Sammy Dent House

The painter Sammy Dent contacted me in 2011 after she had come across my photographs of the Aeolian Islands. She had recently sailed through the islands on holiday with her family, and was browsing on the internet on people and artists who had links to them.

Seeing that I was an interiors and architecture photographer, she wanted to commission me to photograph her house. Of course I was keen, as it was a real treasure trove, brimming full of art and artefacts, many of her own abstract paintings as well as objects picked up over the years from her family’s adventures. Just a couple of years before they had taken their children out of school for a year to sailed across the world in a yacht.

The apartment itself consisted of 3 interjoined lateral apartments in a garden square in Pimlico, central London, with another linked apartment a floor below. There were so many rooms, corridors and staircases that I got lost whilst photographing it! Throughout it was rich with paintings, photographs, art objects, collectibles, painted furniture, colourful walls, musical instruments, skulls and pieces of Pacific island coral and shells, and even a propellor from a 1940s aeroplane. I love houses like this, although I very much appreciate minimalist style, I also adhere to the more is more philosophy as long as it all works together. In Sammy’s house, it certainly does!

This was published in Ville e Casali magazine, see the feature here