The World of Interiors

Top: a blanket thicker than the others in the house protects the living room from the elements. Above: at one end of the kitchen
a vivid hand-painted Bhutanese dresser with sliding doors contains wicker baskets used for collecting fruit and vegetables.
Opposite: in the heart of the kitchen two gas-fuelled hobs perch on an old wood-burning stove. Pots and pans sit on shelves above

IN 1890 an Indian official wrote to a British con-

sular functionary who had taken an interest in the tiny

unmapped kingdom of Bhutan on to which his country

bordered: ‘No-one wishes to explore that tangle of jungle-

clad and fever-stricken hills infested with leeches and

pipsa-fly and offering no compensating advantages. Ad-

venture looks beyond Bhutan while science passes it by...’

Now 125 years later the Holy Realm of the Peaceful

Dragon is according to one survey the ‘eighth happiest

place in the world’ and early this year adventure came in

the form of a Vogue fashion team led by photographer Tim

Walker and flame-haired model Karen Elson. And science

of a kind too in the logistics of transporting 40 pieces of

luggage up inclines that seem never to end through forests

of white pine and fir of holly oak and mountain laurel and

along alpine-flowered roadsides that do end sometimes

unexpectedly in sheer-drop precipices.

Six other members made up the Vogue team: hair and

make-up artists fashion editor fashion editor’s assistant

Walker’s photographic assistant and his aide-de-camp

Jeff who had arrived early to scout for locations.

This is a Himalayan kingdom – technically it’s a demo-

cratic constitutional monarchy – wedged defying gravi-

ty between India and China on the foothills of mountains

that soar thousands of feet into the air. You bypass Everest

to land battered by the winds that whipped up the valleys

at Paro Bhutan’s international airport. And then on the

road out the rest is silence: a landscape of chotens and stu-

pas both traditional funerary monuments and streams of

prayer flags carrying their silent benedictions on the wind.

Unspoilt by mass tourism Bhutan has taken a side-

ways glance at Nepal to learn what not to do. The rest of

the world seems very far away. And until 1974 when the

country opened its doors to the first official visitors it

was. Being glamorously inaccessible Bhutan was until

very recently without a regular army (what is fighting?)

and is still without a navy (it is landlocked) or an air force

(it borrows India’s). Instead it is populated by presum-

ably the eighth-happiest people on earth for whom tra-

ditional dress is mandatory. It famously eschews Gross

National Product for Gross National Happiness. Plastic

bags billboards smoking and traffic lights are banned

as is killing a crow – as great an atrocity as slaughtering a

thousand monks – and climbing a mountain over 6000m.

As a result Bhutan can claim the world’s highest un-

climbed mountain in 7570m Gangkhar Puensum. ‘I can’t

decide’ Karen Elson tells Vogue ‘if my heart is fluttering

from anticipation or altitude.’

At several thousand feet above sea level the hills out-

side Paro are fertile grazing grounds dotted with timbered

farmhouses such as the one shown on these pages pho-

tographed by Walker on a trek to shoot fashion pictures.

It didn’t take long for the architecture to engage Walker’s

inquisitive gaze (‘He is superhuman’ says Elson. ‘He liter-

ally ran up the mountain trail and out of sight.’) They

were not difficult to get into. ‘We simply knocked on the

door’ said Walker ‘and in we went.’