Stumpery adrift in the landscape

The Stumpery  – a driftwood cave by Phil Game Follies echo the zeitgeist of their time. In the 18th century follies were the playthings of rich men and often built to flaunt their wealth and education in a showy display of conspicuous consumption. Shell grottoes are a good example of this, costing thousands and taking [...]

Read Full Post »

Eerie fusion of past and present

Often today it seems the line between follies and works of art in public places, is increasingly blurred. With fewer opportunities to build permanent follies, in urban environments, artists and architects are constructing temporary sculptures and fanciful buildings which reference the past and the future to stir our imagination. One such artist is the Auckland [...]

Read Full Post »

Pure Folly but Fun

If you fancy a modern garden folly, but lack the imagination or time, to build one, you can always consult the folly designer Phil Game. Phil’s work has recently been brought to my attention by Shedworking and includes some very cheerful and eccentric sheds. But his scope is wider than that. Pictured above is a  folly [...]

Read Full Post »

A Modern “folly” tower for the Millennium

Hurlestone Tower, Lilburn, Northumberland   Several new folly towers were put up to commemorate the new Millennium in 2000. This tower, at Lilburn in Northumberland is again, not really a folly as it is designed as an observation point and a venue for conferences and meetings. (There are even, whisper it, kitchen units inside.) Nevertheless it [...]

Read Full Post »

Monument to a lost love

Alster Tower, Boldt Castle, St Lawrence River, September 2007   OK so it isn’t strictly a modern folly but it is a nineteenth century one which, after over 70 years of dereliction, started to undergo a major restoration in 1977. And the transformation has been remarkable. At the turn-of-the-century, George C. Boldt, millionaire proprietor of the world [...]

Read Full Post »

Lost in the Boxwood

 After LA antiques dealer Richard Shapiro created a Palladian folly in his Holmby Hills garden in Los Angeles, (see previous blog post “Palladio in Hollywood”), he decided to enhance its setting with a maze. Thumbing through a magazine, shortly after completing the Palladian pavilion, he came across a photograph of the Chateau Marqueyssac in the Dordogne [...]

Read Full Post »

Palladio in Hollywood

Eccentricity and excess mark a centuries-old tradition.    Richard Shapiro’s folly began, as many great things do, with the smallest of ambitions. Though the modern art collector and antiques dealer already had seven fireplaces in his 1920s Holmby Hills villa, he wanted an outdoor hearth. A place, he recalls, where, “I could sit in front of a [...]

Read Full Post »

Where Naiads play on a Surrey hillside

Cherkley Court in Surrey has a new shell grotto by Belinda Eade     Cherkley Court, near Leatherhead in Surrey, was the home of newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, from 1910-1964. Beaverbrook was a cabinet minister in Churchill’s wartime government and Winston Churchill was a regular visitor to Cherkley. The house, rebuilt after a fire in the 1890s in high Victorian style, [...]

Read Full Post »

Follies by Design

    Fancy a folly but lack the funds to commission or the expertise to build one?     An American firm, Folly by Design, has come up with the answer. They will sell you a set of plans to build a shed with a mock Roman, Egyptian or Greek front door. Plans start from [...]

Read Full Post »

Flaming Folly on Dutch Seafront

  Folly Fanciers, I present the Nonument. Strictly speaking, if your definition of a folly is a building with no particular function then this one does not qualify. On the other hand if it merely has to show folly in the designer or builder, then it does that in spades. Commissioned by the City of [...]

Read Full Post »