I Snag My Cardy on the Tudor House «

I Snag My Cardy on the Tudor House

Tuesday 22^nd February 2011

As I was saying – Angus Willis’s Tudor House at Hastings is at last open. I slept there for the first time last weekend.

This flagship Poor Little Rich Gay building project has throbbed at the core of our lives for five years now, not least with contradiction, for nooky, beamy, cotty (i.e.Tudor) is everything Poor Little Rich Gays are against. But Angus would have it and his jaw only hardened and lengthened in the face of cruel mockery as he set about ruthlessly and brutally re-Tudorising the Tudor House. You see, it had been modernised nasty and naff: an acquamarine bathroom suite, Tudor fitted kitchen, Aga, carpets and other horrors.

On Friday he over-heard some passers-by peering in at the window: ‘Such a pity there was no money to do it up.’

No money! £200,000 so far, thank you very much! And more to come! The builders are still in for part of most days, as is correct in Poor Little Rich Gay life. On Saturday they installed a York Stone ledge along the street front with no mortar in the cracks. Angus is hoping stinging nettles will take root to give a neglected look.

The latest thrilling novelty is furniture. When I was there in November there was no furniture. I thought, ‘He’s gone too far with the groyne wood.’ Groynes are those wooden dividers you see on certain beaches. Angus has used the utterly rough, sea-weathered wood reclaimed from them for shutters, floor boards, cupboards, shelves, the box beds (yes, I was in a box bed, boxed up for bed, eyeing with small envy the considerable expanse of the unboxed remainder of the room).

But furniture has put it right again, added just the tiniest lift of colour, different shapes and textures although the overall impact is superbly dessicated, challengingly murky, primitive, and, something I’ve never seen before, utterly convincing fake old.

Furnishing was always going to be a challenge. Real Tudor would have been too expensive and (this is where Angus is so brilliant) ineffective. The stroke of genius was to realise that nothing is more ancient to us than Formica, those white enamel sick-basins with a blue rim, especially if with a hole, a teacher’s chair from a 50s classroom (on which I snagged my champagne cardy by Fabrizio del Carlo), an electric kettle about 30 years old or improving post-War pocket guide books about birds or insects with brown-orange covers. Angus has also included some excellent 18^th century wing armchairs and a lot of Rumanian and Hungarian peasant furniture so wobbly, bashed, pecked by chickens that someone must have thought: ‘Do we burn or sell for a fortune?’

My God! The shopping! And the eye! An ordinary member of the public would see no merit in an Orkney chair with grubby hemp backing or a great round slab of wood on three legs.

But Angus knows. He sees at once.

The Tudor House is astonishing. There’s simply not a thing out of place. I’ve never known the like.

No wonder Interiors is to be graced and the Graph.

Actually living there is another matter. The front door gives clearance for someone under 5 foot. The last turn of the stairs veers so near the ceiling you have to crawl as for pot-holing. The famous lead-lined Sir Wilfred Self barrel bath must be approached with caution. An over-excited entry might result in water spilling over the edge and cascading through two floors. ‘We’re sitting on spikes,’ Fergus Strachan, Angus’s recently Derma-rolla-ed partner complained. We could have sat in the wing chairs, but we didn’t. It was less warm in that parlour. In fact on Sunday night we withdrew to another property of Angus’ for a rest. Fergus hurled himself onto the profoundly floral and flounced three-piece suite and lolled with vodka and tonic.

But Poor Little Rich Gays were not born to be comfortable.

The Tudor House is right.