Paul Velay, Jardin décoré / Decorated garden

unless stated otherwise images (2025) are courtesy of Tipeek Photos

In the centre of Vismes, a small village with 475 inhabitants (2020), located in the Somme department in the Hauts-de-France region, there is a house, now uninhabited, whose walls and the garden along the street were decorated in former years.

Life and works

This art environment was created by Paul Velay who was born in Vismes on February 15, 1904 and died, also in Vismes, on March 8, 1984.

There is no information about the job or jobs he had.

It is also not clear when he started decorating the garden and the exterior of the house. However, it could be that he began when he retired, as is the case with many other non-professional artists. This would mean that he started his decorative project in the 1960s.

another  view of the fence along the street

After Velay's death, a family member probably lived in the house until around the turn of the century. 

After that, the house, which was inherited by a granddaughter, remained uninhabited because she did not want to sell or rent the house. She didn't arrange any maintenance also.

The current status of the decorations

As can be seen in the image at the very top and the one directly above, the garden in front of the house is separated from the street by a fence decorated with triangular mosaics on top and creations depicting butterflies below. 

These decorations appear to be in reasonably good condition.

This does not apply to the garden, however.

For example, from the fence to the house there is a path formed by colorful pieces of stone and glass, as can be seen in the image above, where the decoration only appears after the overlying vegetation has been removed.

There was also a small castle with a small moat, as can be seen in a photo below from the year 2000, which is now completely overgrown with greenery.

this image (2000) and the next two (2000/2015)
by Laurent Jacqui

A hunter, positioned in front of a decorated wall, is also unlucky. In 2000 he stands proudly in a colorful flowerbed, in 2015 that flowerbed is overgrown and the roof has collapsed.

The front of the house is decorated by Paul Velay over the entire width with colorful frescoes, depicting all kinds of scenes.

The image below shows two people at a table with a meal. The bouquet next to the entrance door that welcomes visitors also still looks good.

This also applies to the wall decoration below, respectively a farmer with his horse ploughing and a hunter with his dog.

The walls of the buildings surrounding the garden generally still look solid, but Google Streetview shows that, for example, the roof of the building on the right side of the garden is quite badly damaged.

It is therefore doubtful whether there are people or institutions willing to undertake a restoration.

Documentation

* Article (2015) by Laurent Jacqui on his website Les beaux dimanches 

* Article (2025) on the website Tipeek Photos

Paul Velay
Decorated garden

8 rue du Moulin
80140 Vismes, dept Somme, region Hauts-de-France, France

can be seen from the street

Google Streetview

Paul Roger, Maison en coquille / Shell house

image as on Google Streetview

Along the northern French west coast, directly south of the large port of Boulogne-sur-Mer, lies Le Portel, a municipality with approximately 8,800 inhabitants (January 2022).

South of the city, parallel to the coast, there is the Rue de Cap, a rural street with at number 36 a house that has a special allure, because it has been abundantly decorated with shells, both inside and outside.

As can be seen in the image above, the house is separated from the road by an elongated shell decorated wall.

image as on website waymarking

Life and works

The shell decorations were added by Paul Roger (1923-2020), when he was a resident of the house. The project began in 1984, when he had just retired.

That year he got a visit from a brother-in-law. When they were walking on the beach they saw all kinds of shells lying around and his brother-in-law suggested that Roger could do something with these items in terms of decorating his home.

Roger thought that this was a bit crazy, but still worth a try, and so he got to work.

image as on Google Streetview

Crazy or not, the project would take ten years. It was also quite a job because Paul Roger sorted the tens of thousands shells by size and by color, pink, gray, or white. The large shells formed the frames and the small ones were glued inside the frames.

Various parts of the interior of the house have been also decorated with shells. This article does not have any images of the interior, but the video below includes views of various places inside the house.

After Paul Roger died in 2020 the house was sold. The new owners kept the decorations on the outside walls, but probably removed the decorations in the interior.

 

Documentation

* Article (undated) on website Waymarking

*Article (August 2014) in French magazine France Infor, includes a video (2 minutes)

Video

* Video (2014) in magazine France Info referred above

Paul Roger

Maison en coquillages

36 rue du Cap

62480 Le Portel, dept Pas-de-Calais, region Hauts-de-France, France

can be seen from the street

Google Streetview

Christine Fayon, Maison d'artiste décorée / The artist's decorated house

all images courtesy of Sophie Lepetit,
from her weblog

The image above, as well as the others in this post, show an interior decorated with a composition of all sorts of different small piles or hung objects, which can be seen as colorful spaces inside that together give shape to an art environment.

