My family and I live in a wing of a Georgian mansion in East Sussex, which was built in the 1780s and fell into disrepair. It was rescued in the Seventies and carved into six terrace houses.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Years ago I had a house in Sussex, it was like Arcadia, with an old Victorian bridge, a pond and the Downs.
I love antique architecture, so if I have any indulgences, I have owned and renovated and reconstructed a lot of old houses.
I live in the house my great-grandfather moved to in 1865... I spent all my summers here as a kid haying with my grandfather, and it was my favorite place in the world.
In the summer of 1988, my father took me up to look at the remains of our home, the dream house that he'd built. It was my first time since our family left four years earlier. Political and obscene graffiti covered the half-torn walls. There was no ceiling and surprisingly no floor: the parquet, the stone, the marble, all looted.
The house where I grew up in the Hancock Park section of Los Angeles was like a dream - even though my family faced threats after my father bought it in August 1948.
The great houses of Britain have, for centuries, been the guardians of much of our history, not just of the families who built and lived in them, but of the people who worked there, of the local area, of all of us.
There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different - from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.
The house I grew up in was a tall Victorian town house in Bristol. There were very big rooms, which were under-furnished and always cold.
Our house was destroyed in 1943, and I moved the family to a cottage I owned before the war in the Bavarian Alps. This cottage was meant for a very few people, and at the end of the war, there were about 13 people in this very small house.
I lived in Peckham for the first 12 years of my life and then my mum and dad decided they really didn't want to bring up their children there. So they saved up money and bought a house in Plumstead, semi-detached, three bedrooms.