It was all very different 30 years ago, when Gael and Francesco Boglione went to visit friends for Sunday lunch in Richmond. At the time they were living with their four young children in South Kensington, less than ten miles to the east, but the contrast between their central London home and this bucolic section of the Thames riverbank could not have been more pronounced. “We did have a nice house, but I had always wanted more space and freedom for our children to play,” says Gael. “Our friends mentioned Petersham, and the minute I peeked over the wall and saw this place I fell in love with it – the pretty Queen Anne house and the location felt a million miles away from the life we had been living.”

Located just a stone’s throw from Richmond Park, Petersham was built in the 17th century as a convenient hunting lodge for aristocratic entertainments in the royal park. “But no one wanted to live here back in the 1990s,” explains Gael. “When we went to take a look at it, the house had already been on the market for nearly five years and was all pouffed up with fussy frills, but we could see what it might become.”