David Bowie begins to change: skin, clothes, hair, and houses. The artist first lived in various parts of London: Brixton, Bromley, South Kensington… and then all over the world, renting and owning properties in New York, Los Angeles, Lausanne, Sydney, Mustique.
His first home was at 40 Stansfield Road, in Brixton, but he only stayed there until he was six when he moved to another working class suburb of south east London, Bromley.
It was with his famous Haddon Hall home that his passion for furniture and décor really began to make itself felt. The large house where he had gone to live with the new American bride Angie must have had something in tune with his particular expressive moment.
Is 1969, and the house is the famous Haddon Hall, at 42 Southenr Road, Beckenham, another suburb of London
Here Bowie began writing and recording Hunky Dory, The Man Who Sold The World and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
He lives, writes and composes in his flat, on the ground floor of this enormous Victorian mansion which overlooks a park and golf course. Basically this is where "Ziggy", Bowie's most famous alter ego, was born. The ceilings were painted silver by the new couple, and here Angie cut Bowie's hair and sewed him the first "Ziggy Look"
Bowie paid a token rent of around £7 a week. The artist, at the beginning of his career - but with Space Oddity already active - lived here with Angie and little Zowie (who later decided to call himself Duncan), as well as the musicians who would later become the Spiders From Mars.
David, at the time, had a passion for antiques, and filled the house with antiques, including a grand piano, on which he composed some of Hunky Dory's tunes, such as Changes and the Eight-Line Poem.
Berlin: The other great passion of Bowie's new era, once he had stopped playing Ziggy Stardust and Halloween Jack (his alter egos in the period between The Rise and Fall and Rebel Rebel), was East Berlin, where he moved for a period of time, in the hope of rediscovering his European roots, after a time spent in Los Angeles between excesses and vices.
The building where he lived, at 155 Hauptstrasse, in the Schöneberg district still bears a commemorative plaque today.
New York,
Boeir lived in New York, at 285 Lafayette Street. Two blocks across Broadway to the Prince Street stop.
A building born as a candy factory at the end of the 1800s, converted into a residential building over a hundred years ago.
Here, on the seventh floor, David Bowie, his wife Iman and their daughter Alexandra lived until that tragic and painful January 10, 2016.
In 2021, Iman decided to sell the almost 500 square meter house, with three terraces overlooking SoHo, a lounge, a library, four bedrooms, a private elevator. Sold in just one month for 16 million and 800 thousand dollars, the apartment had been bought by Bowie in 1999 for just under 4 million. The couple, already married, had previously lived at Essex House, overlooking Central Park.
During the pandemic, the model thus decided to go and live in their country house in the North, in Catskill, in Greene County, in New York State,
Before marrying Iman, Bowie had his primary residence in Lausanne, Switzerland. Then an apartment in Los Angeles and a boat in the Mediterranean. But he always spent five or six weeks on the private island of Mustique, the same famous private island formerly home to Mick Jagger, where he had built a villa. A unique house of its kind, with five bedrooms and a recording studio, which still today retains the interior details requested by the artist.
"Why in Mustique? They ask me, well frankly it was a rather curious coincidence. I was with Mick and Jerry (Hall) at their island home for a couple of days, waiting for the boat to arrive - I had to do a trip up and down the Caribbean.
Trip that never started because the prop broke or something, and so I got stuck there. I went scouting one day, having nothing better to do, and came across this patch of land near that of Arne Hasselqvist. We talked about it and I thought, “Why not?”
Arne was willing to sell only if the sister house that would be built on the site had the same "weight" as the house he had built for himself. I could have agreed, but then what to do with it? I said to him, “Look, it's obvious you've been to the Orient, Arne. But have you ever been to Indonesia?”. He had been walking around there, so he knew what I was talking about…”
“Home is such a peaceful place that I have absolutely no
no motivation to write when I'm there."
(David Bowie)
Unfortunately the villa turned out to be too peaceful and too idyllic: the singer was no longer able to compose, and in the absence of stimuli, he decided to sell it.
(excerpt from AD .it)
