Dickens the Home Renovator

[x_los]

For one weekend this year, Gad's Hill--a working school that was once the only home Dickens ever actually owned--was open to the public for tours. Here are interesting aspects of the house the writer both lived in and extensively remodelled.

• A lot of the furniture also isn't original because the contents auction held after Dickens' death turned into kind of a feeding frenzy (people having been 'denied' the customary huge public funeral). There was a lot of running off with unofficial souvenirs. Because that the house has been an active school for the best part of the many intervening decades, there are many changes/it's a working environment.
• It's not actually as grand a house as the author's prominence and wealth at the time might lead you to expect. The present school's much bigger than the property was in Dickens' time.
• "Where's the Swiss Chalet?" You can still see the path under the road in front of the house, but that's been sold off. The chalet is in Rochester now, and you can't see inside.
• You can actually walk to Gad's Hill from downtown London in a night if you have way too much energy and are fucking insane. Luckily, Dickens was absolutely nuts.
• Tiled walls up to a dado rail in the billiard room, so cues couldn't fuck up walls. A built-in metal-lined drinks cabinet. The one quibble I have about the guide's contention that the tile is original but the path behind this room is a later change is, if this wall moved back, how exactly did they re-tile it to match the rest of the room? Workmen generally aren't careful and conscientious enough to preserve this surface intact for re-application.

• Different rooms have different parquet, all of it very nice (if in need of contemporary maintenance). This is the hall, the parlour and the dining room. There are interesting border transitions, and decorative lining around the outside of the rooms. Parquet is very undervalued at present, imo.

 

• Some features of the drawing room:
  
  - a very cool long window seat.
  - a 'stable door' style entrance to the then-new conservatory. The top rolls down, and the bottom panels can flip open. This is a wall, a passage or a door, as desired, and a great way to control both rooms' heat, light and division of space.
  - the red thing to can see is a replica lectern from the reading tours. The tour didn't point out that's what it is, which was kind of odd. The lectern was the set piece of the readings.

 

• Kate Dickens painted this stair rail (you can see the modern 'safety stair' Ofsted mandated behind it). It's quite unusual for an English house, but actually fairly typical of bauernschrank-style domestic painting--a reminder that Kate and the family spent considerable time on the continent. It's also possibly influenced by bargeware.

• The hall has this great metal radiator cover, next to the dumb waiter. You can see some of Kate's stair design behind. (The upstairs is inaccessible.)

• Minton geometric floor tiles in the then-new conservatory, which also had some fun Chinese hanging lanterns. Interestingly, this is not at all the most expensive Minton tile you could buy--it isn't fully encaustic, like a lot of Parliament's versions. This is a nice upper middle class house, but it's not upper upper middle. I tried to ask if there was more tile upstairs and got "oh, not in the bedrooms". As if a British Victorian would ever tile a bedroom? The hearth, duh.

 

• Great panelled window shutters. Good for controlling light, insulation and privacy.

• A chaise in the corner of what I think is the dining room where Dickens took ill the final time. This is not the chaise where it happened, but there's a picture of that chaise on this chaise. Everything got very Baudrillard at this stage.

• Ceiling texture doesn't have to be popcorn. Victorians did interesting things with this. Time to bring it back, imo.

• Main hall ceiling rose (the lighting having subsequently been moved, perhaps? Ofsted reasons?).
  

• Benches on either side of the front door: a place to remove muddy galoshes, etc., or just sit. The wood is from Stratford, possibly due to Dickens' involvement in preventing PT Barnum from buying the house Shakespeare was born in and moving it to America as a tourist attraction.

 

• Left, right and base views of the fireplace in Dickens' study. This is Delft-tiled (or maybe an English imitation thereof, looking at it), with a notable tiled base as well. That's smart: this should be easy to clean.

• The desk in Dickens' study.

 

• Dickens was into adding light to the Victorian domestic interior. He employed a lot of mirrors like this one, in his study. Not a bad idea for your modern terrace house (London is still extremely, even predominantly, reliant on its 19th century housing stock).

• The doors on these book cases are less ornate than the ones in Strawberry Hill's library, but they're still extremely useful, with additional curtains to keep off dust and prevent de-coloration. The whole set-up is pretty child-safe.

• The interior door of Dickens' study is lined with fake books. Dickens gave them the shitty joke titles; here is an unbearable but essentially factual piece about that. This is a foreshortened version of the original Dickens built in the rented Tavistok House.

Comments

[merelydovely]

Love those parquet floors - and the patterned ceilings to match! I'm really ready for a bit of traditional maximalism to make a comeback. Minimalism only really looks good if you have an absurd about of space to be your canvas. On the smaller scale most of us live at, minimalism looks soullessly utilitarian while maximalism looks cosy and cheerful, in a kind of "Surround yourself with things that make you happy" Marie Kondo way. Parquet floors would make me very happy!

I also love the introduction to the concept of bauernschrank and 'domestic painting.' That seems like an absolutely excellent worldbuilding detail to add to a fantasy culture.

[x_los]

Yeah I’ve been interested in doing some folk art decorative painting for a while now; there are some amazing architectural uses as well.

As far as painted furniture goes, the Fornasetti approach is also very cool.

[merelydovely]

oooooh that is also VERY cool. thanks for sharing!