Gentle Windows

What kind of homes and work spaces do women make as expressions of who they are, when able to live alone? An immersive, engaging and evocative journey through research, travel and family memoir, Gentle Windows explores how women create and curate the spaces around theme when free of societal and familial expectations.

Alice Maddicott blends social history with family history, art with literature, to explore what women’s spaces look like without the conventional pressures of family – and what this tells us about society. Alice’s grandmother – swimmer, firefighter, teacher and orphan – was saved by a chosen family of women, and as Alice retraces her grandmother's steps through the 20th century she encounters A La Ronde, the 16-sided cottage built by two cousins after a Grand Tour of Europe and bequeathed for the use of single women alone. She considers other artists, outsiders and pioneers through history, like Ithell Colquhoun, Elsie de Wolfe and Hope Bourne. She takes us back to meet Manhattan interior designers at the turn of the century to as well as teenage girls painting murals in Paris and we travel through cities and wild landscapes to meet women living alone in cottages, caravans and studios.

With curiosity, playfulness and honesty, Maddicott opens the window to the joys and possibilities of unconvential living.