In all, Emily Marshall may have photographed more than 1,000 homes – but this house in the South West, gradually tended to by a pair of families, stopped her in her tracks
In working with light, Emily Marshall is as artistically aware of the shadows that frame it. But then, there’s always been what is manifest and what is not.
‘I wanted to be an architect, but got the feeling the successful ones had to have money behind them,’ she says ruefully. ‘I was aware that’s not my background, and I wasn’t going to train for years to earn nothing, so I figured the next best thing would be to photograph buildings.’
It’s ironic that, shooting for clients such as Inigo and The Modern House, Marshall is exposed daily to luxury and opulence. While she appreciates time granted to capture the experience of being in such homes, it’s via long shoots for the Landmark Trust that she feeds her fascination with tracing light over time as it passes over rough stone walls or peeling plaster, or into dark timber nooks. Marshall may have documented over 1,000 houses, old and new, in all.
Chelvey Court took her breath away. It was bought semi-ruined over 40 years ago, by two young couples who moved into different parts of the house without ever dividing it.
As their families grew, a decades-long process of light-touch, contingent restoration meant they expanded into empty rooms as they saw fit and could afford – 10 bedrooms, two living rooms, kitchens and bathrooms – all the time sharing the grand Jacobean staircase at the home’s heart.
Marshall found this intimate custodianship touchingly rare and precious: the great walls and roof restored as a unifying act, but the rooms bearing individual traces of parallel lives and generations. Intervened on but delicately so; one more veneer in Chelvey’s passage through time.