Charleston is an English farmhouse nestled deep in the Sussex countryside. In 1916 Charleston became the home of Bloomsbury group artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant; two of the most radical and influential British artists of the twentieth century. The house had an open-door policy and frequently hosted fellow intellectuals including Virginia Woolf, E.M Forster, and Roger Fry. Over the next 50 years, they transformed Charleston, from an unremarkable seventeenth-century farmhouse, into a decorative masterpiece - bringing the experimental language of modernism into their home.
Annie's collaboration with Charleston has seen her create three distinctive Chalk Paint® colours inspired by the incredible home of the Bloomsbury group. Each of the colours are named after local places which the artists would have known, and are inspired by elements of the highly decorated rooms within the British farmhouse.
About the Book:
Set in the heart of the Sussex Downs, Charleston Farmhouse is the most important remaining example of Bloomsbury decorative style, created by the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Quentin Bell, the younger son of Clive and Vanessa Bell, and his daughter Virghinia Nicholson, tell the story of this unique house, linking it with some of the leading cultural figures who were invited there, including Vanessa's sister Virginia Woolf, the writer Lytton Strachey, the economist Maynard Keynes and the art critic Roger Fry. The house and garden are portrayed through Alen MacWeeney's atmospheric photographs; pictures from Vanessa Bell's family album convey the flavor of the household in its heyday.