Service included
“WHAT’S your favourite foreign food?” the Rat, my stepson asked me the other day over a plate of his favourite foreign food (Chinese). Amandier

26 Sussex Place, London W2, 0171 262 6073 Lunch Mon-Fri noon-2pm Dinner Mon-Sat 7-10.15pm Three-course lunch pounds 18.50, dinner pounds 28.50. “If we move, it would be nice to have different types of installations, a very minimal room with a concrete floor and nothing in it except a huge display case,” says Francis “It would be one way for me to incorporate the clutter.”. Already they’re checking auction catalogues in search of something bigger: a school perhaps, a pub, or even an old cottage hospital.

The mix of coolly clinical and organic beauty in the work is an interesting parallel to the ideas at play in the house.It may not be their house for much longer, though, since they have almost outgrown the space. In one picture of an operating theatre the floor is carpeted with leaves, in another the ceiling sprouts a delicate whorl of fungi. There’s a definite aesthetic link.”They have been collaborating on a photography project for King’s College Hospital. Even the dog sleeps in a functional wire- mesh basket.Their enthusiasm for this utilitarian style seems to be genuinely shared: “Most people are horrified by old Victorian hospitals with cream and green walls,” says Hirst, “But we go – wow, this is gorgeous. “I do like modern furniture but I prefer to look at it rather than live with it,” explains Francis.This magpie theme and its glittering prizes continues, from the salvaged deep-fat fryer disguised as the perfect modernist corner cabinet in the hall, to the hospital lockers used as bedside tables (Francis used to have a studio at the old Lambeth Hospital in Kennington, and several of his best finds came from there).

It doesn’t feel antiseptic, perhaps because each well-worn piece comes with a hist- ory Nothing is new, except the fridge and cooker. A hospital trolley does duty as a sideboard, a sterilising cabinet hides the dishcloths. There is a steel filing cabinet, a set of shelving from a delicatessen, and some lovely Fifties aluminium dressers. A row of bottled mushrooms, chanterelles and ceps, is the result of yet another of Francis’s consuming hobbies “I’ve got over a hundred fungi books,” he says. “We go to Scotland to collect mushrooms for three weeks every year.”What gives the kitchen coherence, though, is the furniture, an eclectic array of gleaming metal. Pots and pans dangle sculpturally from an iron bar running the width of the ceiling. Long open shelves are stacked with a decorative line-up of ingredients.

“The walls were all cream which felt more minimal, but then we got tired of it, and thought a bit of colour would brighten things up,” says Francis (he has recently brought a similarly bold infusion of colour to his paintings, after years of working primarily in black, white and grey).Again, what might amount to a muddle in less adept hands is transformed here into an orderly visual cornucopia. They knocked out a wall to join the cooking and dining areas, stripped the floorboards, and recently gave the walls a coat of rich, deep red paint. “Sometimes when I’m arranging food tins in the kitchen I feel it’s a part of what I do anyway, it’s how I make things,” she says. “My ideal scenario for an installation would be to be presented with a given space and to make something out of what was already there.”Hirst’s own studio, converted from a spare bedroom, is a marked contrast to the rest of the house – unencumbered, white- walled and airy The kitchen is much more of a shared domain. I think the aesthetic kind of follows through.”As an installation artist, she has dealt with bigger messes than this (for a site- specific project at the Barbican she made a sticking-plaster curtain as a comment on its scrambled architecture).