Picasso came for tea

Acclaimed artists often stayed at Lee Miller and Roland Penrose's home, now a museum. Joanna Moorhead takes a tour with their son

"I don't suppose as a child I was aware of who my parents were," remembers Tony Penrose, as he shows me around his ordinary-looking Sussex farmhouse in Chiddingly. "I remember one day digging a Noah's ark figure out of my toybox, and my father said: 'Don't break that, Tony, it's by Picasso.' The house was always full of art."

Picasso was one of many art-world greats who came to stay at Farley Farm, near Lewes, home of the Vogue model-turned-photographer Lee Miller and her surrealist artist husband Roland Penrose, from the 1950s until Penrose's death in 1984. For more than 30 years the couple hosted gatherings of significant artists around their kitchen table - counting Man Ray, Miro, Max Ernst, Eileen Agar, Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton among the famous visitors. "My parents were great entertainers," says Penrose. "It was always buzzing."

Today Farley Farm is kept exactly as it was then - you feel as though Miller has just popped out to the shops, and could put her head round the door at any moment. Her cookery books are still on the kitchen shelves, her plates are dotted around the Aga ... though, naturally, they are ceramics by Picasso.

The sitting room is packed with paintings by Penrose, whose talents have never been given their due worth in the UK, though he is much revered elsewhere. Beyond the kitchen, the walls are covered in original artworks. "Visitors would invariably leave a gift, usually a sketch or a painting," says Penrose. "What's lovely is that they're all very personal - many of them have little notes to my parents from the artist who painted them."

Until now, Farley Farm has only been opened to the public by appointment, but from 5 April you can visit without phoning ahead on the first Sunday of each month. Penrose and his daughter Ami guide the tours, spilling lots of family anecdotes: the day Max Ernst decided to help in the garden, how the pop art movement was conceived at their kitchen table, and the fact that Lee Miller, a known communist sympathiser, was spied on here by MI5 during the cold war.

Farley Farm House, Chiddingly; 01825 872 691