At the end of Black Boy Lane, a farm track sneaking out of the northern Essex village of Wrabness (population: 400), two bouncers wearing black suits and wrap-around sunglasses are guarding a gate. The muscle, seemingly imported from the fleshpot nightclubs of Basildon or Romford, isn’t there to protect a local pop star or footie player but a celebrity of another kind – the artist Grayson Perry.
Behind the two men, Perry, in male artist mode rather than female partygoer attire, is holding forth about his latest jeu d’esprit, a small, intricately tiled building – part gingerbread house, part wayside chapel – sitting at the edge of a field that slopes gently down to the River Stour, with Suffolk resting on the opposite bank. A House for Essex, or “Julie’s house”, is a collaboration between the potter/tapestry-maker and the FAT architectural practice – a part of the Living Architecture scheme, dreamt up by Alain de Botton so that people can rent out holiday homes designed by “world-class” practitioners. People, in this instance, will need to stump up £1,800 for a three-night stay.
What they get for their money is a trim, two-bedroom property constructed from four boxes of descending scale, something akin to an architectural Russian doll. The roof is covered with a shiny copper alloy and decorated with sculptural finials. The walls are clad with 1,925 ceramic tiles, each cast with Perry-style fetish symbols: a nappy pin, a cassette tape, a heart and a scooter wheel.
Inside, there hangs a series of tapestries, above which looms a life-size statue of a woman of substantial girth. It’s a bit Game of Thrones meets The Hobbit, or, to mangle the metaphors further, a “Taj Mahal upon the Stour”, as Perry puts it.
To justify the building’s appearance and explain the iconography, Perry invented the story of Julie Cope – a fictional Essex Everywoman whose story takes us from her birth (on Canvey Island in 1953) to her death (in 2014, after she was hit by a curry delivery scooter), stopping on the way for two marriages, children, a career as a social worker and homes that filter her away from the conurbations of estuary Essex and up into the county’s rural hinterland (Julie’s gravestone stands in the back garden of the house). Her social mobility, reckons Perry – an Essex man – is archetypal and Julie’s house doubles as a pilgrimage shrine to a woman who represents innumerable unsung heroines.
The backstory is an elaborate justification for a dollop of architectural fun. As Perry notes, “Minimalism is the new kitsch.” Who knows how much the artist believes in Julie’s story, or in his claim that the house is “a three-dimensional musing on religion, local history, feminism, happiness and death” (let alone the architect’s supposed influences, ranging from the arts and crafts movement to the English baroque)?
The house has won over local people. A presentation by Perry at the nearby community centre, during which he pointed out that he didn’t intend “to socially engineer Wrabness”, was the turning point.
What is certain is that the pilgrims who make the journey to this distant corner of Essex are unlikely to be devotees of the martyred Julie, but rather of the bouncer-protected cult of Grayson Perry.
Content from our partners
Related
