I took over the council house of the Sistine Chapel… and then I plastered it all over
THE new tenant of a council flat dubbed the ‘mini Sistine Chapel’ has painted over its religious murals.
Former tenant Diana Keys spent 40 years painstakingly painting murals on the walls of her home in Hemel Hempstead, Herts.
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The amateur decorator covered every wall and ceiling with a mural after taking inspiration from the Sistine Chapel, even though she had never been there.
In the salon she painted Jesus Christ, cherubim and horses in a meadow. In her bathroom she painted a golden-haired mermaid next to the toilet.
But after her death in 2018, Diana’s flat was transferred to a new tenant: Patrick Morrissey.
He paid to have them plastered over and said they were “too dark” to live with.
It made the 52-year-old feel like Diana was still haunting the house.
He said: “I heard that some locals were trying to keep it as a museum, but I couldn’t live with it… For me it was dark.
“It was like she was still there.”
He said that at first he didn’t think the paintings would be too bad to live with, but they soon became too much.
He even found a ‘crazy’ painting in a cupboard that glowed in the dark at night.
“I lived in the bedroom for six months. I sanded the whole thing and repainted it.
‘I tried to do the front room, but the stuff she painted was a nightmare to get off.
“I ended up plastering it all over. All together it cost about €3,500.
“I couldn’t live like this… It was too depressing. In the beginning I slept in the front room for two weeks.
“It wasn’t scary, it felt more depressing. It felt close.”
Diana, who was in her early 70s when she died, had said she feared the congregation would be the ones to paint over her life’s work after her death.
She said in 2017: “If I go to heaven, they will paint over it.
“But I like to think some will live on and I left a piece of love behind.”
Morrissey was told by the Dacorum Borough Council that it was up to him whether he kept or removed Diana’s life’s work.
Grandfather-of-one Morrissey said he had known about Diana, who was a friend of a friend, and had heard she was “lovely”.
It was as if she were still there
Patrick Morrissey
“But I didn’t know the painting… I knew her as the bird lady, because she kept a lot of birds.”
Some locals were still sad to see the Sistine Chapel mini-attraction disappear.
Father-of-three Alan Foster, who has lived in the area for almost 25 years, said it was a shame the ‘beautiful’ paintings had been removed.
The 74-year-old added that if he had been given the flat, he would have kept it as it was.
“Diana was a nice lady,” the retired factory worker said.
“She was devoutly religious, and we saw her in the back all the time putting out food for the cats and birds.
‘All the paintings she had looked very beautiful. I still have pictures of how it was all done.
“It took her years and years. Some of it was absolutely beautiful.
‘It’s a shame that it’s all gone now, all erased. Many people would have liked to see it.
“If I had the chance, I would have moved there myself and left it as it was.”
But Morrissey said he doesn’t regret plastering over the murals, saying they were too strange and personal for anyone else to keep.
He said: “Some people said I shouldn’t have done it.
“I said to them: ‘If you want to come and live here, that’s fine. But I’m not going to live like that.”
“The municipality said it was up to me what I did with it. I could have kept it, but I didn’t want to.
“Some people said I could have charged people a pound to come and see it all, but I never wanted to do anything like that.
“They just had to go.”
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