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Passengers on buses passing up and down Kingston Hill, in south-west London, may wonder what’s inside the building set back from the road that looks like a cross between a municipal pumping station and a Scottish castle. The answer is that it is a shrine to the sculptor Dora Gordine, who designed it, worked and lived in it and whose star glowed in the middle decades of the 20th century but then faded.
Born to an middle-class family in Latvia in the 1890s, Gordine refined her technique in Paris in the 1920s. Her smooth, idealised classical forms, cast in bronze, found a ready market. By the 1930s she was well established, the first female sculptor to have her work acquired by the Tate Gallery. A newspaper critic described her as “very possibly becoming the finest woman sculptor in the world”.
In 1936, with her third husband, the art collector and former diplomat Richard Hare, she built Dorich House — conflating the couple’s first names — at the edge of Richmond Park. She had no architectural training, but she had a sympathetic builder and a clear knowledge of what she needed from a studio.
The two great double-height rooms that fill the first floor are the house’s centrepieces. One is Gordine’s studio, empty today except for a dais and her sculpting tripods. The other is the exhibition room. Here, instead of the gridded metal-framed windows that fill a whole wall in the studio, multiple slender lancet windows bathe the space with natural light but minimise the distracting views out, thus focusing all attention on Gordine’s bronzes. These are arranged now as then, on tall plinths around the room — with one in a semicircular recess, like a church apse, adding to the reverential ambience.
Discreet stairs lead to the private quarters above, which are modestly sized and functional except for the odd extravagance, such as the sliding doors in a circular frame, like a Chinese moon gate, dividing the living and dining rooms. The tiny white-tiled bathroom with its half-length bath is reminiscent of those in the studio flats built for single office workers around the same time.
The museum’s curator, Dr Fiona Fisher, says the main rooms below allowed Gordine to sidestep the tyranny of commercial galleries. “It was an attractive environment to be bringing people into to sit for her or to encourage them to buy the work,” she says. “It certainly fuelled her professional success in that way.”
That success brought a steady flow of private portraits and public commissions. But after Hare’s sudden death in 1966, Gordine gradually withdrew and became reclusive. When she died in 1991, most of her work was put in storage and the house was abandoned, occupied by pigeons and squatters who threw parties among her maquettes. When I visited, a sound installation by Laura Grace Ford filled the living room with disembodied ravers’ reminiscences.
Kingston University acquired the house in 1994. Sympathetically restored, it doubles as a museum and a resource for the university. The studio is used by dance students; academics meet in the ground floor café space under the benevolent gaze of Gordine’s plaster heads on racks.
Fisher is keen that the house acts as a springboard for new work. “We have artists coming into the house all the time, rethinking the collection, bringing their own ideas and enlivening the space for new audiences. I think these things bring a sense of excitement and a constant sense of reflection on Gordine’s work and her position.”
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