Launched in 2023, the London-based magazine Scenery has accrued a cult following for its playful, intimate approach to capturing interiors. Here, the makers of Scenery share a story from the second issue, released this week, with Vogue: a rare audience with Kim Jones at his London home.
The journey into Kim Jones’s London house—and it really is a journey—is one of surprises. First, there’s the nondescript alleyway you must take to find it, tucked away in the heart of a well-heeled neighborhood better known for its imposing, wedding cake Victorian terraces than its contemporary architectural marvels. Once you’ve passed through the steel grille gate and into the sprawling colossus of concrete and glass that sits beyond it—the house takes up the center of an entire street block, you’ll soon discover—events take an even stranger turn. The first artwork seen when stepping inside is a pair of old TV screens on wheels, playing Bruce Nauman’s 1985 video work Good Boy Bad Boy, in which a pair of actors repeat the same phrases hundreds of times, at different speeds so they overlap, and at increasing volume.
“I only switch it on for special occasions, really, as they’re very intense,” Jones admits. (Clearly, Scenery paying a visit was one such special occasion.) “But I love having them in the entrance because it’s kind of confrontational,” he continues. Jones explains that he used to go and see the very same Nauman work at the Tate Modern when he lived nearby as a Central Saint Martins student. “It always really spoke to me. It’s got that sense of humor about it, too, and it’s nice to have something challenging right at the door.”
That interest in objects that are inherently challenging—and yes, that sense of humor—is something of a throughline within Jones’s head-spinningly eclectic collections of art, books, and pop culture ephemera, all of which have now come to line the walls and shelves of his London home. “I wanted a house that had a personality,” Jones says, explaining that his search for a fixed abode in London initially led to period properties before his estate agent presented this Brutalist behemoth as a wild card. “I just fell in love with it—I knew it would lend itself to art, as a sort of blank canvas.”
As a self-confessed “organized hoarder,” Jones has held onto pretty much everything he’s picked up over the decades. His decision to put down roots was partly to create a living, breathing archive of his wide-ranging tastes: “I didn’t want my things scattered everywhere,” he says, firmly. “I think having had that nomadic start to my life, I wanted something quite grounding.” Indeed, Jones’s innate urge to collect can be traced back to that itinerant upbringing: throughout childhood, he followed his hydrogeologist father around the globe to live everywhere from Ecuador to Ethiopia. “I suppose it all began with books,” Jones reflects. “And then just little things from all over the world. But after that, things went in a different direction.”
Many different directions, in fact. Jones’s wildly eclectic collections span centuries and continents, lending what could be a sterile, even forbidding house a sense of lived-in warmth and playfulness. Just take his office set-up, artfully arranged at one end of a light-filled library room. Its skeleton is an exercise in modernist rigor, with a geometric shelving unit and modular desk by Pierre Chareau; the former stacked with a series of Hogarth Press first editions that includes copies of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land from its initial print run. Look closer, though, and you’ll spot a hippo-decorated ceramic Jones picked up in Egypt, a packet of Benson Hedges that once belonged to Freddie Mercury, and a decidedly funky table lamp designed by the furniture designers and regular Judy Blame collaborators Frick and Frack. “I do think about things in groups,” he says. “I see something and I’m reminded of something else I own, and I think, Oh, those might look nice together.”
Part of the joy of collecting, Jones explains, is creating these unusual constellations of reference that link one world to another. “I’ve got a painting from around 1498 next to a Lucian Freud drawing, and what I love is how similar they are,” he says. “You could take that painting out of the top frame and change the hat, and it would almost look the same.” It’s not dissimilar to Jones’s well-known skill for bringing together collaborators in his work as a fashion designer. Drawing a synergetic line between a Venetian oil painting and a post-war British portrait sketch, after all, isn’t all that different from the explosive alchemy of recreating the iconic Louis Vuitton monogram pattern in Supreme red.
But what it really speaks to most is Jones’s cheekier side. A portrait of Leigh Bowery—well, mostly Bowery’s genitals—by Lucian Freud is still decorated with an addition from last year’s festive season: a sprig of mistletoe on top of the frame. On display elsewhere is Allen Ginsberg’s credit card that he bought at auction—“I think it must be the last one he owned before he died, which is a little morbid”—and a seemingly endless collection of Baby Yoda figurines, which began flooding in from friends after Jones, a life-long Star Wars nerd, became obsessed with The Mandalorian during lockdown. “I don’t take myself all that seriously,” Jones says, smiling. “I don’t consider myself a scholar of the arts. I just have a very instinctive eye. When I see something that appeals to me, I want to get it.” (Or, as Jones recalls the artist Peter Doig once telling him: “You like the weirder side of things, Kim.”)
Just as topsy-turvy as Jones’s collector’s instinct, it turns out, is his ever-evolving approach to displaying these objects within his home. “I’m constantly moving things around,” he says, smiling again. “Quite often things go out on loan for museums and exhibitions, so I’m always switching things up, adding things, taking things away. It’s a work in progress.” The only problem, Jones admits: he’s running out of wall space. “I don’t want to over-clutter it,” he says. “I’m trying to be very selective now.” He pauses for a moment. “Although I have seen this one little painting coming up at auction that might look nice in my library...”
