House exterior. © courtesy of The Charleston Trust.

To coincide with the 20th anniversary of Charleston being open to the public, Olivia Laing went off to explore what was once the rural HQ of the Bloomsbury group.

The Charleston Festival is a remarkable event, drawing writers and audiences from all over the world to a small farmhouse in the Sussex countryside. But this is no ordinary farmhouse.

Charleston, nestled into the South Downs near Lewes, was the home of artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and the country outpost of the Bloomsbury group.

Vanessa Bell, by Duncan Grant, 1916-1917. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Vanessa Bell’s sister, Virginia Woolf, lived with her husband, the writer and publisher Leonard Woolf, across the fields in Rodmell, while the economist John Maynard Keynes, critic Lytton Strachey and artist Roger Fry were frequent visitors.

The house was taken on by Bell, Grant and David Garnett in 1916 because the men, as conscientious objectors to World War 1, were only exempted from military service if they worked on the land. Over the years, the house became more and more elaborately decorated, as well as housing an impressive art collection, including work by Sickert, Renoir and Picasso.

Vanessa Bell died in 1961, and when Duncan Grant died in 1978 it seemed that Charleston Farmhouse, once the creative hub of the Bloomsbury set, would not survive. In the years before his death, Grant had lived largely in his studio whilst the rest of the once glorious house slipped into decay.

The exuberantly decorated interior of the house. © The Charleston Trust.

28 years later, and artists and writers are once more converging on Charleston for an eight-day festival of literature, music and conversation. The garden is a riot of tulips and cherry blossom, and the house a rare jewel of the Bloomsbury artistic style. So how was this prodigious feat of restoration and revivification achieved?

Just after Grant’s death, it became clear that if Charleston was to be preserved it would need to be done quickly. Two of Vanessa Bell’s children, Angelica Garnett and Quentin Bell, were determined the place Quentin Bell once described as “not so much a house as a phenomenon” should be preserved. The Charleston Trust was established and the slow, painstaking process of restoration was begun.

“It was a very difficult restoration project”, explained curator Dr Wendy Hitchmough, “because the house had evolved so much over the years. We had to really think about which era we were going to restore it to, and in the end the decision was to take it back to the Fifties.”

Every surface in the house has been painted, even the bath. © The Charleston Trust.

The house is now once again an extraordinarily colourful and inspiring place to be. From the kitchen walls to the sides of the bath, every last space has been decorated. Doors are adorned with frescos in the characteristically exuberant and sensual Bloomsbury style. Even the library, formerly Bell’s bedroom, has black walls and is adorned with a Duncan Grant frieze of a cock and a dog, the one to wake Bell in the morning and the other to guard her at night.

Such whimsy permeates the house, which is very much an artist’s home. The light-filled downstairs studio has been restored exactly as if Bell and Grant may at any moment return, perhaps from a brief snooze in a deckchair on the lawn.

Much of the original art that hung in the house has been restored or re-bought, including the beautifully decorated Omega furniture members of the group produced. A particular jewel, and one that Dr Hitchmough is especially proud of, is a portrait of John Maynard Keynes by Grant. The painting came up for auction earlier in the year, and none of the Charleston team had previously known of its existence.

Portrait of John Maynard Keynes by Duncan Grant, 1917. © The Charleston Trust.

“The owner very much wanted us to have it, but he had to have the market price, so we had to raise that before the auction date. But we had a very strong case, because Charleston really is the only place where the whole of Keynes' life and work is celebrated. And the painting is just so beautiful, so everybody we showed it to looked at it and agree that we certainly should have it.”

In planning the restoration and running of Charleston, a very significant decision was taken. As Dr Hitchmough puts it, “we didn’t want Charleston to be a museum that would be stuck in aspic.” As such, the Charleston trust has a bold and imaginative outreach programme.

As well as organising events throughout the year, regularly hosting exhibitions in the art gallery and running an award-winning education programme, the house opens its doors each year to an array of writers, broadcasters and critics for the annual Charleston Festival.

Festival audiences enjoy the sunshine in the Charleston gardens. © The Charleston Trust.

“The idea of the festival was because we wanted to continue the creative energy. Charleston was always about contemporary practices, and we wanted to invite contemporary writers to the house. The festival is very much about us engaging with different artists and them responding to what we have here."

The festival began in 1992, and was “a very small affair”. But over the years its reputation spread, and this year’s programme includes such luminaries as Jung Chang, Lionel Shriver, Peter Carey and Patti Smith.

According to Dr Hitchmough, part of the appeal of performing at Charleston is that speakers are often fascinated by the house and its history. And then, of course, there’s the engaging experience of performing at the mercy of the British countryside.

The path to the tea tent. Image by Olivia Laing

“Because the festival takes place in a marquee, in a field, surrounded by cows, it has a slightly surreal quality which very often brings out the best in our speakers. You have a sense that this is something extraordinary.

"For example, Melvyn Bragg came and the weather had been beautiful all through the festival until his event, when there was the most torrential rain and a thunderstorm. He was quite relaxed, but when he opened the porch door to walk down through the garden to give the talk the heavens opened. It completely stirred him up, and he got to the stage and couldn’t stop laughing! The festival is a strange and wonderful thing.”

With the forecast set for shine, and food provided by the locally worshipped Bill’s Produce Store, there can’t be many finer ways to spend the month of May than sipping wine as contemporary writers expound upon their work. How utterly Bloomsbury, darlings!

The Charleston Festival runs from 20 - 29 May 2006.

Olivia Laing is the 24 Hour Museum Renaissance Student Writer in the South East region. Renaissance is the groundbreaking initiative to transform England's regional museums, led by MLA, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council.