Continuing the Winter Clean

Jo and volunteer, Linden, both with hip vacs, dusting dado rail in Long Gallery at Osterley Park (image: Laura Brooks)

Last winter, our house team worked their socks off,

Polished to perfection

 

Volunteer applying polish to fireplace tongs in the Family Entrance at Osterley Park House (image: Laura Brooks)

On a lovely sunny Saturday, before the downpours that we have endured recently, two of our conservation volunteers were hard at work in the house, cleaning metalwork.

Back to work

Laura cleaning the French ebony cabinet in Childs’ Bedroom at Osterley Park (image: Laura Brooks)

We are well into the new year now and the team at Osterley have certainly had a productive start to 2015.

Ssshh! No talking in the library!

Library at Osterley Park, during the winter clean (image: Laura Brooks)

Osterley is a house full of things to intrigue and excite, and I don’t just mean the collection.  One room that sometimes proves interesting to visitors is the Library.  There are a couple of reasons for this, one of which we’ll blog about at a later date, but the other is its colour, or rather, lack of, as some would say.  For a house that combines pink with green in one room, contains a rather beautiful shade of blue in another (if we do say so ourselves), whilst yet another is a riot of colour (and largely unfaded after more than two hundred years), you could be forgiven for thinking that every single room was just as colourful, other than the servants’ rooms, of course.  This is not the case.