When I arrive at Artist House Kadenówka, the gate stares me down with giant cast-iron eyes. Behind it looms a wooden house lifted straight from a fairytale. Both enchanting and creepy, it is neighboured incongruously by boxy midcentury apartment blocks in the Polish spa town of Rabka-Zdrój, an hour’s drive south of Kraków.
“I didn’t choose this house; it kind of came to me,” says artist Paulina Olowska of the building she bought in 2009. “Rabka has all these amazing abandoned…

