So to Bruce Chatwin and his impeccable taste. He bought a lease on a one room attic in Eaton Place. In An Anatomy of Restlessness Chatwin wrote about how he found and renovated this room.
“It was Sunday. My friend glanced down the property columns of the Sunday Times; her fingers came to rest beside an entry, and she said, ironically, ‘That is your flat.’
The price was right; the address was right; the advertisement said ‘quiet’ and ‘sunny’; but when, on Monday we went to see it, we were shown a room of irredeemable seediness.
There was beige fitted carpet pocked with coffee stains. There was a bathroom of black and bilious-green tiles; and there was a contraption in a cupboard, which was the double bed. The house, we were told, was one of two in the street that did not belong to the Duke of Westminster.
… It did, however, face south. The ceiling was high. It had a view of white chimneys.
… Very rarely—perhaps never in England—I’ve gone into a modern room and thought, ‘This is what I would have.’ I then went into a room designed by a young architect, John Pawson, and knew at once, ‘This is what I definitely want.’
Pawson has lived and worked in Japan. He is an enemy of Post-Modernism and other asinine architecture. He knows how wasteful Europeans are of space, and knows how to make simple, harmonious rooms that are a real refuge from the hideousness of contemporary London. I told him I wanted a cross between a cell and a ship’s cabin. I wanted my books to be hidden in a corridor, and plenty of cupboards. We calculated we could just make a tiny bedroom in place of the green bath. The room, I said, should be painted off-white with wooden Venetian blinds the same color. Otherwise, I left it to him.
I came back from Africa a few months later to find an airy, well-proportioned room, rather like certain rooms in early Renaissance paintings, small in themselves but with vistas that give an illusion of limitless space.”
Chatwin bought a folding card table, a tubular chair, and a Chateau de Versailles sofa from Christie’s. He already had “an old French chair, of the Regence, in its original but bashed-up condition,” and an Alvar Aalto birchwood table and stool.
Bruce Chatwin had taste.