Designer’s daughter tells how fashion shows were held at home
coach and driven to High Sunderland, where my father’s latest creations were being modelled.
“The open-plan living room had an elevated gallery that made for the perfect catwalk, where the models strutted up and down. Week-long photo sessions also took place at the house, with models striking poses against the Mondrian-style exteriors. “I loved watching these women as they stalked the rooms – leggy flamingos in flame-pink bell-bottoms, peacocks wrapped in dizzy green maxi-skirts.
“I snuck into the bathrooms to try on their vast array of wigs in ever y imaginable colour and cut. To an impressionable child, these were wonderful moments. On occasion Beri referred to peo Balenciaga or Yves Sain people called whom he admire with, but the names meant nothing to me.”
Shelley, 57, reveals the fascinating snapshot into her chi ldhood in he memoir The See Through House, which has jus been published by Chatto & Windus.
It tells the story of he Serbian-born father’s life through the family home he had built in the 50s designed by modernis architect Peter Womersley
Born in 1922, Bernat los at Auschwitz and came t study textiles in 1945. H
designer Margaret (Peggy) and the couple moved to the Borders for work.
One day the couple were driving through Holmfirth in Yorkshire when Bernat caught a glimpse of what he described as a “strange geometric s t r uc ture f loat ing between the trees”.
Mesmerised by the house, they stopped the car and knocked on the front door.
The owner – John Womersley – explained that his brother Peter had designed the house as a wedding gift.
Bernat contacted the young architect, giving him his first professional house commission, for a modernist home to be built on land he and Peggy had bought on a country estate five miles from Selkirk.
The result was High Sunderland, a geometric, modular, single story bui lding with f loor- to- cei l ing windows and colourful glass panels, set in the heart of a forest.
Womersley, who also moved to the Borders, went on to become one of Britain’s most celebrated architects.
Bernat furnished the interior of the house with his own artwork and textiles.
Shelley, whose father died in 2014 aged 91, said: “I couldn’t separate the house from my dad. The house was my dad. My dad was the house.
“He spent a number of years in Jerusalem before and during the war and there were some modernist buildings there he was struck by. He was always one for looking forward.
“When he saw Peter Womersley’s brother’s house, it was my dad’s vision of what a house should look like.”
Growing up, Shelley, the youngest of three children, thought little of the design of the house, which is now Category A l isted. She sa id :
“When
I was very little, it seemed ordinary. I was far more drawn to my friends’ houses – they all lived in old, drafty Borders houses with eerie attics.
“I did love the open-plan style of the house but, as I got older, I wanted privacy – at the very least a door on my bedroom. I was probably in my late teens before I began to see our house as an architectural piece of art and started to appreciate it.”
Throughout her life, Shelley remembers lovers of architecture turning up at their door in the hope of being able to view High Sunderland.
Others would appear in the garden armed with a camera, while design students got in touch in the hope of arranging a
tour. Her father never turned them away. Shelley, who lives in London and is training to be a psychotherapist, said: “There was a running joke in our family that you never knew who was going to be at the door.”
After Bernat’s death, Shelley and her siblings reluctantly made the decision to sell their childhood home.
She said: “It was time to move on. The National Trust for Scotland were interested in buying the house but they decided it was on the market 20 years too early to be considered historic enough for them.
“In the end, we had potential buyers flying in from countries including America and Greece. It was bought by a couple who are in the world of design.
I’m heartbroken it’s no longer my home but I feel it’s in good
hands.”