A roofless, stone dovecote stands, sentry-like, on a hill – an unusual, evocative landmark for the quiet, historic Somerset town of Bruton. The river Brue ripples through its heart. A tiny post office, a couple of pubs, a shop and a clutch of antiques and gift outlets populate the main street, off which is the disarmingly named Sexey's Hospital – a quadrangle, chapel and almshouses, founded in 1638. Bruton built its wealth on wool – then silk – and farming. Today, its economy is driven by a combination of agriculture and education, and the population hovers, daintily, around the 3,000 mark. Change is afoot, however. The arrival of a contemporary art gallery could, very possibly, turn Bruton into an international tourist destination.
I stayed here several years ago, reviewing a newly converted self-catering coach house. I still remember stepping out, into frosty darkness, in search of a takeaway. The town's silent desertion was such a contrast to city life come nightfall. I walked past narrow townhouses and the odd, mud-spattered 4WD. Steep, narrow alleys, called bartons, ran from the main street down to the river, along which I returned (clutching a Chinese). How clear the night sky was, the stars enchantingly bright, and I sensed, as my feet crunched on the ground, that I had fetched up in a rather special place.
Others clearly think so. As well as the farming families and West Country bohemians (Glastonbury is 15 miles away), there is certainly an element of comfortably off DFLs (down from Londons) whose children attend one of a clutch of local, independent schools. This is also an area fertile with creativity. Artist Richard Pomeroy and his writer wife Helena Drysdale are locals. As are writer and TV presenter Mariella Frostrup, photographer Don McCullin, film maker Julien Temple and painter Luke Piper, grandson of John Piper. Its most famous visitor was, perhaps, John Steinbeck, who stayed in the 1950s while he worked on The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights, published posthumously.
Fifteen minutes' walk or so from town, along a country lane which passes the railway station (oh yes, you can still get here by train, from London via Westbury, and the Midlands via Bristol) lies Durslade Farm, a 17th-century model farm which the local council had regarded as being "at risk" for several decades. The Grade II-listed former farmhouse, outbuildings and much of its 200 acres are now a hive of activity, a building site characterised by mud of Glastonbury proportions.
By midsummer, though, the farm's transformation into futuristic art gallery and education centre will be complete, masterminded by the people behind privately owned contemporary gallery Hauser & Wirth.
In the 20-odd years that Hauser & Wirth has been in existence, opening first in Zurich, then adding galleries in London's Mayfair and New York, it has established itself as a serious player in the commercial art world. Swiss art dealer Iwan Wirth co-founded the gallery with retail magnate and art collector Ursula Hauser in Zurich in the early 1990s, then married her daughter, Manuela. They expanded into London (first in Piccadilly; they now have interconnecting spaces on Savile Row), then New York, with Los Angeles in their sights for 2015.
They are described as "the gallery world's power couple", handling artists including Turner Prize-winner Martin Creed, hyperrealist sculptor Ron Mueck, the late Louise Bourgeois (whose dramatic spider sculpture appears on artists' impressions, see below, of the Somerset gallery's entrance), Paul McCarthy – one of H&W's most successful LA artists – and Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist. Somewhere in between openings in London and New York last year, the "power couple" discovered this laid-back, pastoral corner of Somerset, on the cusp of Dorset and Wiltshire. They now have a house here, and their children are at school locally.
Initially, the only sign that such art heavyweights were in town was at a restaurant with rooms (which is also a bakery, wine shop and generally cool watering hole) housed in a former chapel. The Wirths soon became regular diners in At the Chapel, so named for obvious reasons, and generously offered curating help for the building's lofty white walls. If you check into one of the rooms upstairs, you may well find yourself waking up with a Louise Bourgeois looking at you.
There are other attractions, of course. Walking is a joy here, as is pottering around antique shops and walled gardens, and it's great as a base for visiting nearby Wells. But, for now, At the Chapel is as close as contemporary art tourists will get to a taste of what is to come.
Near-derelict Durslade Farm – with barns, stables and buildings laid out attractively around a courtyard – presented the Wirths with a unique opportunity to do something wild in the country. If you stand in the lane that passes the farm you will get a sense of the magnificence of the original buildings, but no clear sense of the new structures being built behind them. Despite the mud and the cold, the noise of machinery and drills, the sheer scale of what is being imagined and fashioned is breathtaking. Farm buildings made of softly hued local stone are being renewed; original brick floors of time-worn beauty have been restored and replaced; double-, no, make that triple-height barns are being given a second chance, brought into fresh prominence, juxtaposed as they now are, with angular, modern additions that create an inner cloister behind the neat, traditional farmyard.
When it all opens on 15 July, there will be no fewer than five gallery spaces, occupying a total area of 2,483 square metres. They will be open six days a week and free to visit. At any one time, they might show work by five artists, or be devoted entirely to the work of one. The incredible scale of this project looks sure to put Bruton on an international stage for both contemporary art and cultural tourism.