Life and works

This style of decoration is characteristic of the house of Christina Fayon, who was born in 1956 in Paris, where her parents worked as leather workers in a suburb.

Inspired by her parents, Christine started working with leather at a very young age. She was only three years old when she began making small creations, initially of course very simple ones, such as small leather bags that could carry her dolls.

As she grew older she also started making her own clothes.

Her preference for making her own clothes speaks to her need to live her life as she sees fit. 

For example, in 1979, when she was in her early twenties, she decided to travel to Central America, knowing when she would leave, but not setting a date for her return to France.

She loved this freedom to come and go, to meet the unknown and herself.

And then, during that first trip she experienced a great need in herself to feel and absorb everything around her, habits, encounters, experiences, colors. This experience would also become the basis from which her artistry would develop.

And so it may very well be that this experience also made her decide to continue her life as an artist.

 

In any case, when she went to live independently, she made sure that the house she moved into in the Aveyron department in the south of France, also offered the opportunity to set up a studio.

When furnishing her own home, another special characteristic emerged. She turned out to be a master in the art of collecting all kinds of things with which she could surround herself and express her artistic nature.

Gradually, the interior of her home not only became a multi-coloured collection of various independent ensembles composed of all kinds of objects. Beautiful to look at, these small universes also inspired her to make new creations and guided her in her further career.

That career went well. 

In her creations of textile paintings and textile jewellery, but also dolls, travel booklets, and postal art, she arranged a multitude of colourful fabrics in such a way that a coherent, inspiring composition emerged, a way of working that she gradually refined more and more.

During twenty years she also made a varied collection of leather bags.

The video below, made in 2020, shows Christine Fayon creatively active when she was in her early 60s and could look back on a life in which she travelled to areas in Asia and India and participated in many exhibitions of her creations, especially in France but also in Morocco.

A beautiful basis for further developments.

Documentation

* Article (March 2025) on the weblog of Sophie Lepetit, with a variety of images

* Weblog  Imbroglios textiles (Textile Tangles) by Christina Fayon (includes an overview of exhibitions in which she participated)

* Facebook

* Instagram, with a variety of images

* Series of photos on Facebook (September 2024) taken by Sophie Lepetit, showing material used and creations made by Christina Fayon

Video

* Video Un jour dans l'atelier de Christina Fayon (2020, 16'13", Vimeo) by Viallat Hélène

 

Christine Fayon

The artist's decorated house 

located in the dept Aveyron, region Occitanie, France

exact place of residence not published here

Tibor Türk Túri, Hagyományos viseletek babamúzeuma / Doll Museum for Traditional Costumes

pictures are screenprints from the video
referred to in the documentation

 

The Hungarian city of Keszthely with about 20,000 inhabitants is located on the western tip of the large, elongated Lake Balato, located southwest of Budapest.

 It is a city that attracts holidaymakers and includes various cultural attractions, such as one of the largest puppet museums in Eastern Europe-

Life and works

This museum was founded by Tibor Türk Túri, who was born in Budapest in May 1954.

He studied at the university in Nyíregyháza and then worked first as a business engineer and later as a teacher and tutor. He loved drawing and painting and was very interested in ethnography.

In the 1980s he entered the field of sculpture, creating a variety of all kinds of sculptures.

His interest in ethnography led him to put together a collection of various dolls in specific costumes, which in turn led to the establishment of the Doll Museum for Traditional Costume. 

The museum, which opened in 1999, was housed in a building in Keszthely that used to be a granary and already existed in the middle of the 19th century.

The building contains larch beams with a length of 14 meters, which are even older and possibly date from the time of the Rákóczi, the first war of independence (1703-1711) that was fought in Hungary against the Habsburg rule.

The walls of the building also include unplastered parts of the walls of an old castle in Hungary dating from the time of Roman rule.

The main collection of the museum includes about five hundred dolls showing the traditional costumes worn by the bourgeois inhabitants of Hungary in the past.

There is also a collection of 120 dolls with Transylvanian costumes displayed in two separate showcases.

The heads, hands and feet of the dolls are usually made of ceramic, the rest is made of textile.

The museum management is actively pursuing a policy of adding dolls to the collection.

This applies, for example, to the collection from Transylvania, which was formed by organising a competition via a children's magazine to see who could send in the most beautiful regional costumes. 

This action led to a very good result, as very valuable material was received, which was assessed by a jury of ethnographers.

