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It is not unusual for a passer-by to confuse the British artist’s house Sara Kaye Rodden for a store. The 15th-century house sits on a bustling main street in the English village of Brasted, in rural Kent, and people are often drawn inside by the distinctive objects kept near the entrance: a board of Belgian oak drawing from the 1930s, a slatted chair next to the Danish modernist designer Grete Jalk and several of the artist’s minimalist constructions made of paper, rubber and leather. “I have to tell them this is my house, and then they shy away,” says Kaye Rodden, 48. Completed in 1430, the original timber-framed building, which once served as a medieval meeting hall, was in fact repurposed. as an antiques shop in the 19th century, and its large Victorian window still seems to promise that rare treasures can be found inside.
Kaye Rodden bought the three-story, 2,200-square-foot home nine years ago with her husband, John Rodden, 49, an executive at film production company Studio Canal UK. They had been looking to move from their one-bedroom maisonette in London’s Battersea district to a place with enough space for her two children, Aoife, 12, and Naoise, 8, to run around. Kaye Rodden, who comes from several manufacturing lines (her paternal great-great-grandfather was a tanner and harness maker); Her maternal grandfather was a carpenter; She also wanted to set up a studio. In 2012, after years working alongside acclaimed British designers such as Thomas Heatherwick, Ilse Crawford and Faye Toogood, she began to focus on her own multidisciplinary art practice. She imagined a space where she could experiment without restrictions.
“The minute we walked in, it was, ‘Yes, please,’” he says of the first time he saw the house. She was immediately captivated by the bright 387-square-foot front room and chose it for her workspace. She also liked that the place didn’t have what she jokingly calls the “ye olde” feel typical of many 15th-century structures. In the 1970s, the house’s previous owners had added a double-height extension with a mezzanine to the rear of the building to create a modern living room. The mix of different periods embodies exactly the type of raw imperfection that Kaye Rodden seeks to capture in her pieces, which range from tabletop sculptures made from blocks of swamp oak from 3500 BC. C. to striking geometric ensembles of leather, bookcloth and wood that can be hung. from a wall.
Unfazed by the dusty pink carpet covering each step, the couple set about making the house their own. “There wasn’t a big renovation,” says Kaye Rodden. “It is not the type of house in which everything is dismantled to be redone in a traditional way; “We worked with what we had and preserved everything.” They kept the pre-existing frayed burlap wall coverings in the main living room and enjoyed the contrast between the home’s worn original oak beams, piranha pine stairs, and 1970s golden brown parquet floors.
The hodgepodge of styles also provided a complementary backdrop for the couple’s extensive furniture collection, which includes both finds from British antique stores and mid-century classics from designers like Marcel Breuer and Vico Magistretti. They decorated the living room in a minimalist way, with just a few of Kaye Rodden’s favorite pieces, including a black rocking chair by Hans Wegner and a simple pine stool from contemporary Finnish furniture brand Vaarnii, for which the artist recently designed a series of brutalist wall hooks. And the large living room, as a hall, is also defined by the arrangement of pieces from different periods. To the right of a Victorian oak trestle table in the dining room is a white painted Arts and Crafts period seat with a commanding backrest. To the left of the table, almost like a shadow, is a smaller, curved black seat from the 1840s. And at the head, in stark contrast to both benches, is one of the ultra-solid aluminum Spade chairs. Toogood minimalist.
While downstairs, the house exudes texture-rich, lived-in British warmth, exemplified by the modernist house and art gallery Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. (a frequent source of inspiration for Kaye Rodden) the three upstairs bedrooms are more restrained. In the master bedroom, a hand-carved oak bed is flanked by a pair of simple antique wicker chairs. The two children’s rooms are equally spare but imaginative: Kaye Rodden has pinned sheets of paper to the walls and covered them with drawings of animals, including the family dog (a long-haired Bedlington greyhound named 4B, after the pencil).
Just as Kaye Rodden’s work helps set the tone of her home, place has come to inform her practice. Arranged on seemingly every surface of the house are carefully assembled collections of objects: in the living room, vessels of Hellenic Greek pottery sit atop an 18th-century oak chest alongside Neolithic flint tools and a finger bone of Ice Age moose, and Kaye Rodden often sketch still lifes of these small paintings. “Shapes are then extracted from those drawings,” she explains, “and turned into larger abstract shapes that she organizes into a work of art.” For her recent piece “Just Hanging” (2021), she placed several of these abstract shapes, cut out of paper, on a wire nailed to the wall of her studio. This summer, variations of the composition, done in pencil-shaded parchment, debuted in an exhibition of her work at Francisco Gallery In Los Angeles. “The house is full of the things I want to be surrounded by,” she says. “I think it’s good to interact with art physically, to have it in your hand.”