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How Much Political Propaganda Art Can One Mansion Hold?

October 17, 2025
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How Much Political Propaganda Art Can One Mansion Hold?
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TWENTY-ONE YEARS AGO, Roland Emmerich purchased a well-preserved Georgian mansion on Brompton Square, one of the nicest private parks in West London’s Knightsbridge. Soon after, his friends told him he’d “bought a house in the wrong neighborhood,” he recalls, on an early June video call from his yacht as he travels between Greek islands with his husband, Omar. By that they meant that the area was too posh for an outspoken gay German expat who’d made his name (and his money) as a Hollywood director of big-budget, geopolitically inspired action movies, notably “Independence Day” (1996) and “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004).

A few months before, Emmerich, who’s 69, was in Los Angeles at a party where he met an English interior designer, John Teall, who’d recently graduated and had just begun doing interiors, film sets and other commercial projects. Emmerich told him he was considering buying an overly refined townhouse and talked about his collections: After the director became successful in the 1990s and began traveling constantly for work, he’d become interested in international propaganda art — the way it shaped both nations and their distinct aesthetics — and had just returned from Shanghai with Chairman Mao Zedong statues and a large set of vintage Chinese Communist Party midcentury figurines depicting children and their parents paying fealty to the regime (saluting, raising Little Red Books). What if, Teall asked, there was a way to play up the contrast between those controversial objects and the residence’s stately character? “He had that English sense of humor,” Emmerich says of Teall, now 50. “And together we decided to make it fun.”

So began a collaboration that, though it’s spanned nearly two decades and a recent renovation, has remained focused on filling a 5,400-square-foot, five-story traditional English house with as much outré nationalist and authoritarian iconography as it can hold, all without losing sight of the comfort and cozy proportions that first compelled Emmerich (who mostly lives at his compound in the Hollywood Hills, which Teall is currently overhauling) to buy the property, built in 1821. After you open the front door and walk down a long hallway, past a private study and library, you see the oldest — and perhaps most daring — of the home’s many decorative elements: a wall-spanning mural, painted in the mid-aughts by the designer and artist James Gemmill, of Mao, who presides over a pair of leather club chairs in an airy, sunken lounge. The lamps that flank the room’s white linen sofa are made of original Olympic torches from 1980, when Moscow held the summer Games. Those light fixtures are placed on boxy, diorama-style transparent side tables made by Teall and depicting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the scandal that ensued in 1995 after the English actor Hugh Grant was arrested for soliciting a sex worker.

Behind the sitting area is a lush back garden with a custom couch upholstered in outdoor-friendly velvet and a marble coffee table on which lolls the head of Vladimir Lenin, salvaged from a statue in East Berlin. In the flower beds are garden pebbles that feature the tiny faces of figures like Saddam Hussein and Che Guevara, all 3-D printed by Teall’s firm, Flux Interiors, which has a handful of employees between England and California. Such design decisions “all came from talking about art,” Teall says, noting that Emmerich had once argued that all art should be political — if a work’s not saying something, what’s its point? Teall made it a personal challenge to incorporate as many political statements across the residence as he could, he adds, all without it being too “in your face.”

While it perhaps goes without saying that none of Teall’s other projects look like this — or follow such a specific theme (although a London members’ club did try to commission him to do something similar) — what they all share is an obsessive attention to detail. In the middle of the second floor, down the hall from a roof deck, is a primary suite that has a bedroom mural of a Chinese dissident. Above, on the third floor, is a study with heavily scrawled chalkboard walls that pay homage to the Ron Howard movie “A Beautiful Mind” (2001) and a bathroom with a trompe l’oeil floor that features mosaic details borrowed from a Pompeii orgy room. On its walls are photographs of abstract genitalia-themed wallpaper from the British fabricator Cole & Son. On the fourth floor, which leads to a Francis Bacon-inspired artist’s studio that was converted from an attic and a housekeeper’s room, there are dueling guest bedrooms representing the British and American empires. The former lampoons the monarchy, with an en-suite bathroom of crimson brocade Humphries silk wall fabric in a pattern previously used in Buckingham Palace, accompanied by satirical photos of the royal family by the English artist Alison Jackson. The American one, meanwhile, is a commentary on post-9/11 expansionism and enduringly homoerotic military fantasies — covering a steel bed constructed from a decommissioned fighter plane is a duvet stitched from old Army underwear. Next to it, on a night stand, is a framed picture of the former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad transformed into a hairy-chested beefcake.

IS ALL OF this in bad taste? Absolutely. But both men seem to believe that’s better than having no taste at all or, worse, polite taste. For his part, Teall insists he’s mostly interested in history — he grew up the son of two academics in Battle Abbey, a national monument in East Sussex that, after its founding by William the Conqueror in 1071, had lodgings that were transformed into a private country manor five centuries later. He and his client also clearly enjoy shocking neighbors who happen to hear about the décor or catch glimpses through the windows: “There’s an irreverence built into the kind of neuroses of English culture — it’s an anxiety relief to laugh,” Teall says. “There’s an uptight arrogance to Britishness that needs to be laughed out.”

Over the last five years, in fact, he’s redone much of the project, adding new pieces that he’s pulled from Emmerich’s cache or sourced himself . He also installed several skylights and tore down walls to rearrange the flow of the kitchen, dining room and other first-floor common rooms, a challenging bureaucratic feat in a structure that’s historically protected. When the architect realized that many of the financiers and oligarchs who live in the area were adding basements to dramatically extend, and increase the value of, their properties, Teall found a loophole so that Emmerich could as well: His includes a gym with a mural of a North Korean hand crushing a missile on top of an American soldier and a vintage Japanese kimono with illustrations representing the ravages of the Second World War. Nearby is a midnight blue cinema and blood-red bar, which both pay tribute to Russian Communism with metal doors replicating those from Moscow’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and star-covered cornices and wallpaper inspired by Soviet imagery.

In redoing and expanding the place, they talked about what might never belong here: references to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis are forbidden, and they scrapped a portrait of Vladimir Putin after Russia attacked Ukraine. The homeowner is currently waffling over whether Mao has overstayed his welcome. “It’s the house of mass murderers — it is what it is, even if I’ve toned it down a bit,” Emmerich says. “The provocation I intended is a little bit now, because of Trump, you have the feeling of … Oh, my god.” Lately, whenever he’s returned to London or thrown parties here, he’s started to ask himself: Is it too much? For now, the answer is no.

Kurt Soller is the deputy editor of T Magazine.

The post How Much Political Propaganda Art Can One Mansion Hold? appeared first on New York Times.

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