Ceramicist Kate Braine has added to the artistic heritage of her home using texture, fresco and wood panelling to great effect
Some houses call you… You feel drawn to their layers of history,” says Kate Braine. Her 18th-century townhouse in Chelsea is an atmospheric case in point. Narrow passageways lead to panelled rooms where marble fireplaces are illuminated by lamplight. Gappy floorboards are split with the fissures of three centuries; vertiginous stairs plunge towards the dark basement kitchen. Sometimes, says Braine, she can hear the spectral “twangings” of the ghost that flits benignly through the grid of stucco-fronted houses bordered by the inky wash of the Thames.
Braine, a ceramicist whose fantastical forms spring from the “accidents and surprises” of experimentation, feels particularly at home here because the area has a history of innovation in design and art. From her roof terrace she can see where William de Morgan, the 19th-century potter renowned for wares adorned with fantastical beasts in lustrous glazes, had his workshop on the corner. A few doors down Josiah Wedgwood set up his decorating studio, luring other artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James McNeill Whistler, who turned this quiet backwater into a busy bohemia of studios and factories.
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