Charleston Farmhouse

It was the country home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and is an example of their decorative style within a domestic context, representing the fruition of more than sixty years of artistic creativity.

[1] In addition to the house and artists' garden, Charleston hosts a year-round programme of Bloomsbury and contemporary exhibitions in a suite of galleries designed by Jamie Fobert Architects which opened in September 2018.

The Outer Studio at Charleston hosts a permanent display of Bell and Grant's Famous Women Dinner Service,[2] and there is also a shop selling Bloomsbury-inspired art, homeware fabrics, fashion, books and stationery.

Garnett, Clive Bell and Maynard Keynes lived at Charleston for considerable periods; Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry were frequent visitors.

[1] The walled garden was redesigned in a style reminiscent of southern Europe, with mosaics, box hedges, gravel pathways and ponds, but with a touch of Bloomsbury humour in the placing of the statuary.

As Vanessa Bell wrote in 1936: "The house seems full of young people in very high spirits, laughing a great deal at their own jokes ... lying about in the garden which is simply a dithering blaze of flowers and butterflies and apples."

The COVID-19 pandemic that broke out in 2020 initially had a devastating financial impact on Charleston, which ordinarily receives no public funding, and relies on income through ticket sales and spend in its shop and café.