I'm not sure if the title applies to the house or to me - certainly, working on my 40 year-old house is proving somewhat restorative to my mental wellbeing!
Since the beginning of the year I have decided to take a serious interest in my long-neglected house and, to this end, have embarked upon a campaign of alteration and re-decoration. The first major decision was to move the kitchen to a basement - yet to be constructed. In order for the servants to access their quarters I have added a false door to the back of the ground floor hall. What was the kitchen will now become a 'Strawberry Hill Gothic' library in honour of MR James' story, The Haunted Doll's House.
Delighted with my prowess with paper and glue I have become more ambitious. One of the first things you have to do when decorating a doll's house is to settle on a period - my favourite spans the Georgian into the Regency eras, which means lots of panelling, elegant proportions and a spare colour palette coupled with the occasional fantastical pattern or print.
As you can see from the first image, the house has been partly decorated - by a younger, more naïve and impatient me (If there is one thing a doll's house teaches you, it is patience). However, I don't want to obliterate all the evidence of former attempts at decor because they represent a specific time in my life and retain potent memories: the marbled fireplaces, for instance, were created when I should have been revising for my 'O' levels and was clearly looking for some kind of distraction. Even now, handling the paper and card constructions so many years later, I can recall learning how to marble paper in a bath of carrageen moss solution and then painstakingly building the fireplaces. They are not to scale and the patterning is crude - but they are a small repository of my past and so they are staying. So, I have to work out how to balance retaining some of what has already been done with a more mature taste and sophisticated eye.
The dining room had already been papered - with a rather hectic design. I decided to tone it down and restore some Georgian order with a run of half panelling, and a full panel and chimney breast against the back wall; this also succeeded in toning down the slightly crazy and out of scale fireplace.
I find the proportions of Georgian interiors soothing in their elegant, classic, simplicity.
Sometimes, when events in the 'real world' become too much, I like to sit in front of this room and fall into a daydream where I imagine myself shrinking to fit inside its well-ordered walls where all is quiet and predictable...
The 'Strawberry Hill Gothic' library Sometimes a single element or embellishment will inspire a complete design. In this case, I spotted a set of brass stampings for sale in the shape of a pagan god (MR James would surely have approved). They are the perfect size for a 1:12 scale interior, so I built the panelling to set them off to best advantage.
When funds permit, I intend to install a Gothic fireplace of Batty Langley design, c 1751, from the excellent Sue Cook Miniatures Langley has been variously described as 'eccentric' and even 'infamous' - he
certainly annoyed Horace Walpole whose miniature castle (Strawberry Hill) at Twickenham had given rise to The Gothic in literature and architecture, by his arrogance in dictating the terms of Gothic design!
