See the Incredible Live/Work Space of One Silversmith in the English Countryside

Though they’re easy to overlook and oddly uncelebrated beyond the poems of John Betjeman, nonconformist chapels are among the quieter delights of the English countryside. Restrained in style and modest in size, these buildings capture the alternatives to establishment Christianity that thrived in 18th- and 19th-century Britain. Today, thanks to declining congregations, many such mute memorials stand empty or have been converted for secular use. With high ceilings and ample light, they work particularly well as artists’ studios, perhaps because artists tend to be nonconformists themselves.

Silversmith Hal Messel inhabits one such chapel, in a small market town in the heart of the Cotswolds, that region of bare uplands and bosky valleys so beloved of the Arts and Crafts movement and the royal family. Built in 1703, his chapel was quietly gothicized around 1900, when the lancet windows were put in and the pointed arch over the nave received the gilded exhortation, “O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the Lord our maker.”

Messel was born and brought up not far away, at Bradley Court, a glorious Tudor manor that his parents bought in 1982. His father, Thomas, is an acclaimed furnituremaker in the traditional mold, while his mother, Pepe, is a painter trained at the Royal Academy Schools. If the name Messel sounds familiar, that’s for good reason: Hal’s granduncle Oliver was the foremost theatrical designer of his day and created some of the West Indies’ most alluring villas (the family tree also includes furniture designer David Linley and the photographer Lord Snowdon). Following in his mother’s footsteps, Messel initially trained as a painter, but a fascination with metal led him to apprentice with silversmith Jocelyn Burton. He eventually earned an award for technical mastery from the Goldsmiths’ Co. His work, which often combines sterling silver with cast glass, has included commissions for the Annenberg family and the Duke of Edinburgh’s charity, St George’s House. For the latter, Messel created a silver “tree of wisdom,” its roots revealed in a cast-glass base, now on permanent display at Windsor Castle.

After spending most of his 20s in London, Messel found himself tugged back toward the Cotswolds, where Arts and Crafts traditions still beat strong and the local Pigs Ear ale is more to his liking. In fact, it was the ale, in a roundabout way, that brought him to his current abode. “I was looking for quite a specific building that I could turn vinto a home and work- shop,” he recalls. “Walking back from the pub one day, I saw the ‘for sale’ sign on the chapel, which was to be sold at auction. I wrote to the Methodists selling it and explained what I would like to do. They preferred my idea over it being turned into flats, and I won the bid.” With the help of local firms Millar Howard Workshop and Kilcot Conservation, Messel reconfigured the chapel to provide living accommodation as well as a large studio space and a hammering and polishing room—soundproofed to spare the neighbors. When it came to furnishing the chapel, he had enviable resources to call on: not only textiles and curios he had gathered himself but also pictures from Uncle Oliver, among other family heirlooms, and of course furniture from his father’s own hand, such as the carved credenza in the sitting room, with its convincing faux-marble top. It’s an eclectic mix, but the quality of the individual items and Messel’s easy, relaxed arrangement makes for a very comfortable, appealing space. “I think the chapel may be slightly less puritanical now than it was in the Methodists’ day,” he says wryly, “but it’s a wonderful place in which to work.”