Designing an Education Salon

Victorian school room inspiration.  

 

Sometimes I get the hardest gigs...(with sarcasm). I've just recently been brought on to convert a space into an Education Salon for teaching BDSM and kink in Melbourne.

 

I have in the past been contacted by a couple wanting to my design skills on setting up a dungeon-style room in their home. And I regularly get asked for advice on the best portable equipment for travel bags. (Including forewarning of airport security scanning embarassment and confiscations... that's a whole other post.) 

 

However this is quite different in that the room is dedicated to education. And as such, I am taking inspiration from Victorian flagellation school rooms, museums of curiosities, and the traditional Parisian salons of intelligentsia.

Flagellation being carried out by an historic Governess, Library of Congress collection.

 

I am eager for the room to have a version of English Governess Theresa Berkley's 1828 design of a flogging frame, named 'The Berkley Horse' (or Berkley Chevalet). A high quality image of the device features in my book, 'The History & Arts of the Dominatrix', from the original print reproduced in 'Index Librorum Prohibitorum' by Pisanus Fraxi - the psuedonym of the 'Victorian erotomaniac' Henry Spencer Ashbee. 

 

As far as I am aware, this will be the first Berkley Horse in Australia. I know of one other modern adaption of it in the world, in the collection of USA Dominatrix Irene Boss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Left: Berkley Horse, designed by Theresa Berkley 1828. Right: USA Dominatrix Irene Boss's modern version of the Berkley Horse.

 

Melbourne is already blessed to have a number of devoted BDSM and kink spaces in existence, which speaks to the rich local scene. The suburb of Brunswick in Melbourne features Splinter Cell - a BDSM, Fetish and Alternative Education Center, Rope Bite and other events held at Pulse Studios, and Tantra Rope Bondage held at AKA Studio in East Brunswick. While other BDSM and kink events regularly feature in various hotels, bars and coffee houses in Collingwood and Melbourne city on any specified night, from munches and meet-ups, to events like Provocation. However such events are designed to best serve the more socially extrovert, lifestyle players and people who are 'out' in their kink interests.

 

The Education Salon is designed to cater to the desire for 1-on-1 lessons for women on how to dominate an intimate partner, rather than public play. Such is the strength of interest in BDSM and kink learning - driven by women, that the Education Salon is now to be set up for purpose. To which I am being given opportunity to apply my skills in design, history and education, to help create an Education Salon for women to learn.

I look forward to posting photographs of the in-progress or finished Education Room. Watch this space, as they say!

Oh and yes I welcome any historic equipment or contribution that anyone wishes to make to the Education Salon collection...

 

With thanks, Anne O Nomis.