Aerial views of the mansion in Mallorca, Spain, featured in the final season of 'The Crown.'
The villa featured in ‘The Crown’ is located in Mallorca, Spain, and can be rented for €60,000
The mansion, where the Princess of Wales once vacationed in real life, recreates the Al-Fayed family property in Saint-Tropez in the show’s final season
Lucía Bohórquez
Palma, 6 January 2924
Wearing a short red dress, Diana of Wales climbs the stone steps of a staircase that runs from a small private jetty to the entrance of a majestic villa with a yellow facade. Accompanied by her sons, William and Harry, the princess greets Mohamed Al-Fayed, who opens his arms to her as her children splash in a pool built on the edge of a cliff with the immense blue Mediterranean stretching into the horizon. The Al-Fayed family’s summer home in Saint-Tropez figures prominently in the first episodes of the sixth and final season of the hit show The Crown, which fictionalizes the life of Queen Elizabeth II. The splendorous villa, christened The Yellow Castle, is not actually in France, but rather in Mallorca, Spain, where Princess Diana of Wales had spent some summer days during her youth, before she married then-Prince Charles.
JD Salinger's house to open up for cartoonist residency
This article is more than 5 years old
The reclusive author’s New Hampshire former home is being offered as a workspace for young artists after it was bought by illustrator Harry Bliss
Alison Flood Friday 9 September 2016
Fans of the reclusive author JD Salinger, who also happen to have a penchant for art – and and four-wheel drives – are in for a treat as the former home of the late Catcher in the Rye author is to be opened up for a cartoonist residency.
10 Frank Lloyd Wright Houses You Can Visit Across the U.S.
Although he became famous for designing public works like the Guggenheim Museum, the American architect’s bread and butter was building private homes.
Ask anyone to name a famous American architect and chances are they’ll name Frank Lloyd Wright, and for good reason. Before Wright, who began designing in the 1890s, there wasn’t a definitive style of American architecture—the pinnacle of luxury was owning a European-esque home: think French empire, Italianate, and Gothic revival. To Wright, who was madly in love with America’s landscape, people, and democratic values, this was a tragedy. Throughout his seven-decade-long career, he would design over 1,000 buildings and put American architecture on the map with his innovative ideas and timeless aesthetic. Today he is recognized as one the most accomplished architects of all time. Though he created a number of famous public works like New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, Wright primarily worked with private homeowners to build the homes of their dreams—and his dreams, naturally.
Places you’d be desperate to avoid in real life provide a magnetic lure in books by authors from Dickens to Du Maurier and even Richard Adams
Xan Brooks
Wed 26 April 2017
M
y novel, The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times, tells the tale of a girl who travels through a dark forest and arrives at a big house. The forest is bad but the house is arguably worse – a false sanctuary inhabited by decadent aristocrats; boozy and boisterous, on the brink of turning nasty.
At some point when writing the story, I realised I was naively blundering into a long and noble tradition of books about terrible houses, much as I’ve naively blundered into many awkward, unfamiliar houses down the years. Maybe I love these places in fiction because I hate and fear them in real life.
Below is a list of good books that fetch up at bad houses. These houses are variously frightening, unsettling or funny – but they all tap into the mounting panic and inadequacy that we (or possibly just me) feel on arriving at an unfamiliar place and realising within seconds that we don’t fit in, that we will never fit in, and that the best that can be hoped for is to avoid some awful faux pas. These are the houses where the flush doesn’t work and the doorknob comes off in your hand and where you say the wrong thing and the host decides that, on balance, he hates you.
Apologies to Sartre, but I think he had it slightly wrong. Hell is not other people; it is other people’s houses.
Rebecca is the name of the first Mrs de Winter, dead in a boating accident but still haunting the wings of lavish Manderley, on the Cornish coast. The house remains much as she left it. Her housekeeper Mrs Danvers remains stubbornly in situ, like an emissary from the spirit world. The second Mrs de Winter knows she can never measure up. It is all she can do to totter out in one piece.
At the start of her peerless 1959 novel, Jackson dispatches a quartet of thrill-seekers to conduct a paranormal experiment at a remote American mansion. Hill House, we are told, is “vile” and “diseased”. The trouble is that the woman who tells us is shy, reclusive Eleanor, who may not be altogether sound and stable herself. In this way, Jackson suggests that the scariest houses are a kind of Rorschach blot, or even a blank canvas. We bring the horror with us and sit it beside us on the couch.
In 1922, suffering from tuberculosis, Kafka sat down to write the story of K, a land surveyor desperate to gain access to a forbidding castle in order to clear up a bureaucratic error. Reports suggest that Kafka planned to have his hero eventually die in the nearby village, with his case still ongoing and his legal status in limbo – except that the author never made it that far. His death ensures that the mystery of The Castle remains forever unresolved.
