EXCLUSIVE: Grayson Perry and architects FAT design 'A House for Essex' | Design | Lifestyle | London Evening

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Lifestyle Design

EXCLUSIVE: Grayson Perry and architects FAT design 'A House

for Essex'
Artist Grayson Perry and architecture practice FAT have designed a kitsch haven in the heart of Essex thats open to paying guests.
Robert Bevan has an exclusive first look around their technicolour Taj Mahal
ROBERT BEVAN | Friday 15 May 2015 |

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House of fun: Charles Holland of FAT and Grayson Perry (Picture: Katie Hyams)

Something from the Steppes has been washed up on the

brackish edge of north Essex. An architectural folly, a
belvedere or wayside chapel. It could almost sprout chicken
legs like Baba Yagas hut in the Russian fairy tale and trot o
down through the meadows to paddle in the nearby Stour

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EXCLUSIVE: Grayson Perry and architects FAT design 'A House for Essex' | Design | Lifestyle | London Evening Standard

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estuary.
It wont though because it is a weighty piece of architecture, clad in
more than 2,000 ceramic tiles and steadied by the weight of its
fantastical roof. This House for Essex is the result of a collaboration
between artist Grayson Perry and architecture practice FAT.
Ostensibly the house is a holiday home in the village of Wrabness
on the River Stour to be rented out by pop philosopher Alain de
Bottons Living Architecture organisation, a not-for-profit that has
built several houses by notable architects that you can stay in to
absorb the power of contemporary design.

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But the dreamlike house is also a secular shrine to Julie Cope, who
died in 2014. Julie is an Essex everywoman, a shopping mall
Madonna... with a kick-ass spirit who also happens to be the
creation of Essex-born Perry. Her fictional life and untimely death
(at the motorbike wheel of an errant curry delivery driver) is
recorded in his narrative poem, The Ballad of Julie Cope, which
every guest at the holiday house receives a copy of along with a
pamphlet guide to the architecture of the house and the artworks
commemorating Julie that fill it. The ballot for paying guests
wanting to stay here opens today.
The poem is the bittersweet tale of a working-class girl born on
Canvey Island during the killer floods of 1953 and her scramble
towards contentment via motherhood, a first failed marriage and a
late university education. The House for Essex is on the site of the
fictional Julies last home where her grieving second husband Rob
decided to build a Taj Mahal upon the Stour to her memory.

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EXCLUSIVE: Grayson Perry and architects FAT design 'A House for Essex' | Design | Lifestyle | London Evening Standard

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Julies lifeline, the A120 and the 82-mile Essex Way long-distance
footpath from Epping all converge near the house. The easiest way
for Londoners to make pilgrimage, however, is via the mainline
from Liverpool Street to Manningtree then changing to the
Harwich branchline where lethargic, ear-budded, sunshine-addled
teenagers put their feet up on the green velour, ignoring the views
to the estuary and the Suolk shore beyond.
Get o at tiny Wrabness station and the intense scent of flowers
tumbles down an embankment while in the distance a lawnmower
throbs. It is a short walk via lane, gravelled track and then path to
the houses front door a journey towards the far end of Essex and
the last of England, Betjemans level wastes of sucking mud and
distant barges sailing in upon the flood.
Charles Holland of FAT Architecture describes the house as a built
story but Grayson Perrys tale of Julie emerged in parallel to the
evolution of the house designs. As it turned out, de Botton
approached FAT to collaborate with Perry almost as the
architecture practice was winding up, (Fats clever playful output
was never corporate enough to be successful in balance-sheet
Britain) so for Holland, himself from Essex, the project has been
FATs swansong, a last chance for the practice to explore notions of
Britishness, decoration and architectural history. Perry, had
already been sketching and populating imaginary houses with his
daughter decades ago.

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The result of the collaboration is a matryoshka doll of a building

that concertinas in on itself, a series of pleated rooms. The scale is
ambiguous too both jewel box and Eastern Orthodox chapel with
a domestic entrance uphill and a larger, ceremonial portal at the
downhill end.
Early ideas of turrets and Faberg eggs have coalesced with the
wooden stave churches of Norway and inspirational visits to places

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EXCLUSIVE: Grayson Perry and architects FAT design 'A House for Essex' | Design | Lifestyle | London Evening Standard

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such as the seventh-century pilgrimage chapel of St Peter-on-theWall at nearby Bradwell-on-Sea.

After early thoughts of using pargetting (Essexs traditional
elaborate external plasterwork) a ceramic facade was hit upon
which is the perfect fit for Perry as a potter. The tiles were crafted
by Shaws of Darwen, a firm that has been making not just ceramic
sinks but a century worth of architectural faience, terracotta and
glazed bricks. The House is clad then in a pattern of deep olive
green and white tiles that depict totems of Julies life: a nappy pin, a
mixtape, a heart, a wheel, a letter J, the Essex county badge and the
pregnant Julie herself depicted as Near East fertility symbol.
The copper alloy roof shines brassily over bulging eyebrow
dormers and is pinnacled with an oversize statute of the pregnant
Julie, a ceramic egg, a lantern and a wheel and longboat motif.
Inside is equally joyful, finished in five shades of red and egg yolk
yellow. Step inside the red front door and a narrow panelled lobby
leads forward into a loosely fitted kitchen. The wall ahead is green
tiled like a decorative Viennese stove with a fireplace and a pair of
doors hidden in its pattern.

Visually stunning: A House for Essex interior at night (Picture: Jack Hobhouse)

The doors lead on to the triple-height sitting room/chapel space.

Here, on either side are massive tapestries depicting events in
Julies life, above your head the delivery motorbike that killed her is
turned into a chandelier. By sheer coincide the number-plate (PAM
13G) of the bike bought for the project incorporates the name of
the secret mistress of Julies first husband. In a corner of a tapestry
is Pams tell-tale hairbrush that Julie found in Daves Cortina.
Turn around and you are confronted with a full height screen that
Holland describes as a mix of cuckoo clock and a rood screen the
decorative divide between the nave and a choir in a church. It
incorporates a pair of balconies reached from each of the two
bedrooms tucked under the roof, although you have to pass
through the mirrored back of the built-in wardrobes to find these
perches. A bathtub big enough for a full-immersion baptism is
hidden above the entrance hall commanding views down the
garden path.
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EXCLUSIVE: Grayson Perry and architects FAT design 'A House for Essex' | Design | Lifestyle | London Evening Standard

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The House for Essex is an extraordinary and fecund vision that has
been made meticulously real. It is serious rather than silly in its
playfulness and the architecture is sophisticated. It quotes directly
from history the convex mirrors from the Breakfast Room at Sir
John Soanes Museum, the staircase hall at Vanbrughs Audley End.
There is a place for the chevron boarding beloved of the Arts and
Crafts period and the colours derived from Austrian architect Adolf
Loos or the bargees folk palette.
Perrys Ballad is moving in its observations on class and feminism,
the house and poem an ornament to his own childhood described
in his poignant 2006 autobiography Portrait of the Artist of A
Young Girl. To Julie, her mother was a lacquered goddess tossing
thunderbolts on their small pastel world; to husband Rob Julie
herself is my all-knowing pagan goddess. Perhaps not so much a
secular a building after all.
Architecture has borrowed the German word Gesamtkunstwerk to
mean a total work of art, a place designed entirely by an architect
from its roof beams to its doorknobs, but Fat and Perry have gone
beyond this to fuse art and architecture entirely. Sit on Julies raised
gravestone in the garden and admire the view of a magical shrine
in the landscape.
Grayson Perrys Dream House, is on Channel 4 on Sunday, 9pm

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