From the archive: David Bailey's home (1969)
2017 marks 70 years since House & Garden magazine first hit the news stands as the quaterly 'Vogue House & Garden Book', bound to its sister magazine with a silk ribbon. As part of a series of articles delving in to the magazine's history we revisit our March 1969 feature about the "much-travelled international photographer David Bailey's conversion of a Victorian terrace house on Primrose Hill".
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As a leading international photographer constantly on the move, David Bailey decided three years ago, that his rented flat was too temporary and insubstantial a home. He decided that he needed a place where he could put down roots, and which would serve as both home and studio. Above all, he wanted something more commodious in which to house the ever-growing collection of objects picked up on his travels.
He had no wish to move far away, for many of his friends live in and around Primrose Hill, and he knew and liked the atmosphere of the area. When a large terrace house with plenty of rooms in a rather sad row of early-Victorian houses in Gloucester Avenue, behind Regents Park, came on the market he bought the freehold.
There were no structural alterations to be done immediately, and David Bailey decided that what he needed straightaway was his studio, a secretary's office, a kitchen and model's dressing-room. That made up the working part of the house. Upstairs, shut by a door, were his own quarters: living room, bedroom and bathroom. The other rooms, he decided, could be decorated later. A major problem is, of course, that he spends only about five-and-a-half months of each year in London, and his ideas, like his destinations are constantly changing. Thus as ones room is completed, he is apt to get a fresh inspiration and starts again. A Work trip to India, such as the one he made last year for Vogue, also sponsors the rapid collection of oriental boxes, daggers and other objets d'Inde. The atmosphere of the living room changed forthwith.
The dimensions of this room are small, but, by covering the chimney-breast from ceiling with mirrored panels, it appears to be much larger. The walls and ceiling are painted black, which might seem a somewhat intimidating background, but the two French windows let in a great deal of light and pinpoint the flashes of startling colour - a sofa and chair in brilliant purple Velvet, a turquoise velvet-covered table crammed with photographs, tiny carved wooden objets d'art and a couple of vases filled with dried grasses. The blackness of the walls is also a dramatic background for Bailey's collection of primitive paintings and kinetic art.
The owner's feeling for a dramatic mise en scene is carried into the bedroom, which is dominated by an enormous seventeenth-century, carved oak four-poster bed with a brown velvet bedcover. The walls are covered in a large Paisley-type patterned, brown-and-yellow Liberty fabric. So, too, are the cupboards.
The bathroom, which was once a dull, are room, was completely altered by an ingenious and skillful local builder (who has done all the work in the house) who somehow managed to infiltrate two handsome plywood arches into the room to form alcoves, and then set up basin, bath and the rest within these.
The kitchen, in the basement of the house, was, inevitably, dark cream. Bailey suggested the builder should put in three oak beams change the window above the sink unit into a circular shape. Two of the walls were paneled in dark oak, one hung with a hundred-year-old Carved, wooden picture. With a black-and-white floor this might sound rather cold but the walls behind the oven, working-top and sink-unit have been covered with terracotta tiles.
Any account of any house furnished and decorated by David Bailey is likely to be an interim report. He likes what he has done in his new house, but he is never satisfied. As in his photography he is always striving after new effects. Things will be altered again and again. This is Bailey's house as of March 1969.
Written by admin
