Lived-in Beauty: Kettle’s Yard

Imagine being confident enough in the aesthetic value of your own domestic whimsy that you display your house for the world in perpetuity. This is what Jim Ede, art collector and friend to artists, did when he bequeathed his Cambridge house and its contents—dubbed Kettle’s Yard—to the University in 1966. He requested that every piece of modern art, every stone and seedpod, every quotidian artifact remain as it was when he was living there. He and his wife Helen even continued to live there while displaying their house for another seven years, continuing a longer tradition of open houses for students and Cambridge residents—a gentle, informal introduction to modern art and a way of life.

Kettle’s Yard is situated on the only notable hill in central Cambridge, Castle Hill (the castle-less Castle Mound is just up the street). In 1956, Jim and Helen Ede bought four disused workers cottages and converted them into a single house for the collection they had accumulated from contemporary British artists during Jim’s time working for the Tate Gallery and beyond. Visiting nowadays, you’re greeted first by a modern museum wing with a gallery for rotating exhibits. Visiting the house is free; you just have to book a time slot for a docent to take your group across a small breezeway to the house. Peek to either end of the breezeway and you’ll see green—including the adjoining grounds of St. Peter’s Church. As per tradition, a bell pull (once answered by Jim Ede) lets the docent inside know that a new group is waiting, and then you are invited to look around and make yourself at home.

It is a home, not a museum, as Ede intended. Low, raw-beamed ceilings and wood floors with frayed red Persian carpets are opened up by soft white walls and bay windows pouring in light. A sweet mustiness tells you the house is old. You wander small interlocking rooms with eclectic, well-loved furniture that you are allowed to sit on. Slices of light fall through Venetian blinds onto tabletops. Docents keep the meadow flowers in vases fresh and regularly replace the lemon on the pewter plate. You can ask them about the art; there are no information placards. There is a landing overflowing with hanging potted plants, magnified by a suspended glass disc that twists gently in the airflow. You could sit in a nearby rocking chair and let the light dance on your lap.

Beyond the cozy cottage rooms, a whole wing was added in 1970 for more art, Helen Ede’s pianos, and a place for musical gatherings. It’s starkly different, open and modernist with pale brick floors, but full of the same kinds of art crowded on the walls and sculptures playfully placed (especially the bold, graceful stone of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, whose biography Jim Ede wrote), plus many shelves of old books that you can take out and read. Kettle’s Yard has a chamber music recital series held in the central space, which can be viewed from the galleries above (somehow I never made it to any of these recitals, which I thoroughly regret).

I think I can understand Ede’s drive to share his collection and his home. I was raised by a collector—my mom collects books, quarters, buttons, boxes, dried flowers—and by an amateur interior designer—my dad has an eagle eye for matching furniture and complementary tones of wood and the right paintings for the space. I could imagine the lovingly accumulated beach glass and whimsical vases being preserved on the Arts and Crafts-style mantelpiece in my parents’ sitting room for posterity, if not the public. As a kid, before the increased self-consciousness and itinerancy of young adulthood, I would have been pleased to make my own bookshelf arrangements of bits of nature and figurines into a museum. It wasn’t just that I thought they looked nice; they took on poetic significance as I arranged them in ways that spoke to me, represented me even, and I wanted to share that. (Incidentally, I suppose this is also why I write.)

When I visit Kettle’s Yard—which I never get tired of doing—this is more or less what I see. As the docents will point out, Ede’s arrangements of art and artifacts in his home was an artform in itself. He placed that lemon on a pewter plate as a counterpoint to the yellow dot in the abstract Miro painting across the room; he scattered motifs like spirals through the rooms—a wooden cider press screw here, a twisted seedpod there, smooth round pebbles arranged in a meditative spiral on a table; he paired paintings and sculptures that spoke to each other. Again, I get this. I habitually notice patterns—alliteration, echoing curves or colors, the way rooftops or trees line up against the sky. Is this just a human thing, like seeing shapes in the clouds? It was certainly Jim Ede’s thing.

There are more points in the constellation of artworks and found objects than you could possibly take in even over several visits—even the little bathroom has its own art—but it doesn’t feel overwhelming. Everything is balanced. The art is often understated and abstract, inviting you to look for a while. It’s a place you want to live just so you can gradually discover every pocket of interest.

At the same time, there is perhaps something fragile about the suspended animation of this place. We’re sitting on the furniture, but no one is truly living here. If I were, I think I would want to eventually move a seashell or add some new art. But there is life in the steady stream of visitors, the chamber music recitals, the community art events, the new exhibitions. People become part of the display, adding their own shapes and movement to the patterns in the rooms.

Visiting the house is perhaps more like reading an interactive, three-dimensional memoir than either visiting a friend’s house or going to a museum. As Jim Ede said, the collection was more than an aesthetic; it was a way of living. He invited us to step into his mind as well as his home. He’s no longer there to show us around, but in his collection he left a creative’s map of wonder for the material world.

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