The Guardian

“It can be bleak in winter but it’s always beautiful, and it’s a place that inspires you to be creative, and ambitious”, says the owner, Caroline Wiseman

Caroline Wiseman was enjoying her morning dip in the sea off Aldeburgh, Suffolk where two brick towers once served as sailor’s lookouts, when an epiphany struck. “I noticed a ‘for sale’ sign on the south tower and fell into reverie, dreaming about how it would make a wonderful place for artists to work,” she says. When the owner suggested that she bought the tower and his 18th-century house behind it, she jettisoned caution and said yes. “I’d been looking for somewhere to buy: this place is unique.”

Since she set up her first gallery at home in south London, Wiseman has always been an advocate of living with the art that she sells. But the Aldeburgh Beach Lookout is no conventional gallery, “It’s a place where artists can come for a week’s residency. We ask them to respond to the setting in innovative ways, with dance, film, sculpture or poetry,” she says. She also invites artists to stay in the pastel-hued house which she shares with her partner, Francis Carnwath, a former deputy director of the Tate.

Built in the mid-19th century, the tower served as a lookout for locals to spot ships in trouble. Later, the tower and adjoining boathouse were used for storage by fishermen. When Wiseman first saw the lookout it was “wind-bashed” but beguiling. “For 30 years the author Laurens van der Post used the second-floor room for writing. It was untouched,” says Wiseman, who preserved the original feel of the interior, with its vertiginous metal staircase. She made few changes to the house, apart from knocking through to the nextdoor cottage, bought from the same owner. “We took a section of wall out of the first floor to link the sitting room with my office,” she explains. On the ground floor a door leads from the dining room to the living room in the cottage.

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