Above: Veere Grenney’s Temple as it is today, painted in the much admired Temple pink.
This September, the collection from the Temple will be offered at auction for the first time, presented by Dreweatts. The nearly 150 lots, according to the auction house, include upholstered furniture, decorative lighting, artworks selected by Veere over the last 40 years, and more. In light of the auction, we’re revisiting our April 2025 Biography of a Room, which spotlighted one of the Temple’s spaces.
When I was at boarding school in New Zealand, I had a photo of the Temple on the wall of my room,” Veere Grenney recalls. The Temple in question is a not a house, really, but a folly—one of the tiny yet mighty English pavilions with the power of expression of a 100-room building, but with more romance than a real house (certainly a big one) could ever have. This photo was on Grenney’s wall because the Temple (built circa 1760 as a “fishing temple”) had belonged to his hero, David Hicks. It then, as follies have a way of doing, exerted a profound influence on his future work. Hicks’s passion for Palladianism, for scale via illusion, all are signatures-to-be, and all are here. He quickly outgrew the little building, and eventually it was time for the boy who had fallen asleep looking at it from across the world, now a distinguished decorator himself, to begin a love affair with this not-quite-house. Grenney sold his London flat to take over the lease in the mid-1980s.
Same room, same Grenney, but in 1996 the walls were hot pink.
Grenney took over the lease in 1984. By 1986 it looked like this.
“I was in love with the whole Englishness of follies, of the idea of living in one grand room,” he tells me, talking about one of the most enchanting rooms in the world. Grenney’s color treatments began with the Colefax staple Butter Yellow, hovered in bolder territory for a while at hot pink, and ultimately evolved into the soft color the room wears today, known in English IYKYK circles as “potted shrimp.” Just as Hicks once did, Grenney has used the Temple as a lab, though this spring, after more than 40 years, he will leave the big little building to live at Gazebo, his house in Tangier, full-time. “I’m not a rich man,” he confides, “but I’ve never minded, because I have great house karma.” Sometimes you don’t need a whole house. All it takes is one great room.
The Temple, built c. 1760, in its David Hicks chapter, late 1950s.
This story originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of Elle Decor. SUBSCRIBE
