The customer was the non-profit organization Living Architecture headed by the philosopher Alain de Botton. Its goal is to better acquaint the general public with high-quality modern architecture by erecting houses in picturesque places in Britain and renting them out for a short time to everyone. Among the architects who have already worked with de Botton - MVRDV and Michael Hopkins, villas are currently being built according to the designs of Peter Zumthor and John Pawson, but even the "Balancing Barn" by Winnie Maas and his colleagues seems to be ordinary housing compared to the latest addition to the Living Architecture collection - Home to Essex.
This villa is located, as you might guess from its name, in Essex - not far from the seaside, on the outskirts of the village of Wrabness, on the top of a hill with picturesque views: very close are the places that Constable loved to paint. At the same time, Essex is not only about beautiful landscapes and cute villages: its borders include the industrial suburbs of London, and the docks at the Thames estuary, and seaside resorts. County residents are often the heroes of anecdotes: they are considered poorly educated, narrow-minded, lacking in taste from the working class who moved to Essex after the war from the slums of London's East End and improved their financial situation under Margaret Thatcher. However, stereotypes hide the stories of specific people, where there are enough not only funny, but also sad episodes. This is well known to the authors of the project of the villa - the architect Charles Holland (FAT) and the artist Grayson Perry: both of them were born in Essex.
Perry, a Turner Prize laureate and a member of the Royal Academy of Arts, is known for his painted vases and tapestries on the themes of identity, social injustice, domestic violence, violations of women's rights, and the dominance of various stereotypes. According to him, 20 years ago, playing with his daughter, he often invented a character with her, his family, life - and his home. Later, the artist thought about designing a house or even a temple himself (interest in a “secular,” alternative religion to traditional confessions brings Perry closer to de Botton, who published the book “Religion for an Atheist” in 2012). On this basis, the next villa for Living Architecture has become not just a country house, but "the sanctuary of a typical woman of the Essex County" - something like a pilgrimage chapel.
Perry came up with a detailed biography of this "typical woman": her name was Julie Cope (from the verb cope - "to cope with someone or something difficult"), she was born in Essex during the catastrophic flood of 1953, and died in 2014, when she was hit by a curry delivery worker's scooter (this Honda C90 scooter serves as a chandelier in the villa's living room chapel). She lived in one of the "new cities" that were being built in Britain after the war, and in a typical village in the 1980s. She was able to get higher education only in adulthood, after a divorce from her first husband, in marriage with whom she gave birth to several children. At the university she met her second spouse and settled with him in the village of Rabniss. According to Perry's idea, it was this second husband who built in her memory a villa-chapel, "Taj Mahal on the Stur River." In general, the artist describes the life of his heroine as "the story of a woman's mind, which was prevented from realizing."
Such a detailed "legend" of the project, it would seem, pushes the architect into the background, makes him only the executor of the artist's ideas. But Charles Holland, like his colleagues at FAT (the bureau existed in 1995–2014) has his own experience in contemporary art, in addition, all projects of this workshop, developing the line of postmodernism, successfully combined ornament, play with color, historical quotes and provocation. Perry also belongs to this line with his desire to connect the incompatible and use both classical tradition and pop culture as a source of inspiration.
The House in Essex therefore has a well-developed genealogy: there are churches of the Russian North, and nesting dolls, Norwegian stave, and the mesmerizing interiors of John Soane, and the ceramic decor of Layton House, and cottages in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement; the bright color of the interior refers to both Adolf Loos and folk traditions.
The villa resembles an accordion or parts of a nesting doll pushed out from each other: it is divided into four parts, gradually increasing as it “descends” from the hill. At first, they wanted to cover the facades of the building with stucco stucco, characteristic of the folk architecture of Essex, but in the end they settled on 2000 glazed tiles designed by Perry: on some of them Julie appears as a medieval symbolic female figure "sheela na gig", the rest depict symbols related to her biography - a pin for fastening a diaper, a heart, the Essex coat of arms, a mixtape cassette, her initial J, etc. The roof is covered with a golden alloy of copper, intricate weather vanes are installed on the ridge of the roof, including the silvery figure of Julie.
In the interior, the story of the heroine continues: there are four tapestries and three ceramic works by Perry, including a statue of Julie over human growth in the already mentioned double-height living room-chapel. This tall and narrow space is overlooked by balconies from the bedrooms located on the second floor (in total, the "House for Essex" can accommodate four people, its total area is 190 m2), but getting on them is not easy - the doors are arranged in the back walls of the built-in wardrobes. The rest of the doors are also often disguised. This is one example of architectural "games" in the interior, which Perry calls Holland's full credit. Also, the artist attributes to the architect's contribution that the house turned out to be not quite fabulous - or even not fabulous at all, and much clearer and more relevant than Grayson Perry originally imagined it. The resulting gesamtkunstwerk completes Julie Cope's “tombstone” in the garden, which also serves as a bench.
The originality of "Home for Essex", it would seem, should scare away those who want to spend a pleasant weekend there among the meadows and hills of southern England, but the summer season of 2015 was sold out almost instantly: it turns out that modern art and architecture are no worse "magnet" than the beauty of nature …
