©Hitomi Kai Yoda
Although the conservation work at Croome Court gathers pace, many of its rooms are still empty. Now We Made That, a cross-disciplinary architecture and design studio, has been asked to recast the experience of being in a ‘drawing room’.
©We Made That
We Made That partners Holly Lewis and Oliver Goodhall investigated the notion of a ‘drawing room’ room through archival research and workshops with visitors, volunteers and staff. Historically, such rooms evolved to answer the need for a family to ‘withdraw’ and find some privacy and relaxation within the wider context of a large house full of servants and dependents.
©We Made That
The result of the project was an immersive installation called Withdrawing Room. It is a room within a room constructed with layer upon layer of suspended mesh fabric.
©We Made That
The work plays with notions of interiority and exteriority, boundaries and openings, withdrawal and emergence. It comments on the formal rooms of an eighteenth-century country house where the spatial and decorative semiotics would have guided people’s movements and interactions.
©Hitomi Kai Yoda
The fluid, insubstantial and yet structured nature of Withdrawing Room also echoes the experience of the park outside, with its vistas and enclosures, its paths and bridges, its shimmering waters and rippling leaves.
©Hitomi Kai Yoda
Further images as well as a time-laps film can be seen here. Withdrawing Room will be at Croome until April 2012.
