Why I turned my home into an art gallery more than 30 years ago despite the fact I can't even paint

Paintings line this room, and the one next door. They are stacked against walls, fill the hallway, march up the wide stairs, and adorn the landing above. Paintings are not hung over other paintings, but only just.

This is Kentmere House Gallery in York, a home that is a gallery and a gallery that is a home.

Since 1991, Ann and David have invited visitors to stumble into somewhere private and public, somewhere ordered and a step or two from chaotic.

The kitchen and the bedrooms are out of bounds, but everywhere else in this fine quirky home displays original art by local, regional and national artists.

Ann had helped set up Grape Lane Gallery in the city in the 1980s and had the idea for a gallery at home after visiting some in London.

“It breaks down a lot of the barriers that people feel about going into galleries. That’s one of my great concerns that so many people are intimidated about art,” says Ann.

Three years of searching led to Kentmere House, a spacious house built by the Primitive Methodist Chapel Aid Association in 1898 for their company secretary. The name Kentmere was chosen by one of the Methodists involved at the time of building, as he was a frequent visitor to the village of the same name in the Lake District.

In about 1980 the Association found that it no longer had a need to house its employee but wanted to remain in the offices, to which they had a great emotional attachment. They therefore sold the entire property, keeping for themselves a lease of the office area, with their own entrance from Telford Terrace.

David, who worked as an architect, was drawn to the sheer quality of the staircase, even though it is in the wrong place: as you enter the front door, it sits sideways on, rather than rising before you.

The house commands a tight triangular plot between the top of Scarcroft Hill and Telford Terrace, near the racecourse.

Ann likes to hang known painters next to promising newcomers. All the work is original, she knows most of the artists, and there are no reproductions.

“We have to fight back against the dreaded Giclee prints,” says Ann, whose forthright manner has not dimmed with the years. She is clearly older than she was, like the rest of us, but rebuffs an inquiry about her age, saying: “No, I don’t answer that, I never answer that.”

The name Kentmere, by the way, comes from the Methodists as the company secretary had been fond of that village in the Lake District.

For a while the gallery was more of a hobby as Ann was busy with Living Over The Shop, her housing project aimed at using the dead space above shops.

Ann expanded the initiative around the country, although found little joy in York.

In the end the money ran out.

“I needed very little funding, just enough to keep the lights on, and nobody would provide it,” says Ann.

After the project ended in 2003, she concentrated on the gallery.

“The principle was always to bring artists from all over the country to York for York people to see. My incentive if you like is to reach those people I feel sorry for who have no art in their homes.”

She exhibits 70 or 80 artists at any one time.

Some are fixtures, such as John Thornton, the Selby artist who paints sweeping seascapes. Ann tracked John down 20 years ago after he won a competition at the Ferens open exhibition in Hull.

There are paintings by Jack Hellewell, who died in 2000.

“He’s on the stairs,” says Ann. “I’m looking after his archive for his family.”

Another long-time favourite is Susan Bower, the Barkston Ash artist who mixes the familiar and the intimate. Among her works here are She Wasn’t A Cat Person and Fame Hasn’t Changed Me, featuring a fashionable woman in a red hat, with the painting’s title written on her arm.

“I was very reticent about approaching Susan because I had seen her in London at prestigious galleries, but she turns out to be absolutely wonderful. She lives in a big farmhouse with lots of dogs and cats and grandchildren. You go there are sit by her Aga and eat home-made scones.”

Others long on show include Jake Attree and Alfred Huckett. Ann lived in Ipswich for some years, where she wondered about opening a gallery in a house, then dismissed the idea. But she kept contacts made at the time, including John Jackson, a lino cutter and printmaker from Norwich.

“Wonderful linocuts, the best lino cutter I’ve ever come across,” she says. “We went to Norwich last year for his 80th birthday and he’s still working.”

Another favourite dates to her Ipswich days, too. “Tessa Newcomb, over the door, she’s a Suffolk artist I got to know there. She’s nationally known now,” says Ann. “I get tremendous pleasure out of contact with the artists, and a lot have stayed here.”

She discovered Adebanji Alade, the London-born artist who partly grew up in Nigeria, painting streetscapes in Bath.

“I invited him to York. He’d never been here, he stayed and did a set of paintings of York, absolutely loved his time here. He is now the president of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters.”

Adebanji, otherwise known as the Addictive Sketcher’, has also featured on The One Show.

Ann, always on the lookout, recently discovered an artist from Doncaster called William Sculthorpe.

“I’m trying to promote him a bit. It’s a very traditional style for someone of that age.”

Some paintings in the gallery are on loan, while others have been bought by Ann.

“I tend to buy at the top and the bottom of the market,” she says. “I will buy at the bottom of the market like this chap (she taps the William Sculthorpe painting) to encourage them. And I’ll buy at the top of the market, that’s a Fred Cuming, you can’t really see it there.”

Across the art-muddled room she points out a small and lovely painting by the Royal Academician, who died in 2022. She makes a note to put Fred somewhere more prominent.

Ann finds artists can be too modest. When she suggested to Keith Roper he should submit to the Mall Galleries in London, he worried he wasn’t good enough.

“But he got in immediately and is now one of their stars. It’s a very strange thing but you find the better they are, the more modest they are. Jack Hellewell was a perfect example of that, very shy and modest.”

Ann still has her first purchase, a painting of Kersey in Suffolk, by Georgina Ling. She always finds room for David Greenwood, the West Yorkshire artist whose work includes racing paintings. “Tremendous energy, you can really feel the speed of them,” she says.

With art on all sides, it seems fair to ask if Ann is artistic.

“Nope. People always expect me to be an artist. I can’t do anything, but I can find the people who can,” she says, as her old dog stretches out in a splash of sunshine on the carpet. Titch has heard it all before.

kentmerehouse.co.uk