Forty years in one house

When the Ashdowns first saw the house on Phillimore Place, it had four doorbells. Like many houses on the street it had been divided into flats after the war, with partition walls across the drawing room and a kitchen on every landing. The staircase had been boxed in, and the fireplaces were hidden behind hardboard.

They bought it in the spring of 1985 and spent most of the next three years taking it apart again. The partitions came out first, then the boxing around the stair, which turned out to have its original mahogany handrail underneath. The drawing-room ceiling had cracked where a wall had been fixed to it, and it was repaired by plasterers who usually work on houses open to the public.

Not everything went back to how it was. In the 1990s the family moved the kitchen down to the garden floor, so that the children could run straight outside. Later the old back bedroom became a bathroom, and the room above the dining room was lined in oak shelves to hold a library that had outgrown every other room.

What the house has gathered over those forty years is hard to describe on a floor plan. There are pencil marks on the inside of a cupboard door, recording the heights of three children. There is a gap in the library shelves where a set of encyclopaedias stood until last summer.

The children have long since left, and the house is too large for two. It is being offered privately first, because the family would like it to go to people who will live in it as they did: all of it, on every floor.