Since in Hungary folk traditions are also gradually disappearing, the museum is just in time to develop activities that will help preserve dolls in traditional clothing by including them in the museum framework.

So, the museum is also undertaking similar actions in collecting dolls, aimed at other areas of Hungary.

The museum does not only contain dolls with traditional costumes that are related to the bourgeoisie.

A contribution was also received from a family that includes all kinds of everyday clothing made of old linen and hemp, about 150 years old. 

For example, the clothing of a cleaning woman wearing small wooden slippers and carrying a bucket with a mop. Or a grandmother sitting in front of the stove dressed in simple, poor clothing.

The third floor of the museum includes replicas of various famous buildings in Hungary. 

A special creation is a replica of the Hungarian Parliament building, the so-called Snail Parliament, made by Ilona Miskei, born in 1920, who from 1975 onwards incorporated 4.5 million seasnail shells into the building over a period of 14 years.

Documentation

* Website of the museum

* Facebook, with a variety of images

* Article on website West-Balaton

* Article on Wikipedia about the Snail Parliament

Video 

* Video (YouTube, 2020, 2"15") by Keszthelyi Televízió

Tibor Türk Túri

Doll Museum

Kossuth Lajos u. 11.,

Keszthely, Hungary

visitors welcome

Google Streetview

Maria and Mircea Dragan, Muzeul Etnografic Casa cu Păpuși / Ethnographic Museum Doll House

photo by Iulian Oancia as on Google Streetview

In Sibiu, a city of some 137,000 inhabitants (2011) in the Transylvania region in the center of Romania, there is a house that as of 2020 has been transformed into a museum of dolls .

Life and works

The collection came into existence around 2000, when the couple Maria and Mircea Drăgan, living in the town of Agnita in Transylvania and working as a mathematics teacher and a Romanian teacher respectively, decided to collect folk costumes from the surrounding countryside.

photo by Наталия Штупун as on Google Streetview

That countryside around Agnita is known as the Hârtibaci Valley, also referred to as Green Valley, an area with lots of wild nature and historical buildings such as churches and castles. 

Folk costumes also contribute to the unique character of the area and the couple Drăgan decided to collect them. Maria Drăgan in particular visited all the 46 villages in the valley and collected examples of folk costumes, often as worn by dolls, and all kinds of decorative and craft objects.

Mircea Drăgan, who was particularly interested in the history and customs of the inhabitants of the villages in the valley, conducted research on this subject, which was published in three volumes.

 photo by Ion "John" Ionica as on Google Streetview 

Maria not only collected all kinds of dolls dressed in traditional costumes, she also bought dolls at the market or got them from neighbors and friends. 

For these dolls she made suitable costumes herself. 

Eventually her collection would include about three hundred dolls. In the couple's home in Agnita, this collection of dolls was brought together in an exhibition. 

this image and the next two are screenshots 
from the video mentioned in the documentation

However, in order to be closer to their children and grandchildren, Maria and Mircea Drăgan left Agnita in 2020 and moved to Sibiu.

There they settled in a house along Calea Gușteriței, near the Cibin River., which they once more transformed into a museum where all the dolls they had collected got a place.

Some of those dolls looked out of the window at passers-by, but most were exhibited as can be seen in the images around.

The approximately 300 dolls on display are dressed exactly like the inhabitants of the Hârtibaci Valley,

The museum has also all kinds of attributes such as old furniture, carpets and cutlery that give visitors who are familiar with the traditions of the Valley, the feeling of being in a Hărtibacă household.

To give an idea of ​​that feeling, here is a commentary Maria Drăgan gave on the first doll in the collection for whom she made a traditional costume, as was customary in her native village in the Valley: "We call her 'woman with a veil', a covering worn by married women". 

The lady doll wears a jacket with a puff above the elbow and ruffled sleeves, a hat, a chevtar and a skirt with tassels. On her shoulder she wears a pair of sandals with a mătăuz in them. This is a bunch of basil that the bride threw at her in-laws' house on her wedding day. Whoever caught it was rewarded with a big drink.

So there you have it. It is not for nothing that the collection of dolls on display is formally called an ethnographic museum.

Documentation

* Article (March 2024) in newspaper Strada Cetatii

* Article  (undated) on the website Zig Zag prin România

* Article  (October 2018) on the website of newspaper Observer, with a short video

Maria and Mircea Dragan

Museum Doll House 

Calea Gușteriței 54B

Sibiu, region Transylvania, Romania

open for visitors

Ibolya Nagy, Galeria de artă a păpușilor / Doll's art gallery,

all images as on Google Streetview

On the facade of the house with the balcony it is stated in capital letters that the Doll's Art Gallery is located here. Below this English mention there are the indications in smaller letters: Galeria Papasilor and Babamuzeum, which is respectively Romanian and Polish for Doll Gallery and Doll Museum.

