A Room Of Her Own: Beatrix Ost
In her feast of a book, A Room of Her Own: Inside the Homes and Lives of Creative Women, photographer and writer Robyn Lea explores the dazzling homes of 20 women who take a creative approach to both their lives and their homes. In this excerpt from A Room of Her Own, we meet artist, Beatrix Ost.
In Upstate New York, Beatrix Ost’s newly renovated house was on fire. The 1981 blaze wiped out a year’s worth of restorations and destroyed the plans she had for her new family home and art studio. It also claimed a lifetime of personal treasures, including hundreds of artworks. It took months for Beatrix to recover from the trauma and loss.
With her dream extinguished, it was time to search for a new home. Consulting her pendulum, a tool used to seek spiritual and material guidance, Beatrix and her husband, Ludwig Kuttner, settled on Virginia. There, she found a farm with a two-storey Roman Revival home and echoes of her Bavarian childhood.
Before long, Beatrix began hosting a salon on the first Monday of each month. News of the home’s sculpture-filled garden and eclectic interiors travelled quickly, and her events grew to epic proportions, with up to 200 people attending. Guests were as enthralled by the house as by their hostess’s infectious sense of fun and wide-ranging ideas. In one parlour, an antique silk damask sofa was arranged as though in conversation with a pair of Texan-style cattle-horn armchairs. In the same room, a gilded ancestral portrait was placed near a row of Beatrix’s wax sculptures of human and animal heads.
Never one to follow trends, Beatrix has always dressed for her own amusement, living by the adage: “Dress for yourself so you feel good about the day.” For Beatrix, this means dyeing her hair a soft shade of blue (using vegan and cruelty-free colour) or choosing magnificent outfits to wear. On the farm, she’ll be seen striding across the lawn in a hand-painted silk skirt, a top of her own design, fishnet stockings and custom-made lace-up ankle boots. Four rings adorn her fingers; she designed two of them based on tree branches from the property, and the others were purchased by Ludwig, as gifts.
Unsurprisingly, Beatrix’s artistic and philosophical outlook attracts like-minded women to her circle. Nigerian-American architect and thought-leader Oshoke Pamela Abalu is one of her closest friends. They share a passion for ideas and Mother Earth, and the belief that love can change the world. They also both choose to wear evening gowns during the day and allow their hearts to lead them to new adventures.
When spending time in her New York City home, Beatrix actively creates time for periods of silence and contemplation. When she needs quiet, she wears a brooch she designed that reads “practising silence”. If someone at a party tries to talk to her when she’s wearing it, she points to the brooch and smiles, and suddenly the dynamic shifts. The ritual allows her to approach talking and listening, sound and silence, in a considered way, trading city-life cacophony for connection to her deeper self.
Over her lifetime, Beatrix’s belief in self-efficacy has remained a constant: “I know that through life, happiness is within yourself. It’s like a fruit or a flower that you carry wherever you go.” Perhaps now, with all she has experienced, she also carries an inner pendulum that guides every decision and ensures she lives each day to the full.
“I know that through life, happiness is within yourself. It’s like a fruit or a flower that you carry wherever you go.”
A Room of Her Own: Inside the Homes and Lives of Creative Women by Robyn Lea is published by Thames & Hudson
Words + images_ Robyn Lea