I wish I was posting today to recommend you visit this surrealist fantasy mansion – with connections to Salvador Dali – on your next secret Sussex staycation. However, it’s privately owned so not open to the public. This is fair enough and doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is that it wasn’t considered interesting enough to win funding to protect it (more on that later, stay tuned); and that not much has been written about it since the mid-1980s.
Today, although I can’t buy it and turn it into a surrealist fantasy house museum – how great would that be!? – what I can do is write about it to keep its legacy alive. So using the pictures and video footage of it I found, I’m taking you on an unusual historical Sussex house tour. Let’s have a snoop around!
Monkton House on the West Dean Estate in Chilgrove, West Sussex, belonged to Edward James, the eccentric and extremely wealthy Sussex gentleman who made Salvador Dali famous. Despite his incredible life, James was an underrated, little-known art world contributor, collector and patron of surrealism and believed passionately in outsider art. He transformed Monkton House in the 1930s to reflect his empathy with the visionary world of the surrealists.
Along with creative input from his friend, Salvador Dali, James transformed the six-bedroom, five-bathroom lodge designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1902-3 for his hugely wealthy parents, Mr and Mrs Willie James as a retreat from their Edwardian mansion, West Dean, on their 6,000-acre estate just north of Chichester. Edward James wasn’t a fan of Lutyens’ style.
“I wanted to get away from that cottagey look that Lutyens went in for,” James says in this video. With creative input from his friend, Salvador Dali, he had the house painted purple and the front door pink, redesigned the pillars outside to look like fibreglass palm trees, the drainpipes to resemble sticks of bamboo, the window sills with drapes made out of plaster, the three exterior chimneys stacks were each of irregular shapes.
Inside, it’s just as unique as it appears on the outside, the place filled with surrealist art and artefacts and redecorated in a mixture of styles that both reflected and defied the taste of the period.
“I decided to make this house comfortable so I’d have somewhere large enough for me and not as big as West Dean. But we had to make it warm and add padding. I know it looks like a padded cell, but it’s padded and buttoned to keep it cosy and warm.”
Among other things – including a bathroom of alabaster complete with two sun and moon nightlights – James also installed a new staircase with an elegant curve and had it covered with carpet originally woven with the footprint of his former wife, Tilly Losch. When the couple split, James later replaced the carpet with one woven with the footprint pattern of his Irish wolfhound.
By the 1960s, James had become disillusioned with stuffy British life and moved to Mexico. On the advice of his American tax lawyer, he started getting rid of his assets in England. He turned over the West Dean property to the Edward James Foundation. He set this up to preserve and teach craft skills he was concerned would be lost after the second world war, and transformed West Dean House, into West Dean College.
Later on, in 1981 he auctioned the greatest of his Dalis through Christie’s. In the mid-1980s, his foundation had put Monkton House and its contents up for sale, but English Heritage lost its seven-month campaign to save Monkton. Apparently the National Heritage Memorial Fund deemed it ‘not of sufficient interest’ to warrant funding, according to this article. In the end, it was bought by a private buyer without its contents which were auctioned off.
“It was the best interior of its period in this country to have survived,” architectural historian Clive Asle says here. ”So many people did imaginative things in the 1930s, but there is nothing left in England to compare to Monkton.” Now, there isn’t even Monkton.
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14 Comments
In 2016/2017 there was a great exhibition in Kunsthalle Hamburg about Edward James (and others): Dalí, Ernst, Miró, Magritte… including famous movies from that time. Since that I feel a need to visit that House.
Thank you, Ellie. I remember walking past the grounds of Monkton House as an impressionable eleven year old and peering through the high fence from the South Downs Way and being bewitched by what lay beyond.
Yesterday I returned and found myself still enchanted and looking through the high fence. I suddenly realised Monkton House is where I live in a parallel universe. I am very happy there playing tennis and writing. Do you care for tea on the lawn?
Of course!
We are opening Edward James Museum in Xilitla Mexico with many replicas of Monkton House. We want the world to see it
Will you put me on your list for updates? I’d love to share this news.
Just cycled past today and was as enchanting as last summer but for being more exposed. A beautiful lounge chair overlooking the tennis courts set the scene to the sound of the peacocks.
I’m even more intrigued now.
Hi Ellie
As a small child I remember going to Monkton House to visit my grandparents who managed the house and farm for the owner who lived abroad at the time. I have a couple of old black and white photos of the outside. I don’t really remember the inside although I do remember my grandfather taking us children to an aviary full of colourful birds.
What an incredible story – I read that there was an aviary in the garden! But couldn’t find any pictures.
Dear Mrs. Neale,
so interesting to hear of the black and white photos of Monkton House you hired from your grandparents as I suppose. I am living since nearly twenty years in the last house Edward James was building for himself when he came back from Mexico in 1980., It is in Liguria, Italy. He builded it from 1980-1982 and died here in December 1984. This house is also extraordinary, somewhat surrealistic with many elements from his sculpturegarden he was building in the Mexican dschungel for 20 years.
That’s why I am very much interested to see your photos. Would this be possible via Email or What’s App? You would do a great favor for me. Thank you very much in advance.
All the best
Hubertus Gaßner
Hi Ellie,
As a Docent for The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, I always chat about Monkton House when I arrive with my tours at the vitrine housing one of the famous Lobster Telephones.
How wonderful to have been “taken inside” by you in this blog post! Thank you!
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I went to view the house in 1987 after PEREDS placed an advert in the Sunday Times. Surreal Estate it cried. I think the asking price was about £500,000. I took a photographer with me. The contents were never included in the sale price by the time the ad was placed. Simon Draper who sold his shares to Richard Branson bought the gaff. There was a lot of house and land and a ‘motor road’ for the money.
I went to school at West Dean Park. The school was called Wispers. I used to love the spiral staircase and other surrealist features. Some of us girls cycled over to Monkton, but we never got further than going down the driveway. I always loved stories of Monkton. At West Dean there was a man who over saw the workshop there. Edward James would come in occasionally and commission him to make something. I remember this man, Bevis, was asked to build a pineapple out of wood, with carvings inside. I never saw the finished product, but I often wonder how he did it. I always loved the idea of the curtains on the outside of Monkton. Bevis said there was so much valuable art there, that he had to take his shoes off when he went into the house, so as not to mark up the floor.