Les Merulies

This is an intimate story about place and time and the extraordinary bond between two families, love of place and a passion for its place in history.  Les Merulies, is at the heart of the story as the glue that has held the two families together and defines them. Though my friendship of over forty years with the new owners and my physical involvement in the restoration over nearly four years, working intimately with the house and its artefacts I have sen what has been kept or discarded. I have been part its metamorphosis  and gained a great insight into place, shelter, memory and continuity and what it has meant to these two families.

We bestow places with character according to our human needs and desires, we find them friendly or forbidding and this is little to do with their transitory occupants, Les Merulies is a happy place.

What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value, the ideas of “space” and “place” require each other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom and threat of space and vice versa. Furthermore if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place. (Yi-Fu Tuan).