Patricia and Jack’s House on Gugh

—03.28.2000—

I’m back on Gugh this week, St. Agnes’s siamese twin. Patricia is taking their dogs back to their other house in Kent, so I said I’d stay on again to look after the plants and wild things. Not that the wild things need looking after, I’m sure they get on fine without me. It’s nice to be back though.

I don’t think I fully described the house the last time I was here, did I? It was built in the 1920s by a retired engineer from London who came out to Scilly to get away from it all. Apparently, he flipped a coin to decide between Sampson and Gugh. Sampson lost the toss, is still uninhabited, and has been since the 1850s. So Gugh is now home to the two buildings he built.

The one next door used to be the main house and this one was the barn. This house served as a barn through the 1940s when Maggie Ross—who is James Ross’s mom—was living here in her late teens and early twenties. She still thinks of Patricia and Jack’s bedroom as “Alfred’s room.” Alfred was their horse. She also told me recently that she used to go up to the top of the island with a gramophone and spend the afternoons listening to records and dancing in the meadow. I love that.

But anyway, the house, it’s a very comfortable, granite building with a gently wavy concrete roof designed to deflect the gusting North Atlantic winds. The dining room looks like it was lifted straight out of a sailing ship. Out back Jon was commissioned to build an enclosed patio—the English call this a conservatory. This particular one is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

Set into the corner of the house, the space is bounded by a series of wood-and-plexiglass doors forming an arc from one wall of the house to another. Each door is progressively larger than the one before, and all can be pivoted open at their midpoints. When all of them are open, the room changes from an indoor space to an outdoor space. The effect is dramatic since there are no door frames. The doors simply lock into one another when they’re closed.

The whole back garden is thick with plant life and enclosed in with a stone hedge and trees to block the gusts. The entrance to this enclosed garden area is a set of giant, sun-bleached, wooden doors. The hedge’s stonework rides right over the top of them producing a striking old-California-mission look. These are, in effect, the main doors of the house. The original front door was blocked years ago since it produces a gale force blast when opened when the winds are up. The house appears to have negotiated a delicate balance with nature, taking it into account instead of trying to push it aside. As such, nature seems to have allowed it to stay. It’s nice to see.

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Last week I sent Clare a necklace that I had made out of seashells. Remember her, the friend of Ellen’s that came down over New Year? We were emailing a bit and I mentioned that I planned on making a necklace out of the little yellow snail shells I’d found. She said, “If you ever need someone to make a necklace for...” So I sent her one. It turned out beautifully—very elegant, slightly tribal, very intricate, and very fresh. She was stunned. She couldn’t believe it, loved it, said she was very impressed but didn’t say “thank you.” It bugged me. I through our emails I’ve begun to see her in a different light.