An image of how the holiday home may look
Grayson Perry, the Turner prize-winning artist, has secured planning permission to build a holiday home encrusted with sculptures, ceramics and tapestries that tell the story of a mythical Essex woman called Julie.
The two-bedroom house near Harwich will be available for the general public to rent from 2014 through a scheme set up by the philosopher Alain de Botton to introduce holidaymakers to the joys of avant-garde housing.
Chelmsford-born Perry has worked with architectural firm Fashion Architecture Taste (FAT) on a building that is intended as a homage to his home county. It will overlook the river Stour at Wrabness, six miles west of Harwich port, and is Perry’s first foray into architecture.
Resembling a cross between a wayside chapel and a fairytale gingerbread house, the home will be topped with a statue of Julie, relief tiles with her image will clad the walls, a weather vane will celebrate her mothering skills and a sculpture of her cat will sit above the door. Inside, renters will be able to pore over tapestries that tell the story of Julie’s life, while a chandelier “could relate to her tragic death. When it is finished, it will be very, very elaborate,” Perry said on Tuesday. “It will be an opportunity to live in a shrine.
“The idea behind the project relates to buildings put up as memorials to loved ones, to follies, to eccentric home-built structures, to shrines, lighthouses and fairytales.”
Perry said he wanted to overturn the idea of Essex women as seen in the TV show The Only Way Is Essex and he has designed artworks to trace Julie’s Essex everywoman journey as she “encountered life’s ordinary triumphs and tragedies; a difficult childhood, young love, a truncated education, children, divorce and finally fulfilment in her career and love life”.
Perry said he imagined her as born in 1953 and dying this year, and as “one of the women who wear purple”.
“She’s in touch with her inner goddess,” he said. “She’s probably read Fifty Shades of Grey, but didn’t like it.”
The project, in a listed area of outstanding natural beauty, won permission in the face of several protests. One objector complained to Tendring district council that the design was “pseudo-subversive neo-kitsch”, another said it was “more suited to a theme park”, while another said it was like something out of a Disney film.
Perry said he had toned down the designs from his original “doodling wildly and quite drunkenly in front of the TV”.
The rooftop sculptures had to be reduced in size by a quarter after conservationists complained they had “a significantly detrimental impact upon the character and appearance of the area of outstanding natural beauty”.
De Botton said the collaboration between Perry and FAT had produced “a building that is intensely alive to history and location, but which takes art and architecture in entirely new and thought-provoking directions”.
De Botton’s development company, Living Architecture, has already built holiday homes in the UK by Sir Michael and Lady Patty Hopkins, the Dutch firm MVRDV, the young Scottish practice NORD and one of Norway’s leading architectural practices, Jarmund/Vigsnæs Architects.
• This article was amended on Wednesday 3 October to remove a sentence saying that renting the house could cost up to £2,000, the result of an error in the editing process.
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