Stanley Picker & The Picker House
Born in New York in 1913, Stanley Picker arrived in England after completing his studies at Harvard University, to take over his father’s cosmetics business. The beauty brands developed by the company – among them Gala, Miners, Mary Quant and Outdoor Girl – each epitomised their era and created a wealth that permitted Stanley Picker to indulge his greatest love, the arts.
The Picker House is an impeccable late-modernist house in Kingston upon Thames, designed for Picker in 1965 by architect Kenneth Wood, with interiors by Conran Partners, for the burgeoning arts philanthropist to live amongst his growing collection of art and design objects.
When he retired in 1976 Stanley devoted more time to his interest in art. He commissioned Wood to create a gallery in his garden that he dedicated to the more important items of his growing collection. In 1977 he established the Stanley Picker Trust to support the education and careers of young arts practitioners.
Stanley died in 1982 leaving in the Stanley Picker Trust, the Picker House and its collection, an enduring legacy that ensures his passion for the arts lives on to this day.
Visiting The Picker House
The Picker House is privately owned and run by the Stanley Picker Trust and is open for a limited number of pre-arranged group visits between April and October each year.
For all general enquires please visit www.stanleypickertrust.org for further details and tour bookings.
For internal Kingston University enquiries only please contact us at stanleypickergallery@kingston.ac.uk
Kenneth Wood: 'A Modernist in Suburbia'
The Picker House & Collection: A Late 1960s Home for Modern Art & Design
A fully illustrated book The Picker House & Collection: A Late 1960s Home for Modern Art & Design – with essays by Jonathan Black, David Falkner, Fiona Fisher, Fran Lloyd, Rebecca Preston and Penny Sparke – was published by Philip Wilson Publishers in 2012, marking thirty years since the death of Stanley Picker in 1982, and is available for sale in our Shop. Architect Kenneth Wood is also the subject of an extensive research project on his wider practice, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.
Stanley Picker Fellowships & The Picker House
Supported by the Stanley Picker Trust, the annual Stanley Picker Fellowships in Art & Design support contemporary practitioners to create and premiere an innovative body of new work at the Stanley Picker Gallery at Kingston University.
Former Stanley Picker Fellows Elizabeth Price and Ab Rogers Design, more recently The Decorators and now currently Débora Delmar have all taken aspects of the Picker House and its collections as a direct inspiration for their respective Fellowship commissions.
See an excerpt from Elizabeth Price’s Fellowship commission At The House of Mr X (2007) below.