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Kaffe's fascinating facets

(reprinted from the Evening Standard)

Ornamental cabbages dot the front garden but nothing else outside Kay Kaffe Fassett’s Victorian semi in Kilburn gives a clue to the visual mayhem within. On the other side of the front door is a three storey rainbow coloured Alhambra in which every surface is crawling with pattern in paint patchwork mosaic and needlepoint.

“I am nervous of restful space,” says Kaffe in his easy Californian accent – he’s a genuine Big Sur beach boy who has lived in London since 1964 – and, although he says he is joking, visitors sense that a plain wall would probably give the man a migraine.

Kaffe, an accomplished artist, is best know for “painting” with yarn, and like his distinctive patterned sweaters, his home hums with vibrant kaleidoscope colour. Giant pink cabbage roses sprawl across the living-room wall, a recent impulse that has since been translated into a fabric collection for the Designers Guild . “I copied them from a Victorian tile. I have finally broken that thing of setting a room in aspic. It was wonderful to just slap up the roses on a whim, then change the background colour from beige to yellow afterward. A room should grow like a garden, not arrive in one piece on day one.”

He’s been teaching for Oxfam in Third World countries, showing weavers how to make textiles marketable; all over the house, the treasures that Kaffe’s magpie eye seeks out on his travels are pinned on the wall or clustered on shelves. Equal billing is given to African beaded bracelets, Guatemalan throws and Japanese paper fans. He has turned the dead corner under the stairs into a tiny Topkapi Palace using artist Gill Gordon’s painted flower miniatures and echoing their opulence with similar pots on the shelf in front.

The bathroom is equally exotic with a heavy Moorish influence. Even the basin is richly striped in crimson and olive, courtesy of ceramicist Rupert Spira, who made the glazed floor tiles in rich, spice market colours. Unexpected lavender cornicing gives the blue door and ceiling maximum impact against the ochre walls. “I was thinking of the way they use intense colour in Morocco. They put blue with lavender , with turquoise, so the colours vibrate, and you’re not sure where one stops and the other continues.”

Throughout the house, Kaffe’s artistry celebrates the beauty of everyday things. In the kitchen, a rag rug depicts cooking pots. On the bedroom wall, a detailed quilt of intricate squares in faded colours is his interpretation of the parchment and print appeal of bank notes and postage stamps, the franking symbol picked out in wavy machine stitches. Postage stamps form a lampshade and bargain-basement china, nipped with tile clippers, decorates the IKEA lamp base.

Fruit and vegetables rate high on Kaffe’s list of visual thrills. His tapestry kits of cauliflower cushions are essential accessories for the Sloane sofa, but his own patchwork covered sofa sports his newest needlepoint of splashy, larger-than-life flower heads.

In the dining room, motifs of fruit, vegetables and leaves create a wildly indulgent rococo harvest festival.

“I wanted to feel like I’d walked into some great tapestry,” says Kaffe, and his aim has worked, with the help of Alexander Beauchamp’s extravagant landscape wallpaper panels of Kew Gardens. This is not a room in which to munch breakfast cereal; it is for piling pheasants on banqueting dishes, feathers in tact. Even the embroidered leaf slippers on the tapestry tablecloth look appropriate.

After this, where else was there to go but through the French windows and on to the patio, which is now blanketed with colourful, Gaudi-like pieces of broken bathroom tiles. “I just butter each one with grout, stick it on and then grout around them afterwards. There’s no mystery, just daring do.”

Like Madam Defarge, Kaffe knits contentedly on the sidelines and observes. What he observes is that many people are scared of colour. And his advice? “Find a painting that makes your heart sing. Take a postcard of it around with you and find exactly the same colours in fabrics and paints. If you love it as a painting, you’ll love it as a room.”