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“I would ban brown buildings,” says the prize-winning children’s author John Burningham. “Brown windows, brown bricks, brown everything. They must make the people who live in them subliminally depressed.” No surprise then that his own house, an elegant Edwardian semi in north London’s leafy Hampstead, couldn’t be more different.

As a designer, illustrator and writer of, among others, the Granpa series of
books, Burningham is known for his witty use of colour. Open one of his
children’s books and you’ll find imaginative use of light and a rich palette
of colours.

John Burningham’s first book, Borka: The Adventures of a Goose with No
Feathers, was published in 1963 and tells the story of a gosling who is born
different, and makes his way to Kew Gardens in London. Since then, with
titles including Granpa and Mr Gumpy’s Outing, the 75-year-old writer and
illustrator has gone on to become an internationally beloved children’s
author.

His wife, Helen Oxenbury, is an award-winning illustrator with a career
spanning 40 years. She has illustrated editions of The Quangle Wangle’s Hat
by Edward Lear, which won the prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal in 1969, and
a 1999 edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

For the first time, the pair have collaborated on a book, There’s Going to be
a Baby, which is released next week. Did they have any creative differences
during the project? “I don’t usually talk to the author much when I’m
illustrating their work, but it was different with John; I know him quite
well, you see,” says Oxenbury.

The couple’s four-storey semi is full of Edwardian features; walking around
it, one could be in an advertisement for gracious living. Built in the first
decade of the 20th century, the main impression of the house is one of
solidity and sturdiness. The previous owner, Lady Mellanby, widow of Sir
Edward Mellanby, an adviser to the government during the Second World War,
lived here for 50 years.

Hampstead’s villagey feel has traditionally been a magnet for certain sections
of London’s intellectual and artistic community. The art historian Kenneth
Clark lived a few streets away in grand Upper Terrace House and Lucian Freud
lived just off the high street. But things have changed; these days there
are a suspicious number of Porsches on show. “It’s the merchant bankers,”
explains

Burningham. “You seldom see any new artists moving in; they can’t afford
to. John le Carré still lives down the road and you sometimes see Alfred
Brendel on the Heath, but they’re the previous generation,” he says.

While the neighbours may have changed over the years, the house itself remains
resolutely Edwardian: it’s all high ceilings, cornices and ample space for
the servants. The ground floor has a large open-plan kitchen/dining room
with floor-to-ceiling windows giving on to the heath-facing sitting room,
with its double-panelled stained-glass doors and parquet floor. Upstairs are
two floors of bedrooms and below, in the old kitchen, is Burningham’s
studio-cum-study.

In the light-filled sitting room with a view of the Heath, a large 1930s EMG
gramophone is something of a centrepiece. One of a pair (the other is in
their second home in France), it is one of the few things in the room that
came from a shop rather than a demolition site.

“In the 1960s when London was being pulled down, we used to live off
demolition sites. I was forever shinning across roof joists in search of
bits and bobs I’d spotted,” says Burningham. A craftsman and artist
himself, he can’t stand the waste of materials when old buildings get
knocked down: “An interesting door, floor or window can please me as
much as a painting or drawing; the applied arts have always appealed to me,”
he says.

Testaments to Burningham’s passion are in evidence all around the house. A
Gothic-revival fireplace in Portland stone that dominates the sitting room
was salvaged from a property in Egham, Surrey; a belfry, originally from a
church in the Finchley Road, looms over the back-garden lawn; and a window
seat from Lillie Langtry’s house in Swiss Cottage now has pride of place in
the large family kitchen. “It’s interesting to think who may have been
lying on it with her…” says Burningham. And Oxenbury’s favourite
object? “Definitely the Aga. Wonderful for leaning on in the winter.”

In contrast to the cosiness of the upper storeys, Burningham’s studio is more
spartan. It stretches across the entire lower floor, and light from the
myriad tall windows floods in. It has off-white walls and an assortment of
furniture, each piece coming with its own story. The low, elegant Dryad
chair in painted wicker was “made by soldiers blinded in the First
World War”. The 16-foot table Burningham works on was rescued from a
débutantes club in Chelsea. The chaise longue in the corridor is called the
Burningham chaise and was a present from the designer Robert Kay.

Adjacent to the studio is the library: floor-to-ceiling bookshelves line the
walls with brightly coloured books wedged into every available space. From
Oxenbury’s version of Alice in Wonderland, to an original of her husband’s
first Granpa book, the couple’s entire oeuvre is here. Burningham alone has
produced some 50 books and Helen only marginally fewer.

Burningham’s work in particular proved to be the first flowerings of a new
type of children’s book. He eschewed the more swaddled notions of childhood
left over from the Victorians and pioneered a style which sought to
reconnect children to their animal instincts. The books became instant
bestsellers, though they offended some sensibilities. After one of his books
featured a dog urinating into a flower bed, he received an outraged letter
from a woman in Surrey. “She wrote me this long letter telling me how
obscene my book was. She ended it: ‘And if this is what you do when you
include dogs, heaven knows what you would have rabbits getting up to.’ ”

Today, neither will be drawn on whether they have further books in the
pipeline, but it’s clear that for Burningham the main project is the house
itself. He points to a couple of Gothic-revival doors waiting to be hung. “I
love fiddling around with the place,” he explains. One can’t help but
suspect that he is the real driving force, the person pushing the tinkering,
changing and reorganising.

