A Private View: the irrepressible maven of monochrome opens the door to her gothic wunderkammer

Sue Timney has a way of making things happen. Of course, anyone familiar with her work as an artist and designer of products, textiles and interiors will know as much, for both her prolificacy and her success is nothing short of awesome. Luck may come into it; talent certainly does. But so too does serious hard work. Now in her early 70s, the maven of monochrome, whose pieces can be seen in museums across the world, including the V&A, is still in gainful employment – “full-time. No, more than full-time” – now as creative director of Wallacea Living, a company radically reworking the image of retirement care with its exquisitely designed community-focused homes. Her dynamism, the same that imbues the objects and rooms she creates, knows no bounds.

As such, it’s perhaps unsurprising that, after 19 years of living in Deal, Kent, Sue landed the house she’d always dreamed about – a neo-gothic confection complete with a verandah of pointed arches in nearby Walmer. She would drive past every time she came into town from the south-west, snatching tantalising glimpses over the flint wall that largely hides the house from view. “I loved the eccentricity of its detailing, the individuality of its architecture,” she says. Naturally, when it came up for sale seven years ago, she was thrilled. And, naturally, her tenacity served her well.

In the intervening years, the Gothic House has become not just a retreat from the busyness of her working life in London, but a repository for her collections of everything from vases to heraldic objects by way of Fornasetti plates and silk scarves, all of which inform her creative practices. It’s also something of a statement of her style: punchy, daringly graphic and uncompromisingly maximalist. It has been great fun putting it together, she says, thanks in part to the “superb” scale of its rooms. It is, as she puts it, “a house for the doing”, one that welcomes reconfiguration and ideas – simply put: an interior designer’s dream. Or, indeed, someone else’s; now, with Sue putting the house on the market, it’s a house for the taking too, one which she hopes will make its news owners as happy as it has her.

Sue Timney: “I passed this house many times before I ever went inside. I was so familiar with its face – everyone in Deal is. You can’t miss it. Even my children knew it and they don’t even live here! But I had no idea what the inside was like. I walked in and immediately thought: ‘The scale of these spaces is superb.’ It did not disappoint.

“Even without coming inside, you can tell it’s a special house. It has a certain stature. It’s very symmetrical, which helps, and the façade, with the arched verandah, is so striking. There’s a theory that it was designed by members of the Pugin architectural family; AWN Pugin’s sons conceived the Neo-Gothic church across the road. Either the house is by them, or it’s been imitated. Either way, it shares that romantic Revival mood.

“It also has wonderful provenance. We know it was built for a relation of Alice Keppel, Edward VII’s mistress and great-grandmother of Queen Camille. More recently, it’s been lived in by a scion of the Marks & Spencer family. And it’s right next door to what might be the oldest house in Deal. It’s got a good history.

“It wasn’t in as good condition as it is now. Old houses, like this one, require sympathy and sensitivity, which is what I felt it was lacking. The eccentricity of a Gothic house with pointed windows, for instance, should be honoured. I don’t mean that you need to fill a period house with period furniture, but I do think you should work with spaces rather than against them. In fact, precisely because of that generosity of scale, it actually suits all sorts of furniture, as I found out.

“I didn’t have a vision for the interiors when I moved in. I think with every house, you have to listen to what it’s telling you. In this case, I had to let the romance take over. I had lived in Victorian buildings before, but never a Gothic one, which are far less strict and more elaborate. This one is also particularly bright. The light seems to peep beautifully into all the rooms. I think it helps things feel more fluid.

“The architecture certainly has something to do with that too. The house has six different entrances from the outside, and lots of the rooms have multiple doors leading in and out. The flow between spaces is almost ambiguous, which has really allowed me to play about with the journey you go on as you move about the spaces. I love how the rooms stand on their own but are also in conversation with one another; the monochrome is a thread that runs through them, but then within each will be a different arrangement of things – my vases on the hall table, for instance, which welcome you as you come in and lend a real sense of arrival.

“There’s a lot of space here but it’s not vast or unmanageable. For a collector like me, that’s quite dangerous – it assimilates things rather too easily. I collect all sorts of things, which may on the surface look unrelated: heraldic imagery, for instance, and ceramics. But they are linked, not just by the fact that they inspire me. I think you can tell from the graphic qualities of my work that, perhaps more than anything, mark-making is what moves me – the line on the page, a scratch on a surface, the curve of a shape. Because of that, I find inspiration everywhere. I feel like blotting paper sometimes. Nothing is taboo, there are no rules about what you can and can’t absorb. It all fuels your creativity and, most excitingly, leads you to take the next risk in your work.

“Perhaps the best thing about this house is the way it absorbs things too. It has taken on me and my things wonderfully and it will do the same for whoever moves in here next. You don’t need to be interiors-y to live here; that’s the beauty of its eccentricity. And there’s potential too – there’s a garage three cars wide that’s begging to be turned into a studio or annexe. There’s a whole new iteration of this place waiting to be created.”

Further reading

Sue Timney website

Sue Timney on Instagram