Charleston

Charleston is a seventeenth century Sussex farmhouse that, from 1916, was the home of two of the most important, influential artists of the twentieth century – Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.  It was the country retreat of the group of individuals known as Bloomsbury which included Vanessa Bell’s sister Virginia Woolf and husband Leonard Woolf, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell and the biographer Lytton Strachey.

After Duncan Grant’s death in 1978 the house fell into disrepair with many of its unique interior paintings and decorations deteriorating badly. The Charleston Trust, a registered charity formed in 1980, raised over  £1,000,000 to restore the house and in 1986 it opened its doors to the public.