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Keynes on the influence of furniture on love

John Maynard Keynes was an aesthete in the most capacious sense.

he wrote of Durbins, the Surrey home he had designed himself, where portraits of friends lined the walls of a two-storey sitting room, and where visitors were greeted in the hallway by a wall-painted procession of life-size nudes, marking the path through to the garden where Grant and Bell had begun a mosaic showing a game of badminton mixed doubles. Some were intrigued by the more salacious press: Fry's assistant led a tour of the basement storeroom for two women who had shiftily asked whether there was "some furniture that we didn't show everyone", only to discover they had been enticed by rumours of "immoral" fittings ("'Oh', said I, 'that's only because we paint our chairs scarlet!'"). tutted the Daily Mirror), advertising wall paintings, furniture, hand dyed cushions, rugs, curtains and crockery, "in all of which", promised Fry, "they employ their power of invention with the utmost freedom and spontaneity of which they are capable".

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