Dutch royalist recreates English country house style

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Country Chic

By Beatrix Kleuver, translated by Claire van Wengen

This stylish, dual-text book, partly covered in tweed cloth, is unmistakably patrician: Beatrix Kleuver’s mother was a Dutch royalist, and a taste for palaces has certainly rubbed off. One associates Netherlanders with an urban, republican lifestyle and a design orientation to continental Europe. Kleuver’s taste is for the English country lifestyle. She ‘lives and breathes country living’: horses, dogs, beautiful plants, abundant flowers and natural materials, articulated through history.

Nine houses are featured, beginning with her own, ‘Beekwold’, which she opens to the public twice a year. This is a new-build in country style and an excellent advertisement for her considerable design acumen. Kleuver is, first and foremost, a garden designer, and here, house and garden form an almost continuous space, strengthening and softening each other by turns.  She does not, like some designers, make all her designs conform to a certain ‘look’. There is much good sense here: no point acquiring a large, spectacular piece of furniture or garden sculpture if you have nowhere to put it; in building and renovation ‘it is absolutely vital to work from the inside out’. In other words, ‘who are you?’ and ‘how do you live?’ comes before ‘how should it look?’.

Having established the principles, she is remorseless for detail, in the book as well as her work. Given her careful curation of the photography and design, the meticulous editing (only one noticeable typographical error: Felbrigg Hall appears as Felgrigg), I dread to think of her reaction when she realized that the page numbers do not correspond to the contents.

The featured houses all belong to wealthy landowners and two are museums. We visit the 17th-century palace of Het Loo, the hunting lodge of the Princes of Orange, and Welbergen, a lovely plain, rectangular house bought by a childless couple in the 1930s and restored as an 18th-century country house. Laura Ashley’s country estate of Remaisnil, in Picardy, is almost a museum: maintained by its present owners as the Ashley’s left it, with an added collection of country-sport art which reflects its present use as a hunting lodge. This has a frozen formality that offers less, but has emotional provenance: Laura Ashley is a much-missed friend.

Of the ‘live’ houses, there is Roodselaar, another new-build in old country style but without dogs or horses; William Morris’ Standen; a Gelderland farmstead called Maandag (Monday), built in 1907 with a 1926 extension. I should have liked more of this, which has few photos and doesn’t seem quite to conform to the brief of ‘uncomplicated living’ that quickened my pulse at the lead-in. Villa Montana, a 1960s house restored and enlarged, is impressive for the way Kleuver softens and rusticates without making it fussy. The Morris principles of beauty and usefulness prevail, with wooden, artisanal pieces modifying the austere, modern kitchen.

Kleuver clads the open staircase with painted tongue and groove, adding texture without subtracting modernity, and in the drawing room she strengthens the space with a large, simple fireplace. In the dining room, all white with a black (bluestone) floor, she counters glare and chill by covering the dining chairs in a thick, textured fabric that absorbs light, and picking up the blue in the dinner service – china is often a colour-key for her – by making a rich blue linen cloth for the table and painting the inside of the china cupboard a soft, Greek blue.

She uses black with cleverness and originality, as at Roodselaar, where she tempers the machined look of the concrete staircase by painting it black and using a coir runner with grippers, introducing texture and rhythm. As at her own house, she uses limewash and coloured plaster to imbue age and intimacy.

The writing is rather uneven, sometimes reading like a series of captions, and at times it all gets a bit much: I find it hard to believe she really could stand and stare at a baluster, however beautifully crafted from nature, ‘for hours on end’. At best, when her heart is in it, the narrative runs smoothly and there are some nice anecdotes. The carpenter who made her staircase at ‘Beekwold’ alarmed her by suggesting that she was a romantic and needed a four-poster bed – which he would make, if, in return, she would design his garden. Relieved and amused, she did not resist.

‘Is there such a thing as the perfect interior?’ Kleuver asks in her foreword. Her answer is that it’s all personal: ‘The right design exudes personality and reflects the owner’s confidence in themselves and their surroundings’. No confidence lacking here. Knowing how far you can and should make your dreams come true is about knowing yourself in relation to the world (and having the means to realize them). And this is where good interior design, rather than a quoted set of clichés, is both fascinating and important.

Country Chic by Beatrix Kleuver, translated by Claire van Wengen, is published by Terra Publishing, 2009. 179 pp., 230 colour illus. ISBN 978-90-8989-475-5