Lytes Cary: Wholeness Makes an Interior Not Taste Necessarily «

Lytes Cary: Wholeness Makes an Interior Not Taste Necessarily

Wednesday 4th November 2015

In the hotel at Lyme, the Gay Mother announced that Lytes Cary was to be our National Trust destination. I’d never heard of it. I don’t suppose you have either. It’s actually in Mumerset, about my least fav county (whoops! who lives there of the Poor Little Rich Gays?) – I don’t know why. It’s mediocre somehow despite many glories. Maybe it’s the effect of all those dreary towns – Taunton, Ilchester, Ilminster, Yeovil… Our day for Lytes Cary was murky and the flatness of Mumerset was apparent. The medieval buildings were sitting there, with a much larger extension of more recent date, amidst the usual National Trust plant stall and shop. We entered a mini Great Hall. I was struck at once. As you know, nooky, beamy, wheamy , cotty is the least favoured mode for Poor Little Rich Gays. Yet the great irony is that the most important new Interior in England in the last twenty years, possibly since the War, created by leading Poor Little Rich Gay Angus Willis, the Tudor House in Hastings, is so chronically nooky Sid Id was barely able to get up the stairs (his height). There was something very satisfying about the mini Great Hall at Lytes – its mini-ness, the top lighting, the ocre walls, the limed furniture. We passed on through a stoney anti-room. The house was abandoned by the family of Lytes in the 18th century and only reclaimed by one Jenner (of the department store in Edinburgh) in the 20th. So essentially it’s a fake – rather like the Tudor House in Hastings. Then we came to the drawing room – at once I wanted everything in it. A thrilling room. Really I didn’t want everything it in because in my own home Jaco-tudorbethan won’t do and it’s not my taste. Knole sofas, black carved frames, stump work – no thank you! But it was the absolute rightness of everything in it for the room and the sumptuous living effect – although Jenner and his family, all stump-working away apparently, long dead. So it went on. Superb standard and wholeness maintained all through the upstairs quarters – not a wrong note. I was moved to think of re-starting my own decor work in my own home, which has lain fallow, fallen into the yellow leaf, for some time. Maybe now I’ll re-do to leave a living interior.