A Meeting place for the Bloomsbury Group, today Charleston Farmhouse is a hub for art and community. From the outside, the home and studio of painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant is a fairly standard, albeit handsome, Georgian building with an adjacent duck pond and a smattering of barns. But the interior, accessed via guided tour, is a feast for the eyes. Every surface seems to be painted in an explosion of colour and pattern. Creativity exudes in a tour de force of artistic expression from the walls to the doors, from the kitchen to the bedrooms.
Some of the 20th century’s biggest names in art, literature and philosophy met here. Charleston could have quite easily become a museum, a work of art in and of itself. A series of exhibitions in the gallery spaces, year-round events and an annual festival, now in its 35th year, bring together artists and thinkers, meaning it remains, as it once was, a place for experimental thinking.
