Over a long life, Holland owned and rented many different properties. His sometimes unconventional ways of dealing with property transactions are referred to in John Mortimer's autobiography - it was news to me that he ever owned property in Kentish Town, but it is there in "Clinging to the Wreckage"! After a number of years of saying that he didn't want to own property again, Holland fell in love with a rather ramshackle cottage in the wilds of Kent near Tunbridge Wells.
He bought the cottage from a friend's mother, with a certain level of wheeling and dealing to ensure that she was able to enjoy the fruits of the sale and not the owners of the rest home to which she retired. Mrs Stephens and Miss Godfrey, her compagnon, were believed to haunt the cottage for a number of years after their deaths.
Romford Cottage was a built on a long established small plot ceded from the Abervenny Estate in the 1700s, but the cottage my father bought was built in around 1850, after the first building had been destroyed, and was thrown up as a temporary structure of two "two up two down" cottages with facilities out back and a plot of land to each side. The temporary nature was demonstrated admirably by complete absence of foundations, floor boards laid on bare earth, single bond brickwork downstairs and wattle and daub walls upstairs faced with Kentish weather board. The rafters were split tree trunks with bark still in place, and heat was provided by small hearth fires in all four front rooms.
Holland had the back offices removed and a one storey studio built on, moved the bathroom upstairs, rewired and decorated the cottage and that was about it. While intended initially as a weekend cottage, by early 1964 Holland had made the decision that rather than keeping flats in London and Birmingham, the family would move to Kent and he shared digs during the week in Birmingham and then in Leicester, where the work was. When he finally retired, the cottage became home full time until his death in 1996.
There are a number of sketches and prints of the Cottage among Holland's work. This sketch from 1975 or 76 was done in the garden looking to the side of the building that had an interesting oriol window.
The history of the cottage also fascinated Holland, particularly when he finally obtained the full set of deeds to the property including the original sale of the parcel of land from the Abervenny Estate, which implied a duty of an annual ground rent which never seemed to be rescinded. This drawing, which was a Christmas card one year, shows Holland's view of what it must have looked like shortly after construction.