Fairy tale holiday home fit for Hansel and Gretel

A House for Essex, designed by British artist Grayson Perry. Photo / Living Architecture

Ever wanted to have a holiday in a fairy tale? Then a Grayson Perry-designed Hansel and Gretel house in Essex could be right up your alley.

Overlooking the wide Stour Estuary in north Essex, set in a swathe of vivid green fields, a small, glinting gingerbread house has appeared, as if Hansel and Gretel had just touched down.

Called A House for Essex, it has been designed by British artist Grayson Perry and London architecture firm FAT for Alain de Botton's Living Architecture project.

"We all sat down," says Charles Holland, of FAT, "and had the idea of a chapel you could live in, with references to wooden Russian architecture, too. Because of Grayson, we had the idea of a pottery building, with the inside designed around his artworks. So Grayson went off and started on some tiles for the outside."

Perry wanted the house, which he likens to a jewel box, to tell a story, as if it belongs to an imaginary woman called Julie. The decor inside will relate to her life and include tapestries and ceramic tiles.

In its isolated and beautiful setting, the house also belongs to an ancient tradition of wayfaring chapels, designed to shelter and comfort exhausted travellers. Its shimmering gold, steeply pitched copper-alloy roofs are graduated in size and make the house look as though, if you pushed it in at each end, it could collapse into itself like an accordion.

Beneath the roofs, with their curved gable windows, the walls are clad in Perry's glossy, green-and-white, equilateral-triangle ceramic tiles, all bearing moulded motifs. Topping everything off, the golden roof line flaunts four outsize finial-sculptures, including what appears to be a painted egg, a naked pregnant woman and a weather vane that looks like a ship's compass, all in aluminium.

From some time next year, anyone will be able to apply to rent A House for Essex for short stays via Living Architecture. Since 2012, the not-for-profit organisation has been working with architects to design striking holiday rentals, to let people experience what it is like to live inside a world-class building.

A House for Essex will be its sixth property. Two more are in the pipeline: the Life House in Wales and the Secular Retreat in Devon.

FAT is known for highly decorated architecture using unusual forms. The style has been called cookie-cutter because of its cartoon cut-out shapes.

Its Roath Lock Studios for the BBC in Wales, where Doctor Who is filmed, are a perfect example. The long, shed-like building is faced with a fantastic, baroque, clip-on facade. With its sharply drawn form, A House for Essex is just as incredible, and equally captivating.

- Independent