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FINANCIAL TIMES
US
November 2005
FINANCIAL TIMES NOVEMBER 2005
When the Cunningham-Reids aren’t relaxing inside their holiday home Hippo Point, they can watch giraffes gambol on the shores of Lake Naivasha
Bridging two cultures in Kenya
Designer Dodo Cunningham-Reid tells Allegra Don about African touches in English homes
When the British arrived in Kenya in the early 20th century they tried to bring their world along with them, constructing mock Elizabethan and Tudor mansions that reminded them of home.
But what does one build in Africa a century later, and how does one decorate it? German-born interior designer, Dodo Cunningham-Reid, who arrived in Kenya in the early 1970s, successfully merges two worlds. “You see a landscape and you think of what kind of house you want to build there and how to incorporate it into nature,” she explains, sitting in the immaculate white sitting room of her London home, where she’s staying for a few days.
The designer who is married to Michael Cunningham-Reid, stepson of Kenya’s “founding father”, Lord Delamere, has, over the years, restored several family properties to their former glory and built new ones – all with great personal style.
Her primary home is in Nairobi, a rich and diverse city of almost 3m that has risen up from what had been a handful of shacks founded during the construction of the Uganda Railway a century ago. In its early years, the capital was segregated into different cultural communities and it remains largely that way today. Indian communities traditionally live in an area called Parklands, while diplomats and UN officials call Muthaiga home. British colonial families, descendants of hardy pioneers and the less reputable “Happy Valley” set, mostly live in the south, either in the chic green-lawned suburb of Karen (where Karen Blixen’s coffee plantation once was) or in Langata, a 250 acre of forest inside the Giraffe Centre, with giraffes, warthogs and the occasional leopard as neighbours.
The Cunningham-Reids’ home, a timeless natural quarry stone country house built in the 1920s by the Twining (tea) family, is in Karen. “Michael bought (it) in the 1960s”, Cunningham-Reid says. “It’s a great house with floors in Ugandan hardwood and thick walls to keep out the heat. There is no central heating, so on cold evening we light fires. All I did really was upgrade the bathrooms and kitchen, panel the walls with mahogany and get rid of some of the antique furniture because I wanted to make it more minimalist.”
Simplicity is her mantra. “Though I like my interiors to be rich and warm, I also like them very minimal. (It’s) about letting go; less possessions and more quality.”
A large property was a necessity, however, since Nairobi is the obvious step off for anyone visiting East Africa. The Cunningham-Reids have two independent guest houses with five double rooms in their park-like garden.
They also own Hippo Point, an idyllic country estate on the shores of Lake Naivasha, about 70 km north of Nairobi. The Tudor style main house, build in the late 1920s by a British colonial administrator, was restored by Cunningham-Reid. Less than a 10 minute walk away is another construction, straight out of a Brothers Grimm fairytale, that Cunningham-Reid designed and had built. It’s wooden tower on five floors, as high as Nelson’s Trafalgar Square column, ensconced in a suggestive cedar-wood forest.
“When we acquired Hippo Point, an old English lady had life-tenancy for the main house, so we decided to build the tower on the property for ourselves,” Cunningham-Reid explains. “It was totally in my head.”
The key to making such an unusual building work in its Kenyan environment was using local materials such as cedar wood, mahogany, ebony and black granite, she says. Furnishings enhance the mix. She installed Biedermeier dining chairs with an African twist: ebony inlay. For curtains, she asked friends in Europe to hunt down auction houses. And she also turned ordinary plastic bottles into art objects by wrapping them in colourful beaded covers, made by the Masai – she also sell these among her other finds and inventions, from a shop on the estate.
Following the death of the woman who had lived in the main house, Cunningham-Reid went to work on that too. “I had to follow the style of the house but it was very messy – lots of pigeon-hole rooms and far too much black (so) I stripped it, put in wonderfully scented honey-coloured cedar wood,” she says. “Even a mock Tudor house can have clean lines and be simple inside.”
She installed a floor in polished pigmented cement, “which is lovely in ochre, say for a bathroom, and also not very expensive’, and filled the house with furniture and fabrics inherited from her mother-in-law – as well as key pieces in native woods she commissioned from local artisans. She also converted two stables in the courtyard into guest bedrooms with ensuite bathrooms and transformed the old tractor workshop into an enormous drawing room with an imposing fireplace.
After our conversation about houses in Africa, the white interior of her London home looks unbearably bland. As though reading my thoughts she says “a house in Kenya would be totally different from a house over here.”