Aickman was an eminently respectable Englishman (chairman of the London Opera Society, co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association) who wrote scary fiction on the side. The Hospice might just be the most purely unnerving short story I’ve ever encountered, despite (or because of) the sense that I’m not entirely sure whether anything truly terrible happens. It’s about a travelling salesman, Maybury, who stops for the night at a mysterious house that may be a hotel, or a hospital, or some kind of purgatory. Inside, the guests sleep two to a room because they hate to be alone. At mealtimes, they wolf down mountainous portions while fettered by their ankles to the table. At one point, in the night, there may have been a murder. But the rooms are too dark and the thermostat’s turned too high and besides, it’s impolite to ask awkward questions. Just eat your food; get some rest.
Ishiguro is the master of the dramatic side-eye, a writer who affects to position himself at one remove from the plot’s centre, quietly attending to the place settings and all but daring us to look elsewhere. The Remains of the Day, then, is the memoir of a dutiful butler (Stevens) at lavish Darlington Hall. But it is also (at heart, really) the tale of a passion that threatens to pop his starched collar and of a faithless, would-be quisling aristocracy in the runup to the second world war. Stevens clearly feels that certain doors are off limits. Ishiguro, very gently, invites us to prise them open.
Starched … Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in the 1993 film version of The Remains of the Day. Photograph: Allstar/Columbia Pictures
How does one begin to navigate Danielewski’s literary hall of mirrors, let alone explain the damn thing? Ostensibly, it’s about the Navidson family, who return home to discover that their Virginia house has mutated. It’s bigger inside than out. A hallway appears out of nowhere; the spiral staircase seems without end. And audaciously, in the meantime, the book’s mutating too. Danielewski throws in references to illusory films and essays. His footnotes sprout footnotes and these lead us down the wormhole. One day I have to reread it, but the very prospect makes me nervous.
Before anyone cries foul, my defence is that a) a burrow is basically a house for rabbits and b) that the evergreen Watership Down is a book that views the world at rabbit-eye level. Oh, and c) that the rabbits in Cowslip’s warren are the most peculiarly human of beasts. Creepily so – a group of pampered, indolent aesthetes who are permitted to lounge about like minor royals so long as they turn a blind eye when the farmer wants fresh meat. Adams’s vagabond heroes initially view the warren as a place of sanctuary. But it’s a horrible place, a terrible house, where the residents sleepwalk towards the snares.
Dickens’s novel peaks early, with Pip’s visits to spooky Satis House (apparently named after a real mansion in Rochester, Kent). This is the home of Miss Havisham, still wrapped in her wedding dress, who keeps an uneaten tiered cake mouldering on the table and ensures all the clock hands point to twenty-to-nine. Dickens, of course, wrote great ghost stories in his time. But I don’t think he ever conjured a phantom quite as tragic and creepy as this.
Stumble upon this novel at an impressionable age and the experience is like walking into the middle of a firework display; dazzling and colourful and a little scary, too. Fowles rustles up a gripping tale of seduction and betrayal as cocky Nicholas Urfe falls under the spell of a puckish Greek recluse. The island estate is a laboratory, which leaves Nicholas Urfe as the rat. In playing tricks on his hero, Fowles plays beautiful tricks on us, too.
For anyone who has ever misjudged a mood, wrecked a dinner party or generally disgraced themselves in polite society, there is always Lucky Jim, one of the flat-out funniest books ever written. This hits a comedic crescendo at the home of Professor Welch and his horrific son Bertrand, where the guests are dragooned into madrigal singalongs. The first time I read this – aged 18, on a train – I wound up laughing so violently that I first knocked my drink to the floor and then pitched head-first into the aisle when trying to retrieve it. A case of idiotic real life imitating great art.
The Casa Malaparte in Capri has been chosen as the location for the new 2018 Spring/Summer Saint Laurent campaign starring the beautiful Kate Moss. The video was directed by Nathalie Canguilhem who places the top model on the villa’s iconic staircase, an architectural walkway that seems to lead directly to the sky.
Casa Malaparte and its particular thirty-three step staircase are an icon of rationalist Italian architecture. Created between 1938 and 1943 by Adalberto Libera, but showing signs of the influential relationship between the writer Curzio Malaparte and the builder Adolfo Amitrano, it stands on the almost inaccessible promontory of Punta Masullo, one of the most fascinating and mysterious places in Capri.
