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My conservatory with an amazing power to heal
BY DESIGN: The pyramid-shaped conservatory
which Uri designed in his back garden
Every step you take into the future, you bring the past with
you. When I agreed to design a revolutionary extension to
my home, I never dreamed that the project would lead me back
to my old house in Cyprus.
As I look out of my study window, an extraordinary object
stares back through four immense glass eyes.
If you glimpsed it from the Thames that runs behind my gardens,
you would probably think, ''Oh that Uri Geller, he's got aliens
visiting him again! Why do they always have to park their
spaceships on the lawn?''
It is not a UFO - it is a conservatory. A conservatory built
like an Egyptian pyramid, except the Great Dynasty never created
anything from massive sheets of glass and shining red steel.
I adore the traditional conservatory which extends from our
kitchen. The table is big enough for ten, and we always eat
our Sabbath meal around it, usually with friends and guests.
My exercise cycle is in there too, so I can enjoy the maximum
morning light and energy as I power through my daily 40km.
When it rains, I love to watch the rivulets distort reality
outside, and listen to the raindrops hammer on the panes.
There is nothing louder or more dazzling than to enjoy a
thunderstorm in a conservatory. So when I chanced to meet
some of the bosses of a top conservatory company, and I told
them how I loved my glass house, they set me a real challenge
- could I create a second conservatory, something radically
different, that would add just as much to my home?
My instant reaction was ''Yes - I am visualising something
very powerful!'' And when I'd checked that this was a serious
company I was dealing with (which it certainly is, for Ultraframe
employs more than 1,300 people on two continents) I told Hanna:
''I've got a great surprise for you . . . no more journalists!''
My wife is the best hostess in Britain, but the constant
stream of reporters and TV crews through her home would try
the patience of St Julien, the patron saint of hotel-keepers.
With a massive new conservatory in the garden, I would be
able to greet all my media guests in a purpose-built Geller
Pyramid.
I have already started to give interviews in there, and it
is an awesome structure. I am proud of the fact that I designed
it myself, and grateful to Ultraframe for giving me so much
artistic freedom.
My vision tested the skill of their engineers to the limit,
and the air-conditioned glass palace which they have constructed
is like a sci-fi set.
I placed a Japanese-style doorway at the entrance, to accentuate
that feeling of stepping into another world. Everyone who
walks inside says that, after 10 minutes inside the structure,
their energy levels are brimming.
When 140 children who were being treated for cancer flew
from Israel and Palestine to visit my home a few weeks ago,
the pyramid was both a fun place for them to play and an inspiring
place for us to focus on healing.
I have been praising the curative power of crystals for years,
but this is the first chance I have had to live in one!
We flew to Cyprus for the launch. One hundred and fifty people
from the trade joined us, and we partied the night away at
a gorgeous hotel in Limassol. A belly dancer taught us all
to gyrate - after a few glasses of ouzo, anyone can learn
to bellydance!
I also took the opportunity to open an exhibition of my painted
boxes and plates at the K Gallery in Nicosia, and to lecture
to a packed auditorium.
But the truly extraordinary part of the trip was my journey
into the past.
I was brought up in Cyprus. My mother remarried when I was
10 years old, and we moved from Israel to Nicosia in 1957
to run a pension-style hotel.
With Hanna, I returned to the town, and found my old home.
It is derelict now. As I picked my way through the familiar,
strangely alien rooms, I thought how much smaller it all was
than I remembered.
When I was 10, it was like a mansion - now, it was a vacant
bed-and-breakfast, badly in need of repair. If a businessman
bought it and lavished a little money on this place, it would
repay him 10-fold, for good property in Cyprus fetches respectable
prices and this house has magnificent architecture.
But I could not do it myself - that would be a step too far
into the past. When I told a property developer friend how
I'd found my old home, she exclaimed, ''What a coincidence!''
But I do not believe in coincidences - like Carl Jung, I
think that events which mirror and echo each other have a
greater meaning, that the connection is all part of some higher,
invisible design. There is a pattern to life, and patterns
do not arise from coincidence.
One fragment of synchronicity really did make me gape - a
neighbour in Nicosia, who remembered my mother from the Fifties,
said our hotel had later become a vegetarian restaurant.
I have been a passionate vegetarian all my adult life - I
wonder if the building somehow caught an echo of my conviction
and turned veggie too?
Email
him at uri@urigeller.com
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