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 that’s open to paying guests. Robert Bevan has an exclusive first look around their technicolour Taj Mahal
House of fun: Charles Holland of FAT and Grayson Perry (Picture: Katie Hyams)
Robert Bevan15 May 2015

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 Yaga’s hut in the Russian fairy tale and trot off down through the meadows to paddle in the nearby Stour estuary.

It won’t 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 Botton’s 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.

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 Julie’s last home where her grieving second husband Rob decided to build a “Taj Mahal upon the Stour” to her memory.

Grayson Perry and FAT's A House for Essex - in pictures

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Julie’s 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 Suffolk shore beyond.

Get off 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 house’s front door — a journey towards the far end of Essex and the last of England, Betjeman’s “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 Perry’s 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, (Fat’s clever playful output was never corporate enough to be successful in balance-sheet Britain) so for Holland, himself from Essex, the project has been FAT’s 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.

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 Fabergé eggs have coalesced with the wooden stave churches of Norway and inspirational visits to places such as the seventh-century pilgrimage chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall at nearby Bradwell-on-Sea.

After early thoughts of using pargetting (Essex’s 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 Julie’s 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)
Jack Hobhouse

The doors lead on to the triple-height sitting room/chapel space. Here, on either side are massive tapestries depicting events in Julie’s 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 Julie’s first husband. In a corner of a tapestry is Pam’s tell-tale hairbrush that Julie found in Dave’s 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.

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 Soane’s Museum, the staircase hall at Vanbrugh’s 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 bargee’s folk palette.

Perry’s 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 Julie’s raised gravestone in the garden and admire the view of a magical shrine in the landscape.

Grayson Perry’s Dream House, is on Channel 4 on Sunday, 9pm

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