If you are in any doubt of the effect of cultural tourism, it is worth considering that since the Turner Contemporary opened in Margate in 2011, visits specifically motivated by arts and culture have steadily climbed by at least 10% a year, generating funds and jobs in the area, and fuelling new business. There seems no question, either, of the calibre of what will be on show in Bruton. The opening exhibition will be by Royal Academician Phyllida Barlow. Her large-scale sculptural installations, using everyday materials such as fabric, plaster and cardboard, are unforgettably bold and vibrant. At the end of this month, Barlow will unveil her largest work to date, in the Duveen Galleries in London, for the Tate Britain Commission 2014.
H&W is cagey about the cost of the project but, in terms of investment in a rural community, it makes a refreshing change from supermarkets and garden centres. One suspects other towns in the locality would have bitten Wirth's hand off for a planning application such as this, especially when you take into account the library and education centre that will form part of the development as a commitment to a learning programme for local schoolchildren. The estimated footfall is 40,000 visitors a year but this could be conservative (386,000 people apparently visited nearby Stourhead house and gardens in 2013). It is likely, too, that tourist interest will ripple out beyond Bruton to neighbouring Frome (home to scores of artists), Wincanton and Castle Cary (whose station is the one for Glastonbury festival).
But it isn't only art-lovers who will be beating a path to the south-west. Running concurrently with Phyllida Barlow's opening show will be the first ever exhibition of garden designer Piet Oudolf's landscape drawings. Described as the most influential garden designer in the world right now, he won international acclaim for his work on New York's High Line park. He is the modern Dutch master of naturalistic planting – using dreamlike drifts and swaths of colour – and he is landscaping the gallery. Magnolias are about to go into the inner courtyard, but an entire Oudolf creation of contoured beds, packed with his signature perennials, will be planted this spring on a south-facing acre-and-a-half directly behind the farm, a colourscape through which visitors will be able to meander, taking in a vista of the gallery buildings and hilltop dovecote beyond, enhanced by a canopy of Kentucky coffee trees. For the gardening fraternity, it will be an irresistible new destination.
A restaurant and bar off the handsome, brick-floored main entrance, adjacent to the threshing barn, will not, I suspect, be the sort where you slide a tray along to the cash till. H&W have invited At the Chapel's team, restaurateur Catherine Butler and designer and furniture-maker partner Ahmed Sidki, to run it. It was to be called At the Farm, but this whole operation is nothing if not fluid. The name has been dropped and there is now talk of the restaurant itself being an art installation. Whatever the outcome, given Butler and Sidki's success down the street, it seems likely this next venture will also become a destination in its own right.
"The most excited people of all, though, are the artists," says gallery director Alice Workman, who admits that H&W Somerset is constantly evolving. Just as the gardens will grow and change over time, that seems to be the game plan in general, a reflection, perhaps, of the artistic process itself. This is not to say that only the artists are in a state of pleasant anticipation. Presentations held locally have been arranged along the way, to keep the town's inhabitants in the picture. Workman tells me not one objection was received during the planning process, and my own enquiries locally elicited positive responses, except from one woman who told me that what Bruton really lacks is not modern art, but a dry cleaner.
It's also short on desirable places to stay. At the Chapel has just eight rooms, Babington House has far more, but is hardly cheap, and ever since the Sunday Times named the Talbot Inn in nearby Mells the top hotel in Britain, those pretty bedrooms have been permanently jammed with its readers.
Which brings me to the farmhouse at Durslade – the first element of H&W Somerset to reach completion, it was the only place where I was able to remove wellies and get out of the rain. When the galleries open, the house will be available as a private holiday let, an opportunity to stay on site, and will also offered to visiting artists (who could come to work in one of four studios currently being hewn from an old maltings off the high street).
Solid, reassuring stone, embellished with original ornate details, such as arched stone mullions, encases a six-bedroomed interior which almost sings with colour (lipstick-red stairway), retro tongue-in-cheek style (Lloyd Loom chairs in black-tiled bathrooms which retain 1960s porcelain fittings – remember the blue and the pink?), and work by H&W's own stable of artists. A Zhang Enli hangs over the staircase. The dining room has colourful murals by Argentinian artist Guillermo Kuitca. In the damson-and-gold-leaf confines of the sitting room, a mesmeric video installation by Pipilotti Rist (who spent a year in Bruton as a pilot artist-in-residence), casts reflections on a giant chandelier created from glass found on a rubbish tip and strung so that shadows glide across an unpainted wall. It is an immersion in modern art – the most exciting holiday house I've encountered in a long while. Maybe ever. A foretaste of things to come? Only time will tell, and only time will reveal what impact cultural tourism has on this town. For soon it will be listed on glossy art brochures: Zurich, London, New York ... Somerset. One thing is for certain, though. As edge-of-town developments go, Hauser & Wirth will make one hell of a change from Asda.
• Further information at hauserwirthsomerset.com
