When he was seven, Pablo Bronstein won a school prize for a drawing of ‘Laertes Castle’. On his phone he has a photograph of it: a precocious confection of patterned bricks and stripey onion domes, meticulous and ebullient, its proud owner, Laertes, father of Odysseus, standing at the gates sporting a top hat. ‘My teacher loved it so much he commissioned me to do another one,’ says Pablo. ‘I was thrilled and added feathered plumes to the domes. To my horror he didn’t like the plumes. It was an early introduction to the cruelty of the art world.’
Pablo has stayed true to his childhood passion for drawing buildings, but if the art world has been cruel to the artist as an adult, it is not apparent from his CV, which bristles with prestigious venues and choice commissions. As he sits on a velvet knole settee in the living room of his out-of-town residence, a 17th-century terraced house, set one street back from the beach in a pretty town on the Kent coast, a blazing fire casting its flickering glow across dark panelling, oil paintings and early Georgian furnishings, you would be hard-pressed to see him as victim.
The house is as much a Pablo Bronstein creation as any of his witty, elegant pen-and-ink drawings or architectural conceits, and shares with them the same Baroque aesthetic. He bought five years ago with his partner and fellow Argentine, the poet and journalist Leo Boix. While their home in London (WoI September 2011) is spare, white and almost minimalist enough to suit Leo’s ascetic leanings, this house is as rich as plum pudding.
‘Pablo has been meticulous about its decoration and furnishings,’ explains Leo. ‘It has taken months and years, and huge amounts of energy,’ Pablo describes the project as ‘an ongoing conversation,’ between them. ‘Leo made some of the big decisions, like painting the hall gloss black, and plays the vital role of editing, and curbing my shopaholic tendencies.’ Later, Pablo admits to repeated and often furtive repaints. ‘I have nearly driven Leo to tears with some of my impulse colour schemes. The Chinese room has probably had as many as 20.’
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These decorative attentions are a new experience for a house that until the early 1980s had survived unrestored, drably dressed in old-fashioned brown and arsenic green, its original layout undisturbed – that is, a basement kitchen and scullery, two ground-floor reception rooms, a first-floor drawing room and main bedroom, and two attic rooms under the steep pitch of the roof. ‘We were told that the old man who lived here was still heating water for his tin bath on the kitchen range,’ says Pablo. As DFL (down from London) gentrification seeped along this southeastern edge of England, the house was bought and done up as a holiday let which is the state in which Pablo and Leo found it – lifeless, cold, boring, all magnolia paint, plasterboard and beige carpet. There was just enough left – a wall of panelling, a late Georgian staircase, a casement window, stone flags and that kitchen range – to convince them that the house could be revived, its character rediscovered and reconstructed. ‘I fantasised about pulling off plasterboard to reveal more panelling, but there wasn’t any,’ says Pablo. But there were wide, old floorboards under the beige carpets, and fireplace embrasures in every room, though Pablo had to take a sledgehammer to walls covered with concrete to find two of them.
It is hard to imagine Pablo, as neat and graceful as a dancer, wielding a hammer, let alone one big and heavy enough to pulverise concrete. But as we move from room to room, and he opens a cabinet to single out a particular piece from his collection of 18th-century silver, or lifts a delft apothecary jar off a mantel shelf to discuss some aspect of its decoration, he also reveals just how much of this house, which feels so authentically historic, is actually new – designed, made or reconstructed, more often than not by Pablo himself. He shared the work with local beekeeper and carpenter Elvin Roberts, and delegated to a few other trusted craftspeople including frame-makers Pure and Applied and cabinetmaker Steven Marfurt. ‘I have to state that [am a control freak,’ says Pablo. ‘Everything is to my exact specification on peril of execution. I hover, watching the placement of every nail.’
In truth, he mucked in more than hovered. In the basement kitchen, for example, he and Elvin built the fitted dresser with it wooden top and shelves below, using legs turned in London to a pattern of Pablo’s own devising. Elvin made the plate rack and Pablo carved the simple curves of its apron. They prised off the plasterboard together and Elvin lime-plastered the walls. In the dining room next to the kitchen, Pablo took down the false ceiling, restored the double boarding, and made the fire surround. He has vision, but also the patience for some of the more tiresome jobs. So it was Pablo who stripped, stained and waxed three storeys of stair rail, and picked the filler out of the shakes in the handsome oak beam that dissects the living-room ceiling. He designed the cornice in his first-floor study, and then glued on each separate dentil, one by one. And he also painted, and painted again. And again.
His final (or most recent) decision on a colour scheme for the chameleon Chinese music room is a tropical cocktail of turquoise and school-poster-paint green, which works a treat as a background to gilded brackets and Oriental china. The most playful of all in the house, it has something of Laertes’ Castle about it. Perhaps Pablo will add some feathered plumes, when Leo is not looking.
‘Pablo Bronstein: Clocks’ runs at Olney Gleason from 10 September – 17 October 2026. For more information, visit olneygleason.com.
A version of this article appeared in the April 2017 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
