Charleston House, Monk’s House and Farleys House are the historic house museums of British artist Vanessa Bell, her sister the writer Virginia Woolf, and ex-pat American photographer Lee Miller, respectively. The antithesis of grand stately homes, they’re places that both inspired and mirrored the artists’ output – private spaces that blur the boundaries of work, creativity and daily life to offer a unique reflection of their inhabitants’ spirit. And they not only boast overlapping literary and creative circles, they share the same pocket of Sussex, a surprising cultural hotspot, just over an hour’s train ride from London’s Victoria Station.
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The most famous is Charleston (charleston.org.uk), the modest farmhouse that became Bell’s country home with husband Clive Bell, their friend (and her lover) the painter Duncan Grant and his romantic partner David Garnett. It became notable as the decades-long seasonal hub of the bohemian Bloomsbury Group of literature, art and politics – Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, E.M. Forster, et al., radical creative figures who not only wrote and painted but lived in a new, modern, sexually liberated way. The house and garden have been restored, with all the furnishings and personal everyday items left behind by its occupants preserved intact.
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It’s the totality of vision at Charleston that is breathtaking: Every surface – wall or chair or bathtub or crockery – is hand-painted, decorated and ornamented in the exuberant freeform patterns of Grant and Bell’s trademark styles. In person, you also notice small details, for instance, how Bell oriented her bed: facing the terrace, so that the walled garden’s riotous flowers and plantings would be the first thing she saw waking up, without even having to raise her head from the pillow.
By comparison, the 17th-century Monk’s House (nationaltrust.org.uk), where Virginia Woolf spent summers from 1919 until her suicide in 1941, is a plain and more dour visit: Books in tidy piles line the stairs, reading glasses still sit on the orderly desk of her room. However, it’s an important pilgrimage for devotees who want to experience the atmosphere of where the pioneering modernist writer lived and worked.
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Nearby, Farleys House & Gallery (open April to October, farleyshouseandgallery.co.uk) is the tranquil Georgian farmhouse where American model turned photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller settled in 1949 with her husband, Sir Roland Penrose, a Surrealist artist, curator and one of the foremost collectors of modern art, with which the house and galleries are filled. Miller is famous for her 1945 self-portraits in Hitler’s bathtub. Her lesser-known fourth and final act, however, was as world-class chef; after the war she threw herself into cooking and trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. (The museum café serves a few of Miller’s signature Surrealist dishes, like upside-down onion cake and cauliflower salad styled to resemble a woman’s breast.)
As can be glimpsed in Annie Leibovitz’s recent Vogue shoot of Kate Winslet (star of the upcoming Lee biopic), Penrose’s intense Surrealist fireplace mural dominates the dining room, which is painted an eccentric yellow and hosted guests like Man Ray, Picasso and Miró at its narrow table.
It was standing in Miller’s timeworn blue kitchen that I found myself unexpectedly moved. This was the photographer’s inner, private world. She once presided over these banged-up pots and pans at her AGA, under the watchful eyes of the Picasso wall tile that now gazes at me. The shelves are still a jumble of the exotic spices she assembled on her travels, befitting her gourmet training and adventurous palate. It’s a space so thoroughly personal and suspended in time, it’s as though she’s just popped out to the shops for a forgotten ingredient and will be back any minute. This feeling of stepping into lives, messily and artistically lived, is what makes visiting these unassuming houses so profound and resonant.
A version this article appeared in the Feb/March 2024 issue with the headline ‘Inside Artists’ Retreats’