Penis-inscribed tables and parking meter chairs: the lost queer genius of House of Beauty and Culture

The Guardian

19-03-2025

How do we tell histories, particularly queer histories, when they are ignored by the establishment? In 1986, a loose design collective of around eight people named the House of Beauty and Culture started a shop in Dalston, east London. At the time, Dalston was a desolate area, nothing like the fashionable neighbourhood it is today. The House of Beauty and Culture was so unconventional, it barely ever opened.
Its output included shoes, furniture, garments, jewellery and art. Much of the work was made from salvaged materials, for both aesthetic and financial reasons: the collective were all broke. The floor of the shop was scattered with loose change, as a joke on their collective lack of money. Their romantic, fragile work was made against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher's Britain, in the shadow of the Aids crisis.
It only lasted a few years, but the impact of the shop was so great that, according to legend, the artist and fashion designer Martin Margiela first turned to deconstruction after his visit. In 2015, a Louis Vuitton menswear show was inspired by the collective: its then designer, Kim Jones, was an avid collector of their work. And yet, today, no pieces by its protagonists are held in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, nor the Design Museum. In our institutions, it's like HOBAC never existed.
To me, HOBAC has always seemed from a parallel universe, with creative freedom totally at odds with the crippling environment of today's London. For the past five years, I've been writing a novel, Nova Scotia House, attempting to reconnect with queer philosophies and alternate ways of living from the 70s and 80s. The primary focus is HIV/Aids, and the underexplored repercussions of that pandemic. But also central to the narrative are stories of queer creative acts, like HOBAC, that have been underacknowledged. It's not just their work, it's how they worked: communally, collaboratively, outside heteronormative value systems.
Its members included John Moore, the shoemaker who founded the collective; Judy Blame, a jeweller and stylist who went on to art direct the debut albums by Neneh Cherry and Massive Attack; Richard Torry, who worked in knitwear, and the designer Christopher Nemeth, known for making garments from old postal sacks. Within fashion circles, these names are known and respected. It is the furniture makers Frick & Frack who to me seem entirely excluded from cultural discourse.
The duo, Alan MacDonald and Fritz Solomon, often made pieces that looked as if they should fall over. Chairs of salvaged wood seem to not have enough support to hold them up; lamps of bent pipe have the lightbulb so far from the base it is as if they will topple. Found objects became visual jokes, like a table made from a stolen parking restriction sign, or a chair seat made from the cover of an old parking meter that reads 'NO: WAITING, LOADING, UNLOADING'.
Their friend Dave Baby would often add provocative carvings to the furniture. According to Kasia Maciejowska's 2016 book on HOBAC, Boy George ordered a set of two tables and four chairs from Frick & Frack, with penises carved into the armrests by Dave Baby. The work wasn't cheap: they charged George £4,000, the equivalent of about £11,700 today. The value was in the craft, rather than the materials used: Frick & Frack's make was exquisite, even if the look was raw.
Many of their friends still live with their pieces, nearly four decades on. This was how I wanted to depict the work in my novel: radical furniture, made within a community, that was part of everyday life, indeed that made living better, but was unrepresented in institutions. Those living with the furniture are now entering late midlife and late life: what happens to the legacy when they are gone?
Frick & Frack's work is often confused with that of Andy Marshall, AKA Andy the Furniture Maker, a gay man who was also making furniture with salvaged materials. Recently, a 1986 documentary about Andy has become cult viewing online, raising his profile. But, just like Frick & Frack, no work by Andy the Furniture Maker can be found in the V&A nor the Design Museum.
Andy was close friends with the artist Derek Jarman, as were members of HOBAC. Today, Jarman is widely known for his films, books, and his Dungeness home Prospect Cottage, with its shingle garden. Still to be more widely acknowledged is his art – there has yet to be a Jarman retrospective at Tate Britain – and his experiments in living as a young man. In the 1970s, Jarman and his friends made homes in a series of abandoned warehouses on the South Bank of the Thames.
We can particularly see Jarman's philosophy of living in his first film, Studio Bankside, 1971, and the last, Glitterbug, a compilation of Super 8 footage released posthumously. He makes art, he reads, he thinks, they party, they play. It is Jarman's design of living that matters, like a hammock strung across a room: pleasure is essential. Of course, the easy response is that no one can live that way any more, that the cost of living is too great. But a re-creation of the past is not the point, it is about learning from the past. Such learning can only happen when our queer legacies are brought to light.
Crucially, this is not about deification. It can feel as if Jarman has been elevated to sainthood, spoken about as though he were an overlord of UK queer culture. Actually, he was separate from much of counterculture. In the catalogue for the Tate's current Leigh Bowery show, Torry writes that while Bowery 'appreciated Derek being open about his sexuality, he hated Derek's aesthetic, which he found too earnest.'
HOBAC and Jarman are influences on my novel, but so too are illegal raves and lawless gay bars, the ecosystems of which to me are the result of creative acts. I was thinking about Gideon Berger, the DJ and co-founder of the NYC Downlow, Glastonbury's queer club that's been running during the festival since 2007, often described as the best party in the world.
Berger grew up in south London in the 80s and early 90s, obsessed with pirate radio. He went to illegal raves and squat parties, eventually setting up his own queer sound system. When nightlife is historicised, it is usually clubs that are listed or promoted, rather than the ephemeral or the outlier. In my novel, I wanted to show illegal rave culture as embedded in queer experience.
It's also the creative nourishment that comes from the seemingly squalid. A gay bar is more than just booze and a backroom. It is the philosophies with which they are established and run, just as vital as the something-from-nothing ethics of HOBAC. A prime example is the Joiners Arms, an east London after-hours gay bar opened with intentional permissiveness.
'The Joiners is a theoretical impossibility,' its late landlord David Pollard told writer Paul Flynn for a 2008 i-D feature. 'That's one of its joys. It shouldn't exist, legally even. But if enough people want to have fun they can sustain somewhere like it.'
The Joiners closed in 2015. What matters is the seriousness with which it took pleasure. It changed my life. From 2008-2012, I co-ran a weekly party on Thursday nights at the Joiners called Macho City. At the time, I was a jobbing journalist at the tipping point of mainstream print media's decline. Before, I'd spent most nights at the Joiners hogging the jukebox to play Sylvester records. We started the party to keep late disco and Hi-NRG in the contemporary conversation. Each week, it was wild. It opened my eyes to what else I could do. The party in the Joiners led to me being able to write books.
Try to write these histories as nonfiction, and so much would be blank. So much was not recorded at the time, inevitable in communities that face discrimination, or was misrepresented in homophobic media. So many died in the Aids crisis, their stories now gone.
Institutions such as the V&A and the Design Museum can, and should, act to ensure queer histories are represented, before they are lost. In the meantime, to get to the heart of these stories, close to what feels to me like truth, all I could do was write fiction.
Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter is published by Particular (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.