Best-selling novelist Douglas Kennedy has homes in Paris, Berlin and Maine, but his base is a loft in London he tells EMMA CULLINAN
DOUGLAS KENNEDY has written 11 books – three travel books and eight novels. His latest, Leaving the World, has just been published. He grew up in the US, went to Trinity College Dublin, ran the Peacock theatre and wrote for Irish newspapers before moving to London in 1988. He has a house in Maine, US and apartments in Paris and Berlin and London.
Your apartments in Berlin, Paris and London are all in the city centres. Is that where you like to be?
I do like being in the city. I am a culture vulture and what is great about here is that it is a 10-minute walk to the Barbican where the London Symphony Orchestra is resident and the theatre there has phenomenal stuff and there are three cinemas. Nearby is St Luke’s, a deconsecrated (Hawksmoor) church on Old Street which is one of the best chamber music halls in the world. Hoxton Square is near here, where the White Cube Gallery is.
I have friends in every place and a different life in every place.
Graham Greene, a literary hero of mine, had three apartments, no bigger than any of mine, and travelled between them. The point is always to have an interesting life and to maintain curiosity. I go to 100 concerts a year, I read, on average, two books a week and go to 150 movies a year.
London is a brilliant mess and I have fallen back in love with it since moving to the city centre from a house in Wandsworth. London doesn’t care: no one is important here. You can be completely anonymous and there is great virtue in that.
When I became successful, first with The Big Picture and then with The Pursuit of Happiness, I had spent many years as a professional writer which is why I have never been cocky about success: it is a fragile veneer and can crack. As they say in New York: “Never fall in love with the aroma of your own perfume”.
How did you come to have four homes?
Often random things happen in life and you make a decision after the random things happen – life is like that for everyone. In December 1999 a French friend rang me and said: ‘I was walking my daughter to school today and saw a studio in St-Germain-des- Prés and the price is ridiculous, I am going to see it in an hour.’ He called back and said: ‘Get down here tomorrow.’ I bought it for around £67,000. It is a tiny 26sq m (280sq ft) garret.
I began learning French nine years ago and now do press there in French (my books are published in 21 languages). I was awarded a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2007 – a knighthood basically – and have a tiny ribbon but I never wear it in France.
Then, a couple of years ago, I was walking past an estate agent in the Mitte area of Berlin and saw an apartment in Prenzlauer Berg.
I bought the house in Maine, in Wiscasset, after I got stuck in a traffic jam outside it and discovered you could buy a house there for around £300,000.
All the places I have bought have not been expensive and have been smart deals at the right time although people don’t like the idea of a writer who has a business head.
Where do you write?
I write everywhere: I am fortunate in my profession that I can move around. When I look for an apartment I tell the estate agent to leave the room and sit for five minutes in silence and listen, to see if it is quiet. I was born in Manhattan and can live and write with a degree of noise but this loft and the Paris apartment face a courtyard and in Berlin I look onto a garden. The village in Maine is very quiet; the only problem is that people there think I’m a vampire. Here I get up at 9 or 10 and work until 1 or 2 in the morning. I will often come back from a concert and spend an hour or two writing.
It’s the same in Paris and Berlin but in Maine they get up at 5am. A dinner party in Maine will start at 6pm and everyone will be gone by 9pm, just when I’m about to start drinking.
London is my base and it is a great base. After I bought this place, St Pancras Station was redeveloped, which was the biggest gift imaginable because on Eurostar I have done, door-to-door, from my place in London to the one in Paris, in three hours.
I spend about 10 days a month in London, to see my kids Max and Amelia; a week a month in Paris, about three months a year in the States and about six weeks a year in Berlin plus a little bit of travel.
How do you make each place home?
By making sure that when I walk in I am happy to be here. This place had three tenants over 10 years between me buying it and when I moved in – after getting divorced – it needed to have everything redone. The good thing about a loft is that it is a shell (this measures 74sq m/800sq ft). What I like about this place is its six huge damn windows looking out onto a very urban scene.
There were bare floorboards which, by the time I was going to move in, looked terrible. It was very La Bohème.
The last tenant was a Mexican artist, I think in her Frida Kahlo phase; she was always wandering around semi-dressed and her scowling boyfriend would be smoking in the corner as I was coming to measure up.
She had the other extreme to me. She was maximalist. There was stuff everywhere: canvases, clothes hanging all over the place. Divorce is an emotionally chaotic and painful time of life and it is interesting that I was trying to create order. Life is a very disorderly business and a lot of things happen that you don’t expect. So it is nice to come in – nice for me anyway – and be in an ordered environment.
But it’s not sterile. It has character.
Thank-you. I don’t like sterile houses. What is really sterile is a hotel room, a Philippe Starck hotel room . . . which is great to stay in and the thing about a hotel is that someone picks up the towels. I’ve often written in hotel rooms and love them but fundamentally they are not a home.
I think you can see that this is a writer’s place: the compact discs, pictures of my children, a picture of Obama on the front of Liberation magazine and shelves of books: I could fill this apartment with all the books I have.
The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are Universal Shelving from Vitsoe. The woman who came to measure up, Tessa, told me about people she knew in the trade: one carpenter, one couple who installed bathrooms, one friend who was a sparks, and those people came into my life.
They were largely in their twenties and thirties, educated and smart and this whole thing came in on budget and on time: flabbergastingly, actually on time, and I was able to move in on the day I wanted. You have to remember, I was an administrator at one time.
I also brought in a guy I know in Paris, Tomas, who has painted everywhere I live. He lived here while he painted it as did the couple who installed the bathroom.
I went into West One bathrooms (www.westonebathrooms.co.uk) and asked a woman in there, ‘do you have someone who designs bathrooms?’ I had ideas but didn’t know what to do. She came up with very detailed diagrams and I had to find a person to install it.
Where did you get the idea to put the large cube (with shelving on one side and a walk-in wardrobe on the other) in the middle of the apartment?
A guy called David Bentheim, who designed our house in Wandsworth, came up with the idea and found a carpenter to build it.
What else did you do to the apartment?
With the brick and wooden floors in here, I decided to have a black and grey theme and white walls. The kitchen and bathroom were both terracotta, somewhat Tuscan, and in terrible shape after 10 years so they were torn out.
The table came from the Conran Shop and the Eames chairs are from there too but there is a great, inexpensive shop called Dwell, and I got the stools there for £59 whereas a similar style at the Conran Shop would cost £350. I got the floor lamp from Dwell too.
The bed and sofas came from the Loft Living in Selfridges. My white desk is from Skandium in Marylebone Lane and the office chair is by Herman Miller.
It is a very good desk chair and in my business that is essential because you are in it for eight to 10 hours a day.
I usually write, at the most, for five hours a day in two segments.
Doing up this loft was one of those nice experiences. The quality of the work was fantastic, there was very little snagging.
The brilliant thing was that everyone who worked on it knew each other and we all got along hugely.
Leaving the worldby Douglas Kennedy is published by Hutchinson, price €14.99