From, Saint Laurentusing the well-known British supermodelKate Mossas the protagonist of the video, passing through Ermenegildo Zegna and the presentation of his UOMO fragrance, or the most recent one, this week, HEARTBEAT byLouis Vuitton,(made byNicolas Loir) everyone wants to use the well-known house on the island of Capri, built in 1938 with the plans of the Italian architectAdalberto Libera.
Agoraphobia and an unhappy marriage: the real horror behind The Haunting of Hill House
Stephen King says The Haunting of Hill House is ‘nearly perfect’. But can a Netflix TV adaptation capture Shirley Jackson’s dark visions of duty and domesticity?
Aida Edemariam Mon 22 Oct 2018 07.00 BST
A
nyone who has read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House will find a couple of details of its 1959 reception almost too neat to be true. Jackson had been writing novels and stories for nearly two decades before embarking on her tale of Hill House, a mansion set under a hill where visitors can turn up any time they like but find it rather harder to leave. These earlier works were striking, wrote Jackson’s biographer Ruth Franklin a couple of years ago, not only because they were such accomplished contributions to the strain of American gothic that includes Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James, but because they foregrounded women – single women desperate for the social acceptance of marriage, or married women trapped in domestic situations so stifling they were (often malevolent) characters in their own right. Jackson herself was increasingly desperate in her marriage and in the imposed role of homemaker.
Possibly our favourite sub-genre of the Gothic, haunted house stories make for spooky fun reading on stormy winter nights. For added thrills, we recommend enjoying the list below when you’re home alone or housesitting.
The home is supposed to be a safe space, a refuge from the evils of the world, so perhaps its not so shocking that when Horace Walpole penned the first Gothic novel, The House of Otranto (1764), he used his own estate for inspiration. After all, what could be more terrifying than finding unspeakable horror lurking in the one place it ought not exist?
Since Walpole’s days, there’s been a proliferation of haunted house stories, and by now, we all know roughly what to expect: a family or group of friends take up residence in old house where an awful thing, or series of awful things, has happened. After a brief period of ‘isn’t this house lovely! What could possibly go wrong?’ Night descends and the terror begins.
At the heart of these stories are family secrets, a cursed house pointing to something rotten and hidden within the family. Incest and illegitimacy are common themes. A haunted house is also a site of domestic terror and, unsurprisingly, the hero-victims of the genre are often women. In the 19th century, when the Gothic was at its zenith, women ruled the domestic sphere but they were also imprisoned within it and the haunted house became a vehicle for externalising their isolation and distress. Male characters are often unaware of the horror visited upon female protagonists and much gas lighting ensues. It is up to the women to restore order. Or not.
While in early haunted house stories crumbling estates are often tenanted by ghosts and serve as externalisations of the protagonist’s psychological landscape, more recently (as readers have become less credulous towards ghostly apparitions and psychoanalysis has fallen out of vogue) it’s the houses themselves that are ‘sick’ and the narratives focus on broader social themes—the house intent on keeping outsiders out and insiders in. In some ways these later stories are more frightening still, with the house itself becoming not only an insidious and unpredictable monster, but also occasionally a narrator.
An ancient prophecy predicts that ‘the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it’. On his wedding day the heir of Otranto is killed, his body found crushed beneath a giant helmet. His father, Manfred, Prince of Otranto, fears the prophecy is coming true and contrives to divorce his current wife and marry his son’s betrothed, Isabella, to produce a new heir. However, Manfred carries a family secret and as his desperation to capture Isabella grows, supernatural forces awake within the castle.
While The Castle of Otranto is unlikely to hold the same terror for 21st century readers as it did back in the day, it remains a must-read for Gothic enthusiasts.
One of Poe’s most famous stories, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is narrated by an unnamed man who arrives at the House of Usher to nurse his friend and master of the house, Roderick Usher. The house appears to be falling apart and both Usher and his twin sister, Madeline, are infected with a strange illness. When Madeline dies, the narrator helps Usher entomb her in the family crypt. A storm rises and strange happenings within the house begin to drive the occupants mad.
‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ remains a chilling tale almost two hundred years on. The narrator’s descent from reason to madness is as unsettling as the horror that occurs within the house.
A woman suffering what we today understand as post-natal depression is taken to the counrty by her doctor husband and forced to rest in what was once a nursery decorated with peculiar yellow wallpaper. Within the pattern the narrator spies another woman creeping, creeping around the room.
‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is just 6000 words long, but will make you shudder to think of it years after reading.
A governess takes a position looking after two orphaned children on a remote country estate. Soon after arriving she begins to sight a strange man and a woman moving about the house and grounds. She becomes convinced that the couple are in fact the children’s former governess, Miss Jessel, and her lover and fellow employee, Peter Quint—now both dead. The governess becomes increasingly alarmed when she learns that these ghostly apparitions are visiting the children.
