For some, the beauty of a space comes from allowing a space to go ungroomed.
In the entrance hall of the von der Becke family’s house in the English countryside is a bench built by the home’s late owner, Bernhard von der Becke, based on one that his wife, Blanka, admired at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. On the wall are four works by the South African-born artist Helena Pritchard, and the prints stacked on the Ping-Pong table are from Bernhard’s collection. The bunting is left over from a birthday party. Credit... Photograph by Henry Bourne. Artwork on wall: Helena Pritchard, “Rorschach Rose Print Ink Blots,” 2021 © Helena Pritchard, courtesy of the artist
A decade ago, I was lucky enough to get to take a middle-aged gap year. For nearly 12 months, I traveled: to Tanzania and Morocco, across Western and Central Europe and then all through Southeast Asia.
The lessons I learned from that year, and the inspiration I found, are the subject of a different letter. But it was on that trip that I got to see a house that I think about still. Helga’s Folly is located on the outskirts of beautiful Kandy, the last capital of Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese dynasty. It was built in the 1930s by the family of its proprietor, Helga de Silva Blow Perera, whose parents converted the house into a small hotel in the ’70s. Many owners, when remaking their private residences into hotels, strip away evidence of their personal lives. De Silva Blow Perera, who inherited the property in the ’90s, did the opposite. The house’s common rooms are idiosyncratic to an assaultive degree; she painted the walls grass green, or Swedish blue or a weird, sticky oxblood; candelabras are encrusted with stalactites of wax; countertops are a jumble of framed family photos and dusty Pez dispensers. On the day I visited, the veranda was cluttered with a collection of Verner Panton-esque plastic chairs that a recent storm had overturned.
- An English countryside home that became lovelier as it fell into ruin.
- In Majorca, a manor with a sprawling collage that took hundreds of summer holidays to assemble.
- An Upper East Side townhouse that gave a husband-and-wife design team space to explore their grandest ideas.
- A film producer’s upstate New York home designed with a long list of collaborators.
- The artist Ida Ekblad’s fortresslike concrete space in Oslo where the imagination can run wild.
I was bewitched by it. To characterize it as Miss Havisham-like would be to suggest that nothing had changed for decades, but what makes Helga’s Folly so engaging is that, clearly, contemporaneity has left its mark (see: the Pez dispensers); it just hasn’t displaced anything that existed beforehand. A house like this can’t be made by an architect or interior designer — it has to be accreted, decade after decade, by one person, one eye.
We’re living in an era of polite taste. What we wear, what we eat, what our houses look like: all of it so correct, so tasteful, that the eyes fall shut from boredom. How stimulating it is to see spaces that have just been allowed to be, that haven’t been groomed or cleaned or edited into obedience. It’s why I was so excited to see photos of Carla von der Becke’s family home on the South Downs , about 50 miles outside of London. The circa 1690 property was bought by her parents in 1975 and, over the decades, it fell into glorious disrepair. Von der Becke’s father was a German print dealer; today, stacks of prints cover tables, are tacked to walls and even tucked into door frames. The paint on the ceiling is peeling off in great, sail-like sheets. The walls look so dry, so fragile in parts that one could imagine they were rendered from sugar.
Could you live here? Would you dare? Who cares, the house says. True taste is doing what you want — which sometimes means deciding to do nothing at all. Leave it alone. Just let the house be.
Hanya Yanagihara is the editor in chief of T Magazine.
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