WOW! House 2024

Hollandridge is excited to be working with Guy Goodfellow and team on the Tissus d’Hélène Drawing Room in the WOW!house 2024, presented by the Design Centre Chelsea Harbour. Built within the Design Avenue, WOW!house is a show house stretching 500 sqm. featuring 19 full-size rooms and outdoor spaces — each one is uniquely designed by world-class interior designers, working in collaboration with globally recognised design brands and phenomenal suppliers.

CONCEPT

Explained by Guy Goodfellow:

"Our WOW!house 2024 design takes inspiration from a Country House drawing room; but intentionally avoiding a facsimile, we are creating a fantasy interior with a strong sense of fun and entertainment – exactly what WOW!house is about. The design will evoke that sense of comfortable underplayed elegance that comes with early summer evenings when the sun is dipping, and everyone congregates in the drawing room for a cocktail. An appetite for beautiful fabrics, custom made pieces and found objects are woven into the story of the room to create a richly layered and detailed space, inviting you in to while away the hours.

"Our interiors strive to be uncontrived with a wonderfully creative sense of past and present, and to be able to demonstrate that at such a well-respected show was an exciting concept. We are looking forward to presenting our vision through the exquisite use of fabrics from Tissus d’Hélène’s collections and specially made items of furniture from our trusted stable of designers and craftspeople.

As in all our projects, we start with the architecture – in this room, we began by creating a colonnade separating the imagined main drawing room from a winter garden; encouraging visitors to weave through and interact with the space. Our work is centred on creating a layered look full of subtle connections; when we build the foundations, each element starts to inform the other, and the design evolves."

ART CURATION

As a curator, our biggest challenge is stepping into someone else's creative space and finding the perfect artworks to complete their vision. We are delighted with the selected pictures from our trusted trade sources, huge thanks in this instance to The Redfern Gallery and Maas Gallery and to others who kindly offered artwork during the search phase.

ADRIAN HEATH 1920-1992

The artwork in the room includes this monumental oil painting by Adrian Heath. A prominent figure of the 20th-century British art scene, Heath emerged as a pivotal contributor to the development of abstract art. Initially associated with the Euston Road School in the 1930s, Heath's style underwent a significant transformation in the post-war years, influenced by his encounters with European modernism, particularly his time spent as a POW with Terry Frost. Heath became associated with the Constructivist movement, embracing geometric abstraction and bold colour palettes. Hollandridge discovered this work at The Redfern Gallery who have played a significant role in promoting the works of Adrian Heath during his career and continue to manage his estate posthumously.

Attributed to HAROLD KNIGHT 1874-1961

Around the time of the First World War, Harold and Laura Knight often went on painting holidays in Cornwall, staying in caravans with their friends Harold and Gertrude Harvey, and Charles and Ella Naper. Harold Harvey painted unmistakably the same boy in 1917 (Daffodils, Christie's 28 November 1996), looking towards us with a basket of flowers, in his typically broad hand. Knight preferred a hard profile and a flatter treatment, and painted the same boy in the same year, in a hat typical of Newlyn fishermen (Knight wore one himself).

GERALD BROCKHURST 1890-1978

This masterly drawing is of the sultry ‘Dorette’, Brockhurst’s nickname for his muse and lover Kathleen Woodward, who modelled at the Royal Academy Schools in London where Brockhurst was a visiting professor. Brockhurst was still married to his first wife, Anaïs Mélisande Folin, when he started an affair with Woodward. He exhibited sensual pictures of her at every Royal Academy Summer Exhibition for six years from 1933-39, and there was quite a scandal. Leaving Anaïs, Brockhurst sailed to the US with Dorette in 1939.

Brockhurst’s social connections, racy reputation, modern style and evident skill with brush and pencil earned him high-profile commissions to paint famous and beautiful women on both sides of the Atlantic, including Marlene Dietrich in 1936, Merle Oberon in 1937, and Wallis Simpson in 1952 (her portrait is in the National Portrait Gallery).

SIMEON SOLOMON 1840-1905

This drawing dates from the year Solomon died, of bronchitis and alchoholism, in August 1905, making this one of his last known drawings. The subject may relate to Solomon's prose poem 'A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep' (1871), wherein the narrator is guided by his soul through a dreamscape and encounters visions of Love - 'forsaken and shamed, wounded and forgotten; of guileless and soulless pleasure in its naked and melodious maidenhood [...] of death and silence, and of sleep and time'. (Swinburne's review, The Dark Blue, 1871) Though varied, every manifestation of Love took male form, winged, with a radiance, or glow about the head. Despite Victorian strictures, its displacement of homosexual love to the shadowy borders of nocturnal London, Solomon created a condition for poetic and artistic refuge: the veil of night.

This late pencil drawing is similar to others related to the poem, such as 'A Vision of Wounded Love' (1893): https://victorianweb.org/painting/ssolomon/drawings/2.html

Provenance:
J. R. Lamantia

Exhibited:
Durlacher Bros., Madison Avenue and Wellesley College, 'Simeon Solomon Exhibition', April & May 1966, no 19

Literature:
Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Simeon Solomon, Durlacher Bros., April 1966, no 19

For more information and tickets please visit Design Centre Chelsea Harbour