The Turn of the Screw remains a terrifying read today. James’ apparitions are truly creepy and made more so by his use of an unreliable narrator. A word of warning: stay well away from the windows while reading this one. #justsaying
One of the most famous (and frightening) haunted house stories ever written, The Haunting of Hill House establishes many of the tropes of the modern haunted house story. Paranormal investigator Dr. John Montague is determined to find proof of the supernatural. He rents a rumoured ‘haunted house’ where several violent deaths have occurred and invites a number of people with links to the supernatural to join him in the house for the summer. Only three accept his invitation: Luke Sanderson, heir to the estate; Theodora a bohemian artist; and Eleanor Vance, a painfully shy woman who encountered a poltergeist as a child and spent her youth nursing her invalid mother.
All four inhabitants of the house experience strange and frightening phenomena, but the supernatural occurrences appear to target Eleanor. As she begins to lose her grip on reality it becomes increasingly unclear how much of the terror that unfolds exists only in Eleanor’s mind and whether it is the house or Eleanor herself conjuring the strange occurrences. Either way, the more unnerving things get, the more determined Eleanor is to remain in the house.
Shirley Jackson has an uncanny knack for the unnerving and The Haunting of Hill House may be her most disturbing work. If you’re in the mood for genuine chills, this should be top of your TBR pile.
Technically The Shining is the story of a haunted hotel rather than a haunted house, but that just broadens the scope for terror. Aspiring writer and recovering alcoholic, Jack Torrance, takes a job as caretaker at the Overlook Hotel during the off-season, bringing his wife and young son along for the adventure. While Jack hopes the winter will give him time to sober up and write his book, the Overlook has other plans. His son, Danny, has ‘the shining’—a gift that enables him to see the horror of the hotel’s past—which he must use to stop his father from killing himself and his mother.
Fun fact: the story was partly inspired by King’s own recovery from alcoholism and his stay at The Stanley Hotel.
In 2013 King followed up The Shining with a sequel, Doctor Sleep.
It’s a big call to make, but House of Leaves might just be the scariest book of all time ever. The primary story follows the classic haunted house plot. A filmmaker moves his family into an old house only to discover a sometimes-there-sometimes-not doorway in the living room that leads to a dark maze beneath the house. Against all common sense, the filmmaker decides to investigate and document the process. Unspeakable terror ensues.
Danielewski fragments his story through frame narratives, footnotes, photographs, interviews and appendices. The words on the page shake loose, distort and rearrange themselves until the reader, like the filmmaker finds themselves drawn into the labyrinth, spiralling round and round, closer and closer to the unnamed, unknown horror at its centre.
Danielewski is an experimental writer and for him the physical object of the book and the way the reader interacts with it form part of the narrative. If that sounds wanky, then this one isn’t for you. But if you’re up for a properly challenging and frightening read, the reward is more than worth the effort.
Winner of the 2008 Aurealis Award for Best Horror Novel, The Seance is the second book in what might loosely be called a trilogy, preceded by The Ghost Writer (2004) and rounded out with The Asylum (2013). The three novels aren’t explicitly linked, but they are connected through Harwood’s nuanced understanding of Victorian Gothic and all pay homage to the archetypal stories and voices of the genre.
In The Seance protagonist Constance Langton comes into possession of Wraxford Hall, a crumbling estate where strange and inexplicable events are rumoured to have occurred. In a bid to help her mother recover from the death of Constance’s sister, Constance becomes ensnared in the world of necromancy and soon finds herself alone with Wraxford Hall and all its mysteries looming ominously over her.
Harwood is a master of suspense, mystery and terror and The Seance makes for an excellent companion on a dark and stormy night.
Set in post-war 1940s England, The Little Stranger narrates the financial ruin of the noble Ayres family and general decline of the landed gentry that occurred in post war Britain. Country doctor, Faraday, befriends the Ayres family after attending a sick maid at their estate, Hundreds Hall. However, as he draws closer to the family and comes to understand the extent of their financial distress and struggle to keep the house, unsettling events begin to occur on the estate, threatening the lives of its inhabitants.
Ideal reading for those who like their terror infused with social upheaval.
Part coming-of-age narrative, part haunted house story, White is for Witching is sinister and surreal. After the death of her mother, eighteen-year-old Miri develops pica—a rare mental illness compelling her to eat chalk, stones and other non-foods. Meanwhile, the ancestral home her father runs as a bed an breakfast stirs to life, scaring off staff and guests, and a mysterious figure, the Goodlady, walks invisible through the rooms.
White is for Witching earns bonus points for having parts of the story narrated by the house itself.