Daniel Chadwick is a serious artist with serious style. He wore a snow-white velvet suit to his wedding last summer, hand-stitched by his longtime tailor, John Pearse of Savile Row, with an off-white shirt and white Converse sneakers. He drives either a dark-brown 1987 Bentley or a white van, depending on oil prices. He gives lunches at his Gothic mansion, Lypiatt Park, in Gloucestershire, which sometimes last until midnight. When Lily Allen was recording a new album, she decamped from London to one wing of the house and did it there. (Her father, the actor Keith Allen, lives in the property's stable block.) Chadwick's wife, 25-year-old Juliet, gave him butterflies for his forty-third birthday this year, which flutter in a geodesic Solardome on the grounds. He gave her a 1970 Alfa Romeo because it's called a Giulietta.
Dark-haired and often dark-bearded, Chadwick invited me to visit Lypiatt this spring. The house doubles as space to see his art along with the work of his late father, the sculptor Lynn Chadwick, who caused an outcry when he beat out Giacometti for the International Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1956. Suddenly rather rich, the elder Chadwick, who had been living in a cottage with no water or electricity, bought Lypiatt Park in 1958 for $20,000. He transformed it from a gloomy, flock-wallpapered home into an "amusing house" (as he told Vogue in 1963) by painting the entire interior white, as it still is today.
The first thing a visitor notices is that the 260-acre grounds are dotted, generously, with the work of Lynn Chadwick, who died in 2003. I am greeted by a giant Scottish deerhound and wander through a magnificent faux-medieval doorway into a vaulted, whitewashed stone hall that must be 30 feet long and 30 feet high. (The main structure is Gothic Revival, but parts of it date back to the 1700s and others to the Middle Ages.) The only dash of color is a circular Damien Hirst spin painting that Chadwick acquired as a thank-you gift from the artist, who is a close friend. Beyond this is an arched window through which I glimpse miles of freshly mown lawn.
Chadwick is wearing his usual daytime uniform of old-school Levi's, white braces, white shirt, and red Converse Chuck Taylors, and is just back from the States, where the Lynn Chadwick & Daniel Chadwick exhibit at the Elaine Baker gallery in Boca Raton — in which he showed his own art with his father's — attracted the attention of Larry Silverstein. The New York developer asked him to submit three possible sculptures for the Rogers, Foster, and Maki towers being built at Ground Zero.
After Juliet, a redheaded, freckled beauty who is also an artist and is expecting their second child, appears to wish her husband goodbye — she is off to London for the day — Chadwick ushers me into his study. The room is lined with rosette-carved paneling, again whitewashed. He shows me the three Ground Zero sculpture designs on his computer, including a white-lacquered fiberglass sculpture of the geographical contours of Manhattan. "When you are thinking about art and talking about art, people always want to know, What's your concept?" Chadwick says. "I always find myself going to a Lynn quote where he said, 'I am a conduit for some other energy,' and he never went further than that. He genuinely couldn't explain how he did what he did." We wander into a 35-foot-long drawing room with arched double doors that open onto the garden. Apart from the giant fluorescent red-and-orange Daniel Chadwick mobile that hangs above the white furniture, the room is as it was during Chadwick's childhood. For him, growing up here seemed absolutely normal — although it was more interesting than that. He recalls visitors like Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon (who photographed the house) dropping by, although his parents were generally reclusive. "My father wasn't a show-off," Chadwick says, "but it was very in vogue at that time to have 20,000 girlfriends." At one point, his parents lived in different wings of the house with other partners. Everyone would have dinner together.
