I think I should say at this point that one thing Freddie was always very unlucky with was showers. The shower in his own bathroom and the one in this guest bathroom caused huge damage to different parts of the building, the Japanese Room below the guest suite and the Gallery above the drawing room respectively. Eventually, the shower in the guest bathroom accommodated some hastily made shelves and he abandoned the shower in his own bathroom in disgust. He couldn’t believe that even the best builders in Britain couldn’t build him a shower that worked. Unlike America, where every household, however small, had a bathroom and a shower room that was operational without apparent complication.
The last thing to be said about the guest suite was that it had the best views from the house. As it was on a corner at the front of the house, it overlooked both the fishpond and the lawn with its magnolias in front and towards the conservatory on the other. Because of the position of the house in the grounds, the view from Joe’s and my bedrooms were very similar and were of other people’s windows. It’s amazing what you could see some evenings without even trying! There was very little land at the rear of the house before the high boundary wall of the adjoining properties.
Turning back on the landing, there were two doorways, the first on the left leading to a bathroom which was actually en suite with Joe’s bedroom. To get to Joe’s room from the main landing, there was a door separating the upstairs from the downstairs. This separation was made even more obvious at this threshold where the plush Prussian-blue carpet of the landing finished and a workaday grey stair carpet began, leading past Joe’s and my bedroom to the stairs descending to the kitchen.
Joe’s bedroom was the first doorway on the left and was decorated in a pleasant Messel-green emulsion. My room was next and was resplendently pale-yellow. My room was diagonally opposite the main guest suite so that my view was concomitantly diametrically opposite to the guest suite’s. I occasionally had an intimate view of other people’s lives. But that’s other people’s fault for doing it without closing the curtains or turning the lights off.
At the head of the kitchen stairs, almost opposite my bedroom door, there was a doorway which led to the modern-day minstrel’s gallery which was, once again, back into the kingdom of the blue carpet. This enclave above the sitting room was crammed full of the most up-to-date, state-of-the-art sound equipment. Also up here Freddie stored a vast collection of videos and albums and had had built a drinks bar and various items of bar furniture like stools, seating and a table, again following the same design principle of the mahogany and maple wood pattern used throughout the house. On the wall behind the bar hung a massive painting, ceiling to floor and twelve feet long, of a jungle scene that Freddie commissioned from his friend, the Jamaican artist Rudi Patterson. At the other end of the gallery, stairs led down into a big sitting room made to look even larger with its sixteen foot high ceiling and its polished parquet floor.
Some twenty-five by thirty feet, this room was dominated by huge windows which almost formed the entire north wall. As Freddie had no intention of painting, this former painter’s studio was turned into his sitting room. In fact, it consisted of three separate sitting areas. The first beneath the windows on a dais, where he had had constructed a banquette window seat to fill the entire bay. Opposite this dais and beneath the overhanging gallery was the area he most used at home in front of the big marble fireplace. He wanted to have an open-fire but without the mess that a coal or woodfire would have involved. He compromised by installing a gas log fire which produced the right visual effect and also he got the warmth from it which he always craved.
To one side was a twenty-eight inch television set which served a seating area comprising a large squashy four-seat sofa and two comfortable chairs with a low Japanese table in front of them on which was placed a silver wild cat bought for him by Billy Squier and various coffee table books and porcelain ashtrays courtesy of Limoges via Hermes in Bond Street. Two lamps sat on tables at either end of this main sofa.
Backed on to this sofa but facing the centre of the room was an Empire period drawing room suite consisting of sofa and four chairs, purportedly made for the brother of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, upholstered in pale green and gold with a bumble bee imperial motif. The piano on which ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was composed was in the corner of the room by the window and covering the top of it was arranged a crowded gallery of silver and polished wood-framed photographs of friends and cats.
There were two large pieces of furniture. In the corner facing the piano was a plain mahogany display cabinet, some eight feet high, filled with a priceless Meissen porcelain dinner service, decorated with various hand-painted still-lifes of fruit on a white ground. Freddie needed such a massive display cabinet so that it wasn’t dwarfed by the room. After much searching in antique shops all over London, we came across this cabinet in Chelsea. It had been used in a huge shop so wasn’t specifically designed for anyone’s front room but it was exactly what was required. Terry Giddings and I took the polaroid camera and photographed the cabinet from all angles. These photos we rushed back to Freddie for his approval. He immediately said that he wanted the cabinet but only after it had been renovated to an acceptable condition. The shop upholstered the interior and checked and reinforced the internal, separate metal framework which was to support the plate glass shelves on which the priceless Meissen was to sit. The cabinet was ultimately delivered in two parts by four stout men and the toughest part of its journey from van to sitting room was its entry through the garden gate which was only achieved after the removal of the eighteen inch high drawer section of the cabinet’s base. Freddie of course nervously supervised every inch of the cabinet’s arrival.
“Up a bit… Oooh! Careful of the floor… Down a bit!”
The other piece of furniture in the drawing room was supposedly made at the Majorelle workshop at the turn of the century. It was a blind walnut cabinet with glorious, in-built buttresses appearing to hold it up, curving from the wider base to the narrower top.
