Simon Costin: ‘I can look out of the window and see another country’

Everyone has their dream projects. The curator and art director Simon Costin has helped numerous visionaries, from the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen to the photographer Tim Walker, fulfil theirs — creating sets and shaping whole worlds that exist just for a night, or a single frame.

One of Costin’s own dream projects came along this year and, while he has two full-time jobs — running both the Museum of British Folklore, which he founded, and the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall — he was more than happy to work through the night on numerous occasions to make it happen. On November 10 the result, The Red Shoes: Beyond the Mirror, opens at the British Film Institute in London.

The exhibition explores the making and myth generated by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 classic film. For the myriad cineastes who list The Red Shoes as their favourite film of all time, it is the highlight of a season of screenings of work directed by the duo, marking the 75th anniversary of the balletic adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale.

“We have the shoes which [lead actress] Moira Shearer wore in the film, on loan from Martin Scorsese,” says Costin, talking to me in the basement kitchen of his home in Dover, Kent, an 1834 seafront house that he has reimagined, floor by floor, as a fantasy inspired by the history of the area and seascape.

He is currently splitting his time between a home near the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle and this house, which over the past six years has become a kind of museum in its own right. “This place definitely feeds me creatively,” he says. “It’s the only place I’ve ever lived in the UK where I can look out of the window and see another country. I wanted to make it colourful, and purposely theatrical.”

The house has only been owned by three families since it was built and is largely unchanged. “Back in the day, before the giant road to the port nearby, there would have been direct access via a promenade to the beach,” says Costin.

Much of the highly decorative wooden furniture in the house is from auctions and eBay, or created Frankenstein-style by Costin’s carpenter friends, using elements from other pieces he has found.

“Everything in the house is there to create a particular mood. It doesn’t have to be Georgian to match the architecture. I hate fitted kitchens, so had my fridge hidden behind antique wooden cupboards.” Instead of any kind of technology being visible, there are a lot of cherished artworks by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Robert Tavener and Walter Hoyle and, in the kitchen, elaborately decorated ceramics. “I love bargeware from the mid 19th to early 20th century,” says Costin of the style named after its popularity among narrow-boat dwellers on British canals.

One thing that was custom-made new is “Simon’s Bed”, created by the studio JamesPlumb in 2019 out of steel, ash, rope and sailcloth. “The designers Hannah and James went for a walk around Dover and came up with the idea of something inspired by Victorian bathing tents,” he says. “It has a mechanism that lets you open the sailcloth up or down to be entirely contained.”

This sense of theatricality demonstrates why Costin was a natural choice to design the Red Shoes exhibition. His portfolio of past projects is defined by materialising seemingly impossible fantasies, on an often operatic scale. Of his plans for the BFI, he says, “I wanted to totally transform the space we are using for the show, which is a simple mezzanine and lecture room. The minute you enter the mezzanine, you are in the world of the film.”

For the ‘Red Shoes’ exhibition at the BFI, we have the shoes which Moira Shearer wore in the film, on loan from Martin Scorsese

Costin’s design makes ample use of props — there are more than 100 previously unseen items from the BFI’s archive — and theatrical trickery, including a Pepper’s Ghost effect which he describes as “an amazing animated holographic device” that was used to create the illusion of a ghost appearing on Victorian stages.

“I wanted the whole experience to be cinematic,” he says. “It’s a journey through the process of making the film, seen through the eyes of its star, Moira Shearer.” Shearer had a decade-long career as a ballet dancer before she was cast as Victoria Page in The Red Shoes. During his research, Costin recalls, he found “fabulous programmes from Sadler’s Wells in the early 1940s, when she was still just a part of the corps de ballet and credited way down the list as an ‘attendant dove’”.

Costin finds endless visual inspiration from the home he has created.

The hall features hand-painted frescoes in soft shadowy hues, featuring cavorting satyrs in an Arcadian landscape running up the staircase walls. The same artist, Paul Wallis, created a mural of mythical sea creatures for the floor of the dining room, which is entirely themed on its ocean view, from a giant seahorse on the wall that was created for a shoot with Tim Walker, to an Italian mid-century wooden dolphin on a plinth.

Around the table there is an arrangement of Pier Luigi Colli 1950s Modernist chairs, which Costin found on an auction site for £440. “They had torn seats, so I had them reupholstered. I saw a similar set on 1stDibs for £4,500 recently.”

The choice of colours for each room has created a journey through each of the four floors, with gently shifting moods, from the aquamarine of the morning room to the strong blues and reds of Mr Punch’s Parlour. In the latter, there’s a bright cushion in the shape of an elongated dog by fashion designer Charles Jeffrey (the tartan used is Jeffrey’s trademarked own). Like everything in the house, it comes with a story.

“Charles gave it to me after I created the set for his show in 2020,” says Costin. “I created an enchanted tree as the focal point for what he called a ‘dance of death’, choreographed by Kate Coyne, who was part of the Michael Clark Company for 15 years. It was folkloric, but also about the environment.” Jeffrey’s tartan stretches along the back of a House of Hackney sofa covered in a William Morris textile, in front of a wall full of antique Punch and Judy puppets, which give the room its name.

There are flashes of colour throughout the rooms, from richly embroidered cushions from Turkey to a small toilet with orange floral wallpaper by Sanderson from the 1960s. In Mr Punch’s Parlour, there is a huge jade-tone Asian-style jardinière of three deified felines that support a giant horned bowl. “I really don’t know the story behind it,” says Costin. “It was gifted to me by Graham King, the former owner of the Museum of Witchcraft, and he was given it by the founder, Cecil Williamson. Apparently, it came from Germany, but that’s all we know.”

The most unusual source for colour came from a close friend. Costin’s partner suggested orange for the kitchen but they couldn’t settle on a shade. The inspiration came from the Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell, who he first met when they both worked with Derek Jarman in the 1980s.

“Sandy was here one afternoon when the house was still a wreck,” he recalls. “She’s known for her shock of orange hair, so she stood against the wall while I got all the tester pots out, and daubed them all behind her until we found one that matched her hair perfectly.”

My favourite thing

“I bought this dolphin in an antique shop in Hastings,” says Costin. “I loved the energy and movement of the carving. It’s a mid-century, Italian, wooden sculpture, basically, that has been painted. I had a plinth made to complement the mural on the floor. It weighs a tonne so it’s on wheels!”

“The Red Shoes: Beyond the Mirror”; November 10-January 7; bfi.org.uk

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram