‘It is like being inside a migraine’ – the first visitor to Grayson Perry’s House for Essex reveals all

Hanging Hondas, gigantic tapestries and a chapel for a living room - the artist’s bizarre shrine to an Essex everywoman is now open to guests. Here’s what they can expect …

‘You’re the first to stay here,” says the guy with the keys as he lets us into A House for Essex, a two-bedroom, two-bathroom, one-chapel, shrine to the late Julie Cope – a fictional Essex everywoman – designed by artist Grayson Perry. It’s not clear whether being first is a good thing or not, but he shows us how to unlock the french doors, because “the architect was here last week and he couldn’t open them”.

When he has gone, my sisters and I run upstairs – in the great tradition of siblings arriving at temporary accommodation – to divvy up the bedrooms. There are two, each with a four-metre-high tapestry facing the bed. You can choose to be stared at by Julie and her first husband, the unfaithful Dave, or Julie and her second husband, the lovely but teary Rob, supposed creator of the house and its contents. I get Dave, but the tapestry turns out to be missing so I have a blank wall. We start to worry whether the tapestry (part of a rumoured £1m worth of art in the house) is supposed to be missing, but decide not to tell anyone in case it isn’t. The Dave room faces west across shallow, rolling fields of wheat, while the Rob room looks east towards a field with horses and rabbits – and beyond them, the distantly muted working ports of Harwich and Felixstowe.

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from Network Front | The Guardian http://bit.ly/1IYUaCn