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There is a sacred quality to most house museums, with their strangely and painstakingly frozen-in-time rooms kept in homage to former residents who have been deemed, after death, to warrant these reliquaries. Kettle’s Yard, the Cambridge home of Jim and Helen Ede from 1957 to 1973, is rather different. It was designed to be more than a home from its inception, though also not quite a museum.
Sometimes called “the Louvre of the Pebble” because of Jim Ede’s collection of found spherical stones displayed on a downstairs table in a spiral shape, Kettle’s Yard espouses a very particular mixture of “high” and “low” art, cohering into a space that is remarkably personal and idiosyncratic.
Born in 1895, Jim Ede was an artist, writer and lecturer who worked as a curator at the Tate in the 1920s and 1930s. He and his wife purchased the original group of cottages that became Kettle’s Yard in 1957. An extension was added in 1970, designed by David Owers and Leslie Martin.
When he spoke about the project of Kettle’s Yard, Ede referenced the artist friends who inspired him, not just with their art but with the way they lived: Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, David Jones and others. He called Kettle’s Yard a “way of life” rather than an art gallery.
From the beginning, the house was open to visitors each afternoon, most of whom were students at the University of Cambridge. Each autumn, the Edes loaned works from their collection to students to hang in their rooms, a tradition that continues today. The house was given to the university in 1966, though the Edes continued to live there another seven years before retiring to Edinburgh.
The house was a radical statement about living alongside beauty. Curating one’s home now feels mainstream, particularly within a certain Instagram set of aesthetically minded consumers. But the Edes’ dual intention of enjoying it privately and sharing it with visitors was not. Kettle’s Yard is filled with Modernist works by the likes of Joan Miró, Constantin Brâncuși, Barbara Hepworth and many others, alongside found objects: feathers and shells, drawings by the Edes’ grandchildren, vintage objects and furniture.
The aesthetic of Kettle’s Yard has become trendy among young people who cannot afford to buy houses or high-value artworks, but fill their rented flats with dried reeds and old plates and chairs from charity shops. Though it was a characterful choice for the Edes to live in a series of slanting rooms with chalky white walls and used furniture, it is now the rather less romantic default for anyone following their path into a career in art or academia.
This reality doesn’t take away from the nobility of the Edes’ ethos: the desire to share space with beautiful things, not because they are expensive or prestigious but because they speak to the soul. Jim Ede wanted to create a place “where an informality might infuse an underlying formality”. The seriousness, or formality, with which he curated and beheld his world makes Kettle’s Yard feel rather monastic to me. It is a space built on a belief system so deeply held that I am moved to silence whenever I am there, wandering among all of the tiny little things that made Jim Ede’s heart sing.
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