a trust, the house will stay this way for a very long time.
If you’re up for a spooky afternoon tea or B&B stayover complete with ghosts, hauntings and everything witchy, Talliston’s Halloween Season runs from Monday 19th October until Sunday 1st November, so head to the website to book.
And if cheese and wine is more to your liking, Talliston have put together the most unusually different cheese and wine tasting on Saturday 7th or Sunday 8th November from 5pm to 9.30pm.
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