Katy and Milo Campbell's At Home in Cornwall: Secrets of Cornish Country House Style, published by Abrams in 2026, visits sixteen of the county's private houses, and Ince is one of them. The photographs are by Mark Nicholson.
The chapter begins with the setting: a house alone on its own peninsula in the Lynher, so nearly an island that until the First World War almost everything it needed came by boat. It then tells Ince's long story, from Henry Killigrew's brick house of the 1640s, through the Civil War, Bobby Somerset and Jolie Brise, to the Boyds, the fire of 1988 and the rebuilding by the architect Anthony Jaggard.
Most of all it is about the house as it is lived in today. When we arrived we asked Ben Pentreath to help us, and in the end chose to redecorate rather than rebuild: Ben and Leo Kary painted and papered every room, updated the bathrooms and found almost all the furniture, while leaving the bones of the house as they were. The book takes in the squirrel hall with its phoenix fireback, the drawing room hung with oyster linen, the Chinese bedroom with its eighteenth-century hand-painted paper, the burnt-orange kitchen and the flower room, where the cutting gardens' harvest is arranged.
It ends by the water, where black-tailed godwits feed on the foreshore below the gardens, birds that were once hunted here as a delicacy and are now left in peace.