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The world of interiors
UK
1996 0
The Pagoda Tree
Towering eight stories above the African Plain,
Dodo Cunnigham-Reid's lakeside pagoda fools even passing hippos into thinking it's a tree.
Pat Garratt braves the stairs - Photography Tim Beddow
In a hundred years time, tourists to Lake Naivasha in Kenya could easily be taken on a detour to marvel at the extraordinary folly created by a late 20 th Century eccentric. To Dodo Cunningham-Reid – German Born, British by marriage and the woman who envisaged the soaring affair – such notoriety would be nothing new. Her husbands, stepmother was Diana, Lady Delamere of Africa's ‘happy Valley' scandal and his mother, Mary, who was sister of the flamboyant Edwina Mountbatten.
But this Pagoda style tower and weekend retreat is no monument to a turbulent past: it reflects Dodo's desire to enrich the natural environment of the continent she loves so much.
But why this yearning should manifest itself in a 155-ft-high octagonal pyre set amongst the swaying fever trees, mystifies even it's designer “I felt the need for it” she puzzles “I've always loved towers, they remind me of cloud-cuckoo-land full of romance and illusion. They're contemplative from another time. Hardly anyone builds towers these days in Europe because they are too costly”
Aah! But this is Africa. Dodo's husband is a ‘terribly generous' chap and the price of a native craftsman is a fraction of the SW3 equivalent. Employing only local people was all part of Dodo's grand plan: she had already cut her teeth on the interiors of friends homes and her own Lake Naivasha Hotel.
Four and a half years elapsed from the time local architect George Wade drew up the plans' following Dodo's ‘Artistic Design' until final completion. Her scribbles became translated into cement surmounted by an Eiffel towerish steel ribcage, clad on the outside with cypress wood weatherboarding on the inside with African Hardwood. Work was often interrupted: the hippos constantly stepped on the plumbing, so we had to dig deeper with the piping. And if we did not watch out, birds would nest in the steel ribs.
Even today as Dodo's occasional paying guests take tea in the veranda or picnic on the kilim-strewn grass, giraffe, zebra or monkeys drift past . The tower blends in so well with the trees that the animals do not feel threatened by it. She confirms.
The African yellow thorn trees – called fever trees because the first settlers contracted malaria from the mosquitoes that swarmed there – no longer present a treat to health. They did, however, inspire the vertical structure because “nothing else would have seemed right” Dodo see's in her tower the barest hint of a Nordic church, the touch of a wooden Russian dacha , and a whiff of the orient – stirred and risen in the baking heat of the oldest continent of all. Her own design style she describes as intuitive, unconventional and timeless.
She has no formal design training, yet oversaw “every single detail” of the house herself. The eight levels of the building are cut into segmented rooms like cake slices with the living room three slices wide, and the smallest bedroom only one. At the very top is a meditation room and a tree top high lookout tower, reached by a ladder. Dodo's respect for wood stretches into every corner, from the cedar floors and ceiling, to the kitchen, drawing and dining rooms, all lined with mahogany panels. ‘As mahogany gets very dark I color washed it' she explains. “We used three water based colors – a terracotta, a light yellow and a white- and then rubbed it all down with sandpaper Between each coat. It was horrific work.'
In the kitchen an Arabian wheel motif, often found along the coast of Kenya and Zanzibar, is carved onto the cupboard doors. The pink-toned mantelpiece in the drawing room is hand carved cedar – impressive but purely decorative. Any furniture that wasn't inherited from her husband's family or rooted out by Dodo or friends worldwide, was made to her specifications in Nairobi. The olive wood dining chairs with ebony inlay for instance, were designed by Marc Rampelberg in the Biedermeier style and given gusty coverings of a locally woven button check.
The sofa's and their cotton covers were made locally as was the coarse hand woven carpet, the leather chesterfield in the library area, the marble panels in her bathroom, the pinky terrazzo work surfaces in the kitchen and the pleated silk lampshades. “There is no skilled labor here,” Dodo says, “so you have to discover how to design something that is beautiful and not too complicated. It is like making a soufflé. You make plenty of them – wrong, wrong, wrong – then you get it right.”
Unable to dismiss the tower from her mind, even when abroad, she picks up follyish items wherever she makes camp.
On a recent trip to London she bought a ‘tiny old carved Pagoda with a Buddha underneath, perfect for a guest room.' From Tunisia\a , France and Thomas Goode in London comes colored or hand painted glass. In the master bedroom sprawls a 19 th century gilt bed and a writing desk from France, and in the study sits a curvy, cool white upholstered love seat, a focal point of this sensual eyrie.
From the study, a carved ladder leads to the meditation room.
Here you can sink breathlessly onto floor-level mattresses to contemplate the vaguely mystical wall murals by David Merrian. If you can't face the steps up to the tiny lookout room-cum-minaret, you can comfort yourself with the stunning view of the Aberdare mountains beyond the lake and the sight of antelope and buffalo.
It would have been easy for Dodo to recreate in her tower an era of between-the-wars colonial clubbiness, a world of fussy chintz sofas, shabby countries chic and manicured lawns. She has resisted the temptation.
