A House for Essex

by Grayson Perry

Why would a Turner Prize winning artist, known for ceramics, not clad a house he's designed in ceramic tiles?

“What I like about this site,” says Grayson Perry, “is they wouldn’t film Towie here.” Flagrant structured-reality slander aside, the largely excellent Grayson Perry’s Dream House follows the process of building a fully habitable and rentable house to Grayson’s artistic specifications, as commissioned by Alain de Botton’s Living Architecture project.

The house is a monument to what Grayson calls “thwarted female intelligence”: an “ornate, terracotta covered temple” sacred to the memory of an imagined Essex everywoman, Julie May Cope. Julie, was born in Canvey Island in 1953, and was raised in social housing, moving upwards and outwards in more ways than one before her eventual death, run over by a pizza-delivery moped.

It is quite a thing and to get there, we enjoyed a walk through the woods and back. A fine day out with the family.