The surrealist Cathedral and Supper-Club dreamscape of Charlotte and Philip Colbert’s East London residence.
Philip Colbert is the flamboyant pop-surrealist dubbed the “godson of Andy Warhol.” His lobster alter-ego: an anthropomorphic crustacean that appears in his paintings, sculptures and performances, was born from the surrealist tradition of Dalí’s lobster phone and the absurdist poetry of the 1930s avant-garde. “I became an artist when I became a lobster,” he likes to say, positioning the creature as both self-portrait and cosmic joke. An emblem of transformation, identity and play; it’s a reminder that art can moult its own shell.
Charlotte Colbert, his wife and collaborator, works across film, sculpture and design. Her art delves into the unconscious, the feminine body and mythic symbolism. If Philip’s lobster stands for metamorphosis, Charlotte’s motifs (eyes, wombs, breasts) speak of perception, fertility, and the surreal logic of the body. Her vision, part feminist reclamation and part dream diary, turns domestic spaces into landscapes of the psyche.
Together, the couple have created a house that refuses to separate art from life. The double-height living room glows under a marble “Eye” coffee table; the bathroom features a claw-foot tub covered in silicone breasts; the bedroom’s headboard swirls into the shape of a uterus. Lobsters crawl across cushions and chandeliers. Even the architecture bends to the dream, with Chris Dyson Architects opening up the conjoined homes into a unified theatrical expanse.
More creative organism than private residence, the couple host events, dinners, and what might loosely be called surrealist salons. Guests dine beside sculptures, lounge on symbolic furniture, and drift between kitchen, gallery and performance space as if caught in a lucid dream. Charlotte describes it as “a house that’s living… and a relationship that grows and changes as you do.”
This is not a supper club in the ordinary sense; it’s a sensory séance. Each event becomes an extension of the artwork itself, blurring the line between host and participant, object and observer. The evening’s real performance is spatial – the way art, architecture and conversation loop into one another until the entire house merges and emerges into something more.
To enter Maison Colbert is to enter an ecosystem of symbols. The lobster evokes metamorphosis and absurdity; the eye, perception and surveillance; the uterus, creation and interiority. The repetition of these motifs turns the home into a kind of mythopoetic code, an environment where every object seems to whisper its own philosophy. Yet there’s a tension, too. Surrealism once sought to free art from bourgeois comfort, and here it finds itself elegantly re-domesticated. The Colberts’ genius lies in keeping that contradiction moving: the dream inside the drawing room, the rebellion gilded in gold leaf.
Their home is both spectacle and sanctuary, a space that celebrates art’s ability to transform the everyday without pretending to escape it. A conceptual menu designed to delight the senses and challenge perspectives, appetites collide across this edible landscape – a whimsical lamp installation dripping with edible gummy bears, imposter striped ‘candy’ ravioli, and Colbert Cocktails. Guests are not simply fed, they are absorbed into a symbolic world where art becomes habitat. It is surrealism reimagined for the 21st century; playful, self-aware, and deliciously alive.
