The 2020s way to announce a new home or a finished renovation is to snap it and share it online, then wait for the likes and congratulatory comments to roll in. But there is a more enduring, analogue way to mark such a milestone.
House portraits aren’t new — I inherited a decades-old watercolour with my house (in which the cladding isn’t battered and the now-limp hydrangeas appear big and bushy) — but as artist Lisa Tolley explains: “They offer something more permanent, especially as photography has become more throwaway with the likes of Instagram.” Tolley, who is based in Thames Ditton, has been immortalising homes for almost 20 years. Commissions range from her local neighbourhood to Scotland. “I’ve noticed an uptick in requests for generational homes, where a number of members of the same family have lived in the house and as it’s being sold the portrait is a memento for everybody,” she explains.
Her joyful gouache paintings often depict the owners and their pets, sometimes with a nod to hobbies and interests — maybe via an oar leaning against the garage or a football shirt hanging on the washing line. Tolley works from photographs and her fees start at £325 — small change in the grand scheme of moving costs for a long-lasting keepsake.
A house portrait can also capture a moment in time; a friend of mine was given a drawing of their Peckham flat by her husband for their first wedding anniversary (the symbol for which is paper). It now hangs in the hallway of their home in Altrincham, Greater Manchester, where they live with their two children. “I love how it’s a reminder of our carefree, child-free days,” says my friend. Artistic licence can also be a little more forgiving: “Ours isn’t hugely accurate as it looks more like a condo in Miami than an ex-council house,” she laughs.
Personalisation is key to Ele Grafton’s work. The self-taught model maker creates 3D light boxes of homes using handcrafted card embellished with documents that are meaningful to its owners. She has worked with sheet music, recipe cards, poems and wedding certificates, all precision-placed so that granny’s writing is still legible across a tiny roof. “For one couple I used locations of maps showing where they’d been to university, where they got engaged and married, with the house as their final destination. It’s a way of bringing a combined life story into a house,” says Grafton.
Most people tend to cry when they see them for the first time
Each whimsical model is displayed on the open pages of old books sourced at auction and presented in a bespoke box. It can take Grafton between four to six weeks to make each one and prices start from £3,000. Her client base is as far-flung as the Caribbean and California. “Most people tend to cry when they see them for the first time,” says Grafton.
The slowing of the property market is what Ben Taggart, founder of Model Houses, believes has led to an increase in commissions for his painstakingly detailed, miniature replicas of residential facades. “People are living in the same location for longer, so when they finally decide to move the house is full of memories and they want to take a reminder of those times with them,” he says. Making a semi-relief of a model of a terraced house without its neighbouring properties provides a fresh viewpoint. “The building is taken out of its environment and architectural details, which would usually go unnoticed, are drawn into focus,” says Taggart, who has made models of houses in smart addresses around Chelsea, Richmond and Dulwich.
Taggart charges from £3,500 and carries out an architectural survey on each property to ensure it is rendered accurately to scale. Details such as half-drawn curtains and plants in pots feature; for a project in Clapham, he recreated the tiny pair of wellies the owner’s son always left on the doormat after a walk on the common. His favourite commission was from two brothers whose family had emigrated to Britain in 1964 from the Caribbean. “They had loved their unassuming Victorian terraced home in east London and when their father died, they reluctantly decided to sell,” he says. “I made a matching pair of identical models, one for each of the brothers showing every detail, even down to the pebbledash texture on the walls.” All these creations prove that making a home is an artform all of its own.