There were rugs on the floor although the dais was carpeted in the kingdom of blue.
Dotted around the walls, wherever there was space, were many French sidetables, Victorian copies of eighteenth century originals, all of which bore some expensive vase or ornament. Pride of place was given to a Tiffany lamp in the design of five lily blooms which stood on a commode which housed his collection of photographs. Large vases made by Rene Lalique and the Daum factory were ranged on the window ledge so that the light streamed through them from outside showing their colours to best advantage, everything from a flaming orange with gold leaf somehow applied to the moulded surfaces to vases of sea-deep blues and greens to others of plain, lead-crystal colours.
On the rag-rolled walls, antiqued with two layers of tea-coloured yellow and a topcoat of dark varnish, hung a variety of paintings. He had another series of Dali prints, this time of various Greek mythological characters. Did he have, unknowingly, an affinity to Catalans? So many of his favourite artists came from Catalonia – Gaudi, Picasso, Dali, Miro and Montserrat. Interspersed with these were large Victorian oil paintings. He liked pictures of people as opposed to landscapes and still lifes. Above the fireplace hung a Chagall print and in one corner of the room Freddie had fulfilled another of his ambitions by hanging a lovely portrait of a woman by the pre-Raphaelite artist Tissot.
Freddie loathed overhead lighting and so arranged around the room were many table lamps which could be operated individually and which were made by the likes of Tiffany and Galle and which Freddie could illuminate at will depending on which areas of the room were in use.
Walking in through the main entrance to the sitting room, no eye could fail to miss hanging on the wall opposite, by the window, a full-size, full-length, framed woman’s dress. It was the costume worn by Montserrat Caballe when she first became an international star singing the role of Lucrezia Borgia. Montserrat gave this to Freddie and although he gave it to me upon his death, the dress is now on
ce again the property of Montserrat herself. Full dress circle!
The sitting room was thus at the same time both the grandest room in the house and yet it was very personal and where Freddie spent most of his time. The one thing he always complained of was how he still felt it looked like a museum with displays at all levels around the walls, with the furniture and artwork using up all available space. Like all square rooms, the middle is often empty and it was certainly the case at Garden Lodge. Had he lived, I have no doubt that it would have been a problem which he would have solved.
A set of double doors opened from the sitting room into the entrance hall of the house. Surprisingly, considering the size and period of the house, the hallway and main staircase were disproportionately small. The hall’s floor was, as all rooms on the ground floor, laid to parquet woodblock tiles. There was a beautiful pietra dura (inlaid marble) centre table which Freddie had bought at auction which stood in the middle of the hall under the porcelain chandelier and opposite it a writing desk with a green leathered top which he had brought with him from Stafford Terrace.
Another set of double doors led in direct line with the sitting room to the withdrawing room, commonly called the Japanese room.
This room got its name because it was where Freddie’s fascination for anything oriental was displayed. Here he brought together his love of things Japanese – prints, lacquerware and netsukes – much of it displayed in a Chinoiserie display cabinet in a style much used in the furnishing of the Brighton Pavilion. The cabinet was part of a large suite of furniture which Freddie had bought many years previously from Harrods and which consisted of armchairs and sofas and tables as well as the cabinet. The walls were painted a very pale lemon which provided a suitably neutral background which did not distract from the multi-coloured Japanese prints from the studios of such artists as Utamaro. Also displayed in this room on what looked like a mediaeval pillory was one of his large collection of kimonos. He bought this antique kimono display stand on his last visit to Japan and it allowed the exquisite and intricate design worked on an unfolded kimono to be appreciated in its entirety.
A set of French windows led into the garden where, across the lawn, another set of doors led into the conservatory and then into the Mews house itself, which formed the last section of a full through-view from one side of his property to the other.
There were two other doorways in the hall, the first leading to the small downstairs cloakroom and its matching pair opening into the dining room. This was the room where Freddie had allowed his imagination to run riot. The walls were painted in a strong saffron yellow gloss. The woodwork was picked out in a rich, dark racing green, again gloss. The ceiling’s plaster centre rose was then painted a multitude of colours – lilac, red, purple and green amongst them to create a totally exotic, tropical effect. Gold leaf was used on many of the doors to pick out various beadings and panel borders. The rear wall of the room was floor to ceiling windows outside which, on the boundary wall of the property he had had put up a trompe l’oeil in trellis work to give the impression of an extensive pergola for in fact there was little room, only three or four feet, between the dining room windows and the property’s boundary wall.
The windows were dressed with dark green curtains matching the woodwork, made in thick, dark, heavy satin with very full hems which draped on the parquet floor and which, incidentally, provided a useful toilet facility for the cats who could never be weaned out of this disgusting habit.
All the furniture bar one cabinet was hand-crafted for the room. He had a sideboard specially made as well as a breakfront cabinet. It was in this cabinet that he had a ‘secret’ drawer created and of course immediately blew the secret because he just couldn’t resist showing people the whereabouts of the drawer. Ultimately, the drawer always contained absolutely nothing at all!
