Jane Kasmin, née Nicholson, my friend for a lifetime. I first met her aged 13 when her son Paul and I became firm chums at our new school, Bryanston in Dorset. She’d come tootling down the drive in her white Mini (car not skirt) wearing her customary striped tights, cotton smock and beret to take us out for the weekend. Her glorious mother, EQ Nicholson, had a cottage nearby and we would decamp there. It was here that I first became familiar with true Nicholson style. Globular lustre lamps topped off by pleated card shades, seagrass rugs, white rooms, ticking-covered armchairs and walls hung liberally with William and Ben Nicholsons, John Craxtons and Lucian Freuds (the latter two stayed with EQ for a while during the war) with the occasional Barbara Hepworth (‘Auntie Barbara’) thrown in for good measure.
Back in London on school holidays I virtually moved in with the Kasmins and here, in her wonderful small kitchen with the electric cooker bought secondhand in 1962 (still there to this day), Jane would feed a growing band of adolescent boys – including Sam Hodgkin, Jasper Morrison and myself – on cassoulet and green salad. Every Tuesday evening Jane would throw open-house parties and we boys would be willingly commandeered to act as barmen, waiters and DJs to the guests, who included pretty much everyone of any note in the art and fashion world of the time. It would not be unusual to find David Hockney and Peter Schlesinger, Patrick Procktor, Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell crushed up on the stairs talk ing to Howard Hodgkin and Dick Smith, while in the living room Wayne Sleep would be feverishly pirouetting to the sound of the Rolling Stones. Naturally, I lapped all this up like a greedy kitten.
At Easter, Jane, Paul, Aaron (Jane’s younger son) and I would cram into her tiny car and drive to their beautiful 18th-century house in the Dordogne. We would take the ferry to Dieppe, buy striped fishermen’s sweaters, eat a crêpe and proceed down the tiny backroads through Normandy (Jane despised the motorway) with its apple orchards covered in pink blossom past forgotten towns and villages, staying overnight in hotels frequented by travelling salesmen and truck drivers. Here you would eat good sturdy French classics from the wonderful prixfixe menu and go to sleep on pretty hard mattresses. These journeys there and back, and the time in between, are among the most precious of my life’s memories. Thanks to Jane I saw France in a way that Flaubert, Maupassant, Zola and Colette would have recognised.
In 1989, Jane decided she would like to buy a house in Normandy. She loves the solidly bourgeois architecture of the region and the beauty of Sickert’s Dieppe. After a strenuous search lasting precisely two days she found her perfect house. It is a long, low, half-timbered farmhouse, one room deep with its back to the road. You enter almost surreptitiously through the glazed kitchen door and find yourself propelled into another world, one that Emma Bovary might have just walked out of. Here all is as it was and all that it should be. Jane’s method of interior decoration is to interfere with what she loves as little as possible. Her only concession was to make an arch opening up the kitchen to the dining room. Her kitchens are always works of art, with her collections of old enamelled colanders and coffee pots, wiry salad spinners, spoons and heavy iron marmites gathered over time from market stalls and brocantes. She arrays these treasures in a way that is entirely particular to her, but which some how reminds you that she is, after all, the granddaughter of Sir William Nicholson.
The kitchen looks out on to an enchanting rectangular garden surrounded by other buildings belonging to the property and occupied by Jane’s grandchildren (she now shares the main house with Aaron and his wife, Sarah, both artists). Here are areas of long grass and wildflowers with vines growing up the walls and tables and chairs for picnics, for coffee in the morning and wine at night. I have come to the conclusion that Jane’s genius lies in the fact that she chooses few but very pertinent things to surround herself with. This extends to the garden too, so a couple of vermilion-red geraniums in pots make all the statements required.
Going upstairs one finds oneself in a long, wooden-panelled corridor, off which are bedrooms and bathrooms. These are painted in pale mint or powdery blue with red-and-white gingham curtains and patchworks that Jane collects or makes herself. The bathroom is minimal and stark white with just a small bunch of coloured flowers in a jug to give the room a kick. Her sleeping quarters consist of two rooms: a dressing room with a simple suspended pole on which hang French block-print smocks; and the bedroom itself, which houses a collection of tin votives – hands, legs, eyes and various other body parts hammered on to the wall. They are clearly doing their work well since Jane, who is in her eighties, remains as fit and agile as a determined young mountain goat.
Mrs Kasmin loves nothing more than to go marketing in Dieppe. Armed with several baskets, and with just a little poule de luxe peeping out, she says to me: ‘I think we should go in your car, Jasper.’ Once in the market she is like a truffle hound with its tail in the air, seeking out the best vegetables, the freshest bread, the most delicious pâtés and saucisson along with the ripest peaches and sweetest apricots. Eventually we sit down at a café surrounded by baskets of our haul and sip our café au lait and chat, just as we now have done for over 50 years. David Hockney is a neighbour in Normandy and we’re taking him to lunch.
A version of this article appears in the March 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
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