From the archive: Kit Kemp's house on the south coast (2000)
The first time I saw it, I tossed my hair back like Miss Piggy and said, "I cannot possibly live here," because the house had not one redeeming feature.' Willowy, blonde and clad in leather jeans, hotelier Kit Kemp is not obviously the porcine Muppet madam's doppelgänger but, like Miss Piggy, she has strong ideas about what she wants. And ‘an oblong, narrow, plastic-pillared house', built during the Thirties with every aesthetic consideration ignored, was not her idea of the perfect weekend family retreat.
And even now as she walks around the elegant, relaxed and airy house she has created, she frequently makes comments such as, 'Right until we moved in I thought I would hate it.'
Hating a house is not high on many people's lists of reasons to live somewhere. However, Kit Kemp is not like many people. During the last fifteen years she and her husband Tim have created a distinctive niche group of London hotels and restaurants, including The Pelham and The Covent Garden Hotel.
MAY WE SUGGEST: From the archive: Antonio Carluccio's country cottage (2001)
Opening and expanding their hotels right through the Nineties, when Pawson and Chipperfield were remaking London in their own minimalist image, the Kemps favoured cosy, chintzy hotels, where guests could sink into well-upholstered sofas and rest their cups of tea on solid, comforting old furniture. Given this approach to hotel keeping, their south-coast home is a surprise.
Where one might have expected to be enveloped in a comforting blanket of excessive Englishness, there is instead an international feel about the place. Occasionally there are bits of southwest France, touches of east-coast American simplicity, hints of Africa and the Orient and a whiff of English vernacular.
Eclectic is too simple a word to describe the Kemps' house. It implies a carelessness and sloppiness that is absent. One benefit of not falling in love with the house is that the couple had no compunction about remodelling it. We bought it for less because other people were put off," Kit laughs. “It's hardly what you'd call a Georgian rectory.'
The kitchen-dining room is typical of the changes they have wrought throughout. The kitchen opens on to a little pavilion-style dining area with a pitched ceiling, covered in trompe-l'oeil woodwork. 'I wanted it to look like a village. hall,' explains Kit, and a certain rough-hewn quality is indeed perpetuated through a huge dining table, formed from two Brobdingnagian planks of sycamore and bought from Peter Place on the King's Road. Outside is a terrace and pergola with teak furniture by Julian Chichester - a local designer and relative of yachtsman Sir Francis - who weekends in a nearby coastguard's cottage.
The area that used to house the dining room and two further reception rooms, as well as a corridor, has been knocked through to create one long, large, pale, gallery-like space, 'a good place to have a party', that looks as if it belongs in the Hamptons. French windows open on to a garden that slopes gently down to a river. A wall of books dominates one end of the room, a French limestone chimneypiece the other. The chimneypiece came from Jean Chabaud, an architectural salvage man based in Apt in southeast France. It was bought for £1,300, shipped over in pieces and reassembled. Its considerable size and the generous dimensions of the deep armchairs and sofas covered in Brunschwig & Fils 'Bichon' chenille make decorative sense of what otherwise might be an overwhelming space. Nevertheless, there is cleanness of line about the room: there are none of the old pieces of furniture, serried ranks of silver-framed photographs and other detritus normally associated with this type of weekend retreat.
'I think the English look can seem very constipated,' Kit says blithely on entering a panelled room, hung with old landscapes and furnished with inviting sofas. It is, well, rather English. ‘At the end of the day we are English and I like the look, she says in an almost complete volte-face.
At such times it helps to remember that Kit is a hotelier and a bit of a set designer manquée, who is constantly creating interesting spaces for the guests in her hotels. For her, decorating a room is to do with building up texture and tone. And when it comes to texture and tone, Kit is able to achieve the effects she wants blindfold. 'I have done more bedrooms than most people have had hot dinners,' she admits cheerfully.
In the main bedroom, the texture in question is provided by the Ian Sanderson ticking which covers the walls, bestowing a decidedly Francophile femininity. Inner curtains in a different candy stripe, delicately patterned white curtains and a pair of fragile Venetian looking glasses enhance the effect. It is an enchanting little soufflé of a room that offers a delightful sanctuary and is a testament to her lightness of touch.
MAY WE SUGGEST: The pure, light-filled spaces of a Cornish house by Marion Lichtig
However, not far beneath the delicacy lies a steely practicality and nowhere is this more evident than in the bathrooms. These are unapologetically robust, with power showers. “Tim likes a good bathroom,' says Kit of her husband's predilection for the kind of shower that makes you feel you have just gone a dozen rounds in the boxing ring. "We have always got a motor to power things up,' she says, patting a vicious-looking shower head with affection.
Indeed, it is this sense of solidity and reliability that has finally brought her round to a kind of grudging, hard-won acceptance of her house in the country. “It is not my ideal house,' she concedes, but it's really practical – somewhere you feel things are not going to go wrong.'
Tim Clinch1/12A hall decorated simply with a nineteenth-century Scottish longcase clock and an Aubusson rug leads to the sitting room.
Tim Clinch2/12In the sitting room, books dominate one wall, a rustic French sideboard another.
Tim Clinch3/12The curtains in the sitting room are 'Palm Tree' by Chelsea Textiles, the floor matting from Crucial Trading.
Tim Clinch4/12Sofas covered in Brunschwig & Fils's 'Bichon' chenille plaid face one another across a Philippe Hurel coffee table.
Tim Clinch5/12Groups of old bottles with candlesticks from Caroline Charles decorate a sycamore table from Peter Place.
Tim Clinch6/12Kit covered the dining chairs in a Dominique Kieffer linen from Abbott & Boyd, and the armchair in Turnell & Gigon Giraffe'. The curtains are by Brunschwig & Fils.
Tim Clinch7/12The 'wood' room, panelled in oak, is cosy, with wicker log baskets and a wide brick fireplace. The raw silk curtains are by De Le Cuona; the needlepoint rug and ottoman cover from Valerie Wade.
Tim Clinch8/12The wood room leads to the study. Pear paintings by the American artist Steven Bear hang above a tray table from Nicholas Haslam. The sofa is covered in 'Comoglio' by Pierre Frey .
Tim Clinch9/12lan Sanderson 'Laldonde' ticking covers the main bedroom walls. The sofa is covered in a Dominique Kieffer twill (also the throw).
Tim Clinch10/12The glass lamp bases are from Vaughan.
Tim Clinch11/12Trompe-l'oeil-painted wooden walls in the 'log' room.
Tim Clinch12/12The curtains (as in the main bedroom) are 'Wisteria' by Chelsea Textiles.