Because the dining room wasn’t huge, Freddie couldn’t have a full-sized dining room table and although the table could seat ten comfortably, it wasn’t really wide enough to put a multitude of platters along the centre length. He used tablecloths, some plain white Irish linen used on high days and holidays and others delicately embroidered in small floral motifs bought in both Ibiza and Germany. There were sets of table mats to dress the table, one set being in silver which he bought at Thomas Goode and Co. in South Audley Street. The silver Christofle flatware was kept in specially made drawers in the sideboard along with Lalique, Tiffany and Waterford table crystal as well as the St. Louis glasses, blue glass with stars cut out of the blue, which to my certain knowledge he bought for two hundred pounds each and which were kept in a matching armoire.
There was a French Empire display cabinet which Freddie had bought from Rupert Cavendish on one wall which contained a large dinner service of Noritake ware amongst other treasures. The Royal Doulton dinner services were kept in the kitchen and Freddie left it to us to make everyday decisions about what to use for lunches and dinners. For special occasions, Freddie of course made all such decisions himself, including the one as to which cutlery to use. Although the main service was the Fleur de Lys pattern by Christofle, there was an equally splendid alternative which was an Art Nouveau set which Freddie had found in Belgium along with other pieces he treasured. In Garden Lodge, he had made special cutlery drawers for this almost antique service. He sent away one piece of each part of the service to the cabinet makers so that compartments were literally made to measure. The Fleur de Lys service was housed in a Japanese chiffonier in the kitchen in six very shallow drawers lined with green baize.
From Rudi Patterson, Freddie had bought several paintings, two of which he had specifically commissioned to hang in the dining room. He had been collecting works of art by Rudi for many years and by looking round the walls the various artistic directions which Rudi had explored were obvious. Rudi loves colours. He went through a phase where there were many bright colours in abstract forms and the theme of the tropical landscape features heavily especially those in the countryside scenes from his native Jamaica, including one of the two specifically commissioned for the dining room. This painting showed a house set in amongst the trees which we figured out must have been in the process of being blown over in a huge storm because the house was slightly crooked.
One of the four doors led into the most-used room in the house. The kitchen. The floor in here was black-and-white square ceramic tiles with a border in dark green. The green was followed through in the doors of the huge Amana refrigerators, the larder one in the American style with double doors and the other which housed the ice-making and drinks-chilling facility. The kitchen’s cabinets were in oxblood red and made by Boffi. Freddie got the idea for these from the time he spent in New York staying in the penthouse suite of the Berkshire Place Hotel. He certainly had a ‘thing’ for the colour oxblood; even his car in New York was of the same colour.
Robin Moore-Ede persuaded Freddie to use what was then a new work surface called Corian which, believe me, is all that it was advertised to be. Namely, indestructible. If you accidentally cut into a Corian surface with a bread knife, the incision is removable by shaving a layer off. To clean the Corian surfaces after a year or two’s use, the colour of the surface went from an off-white to a cream and thus a professional sanding machine and sander arrived one day.
The kitchen had a centre island preparation area. Although it looked like a mere butcher’s block on wheels, in fact it had been specifically designed to house wine storage, and had four cupboards and two drawers which contained all the necessary kitchen utensils, knives, spatulas, spoons et cetera. The kitchen had a large double sink under the window on the rear wall, a dishwasher beneath, one four-ring hob, three ovens, a separate ice-making machine and a microwave which even to the end Freddie couldn’t make work.
To one side, there was a breakfast area with seating for six. A built-in banquette upholstered in green leather, with cream leather piping to match the rest of the kitchen, occupied one wall and there were four barrel-shaped stools arranged aroun
d the table which was specially made in a pale hardwood. Freddie also had a massive Welsh dresser built to fit into the corner which contained more of his vast collection of dinner services.
Off the kitchen was the utility room which housed an industrial washing machine, tumble drier and the drinks fridge and from here there was a back door leading to a side passage. In this area, Freddie had built a wine cellar where in the relative cool he could keep his large stock of St. Saphorin white wine from Montreux. It also had space for dry goods like tins of cat food, tomatoes and also the Christmas cakes and puddings. On top of the tumble drier stood the Elner press iron. It was in the early days of these big pressing machines – easily half the size of the ones seen in Prisoner Cell Block H and often whoever happened to be using it was likened to one of the Aussie inmates. Standard routine where laundry was concerned was that I would collect all the used linen – be that sheets or Freddie or Jim’s clothing – and I would load up the machine and then dry it. On a specific day, Margie Winter would come in to spend the whole afternoon ironing, using a combination of the Elner and an ordinary hand steam iron. Everything was washed in house except the big table cloths used for the dining room table which were taken out to Jeeves on Kensington High Street. Although they would be returned in perfect condition, Freddie never wanted to see the creases and so it fell to whoever was standing unoccupied when the master made his choice of table cloth to hear: “Oh, you’re not doing anything. You can iron out the creases!” Once pressed, Margie would return all the items to their respective homes in drawers and cupboards. I of course would always use Jeeves’ services for any dry-cleaning which Freddie’s wardrobe may have required.
Freddie Mercury: An intimate memoir by the man who knew him best Page 18