‘It’s harvest time!’ Gallerist and sometime artist Caspar Giorgio Williams says these words with gusto while describing the ripening of fruit on trees and vines, the blossoming of multicoloured dahlias and the Mediterranean scents pervading the garden and interiors of the property he shares with British stylist and creative entrepreneur Michael Darlington, his partner. This bucolic outburst, reminiscent of life on a Tuscan farmhouse like the one near Siena where the Anglo/Italian Caspar grew up, seasonally takes place behind the brick façade of the couple’s two-up, two-down on Whittlesey Street, a six-minute walk from Waterloo station in London. Built in the 1820s, this rather dour (in a Dickensian sort of way) row of terraced houses is one of a handful in the area to have survived the Blitz and subsequent urban developments.
Decorator extraordinaire Nicky Haslam, Caspar tells me, was still a teenager when he, too, rented this very house in 1958. ‘I was riding my scooter late one night,’ Haslam later confirms, ‘when I noticed this row of Regency houses. It was so run-down, I thought it was a slum.’ Still, some prettiness caught his attention, so he stopped to take a closer look. ‘There was a to let sign on one of the windows,’ Haslam recalls. Within days, he and his then lover, the painter Michael Wishart, were newly minted tenants and would stay there for the next four years. ‘For the first time in my life,’ one reads in Redeeming Features, Haslam’s riveting 2009 memoir, ‘I had something I could stamp with my emerging taste.’ This he did by spraying the living room with bright-red car paint (‘lacquer was too expensive’) and transforming the dining room into an oval tent of rough brown parachute silk, which he decorated with lanterns and gothic chairs.
Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, still in their prime, were frequent visitors and the parties, where rock celebrities mingled with actors, aristocrats and ballet dancers, including the recently defected Rudolf Nureyev, were wild and memorable. ‘Stephen Fleet woke me up at the crack of dawn once,’ Haslam recalls. ‘When I opened the door, a woman wearing a raincoat and a Tyrolean hat was standing next to him: it was Greta Garbo.’
Caspar Giorgio Williams moved to Whittlesey – as this home is known among the couple’s friends – during what he describes as the ‘deepest, darkest’ days of the pandemic. ‘It was a wreck of a place,’ he recalls, ‘and the backyard was even worse.’ Williams, who was working for Tommaso Corvi-Mora’s gallery at the time, is a passionate gardener. He writes stories for Hortus and is a Russell Page devotee.
In a quest to raise money for the Garden Museum’s archive, where Page’s drawings and manuscripts are stored, he walked the 135 miles from Whittlesey Street to the gardener’s grave in Badminton. His sentimental attitude to plants, however, sets him apart from Page’s stark asceticism. So, when he moved here, the hundred or so potted plants he had amassed (roses from Sissinghurst, pelargoniums from Dixter and humble plants from the local supermarket) moved with him. They are now thriving in the garden among the wildflowers, anemones, bulbs and fruit trees, providing an idyllic backdrop to the couple’s famously fun and delicious picnics, lunches and dinner parties. They are both amateur gourmands and find endless inspiration in the backyard’s abundance of fruit, vegetables and herbs.
‘Life at Whittlesey revolves around the garden,’ says Darlington, who lives part of the year in New York, where he works as an editorial stylist. ‘It was only natural to treat this home as if it were a humble gardener’s cottage.’ The first thing he did when he moved in a couple of years ago was bring out the paint roller. An avid collector of (mostly) British 18th- and early 19th-century textiles and antiques, which feature in these interiors, he replaced the thick coats of brightly coloured paint, some of which dated back to Nicky Haslam’s times, with a palette of pale greens and chalky stone colours that tie in beautifully with the garden.
Yes, the garden. That generous, fertile backyard that has survived so much, including a potentially lethal explosion during one of Haslam’s Guy Fawkes parties, is a constant source of creative inspiration for its current tenants. Michael, who is putting the finishing touches to ‘Darlington’, his brand of men’s shirts made with archive Italian cottons and linens, found his experiments with ‘the humble gardener’s cottage’ so rewarding he is now venturing into decoration with a line of reimagined antique furniture and home accessories, including glasses made in Murano.
Caspar has been working on a series of watercolours often inspired by his botanical endeavours at Whittlesey. Some of these are currently the subject of his first solo show at the prestigious Sébastien Bertrand Gallery in Geneva. Among his upcoming curatorial projects, which usually take place in and around gardens, is an exhibition of Miranda Keyes opening on New Year’s Eve in Istanbul and a survey honouring Fulco di Verdura that will take place in London in 2025. Whatever its role – swinging London pleasure den or gardener’s cottage – Whittlesey continues to spread its magic.
‘Il Faut Cultiver Notre Jardin’ is on view at Sébastien Bertrand Gallery, Geneva, until 9 November 2024. Visit sebastienbertrand.com
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