Kinfauns
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kinfauns was the 1965-1969 home of George Harrison, lead guitarist of The Beatles.
A bungalow-style house, located at 16 Claremont Drive, Esher, Surrey, England, KT10 9LU, on the Claremont Estate, and only a short drive from the homes of John Lennon (Kenwood) and Ringo Starr (Sunny Heights), Harrison bought Kinfauns for £20,000 on July 17, 1964, on the advice of Dr. Walter Strach, the Beatles' accountant. (Going house-shopping, he said later "It was the first one I saw, and I thought, that'll do.") He was joined there months later by wife-to-be Pattie Boyd.
Harrison and Boyd were married on January 21, 1966, and lived in the house until 1970, when Harrison purchased Friar Park. They painted the outside of the house in psychedelic patterns. It was where police arrested Boyd and Harrison in 1969, for hashish possession, as Lennon and Yoko Ono had been months earlier while staying at Ringo Starr's. (Both couples insisted the drugs found had been planted on the premises.)
Aside from Paul McCartney's house at 7 Cavendish Avenue in St. John's Wood, Kinfauns was probably the home the Beatles gathered at most. It was where Harrison, Lennon and their wives retreated during their first LSD experience in 1965, and in May 1968 it was where many of the demo recordings for the White Album were made, on Harrison's Ampex four-track reel-to-reel tape recorder. (These demos have been released on various bootleg albums; seven of them also appear on The Beatles Anthology, Vol. 3.)
Harrison was the first Beatle to own or use a Moog Synthesizer, and he recorded "Under The Mersey Wall" with his Moog at Kinfauns; the track became one side of his Electronic Sound album, released in May 1969.
After moving to Friar Park, Harrison sold Kinfauns; both houses were listed as assets of the Beatles' company Apple Corps.
[edit] External links
- Satellite image from WikiMapia or Google Map
- Street map from Multimap or GlobalGuide
- Aerial image from TerraServer