The Guards Tent at Drottningholm Palace

The Guards Tent at Drottningholm Palace was a place of pilgrimage to me as a child growing up in Stockholm. Hidden amid the palace parkland, it was built to house the king’s troops when he was in residence. Rather than select some humdrum wooden huts, Gustav III rightly decided upon a trompe-l’oeil tent, made from metal but resembling an Arthurian jousting fantasia complete with faux-fabric blue-and-white-striped walls, a lambrequin frieze in a gold-tassel passementerie style and a door composed of heroically draped swags, propped open and beckoning you inside, where you imagine you would find the fire roaring. My first lesson in understanding that the utilitarian could be decorative.

I was captivated by it as a small boy and liked to imagine knights and princesses or soldiers on campaigns in far-flung places. This is what is so rewarding about the feeling of trompe l’oeil: it suspends the real to reveal the world as a stage, as something malleable that we can shape to make our ideas come true. I think this is what has captivated so many people about the Guards Tent over time.

The great eccentric Carlos de Beistegui copied the tent for his own folly at Château de Groussay. And you can detect a similar approach in Portmeirion, Clough Williams-Ellis’s Italianate village  in Wales, which comes complete with a crinkly-tin shelter, for a miniature train, that resembles the The Guards Tent at Drottningholm Palace.

It has just dawned on me that I have my own tented room at home in West Sussex. While not metal,  does feature a wall and ceiling of blue-, white- and gold-striped fabric, leather campaign chairs, canary-yellow foldable tray tables and a few bits of French Empire furniture. I’m now wondering if I have created the adult version of those dreams I had as a child.