In an 1871 column, the critic John Ruskin recounted the painter JMW Turner saying the skies above the Thanet region of Kent were ‘the loveliest’ in Europe. Nicholas Cullinan, the National Portrait Gallery director, reminds me of this when I visit him and art dealer Mattias Vendelmans in their weekend bolthole: a flat on the 14th floor of Margate’s Arlington House with views of those same skies. Opened in 1963, this soaring Brutalist tower block was the vision of developer Bernard Sunley, who imagined a leisure complex made up of holiday lets rising above restaurants, shops and a pool. Designed by Philip Russell Diplock, fresh from his landmark Ariel hotel at London airport, Arlington channelled a distinctly continental flavour.
The entrance lobby’s Carrara-marble facings and turquoise-and-white-banded linoleum still feel like a slice of Milan. The building’s façade of white concrete flecked with calcined flint would once have glinted in the sun. The 1960s was perhaps the last gasp of the British seaside resort, soon to be eclipsed by the newly accessible Costa del Sol. Margate’s recreational appeal was dented by wartime bombing, a 1953 storm and clashes between mods and rockers in 1963.
Attempts by the council to accommodate a new generation of visitors with better roads and parking removed several of the place’s charms but didn’t reverse tourism’s ebb. By the end of the century, coach tour operators reported that elderly customers felt unsafe visiting the resort. It was Turner who brought a change in fortunes in the 1990s, when plans emerged to build an art centre in his name (the painter attended school in Margate, and some of his earliest-surviving works depict the town, to which he returned throughout his life). When the Turner Contemporary opened in 2011 it was an immediate success, welcoming more than twice the predicted number of annual visitors, and sparking a visual-art boom: Carl Freedman Gallery moved from London to Margate in 2019, and was joined by younger galleries and project spaces.
When I first visited the town about 15 years ago, the best place for lunch was the Mad Hatter tea rooms, a crab-sandwiches kind of establishment, where the eccentric owner proudly showed me his collection of Victorian toilets. Today, there’s acclaimed cooking at fashionable restaurants, tasteful bars and stylish lodging. It was after Cullinan invited Margate’s most famous daughter, Tracey Emin, to create new bronze doors for the revamped NPG that he and Vendelmans began to spend more time here. Having seen multiple areas of London undergo rampant cultural refurbishment, Cullinan says, he was drawn to the town’s offer of a ‘real’ community. ‘Let them try gentrifying Margate,’ he recalls Emin saying – and indeed, Thanet still has some of the highest rates of child poverty, not just in Kent but the whole of the Southeast.
For Vendelmans, meanwhile, the appeal of this stretch of coast was simply being physically closer to his native Belgium, across the Channel. As much as its location, it was the splendour of Arlington House itself that drew the couple. Their enthusiasm for the bold, thoughtful design is evident when I visit, with Cullinan extolling the ‘beautiful, original-teak’ concierge office, as well as the building’s angular footprint and north/south orientation, which afford every dwelling a sea view. When they moved in, however, the flat’s interior walls were blocking much of the light. So, with the assistance of a local architect, they remodelled the floor plan. A corridor now cuts a sharp angle from the door through to the open living space, and a series of apertures with sliding glass screens flood the kitchen and bathroom with light. Inspired by Japanese shoji room dividers, these screens also nod to the block’s original aluminium-framed sliding windows, which in turn guided the duo’s distinctive treatment of the living spaces.
The windowsill in the main room sets the height for a ‘dado’ throughout the flat, with the lower walls lined with dark plywood (a take on Le Corbusier’s Cabanon de Vacances in the South of France) and the upper parts and ceiling covered with shimmering mirrored panels, which create a shifting mural of reflections, like light on rippling water. Lie back on the built-in bed in the guest-room and you could imagine yourself at sea in a ship’s cabin. The two men had considered using plate-glass mirror, thinking of the staircase leading up to Coco Chanel’s apartment on Rue Cambon in Paris, but found its pin-sharp reflection too intense. Inspiration struck while watching a scene in the 2018 horror film Suspiria, in which a dancer rehearses in a studio covered in vertical strips of mirror that create a dreamy, almost kaleidoscopic distortion. Excited, Cullinan rang the production designer, who told him how to recreate the effect.
‘Once you’re aware of them, mirrored panels are everywhere,’ notes Vendelmans, pointing to the adjacent 1935 Dreamland cinema, where slender pillars are clad in – lo and behold – similar bands. I mention that I’d assumed the idea came from Cecil Beaton’s foil portrait backdrops – the inspiration, it is said, for Andy Warhol’s use of aluminium at the Factory, which Cullinan points out opened the very same year as Arlington House. That dialogue between the 1930s and the 60s is echoed in the couple’s choice of furniture, including a painted wooden folding screen bought off an antique dealer who noted it could be Art Deco or a 1960s homage.
An Italian Perspex chair by François Français feels perfectly at home alongside a Paul Secon pendant lamp, whose complex form the couple appreciate for resembling a prewar Naum Gabo sculpture. Unsurprisingly, the flat is also home to a healthy sprinkling of art: a still from Amie Siegel’s film Provenance (2013), which Cullinan acquired for the Met in New York while he was a curator there; works by young British artists such as Christina Kimeze; a tender self-portrait by their friend Jake Grewal; a coastal sunset by the Swedish Symbolist Yngve Svedlund (whose catalogue raisonné Vendelmans is compiling). But in some ways Arlington serves as an escape from the cultural consumption and networking of their lives in London. When I ask what their typical weekends in Margate look like, it’s reading poetry, ‘great reservations’ for food, steaming sessions at the Sea Scrub Sauna and dunks in the tidal pool. And walks on the beach, of course, under Turner’s preferred skies.
A version of this article appears in the March 2024 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
