A house for Essex

Some commissions you don't forget. A House for Essex, the extraordinary collaboration between artist Grayson Perry and Charles Holland from FAT Architecture for Living Architecture, is one of them.

The building's exterior is clad with 2,300 custom faience tiles, each one made by our craftspeople here in Darwen. The largest tiles carry a totemic design of a naked woman rendered in deep green glaze, and they dominate the façade in a way that feels genuinely monumental. Woven between them are smaller triangular tiles, some green, some white, each hand-decorated with a different motif: safety pins, cassettes, hearts, swirls, a decorative J, the Essex shield. Every tile is individual. Every tile tells a piece of the story.

A House for Essex has since been recognised among the finest 21st-century buildings in Britain, featured in the Twentieth Century Society's 100 21st-Century Buildings (Batsford, 2026).