The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Who needs the Louvre? Just head to Sussex
After a year within her own four walls, Anna Hart relishes the voyeuristic thrill of the ‘home museum’
I’ll never again take for granted the pleasure and privilege of stepping inside someone’s home. This past year, a year of enforced inhospitality and isolation, I longed to be welcomed into the homes of friends, family or – the ultimate honour for any traveller – an interesting stranger. Nothing turns a stranger into a friend faster than stepping into their living room or kitchen.
When I bought my flat in Margate, it was the high-ceilinged, bay-windowed, spacious living room of this former Victorian schoolhouse that sealed the deal. Nothing made me happier than seeing people I love or admire (and hope to love) dotted around sipping mint tea or mezcal on Moroccan poufs, or digging into a moderately successful Irish stew at my dining table. Hospitality is important to me, and I similarly adored stepping into the lives of others. And judging them immediately… on their bookshelves, their art, their pet, their mantlepiece artefacts. I’m no snob: I’ve slept in township homes in South Africa, longhouses in Borneo, crumbling Scottish bothies and Masai huts, and had some of the warmest welcomes and most charming stays of my life.
Visiting someone’s home fleshes out their character, renders them 3D, makes them human. That’s why I’m captivated by the conserved houses of artists, writers and musicians I admire. I’ve read every word Ernest Hemingway wrote, and several gushing biographies, but it was standing at his writer’s desk at his home in Key West that I met the man in my mind. In fact, the more mundane the household object, the more human our hero becomes. I sat in Nelson Mandela’s favourite armchair in the home where he was under house arrest at Drakenstein, outside Cape Town, and marvelled at his magnificent mind and his fondness for pink velvet upholstery. I tiptoed around Villa Oasis, the Moroccan home of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge, and wished I could have written at the desk in the garden.
Last week, realising my life had been short of various things I enjoy, including “road trips”, “my friends Amber and Rob”, “culture” and “other people’s nice houses”, the three of us set off for Sussex to visit Farley Farm (home of the Surrealists Lee Miller and Roland Penrose), Charleston (the home of Modernist painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and the country escape for writer Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group) and Sissinghurst, the garden and home of authors and gardeners Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. I’m sure this trip was made more special because we had been starved of the lives of others for this past year.
An anthropologist once explained that a mild obsession with other people’s homes – demonstrated by the popularity of interiors TV shows, Hello! magazine photoshoots, and home museums – is a primal human instinct. It’s perfectly natural to check out the caves of others, compare ourselves to them, and assess what cunning ideas we want to steal for our own cave (cooking with fire! bearskin rugs! mammoth stew!) or what aspects we think look rubbish and want to laugh at and avoid.
I found myself wondering if the fabulous fish tiling over the kitchen sink at Charleston (charleston.org.uk) inspired lofty thoughts or poetic words of love and lust. Perhaps, if I had a Picasso tile cemented into my kitchen wall above the cooker, as Lee Miller did at Farley Farm (farleyshouseandgallery.co.uk), I’d be a more dedicated and creative cook. Sissinghurst (nationaltrust.org. uk) stunned me, stretching the imagination of even the humblest and most half-hearted gardener, like myself, and I came home determined to at least buy less plasticky pots for my tiny backyard.
A few months ago – smack in the middle of a wintry lockdown – I moaned to friends that my eyes felt like they were on a boring cabbage soup diet, so sick was I of my own unchanging interiors. This trip felt like a feast. I’m now planning holidays, next year, based around other home museums such as La Casa Azul (museofridakahlo.org.mx), home to Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and Mark Twain House (marktwainhouse.org) in Hartford, Connecticut. Closer to home, I’ve not yet made it to Greenway (nationaltrust. org.uk), Agatha Christie’s home in Devon. After a year that starved us all of intimacy and inspiration, travelling to home museums like these feels like the best way to reconnect with humanity.