Charleston House – the colourful world of free love and free-thinking

A free-thinking, free-loving, scandalising group of artists, writers and intellectuals lived together and loved in various combinations in the 1920s-30s deep in the Sussex contryside, not far from here, at Charleston House. Charleston was the country retreat and home of some members of the Bloomsbury Group, a bunch of metropolitan lefties determined to live their lives as they wanted to, and stick two fingers up to convention.

The Bloomsberries still have the power to fascinate and a small collection of photographs currently on show at Farrow and Ball – The look of Daily Life, Decoration and Design at Charleston – may inspire you to pay a visit, have a tour, and learn a bit more.

The artists Vanessa Ball and Duncan Grant lived there, on and off, from 1916, and the rooms are wonderfully decorated with their exuberant paintings and their painted furniture, fireplaces and fittings. If it didn't move and was made of wood – or ceramics – it seemed they painted it, often over again and again.

It's not a huge house, so a guided tour is the only way you can normally see it, but that's well recommended, and you'll learn a lot about Vanessa and Duncan as well as their children, lovers and associates, including Virginia Woolf (sister of Vanessa), Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, E.M.Forster, Dora Carrington and many others. It's a juicy glimpse of an idealistic, highly creative, narcissitic world.

The house is splendidly colourful, with muted tones of purple, pink, greens and browns dominating, and many of those very hues are available at Farrow and Ball, something we only discovered on our recent – and first – visit.

Rather a joy to discover the spirit of Charleston in pots on the Western Road. But can one translate that feeling of bohemian rural idyll to one's Brighton and Hove home? We shall see...