The doll's art gallery, that includes the house with the balcony and the one next to it on the left, is located in the center of the city of Târgu Secuiesc, a municipality with some 16.000 inhabitants (2021), situated in the center of Romania.

this image and the next eight as on Google Streetview, 
submitted by various photographers

Life and works 

This museum is a project undertaken by Ibolya Nagy, who is married to Tilhamer Nagy, a couple living in the city of Târgu Secuiesc.

At some point in her life she came into possession of six porcelain dolls, dressed in gowns from earlier times. 

She was so delighted with them that she passionately started collecting more of these dolls, which got a place in the house where she lived with her husband.

 

When her collection had grown to 175 dolls, she came up with the idea to exhibit them in a doll gallery, an idea that became reality in 2010. In 2011 there was a first exposition, and in 2017 the gallery opened permanently to the public.

Ibolya Nagy was able to realize her dream thanks to her husband who was the heir of a historical house in the center of Târgu Secuiesc, built in 1910 by his great-grandfather, who was a renowned merchant at the time. 

The communist government that came to power in Romania after World War II had confiscated the house, but Tilhamer Nagy managed to regain ownership in 2008.

Arrangement of the dolls in the gallery

Currently, the collection comprises some 1500 dolls, and until now, every year some 100 to 200 dolls have been added to the collection..   .

Because the gallery is housed in what traditionally is a residential building, the dolls are distributed over the various rooms and spaces that the building comprises.

The Porcelain Room is a place of honor for the very first six dolls with which Nagy Iboly started her collection.

Then there is the Green Room, where the oldest dolls in the collection are exhibited. 

These are dolls from the period between the 1920s and the year 1960. The oldest doll, dating from 1927, depicts a Chinese woman.

The so-called Style Room is about dolls that portray all kinds of princes and princesses, mostly related to (European) royal houses and often going back to times long past.

Then there is the Nostalgia Room, which brings back memories of visitors' youth and the dolls they played with, but also their  early school years and the children's books that shaped their lives during their younger years.

Finally, there is a space designated as the Great Hall.

This area has shelves along the walls with -among other items-  dolls depicting celebrities such as Audrey Hepburn, Kate Middleton and Prince William. Many of these dolls come from Germany and France.

The Great Hall is also referred to as the Olga Gallery, with the name Olga being a tribute to Nagy Ibolya's mother-in-law..

Documentation

* Article on the Anapedia-Travel website with an extensive series of images.

* Article (2017) by Mihaela Aionesei in newspaper Mesagerul de Covasna 

* Article (November 2024) by Gina Artenie on the website Covasna 45, also richly illustrated

Video\

* Video (YouTube, 2024, 7'36") by Maszol

Ibolaya Nagy

Doll's Art Gallery

4 Independenței Street

Târgu Secuiesc, Covasca County, Transylvania, Romania

visitors welcome
Google Streetview

Auguste Léger, Maison aux coquillages / House of shells

 

this picture and the next three courtesy of Tipeek Photos

The shell-decorated house pictured above is located in Gravigny, a municipality of about 4,000 inhabitants in the Normandy region of France.

The house is situated on its own grounds on a corner at the end of a street, which ends at a roundabout, and this specific location means that not only the front along the street can be seen, but also the sides to the left and right. 

These two sides are also decorated, in a design that is comparable to the decorations on the street side.

Readers who know a bit about Google Streetview can see this for themselves

The shell decorations were applied by Auguste Léger, about whom no biographical information can be found on the internet.

Some information about the period in which the decorations were applied can be obtained via the website Habitants-Paysagistes of the Lille Art Museum, where three photos of the house can be seen, made in 1983 by Francis David.

These photos radiate a certain naturalness, as if the decorations have been adorning the house for years.

This would mean that the shells were applied at least forty years ago and probably date from the 1970s.

Documentation

* Short article (1983) on website Habitants-Paysagistes, with photos by Francis David

* Short article (undated) on the website of the municipality of Gravigny, with the remark that the  house  currently is private property

* Article (September 2024) on Tipeek Photos with a series of recent photos

Auguste Léger, 

Maison aux coquillages

7 Rue du 23 Août 1944

Gravigny, dept Eure, region Normandie, France

can be seen from the street

Google Streetview