Words Madeleine Silver
Photography Elliot Sheppard

When the literary editor and her husband David approached the now-retired local architect – Peter Hall from Van der Steen and Hall Architects – over 20 years ago to build their grass-roofed house, books were a priority. For it’s from the kitchen table and against a flawlessly framed vignette of rolling moorland (just one other house reveals itself when the trees are left bare in winter) that Gail combs through proofs of Slightly Foxed.

This year marks 20 years since the first issue of this quarterly literary magazine – which Gail co-edits with Hazel Wood – was published. Printed in Yorkshire by craftsmen printers Smith Settle, with covers illustrated by contemporary British artists, each issue celebrates fiction and non-fiction books that have been lost, forgotten or overlooked. “We started in 2004 when chain bookshops were everywhere, flogging three books for the price of two, and selling piles of celebrity memoirs. It meant that the back list – books that are still worth reading – was neglected. We felt frustrated that everything was focused on the new,” Gail reflects. “People thought we were mad but 20 years on, we’re still going strong.”

Her bookshelves – winding down the circular staircase which takes you to the bedrooms, or lining the corridor running behind the dining room so as not to obscure the view – form her own reference library. Meticulously organised and delightfully diverse, there’s a section dedicated to China (the couple spent eight years in Hong Kong), and at the next glance, a shelf championing the British countryside. Outside her spare bedroom, where her grandchildren happily decamp, are carefully collected editions of Beatrix Potter nestled up against Harry Potter and Arthur Ransome.

But it’s rounding the bend from the sprawling sitting room that the house’s jewel appears: a book-lined study. “I wanted to be surrounded by bookshelves. The dome above the desk, which is backlit, echoes John Soane’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which I love,” explains Gail. Hidden in the back wall of the shelves is a secret door on wheels which conceals a music room. And, like the larder with its uniform Kilner jars, or the enviably organised boxes of Lego hiding in a built-in cupboard and ready to be upended, the house is clutter-free. “One of my favourite TV programmes is Stacey Solomon’s Sort Out Your Life. And that’s what editing is really, clearing out the unnecessary and going for clarity. Clarity and beauty.” Here, Gail explains how the house embodies her editor’s mind — and how it seamlessly sits in its West Country landscape.

“What we bought was a 1930s prefab bungalow. For two years we’d been looking for the best site with the worst house, but we kept finding beautiful sites where the houses were too nice to pull down. We came here one weekend from London, walked down the path to the bungalow and looked at the view. It was May, and we just thought: ‘This is it.’

“We’d seen a house in Ireland that was set into the hill so that the rocks, which were intrinsic to the landscape, just faded away around it. That gave us the idea to create a house that was set into the landscape, but not completely hidden. We wanted something that was timeless, that would still be here in a couple of hundred years’ time. I read so many articles about houses with conservatories, swimming pools, tennis courts, games rooms and cinemas. You just don’t need all that.

“The project took around seven years to complete but that meant we had time to think about it and pare it back: we didn’t want fancy bathrooms; we didn’t want gizmos in the kitchen. We were designing the house on the cusp of technological change in the early noughties. To begin with we had an oil-fired boiler, but we’ve since switched to air-source heat pumps now that the kit is more efficient. We have underfloor heating and our own borehole for water.

“The use of local materials was a priority when we were building. The granite that faces the building comes from the spoil heap of the quarry that was used to build nearby Castle Drogo, the last castle to be built in Britain designed by Edwin Lutyens. Sadly, we had to fell two oak trees in the rebuilding, but we seasoned the timber from them to build the porch. We’ve also planted a couple of thousand native trees since we’ve been here, but the biggest thing we’ve done for nature has been turning the existing pond, which was silted up, into a lake. It’s brought geese, ducks, herons, an occasional cormorant and little grebe, frogs, eels and toads, as well as damselflies and dragonflies.

“We came across a company called Jam Jar in London that specialises in flower pressing and asked them to come down a few years ago to press an array of wildflowers from the roof to be hung in the guest bedroom. A favourite piece of furniture is the rotating bookshelf which my husband designed as a prototype to fit the Slightly Foxed reissues of classic memoirs.

“One of the most joyful things our architect did was to design the central circular staircase. It was built in a warehouse in Newton Abbot and we actually walked up and down it there when it was finished. Then they took it apart to transport it here. It’s always a debate as to whose books go where on the shelves that line the staircase; where David has a whole section of books on mountaineering, I’ve retaliated with P.G. Wodehouse.

“We have about 40 acres, including an orchard from which I made cider for the first time last year. Ever since I came across an amazing greenhouse with no frame, just like our corner windows, at the Hampton Court Flower Show, I’ve become a passionate vegetable grower — although not always a successful one. This year’s been disastrous because it’s been so wet and everything’s looking a bit sad. But editing and gardening are a really good combination. When an article’s not quite right, I go out to the vegetable patch and pick some tomatoes or tie up the runner beans. That interlude somehow clears my mind.

“When the sun comes through the window high up in the hall, you get the shadows of the grass from the roof waving on the wall below. You really feel the seasons here. At the end of spring, you have every variety of green in the trees. Then come the summer it all looks incredibly verdant. The autumn is wonderful, full of reds and oranges and browns. Then in winter the landscape looks as if it’s been scoured and scraped clean. At that time of year, you can be sitting in the house, and the trees down in the valley will be swaying in the wind, but it’s completely still up here. Whoever originally positioned the bungalow knew what they were doing.

“It’s definitely a local landmark. I always say: ‘If you get hopelessly lost, ask for directions to the house with the grass roof’. And because we’re on a bridlepath, we get a lot of walkers who come down looking for the path, and when they see the house appear, and the view, they just smile. We’re very, very lucky.”