As Mr Doodle, Sam Cox found a global audience and made a fortune with his signature scrawls covering furniture, clothes – and eventually an entire house. But behind the scenes, he was unravelling into psychosis
From the road, it’s barely visible; glimpsed, maybe, if peered at with cheeks pressed against the property’s imposing iron gates. There is otherwise little out of the ordinary in this quiet Kent corner of London’s affluent commuter belt – St Michael’s has a village hall, a country club, a farm shop. But at the end of a snaking, hedge-lined driveway is an incongruous home: a sprawling, six-bedroom neo-Georgian mansion, almost every inch, inside and out, covered in the trademark black-on-white line drawings of its owner, Mr Doodle, the 31-year-old artist Sam Cox.
A car honks twice behind me. A woman in her 80s steps out. “It’s mindblowing, isn’t it?” Sam’s grandmother Sue says, eyebrows aloft. “And terribly … different.” The gates ahead buzz open. “Take it slowly,” she offers, by way of warning. “You’ll want to give your eyes a few minutes to adjust.”
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