Vanessa Branson lives in a mews house set back from a cobbled street. At one end is an old synagogue, at the other a Greek Orthodox cathedral, and beyond the little courtyard is a home that, as soon as you enter, feels like the most comfortable art gallery in the world. For all its rickety glamour, this house is significantly smaller than Branson’s previous home, a large townhouse in west London. “I have four kids who were all living with me with their partners, and then I had a friend who moved in for a long weekend and stayed for 32 years – there were 10 of us in the house,” she says, merrily adding that selling it was the only way to get them all to leave.
While her brother Richard was launching Virgin Records, in 1986 Branson opened a small contemporary art gallery in London’s Portobello Road. She was 23, and it was a time, she says, when art meant “sporting prints” for collectors’ walls. “It was quite a risky thing to do to buy something contemporary, but I realised that by buying a young artist’s work you’re encouraging them to push on. I didn’t have much cash, but I started to buy works myself, and it’s been a fabulous part of my life.”
There are paintings, and sculptures, and more paintings that she uses as curtains, hanging by her desk. They’re by a Glaswegian artist she once represented called Fred Pollock, and she’s lugged them between every house she’s lived in. “He has an incredible sense of colour and he sort of set the palette of my life. Someone said to me years ago, when you’re designing a house think of your favourite painting and just use that as a colour palette. Isn’t it such an obvious thing to do? Matisse, Fred Pollock… artists are the greatest colourists – don’t try to reinvent that yourself. It’s a great way actually, of finding out what speaks to who you are.”
The ground floor has the dimensions of a baby warehouse, with poured-concrete floors and exposed timber beams. It’s a bit of a crush, she says, but at parties they’ve managed to seat 48 for dinner. At its centre is a vast, wooden kitchen island, and light streams through the glass doors on to a wall of African photographs. The house feels as if it gets smaller as you climb. On the top floor, Branson’s white-panelled bedroom has views across the rooftops, and a window where her grandsons like to sit and watch the trains. On the ground floor, a huge Bridget Riley painting faces the kitchen (“You’ve just got to live with art and not worry about it – that was in the kids’ playroom at one stage. And they’re very robust paintings, actually,”) and on the stairs there’s work by Richard Billingham. Elsewhere, there are pieces by Sonia Boyce, William Kentridge and Tracey Emin, whose work she discovered in the 80s.
In the living room upstairs, its walls red and a bruised purple, there is a dazzling glass fireplace by Danny Lane. Beside it is a little rat in a champagne glass, which was the first piece artist Polly Morgan sold, and on a butter-yellow cabinet sits an early Grayson Perry pot. “I commissioned it from him after my husband left. It’s a monument to the midlife crisis.” Perched on its lid is a gold masturbating ape. “I’d seen someone had an urn for their ashes as a reminder of their mortality, and Grayson asked, ‘What’s going on in your life?’ I told him and he said, ‘Leave it to me.’” She grins.
Walking through Branson’s house is like being invited backstage at an exquisite museum after hours, where you stumble upon a series of Paula Regos before being offered something delicious to eat. She’s never sold on the pieces she’s bought. “Oh, it just commodifies art more. And I think it’s, well, not very cool.” Instead, when she realised she had too much art to hang on her walls, she simply built a hotel.
In the late 90s, Richard Branson was attempting to fly a hot air balloon around the world, starting in Morocco. While waiting with him for the weather to change Vanessa walked through the city, a plan forming. In 2002, with business partner Howell James, she bought a riad on the edge of the medina and transformed it into a hotel, El Fenn. Despite the hotel’s immense success (this was where Madonna threw her 60th birthday party), they still call themselves “accidental hoteliers”. “Because we’ve never worked out what the packs of butter should cost, and that sort of thing – we’ve just always wanted to make a hotel that we really love staying at ourselves. It ultimately worked, but it has taken 20 years to have some financial confidence.”
After filling the hotel with art, both local and imported (often under her arm), in 2009 she founded the Marrakech Biennale. “I started the biennale really as a response to George W Bush saying, “You are either with us or against us.” I know the power of the arts in stimulating critical thinking and helping people have the language to discuss ideas.” She spends a lot of time in Morocco these days, but also on her farm in Sussex, and on Eilean Shona, a Scottish island she co-owns with former husband Robert Devereux, where they rent out cottages and host art and writing retreats. It’s where JM Barrie wrote an early screenplay for a Peter Pan film and, with its wild woodland and perfect beach, is said to have inspired Neverland. “It’s more of a nature reserve than anything else, so it’s complicated to keep the balance of nature right – you have to be quite proactive,” she says, of the work it takes, “but I’m enjoying it.”
At various desks in these different time zones, Branson wrote her memoir, One Hundred Summers – a love letter to her parents that explores the entrepreneurial streak running through her family – and, more recently, a novel that investigates the relationship between art and money. How does she balance her time? “Not terribly well, actually!”
All Branson’s art has a story and all her stories lead back to her family. Every evening, as her father sat down for his first gin and tonic, he would proclaim, “‘Isn’t life wonderful!’ It sort of became the family mantra. He’d gone through the war and seen a lot of friends die, and had a natural predisposition to gratitude after having had that experience. It’s about taking pleasure in every little thing.” So, when she turned 60, Branson says, rolling up her sleeve, “I decided to have that phrase tattooed on my arm, so I could carry that memory with me always.” She turns over her arm to show me the tattoo abstracted from another angle. “Although, someone said to me the other day,” she hoots, after they saw it upside down, “Why have you got a tattoo saying ‘kill the children?’” She leans back in her chair, laughing, beneath a wall of photographs.
“This is something I’ve really only been able to put into words recently,” she says later. When you look at great art, “and you open up your spirit to the artist’s intention, you connect with their soul. It’s an incredible feeling and it means you’re living on a slightly different plane. That’s why when you walk through the National Gallery you feel spiritually refreshed, almost, coming out the other side.” Leaving Branson’s home I recognise the feeling instantly.
