How the late great Lee Alexander McQueen is supporting the next generation of fearless artists with the renovation of two listed townhouses in Tottenham

As the plainer cousins of the beloved butterfly, moths are frequently disregarded, passed off as dull or drab. But when the late Lee Alexander McQueen set up the Sarabande Foundation in 2006, it was a moth he chose as its emblem. When asked why, Trino Verkade, McQueen’s very first employee and now the charity’s director, answers succinctly: ‘A moth is a tenacious creature. Ever-evolving. Constantly growing. It will always fly towards the light.’

Such characteristics are exactly those Sarabande seeks to support in its work, providing emerging artists of all sorts with the means to realise their vision without restrictions. Offering its annual intake access to affordable studio spaces, mentorship opportunities, chances to exhibit, scholarship programmes and many more initiatives designed to support their future successes, the charity emerged out of McQueen’s desire to democratise access to the Arts (he himself had been born into a working-class East London family in 1969 before achieving stratospheric success).

‘They don’t have to be young, they don’t even have to have gone to art school,’ Trino says of the Sarabande cohort. ‘We just want our artists — whether they be painters, sculptors, milliners, fashion designers, animators or jewellers — to be at a pivotal point in their career.’ Alumni include Molly Goddard, Michaela Yearwood-Dan and John Skelton. She is adamant that Sarabande is not an incubator, but an accelerator. ‘Our artists aren’t babies. They’re not here to work things out. They’re here because they’ve got talent and something to say.’

Since its establishment 20 years ago, Sarabande — whose august ambassadors include the artists Marina Abramović and Sam Taylor-Johnson, the photographer Nick Knight and the costume designer Sandy Powell — has opened two blocks of studios in London, letting them to artists at almost unheard-of rates, subsidising monthly rents to just £1 per square metre, ensuring they can invest instead in their ambitious projects. The first Sarabande site was in Haggerston, the second in Tottenham. ‘We have always gone to the places where we feel exciting things are happening,’ says Trino. ‘We go to artists, rather than asking them to come to us.’

In true Sarabande style, however, the home of the foundation is metamorphosing. While the charity’s headquarters will remain in its Victorian stableblock in Haggerston, in Tottenham, Sarabande will, in May, move from its current location within a pair of Grade II-listed townhouses on the High Road to another set of two, this time Grade II*-listed, just a few doors down.

Such a sentence doesn’t do justice to the immensity of this endeavour. The buildings the charity has taken on — known as Holly House and Prudhoe House — were constructed in around 1715 to 1725 for Sir Hugh Smithson, Duke of Northumberland and a local MP. Thought to be the first semi-detached buildings in the country, the houses are perfectly symmetrical — paradigms of the Georgian ideal, with handsome Queen Anne façades, half-hipped roofs and a dentilled parapet cornice made of brick. Each with its own coach house, they were built to lure wealthy merchants to Tottenham, at the time a well-heeled rural enclave on the road to Cambridge from London. But by the time Trino first looked round the buildings in 2017, they were, to put it mildly, in need of love.

Prudhoe House, though used, had lost much of its charm; Holly House, meanwhile, was in a state of total disrepair. Tottenham Hotspur FC, which had bought the buildings a few decades previously, had managed to slow the decay with a new roof, but the situation was getting desperate. Trino remembers walking around the top floor when on her initial visit; three years later, it was too unsafe. While negotiations with the football club took many years, Trino says she knew Tottenham believed Sarabande could help them save the buildings. She recalls a conversation with Daniel Levy in 2020, then the club’s chairman. ‘He just totally understood what we were doing with Sarabande. Spurs do a huge amount of development in the area and they knew they needed someone with proper vision to take on the tenancy,’ she says. Together, they applied for National Lottery Heritage Funding — and eventually secured it, though it was 2023 before the decision was finalised and work could begin.

Tottenham Hotspur FC had already worked with F3 Architects, which made deciding on their involvement straightforward as did the practice’s experience of the adaptive reuse of historic buildings. What F3 have achieved here — especially in the more tumbledown Holly House — is quite spectacular. It is what they refer to as ‘arrested decay’; that is, a true kind of preservation. Across the 14 studios that now occupy the majority of the building, there must be a fragment of decorative history from almost every era on display. Layer upon scraped layer of paint has been left, as have the palimpsest of wallpapers, revealed when the rotten plaster was removed; there are patches of wall sprouting tufts of horsehair between extant Georgian laths, trippy violet walls, and doors daubed with 300 years’ worth of brushstrokes, as thick as an Auerbach canvas.

Unless something was dangerous or needed removing, F3 have left it. As Trino explains, ‘the idea is that the houses continue to live — and we continue to add to their stories. By patching everything up, you make it fake.’ Naturally, with this approach comes a degree of acceptance that, in the future, things will need mending, crumbling areas will crumble more. ‘And we’re happy with that. That is the life cycle of a building. We’ll fix it when it needs fixing,’ says Trino. ‘What’s important is that these houses are being used.’

The only particularly noticeable interventions are the plywood boxes superimposed on the studios’ walls, providing artists with pinboard space, or the fire-safe lino floors installed in the upper rooms, which are reserved for jewellers and their soldering tools. Next door, Prudhoe House, which had been lived in for 20 odd years, required much less work, though F3 and Sarabande have still placed the building’s historic fabric at the forefront throughout. With their six-over-six sash windows and generous proportions, the studios in here, now properly heated, must still be among the finest in the country, even without the extraordinary material history that survives next door.

One of the stipulations of the Lottery’s Heritage Fund is that any project it supports must meaningfully increase public access to and engagement with the heritage asset in question. Here, that has meant the creation of a gallery space in the basement, which Sarabande artists, who are also encouraged to participate in group shows, can avail themselves of whenever they have a suitable body of work. As Trino says, ‘having a gallery that will show your work is a great impetus for an artist.’

There is also the House of Bandits, a café, its name a nod to the anarchic ‘Sarabandits’ the charity supports, housed within the former coach yard of Holly House. Just as in the house, the building’s preserved historic fabric is integral to its character, only now enriched by the addition of site-specific artworks, including carved flagstones and a bar, created by Sarabande alumni Jo Grogan, Tom Hemingway, Castro Smith, Yijia Wu and George Richardson. ‘Once a Sarabande artist, always a Sarabande artist,’ says Trino.

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The Sarabande Foundation takes its name from Alexander McQueen's Spring/Summer 2007 collection (above), a poetic meditation on fragility, decay and grandeur. There is something fitting, then, about the charity making its home in buildings that have themselves been in metamorphosis for three centuries; here, disintegration and creation are not in tension. These houses have known splendour and neglect in equal measure. Now, housing artists, they are becoming — like the moth — something else entirely.