When my wife, Ramona, died in 2018, after we’d been together for 69 years, there were too many haunting memories in the house. So I left 78 Banbury Road, Oxford, to live in Ireland, next door to my son’s home. It’s my only home now and where I’ve been living happily for the past five and a half years.
What are the best things about your house?
All the main rooms — drawing room, living room, kitchen, bedroom, study, library and studio — are on the ground floor. At the age of 97 my legs don’t enjoy climbing stairs and I can let my grandchildren use my upper floor. Also the house has underfloor heating, so I’m always warm. Its only bad feature is that the letterbox is at the end of the front drive. But it’s good exercise for my legs!
What does home mean to you?
So long as I can have a studio to paint and write I’m happy. With my surrealist paintings I’ve explored a private fantasy world and haven’t expected anybody else to enjoy them; indeed in the early days nobody did. Nowadays they’re being collected. I write books to get ideas across to people, but I’ve never painted to please somebody, apart from my mother who wanted one she could understand! I said: “I’ll do you a flower.” Of all my paintings it’s the only one that is traditional. I still have it.
The Question by Desmond Morris
STEPHEN CHUNG/ALAMY
What room do you gravitate towards?
It’s always my studio. I go in there and disappear into my private world of biomorphic images. Since 2022 I’ve had ten books published and between 1944 and 2023 I completed over 3,600 paintings of my secret world. It’s my lifelong obsession. I was in there last night painting until 4.30am.
How many books do you own?
My mania for collecting books once spiralled out of control. My library in Oxford reached such proportions that we had to buy the house next door to contain it.
What is your first childhood memory of home?
I was born in Hillside House during the Depression, in the village of Purton, Wiltshire. When I was three or four I would play the Post Horn Gallop on the gramophone and gallop to the music, out of the French windows and round the lawn. I loved playing in the orchard and hiding in the copse, where I clambered up a pile of logs and hid inside like a burrowing animal.
Morris, aged four, on the lawn of Hillside House with his dog, a Sealyham terrier
ALAMY
Did overnight success make you change the way you lived?
Having a bestseller in 1967 [The Naked Ape, which has sold more than 12 million copies] was the first time I had money. I said to my mother, “I’m going to live it up in the Mediterranean, buy a big house and a boat to search round the coastline and spend all this money.” That year my wife and I bought a beautiful 27-room villa in Malta and we regretted selling it in 1974. We often talked about spending our last years together there in the sunshine. After six years I got bored with that life and went back to Oxford, researching at university and writing books.
• Naked Ape author Desmond Morris’s sale of a lifetime
His 27-room villa in Malta
What has been your worst property investment?
We bought a holiday apartment on the eighth floor of a skyscraper in Famagusta, Cyprus, which I haven’t been able to get into since 1974 because it’s in a war zone. Until very recently it was a huge ghost town completely surrounded by men with guns.
The fenced ghost town of Famagusta, Cyprus
ALAMY
What is your guilty pleasure?
We did miss the swimming pool we had in Malta, so I built a 40ft indoor swimming pool at my Oxford house. It cost a fortune. But it was lovely because for the last half-century I could swim almost every day, the temperature very high, winter and summer. I’ve done nothing else for health reasons in my entire life.
Have any of your houses had unpleasant surprises?
The most dramatic was when our Oxford house was struck by lightning. It went down a chimney stack, through a bedroom and down into the kitchen where my wife was cooking dinner. She was lucky to survive it.
Morris presenting Zoo Time from London Zoo in 1956
ALAMY
What are your gardening experiences?
The best feature of my present garden is the laurel hedge — over ten feet high — around it, giving perfect privacy. Unfortunately it lacks a pond with frogspawn. I meant to get one built, but I’m too old now. In our north London garden, where Ramona loved flowers and I tended the koi in the fish pond, in 1967, we had a pet abandoned Chinese water deer we called Psyche that lived in our shrubbery and when very small used to sleep in our dressing room. Whenever we had guests she’d reluctantly wait outside the French windows until someone left them ajar, then hurtle up the stairs to settle into her favourite spot, which she did one night during a party while a lady guest we found frozen in horror was going upstairs to find the bathroom.
For Desmond Morris paintings and books visit thesurrealistartgallery.com. His other latest books (The British Surrealists, Peoplewatching, and 101 Surrealists) are also available from the Times bookshop. To order, go to timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members