Just The Right Amount Of Wrong

Karen Walker makes a pilgrimage to Farleys House, the home of Lee Miller and her husband, artist Sir Roland Penrose.

- Karen Walker

It was with skin-tingling excitement that I boarded a train from London to Lewes in East Sussex to visit Farleys House & Gallery. For decades it had been the home of Lee Miller and Sir Roland Penrose. I’ve long been a Lee Miller fan. Who in the fashion world isn’t? She has, after all, been on every fashion designer’s Pinterest board at one time or another. It’s not just her style that draws me in, though. It’s her art, her writing and her strong feminist story. Miller’s the full package. One of my top-10 pin-ups.

An intelligent, curious and drop-dead gorgeous girl from Poughkeepsie, New York, Miller seduced, collaborated with and inspired Man Ray, created some of the mid-20th century’s most iconic images, captured WWII in words and photographs with a gruelling rawness and strength, married the great British surrealist Sir Roland Penrose and, in her final act, became a truly great cook and gardener.

All we have to go by for an address is: Farleys Farm House, Chiddingly. Our taxi driver asks if it’s “the place where all the funny paintings are done”. “That’ll be the one,” we say. Farleys House is a very beautiful building, with its oldest bones dating back to a time when New Zealand was just trees and birds. It has been added to and rebuilt over the years and its current incarnation is mostly from 1730. Its style, from the outside at least, is almost severely formal. It sits solidly in a sprawling garden of perfect lawns, oaks, ashes and what remains of Lee’s vast vegetable and herb gardens.