Stephen Fry unveils Royal Academy plans for Keeper's House renovation

Stephen Fry unveils Royal Academy plans for Keeper's House renovation

07 June, 2012
by: Spoonfed Arts Team

Changes afoot on Piccadilly...

Stephen Fry, Grayson Perry, David Chipperfield and other luminaries were out in force this morning at the Royal Academy of Arts as the venerable institution announced its plans to open up and renovate the Keeper's House. The move will double the space available for the Academy's 94,000 Friends (which make it the largest organisation of its kind in Europe) as well as see the opening of a new bar and restaurant by Oliver Peyton.

At the media view in the ornate John Madejski Fine Rooms, Fry, a trustee of the Royal Academy, was in effervescent form, describing the RA as “one of the most exciting places to visit in London” and emphasising that it is, perhaps uniquely, “owned and run by artists” rather than “panjandrums or grandees”. He also contrasted Anish Kapoor's praise of “the greatest exhibition space in the world” with the current area provided for the Friends, the Sir Hugh Casson Room, as “a bit like a 1970s polytechnic staff room”.

The £5.7 million project is being overseen by architects Long & Kentish with interior design by David Chipperfield, while Grayson Perry has done his bit by, um, designing some napkins. As with anything on this scale at this kind of institution, it's a careful balancing act: Chipperfield talked of a “multitude of tribes within the building each with different expectations”. Likewise, with Friends, Royal Academicians, staff and the paying public all to keep happy, Rolfe Kentish admitted that it had been “quite a challenge”.

By stripping back various floating ceilings, opening up previously unloved rooms and converting the basement – formerly “rather squalid offices” according to Chief Executive Charles Saumarez Smith – into a restaurant, with an additional bar opening onto a little garden, the aim is a dual one: to appease the existing Friends (two thirds of whom are over 50) and appeal to a new generation of art lovers. Only time will tell whether they've got the balance right.

The renovation of the Keeper's House is just the first stage in a much larger and more ambitious project to renovate the entire two-acre site, connecting up the RA Schools with the main gallery spaces and hopefully finally finding a suitable use for the vast 6 Burlington Gardens – until recently a temporary home for Haunch of Venison but now back in the RA's hands, with still no clear signs of what they're planning to do with it.

Read Tom's review of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2012.

The Keeper's House will open in Spring 2013.

Image: © David Chipperfield Architects

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Spoonfed Arts Team