A novelist’s cottage brims with history and charm
Author Esther Freud’s passion for architecture in her tranquil English village has inspired some of her finest work
DESIGN P. 12
Esther Freud first visited Walberswick, a village on the Suffolk coast in England, 30 years ago, when she was a young actress living in London and fed up with city life. She complained one day to her father, painter Lucian Freud.
Her father, who died in 2011, told her, “There’s this awful, dreary place where I had to go in my childhood, but maybe you’d like to go there,” Freud recalled. “He called and made arrangements.”
Freud stayed in a house called the Hidden Hut, a bungalow with “huge, great glass windows”, she said. It was November, and cold and damp, and like the artists who flock to Walberswick for the tranquil setting and quality of light, she loved it.
Freud, who is 51 and the author of eight novels, does indeed own a home there now, a sturdy four-bedroom cottage built of stone, with a striking red-tile roof, that serves as a retreat for her, her husband and three children. Its construction dates to around 1700, which makes the cottage perhaps the oldest of the 400 or so houses in the village, she said.
Inside, the old bones have been made visible, with massive exposed beams dominating several rooms. Parts of the house have high, slanted ceilings, as though you were in a hayloft, while other rooms reflect the low-ceilinged, light-deprived architecture of the period.
That was a recurring problem in the first home she owned in the village, which, as it happens, is right next door to her current one and inspired her latest novel, Mr. Mac and Me. The cramped house had once been a pub and an inn called the Blue Anchor, and during the 12 years she lived there, Freud discovered that Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh had been a guest.
Mackintosh, who is most famous for designing the Glasgow School of Art, remains a celebrated figure in the design world, an artist as multitalented and uncompromising as Frank Lloyd Wright, a contemporary. But by the time he came to Walberswick, in 1914, he had difficulty securing commissions and had begun painting watercolours of flowers and landscapes. A stranger in the tight-knit village, and one with German artist friends to boot, Mackintosh was briefly accused of being a German spy during World War I.
Pamela Robertson, senior curator and professor of Mackintosh studies at the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow, said the architect and his artist wife, Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh, probably viewed their time in England as a brief respite, although it turned out his architecture career was effectively over.
“They chose Walberswick because they knew it,” Robertson said. “Other artists went there because of the open landscape and big skies. The decision to leave Scotland wasn’t seen as final in 1914, but then war broke out.”
Freud’s historical novel, set during this time, imagines a friendship between a young boy with artistic leanings and Mackintosh and his wife. The young narrator, Thomas, lives at the Blue Anchor with his family, which struggles to earn a living running the place.
It’s not the first time Freud has used the Suffolk coast as a setting for a novel, or an architect living there as a central character. In The Sea House, she wrote about a German Jewish refugee who was trying to re-establish his architecture career in England after World War II. Of another character in that 2004 novel, Freud wrote, “All his life Max had dreamt of houses”. It may be in her blood; the architect in The Sea House was based on her paternal grandfather, Ernst Freud, a successful architect who fled in 1933 from Nazi Germany to England, where he resumed his career.
“He spent many years living in Walberswick, too,” Freud said. “So there are houses everywhere here, cottages he transformed into Bauhaus-style structures.”
But Freud attributes her interest in homes to the fact that growing up she never had a permanent one. She and her older sister, fashion designer Bella Freud, had a peripatetic childhood. Their parents never married, and in the height of the hippie 1960s, their mother took the young girls to live in Morocco, a period Freud fictionalised in her acclaimed first novel, Hideous Kinky.
She is less enthusiastic about decorating. She described her style as “kind of 1950s, slightly old-fashioned”, and said she likes to find furniture second-hand, like the green Victorian dresser she bought in Portobello Market and put in the kitchen of her cottage. And while she cares about “the way things look”, she keeps her desire for visual beauty in check when home.
Fortunately, Freud had to make very few aesthetic improvements to her Walberswick home. When she owned the former Blue Anchor next door, the previous owners of her cottage were constantly renovating.
After Freud bought her cottage in Walberswick, a place where she has so much family history and for so long dreamed of owning a house, did she feel contentment and joy? Well, not quite. The restless childhood, she said, has stayed with her.
“When we did buy this cottage, I recall feeling this mixture of happiness but deflatedness, too, because now I would stop looking for a house,” Freud said. “I like the dreaming. I like the fantasising.”