“I always say John has the ability to make a silk purses out of a sow’s
ears; he can just see the possibilities in objects,” says Oxenbury.

‘There’s Going to Be a Baby’ is published on Monday by Walker Books, £12.99

Driven, ambitious, with an endlessly enquiring mind and a desire to constantly
test boundaries, John Makepeace is no ordinary furniture designer/craftsman,
so, when he opens the door to his beautiful, Grade II listed home in
Beaminster, Dorset to welcome me in, I am surprised at his unassuming
demeanor. I forget that Makepeace, who was originally destined for Oxford
and a career in the Church, has made a career of surprising people.

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On 18 September 2010, his first ever solo exhibition, sponsored by the Arts
Council, opens at The Devon Guild of Craftsmen, after which it will continue
on a national tour of the UK. “John Makepeace – Enriching the Language of
Furniture” brings together 25 pieces from public and private collections in
the UK and abroad, some not previously seen by the public, including recent
designs made in limited editions from a single tree.

Most of the designs that will appear in the exhibition have now been rounded
up from their various locations across the world, and I feel quite
privileged to take a tour of Makepeace’s home, where pieces such as the
Ripple Chest, c. 1993; the Trilogy desk, c.1990; and the famous Mitre chair,
c. 1977 are happily ensconced in a bedroom, office or dining room, as though
they have always been here. It is nice to have them back, Makepeace says,
but, he observes, “the pieces that I no longer own, I haven’t lost them
necessarily, it just means that someone else is looking after them.”

Makepeace’s career began in the last year of school, when, following the death
of his father, he began to re-evaluate the conventional path that had been
picked out for him. From a young age he had taken carpentry lessons and,
aged 11, paid a visit to a furniture workshop, where he remembers being
impressed by the quality of the workmanship. “My first interest was in
wood,” he says and, with the parental pressure off, a career as a
furniture-maker beckoned.

Makepeace travelled widely during his early career, absorbing the emerging
Scandinavian influence on design in Denmark via the work of designers such
as Hans Wegner, Arne Jacobsen and Finn Juhl, and, finding the “can do”
culture of America a refreshing alternative to the gloomy post-war
atmosphere that he had grown up with in Britain. Ever the curious young
designer, after winning a kitchen design competition in The Observer in
the mid-60s, Makepeace used the money to travel to Nigeria and Morocco,
where he studied the local mud buildings: “very beautiful and circular –
they look as though they belong in the landscape.”

Those who achieve the greatest success, it seems, are always questioning why:
why isn’t something working? Why can’t this be better? Why does this happen
the way it does? It is a question that Makepeace has never stopped asking.

While an apprentice with Keith Cooper, a Dorset-based furniture designer, he
asked why individual craftsmanship was copying the industrial aesthetic that
was emerging in Britain at that time, and sought to break away from it. When
told that he should not expect to make a living from furniture making and
was struggling to gain commissions, he again questioned why, and set about
designing products which could be made in batches for design retailers. When
his reputation began to grow following his work for Heals and Liberty’s, he
resisted the temptation to follow the “industrial” option, instead pursuing
a more expressive vocabulary through individual commissions.

Later, as founder trustee of the new Crafts Council, Makepeace found himself
asking why the current training available for artist-craftsmen was so
inadequate and set about developing an educational model that would
integrate design, making and business management as a single discipline.
This model was applied in 1976, following his purchase of Parnham House, an
eighty-room Tudor manor house in Dorset, where The School of Craftsmen in
Wood was set up to offer superb vocational training. The school turned out
top class designers such as David Linley, Guy Mallinson, Tim Wood and many
others and “just seemed to be blessed from the start,” says Makepeace, “it
was a charmed existence.”

His next venture, Hooke Park College, was his most ambitious yet: a working
environment, buried deep in a 330-acre wood, in which students could learn
how to fell slender forest thinnings and convert them into exquisite
hand-crafted furniture. The dream was to transform thousands of acres of
neglected English woodland into centres of craftsmanship, and in doing so
re-integrate wood with its sustainable uses. For a while, it worked, but in
1992, the business ran into trouble over a batch of furniture sent out to
Habitat, and later closed amid financial difficulty and much bad feeling and
finger-pointing.

It was a painful time for Makepeace, who still looks quite anguished by the
whole thing. “I was really torn up about it at the time,” he says, but is
pleased that, after the Architectural Association took over the Parnham
Trust and Hooke Park in 2002, the place was revived.

Since resigning as Director of Parnham Trust and moving to Beaminster,
Makepeace has worked on a number of commissions abroad while restoring the
1730 house and garden with his wife, Jennie. “I have my own life back,” he
says.

Today, you will often find him sitting quietly in the tiny reading room, which
he built amongst the grass garden (which he designed himself) contemplating
nature or his latest piece. You can be sure that this eternally questioning,
ambitious and industrious giant of British furniture design will not be
twiddling his thumbs. Be sure to catch his exhibition when it begins its
tour this month, and be eternally grateful that such a prodigious talent
wasn’t wasted on the Church.

Emily Jenkinson is interiors writer for furniture
and interior design website mydeco.com.