Month: January 2016

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Architecture Art Design Hotels Luxury People Restaurants

The Lanesborough Hotel Knightsbridge London Afternoon Tea + Céleste Restaurant

We Shall Have A Ball

The Lanesborough Hotel London Ceiling Detail © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

It’s been a quarter of a century since our last visit. But still there’s an air of inevitability about it. A case of when, not if. Indulging in afternoon tea at Britain’s most expensive hotel (not forgetting the 15 percent tip), that is. Lavender’s Blue intern Annabel P rocks up wearing half a diamond quarry’s worth of rocks. More (late) breakfast with Tiffany’s than Breakfast at Tiffany’s. All in a day’s work.

The Lanesborough Hotel London Lampshades © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Storming past the trompe l’oeiled reception and faux tented lobby, we take in the tiered Céleste at The Lanesborough, a glazed roofed internal pavilion looking heavenwards. It’s Wedgwood blue now. A jasperware temple. Regency, just like the building. Last time round, the wildly eclectic gothiental Conservatory as it was then called was flamingo pink. Sometime in between, lurking here for four years was a greyish art decoesque intruder named Apsleys. The hotel has changed hands as well as hand painted wallpaper, but is still Middle Eastern owned. Once Rosewood managed, Oetker Collection has adopted it as an English half sister to Le Bristol Paris.

The Lanesborough Hotel London Sandwich © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

The Lanesborough Afternoon Tea Pastry © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Christian our sommelier ensures Blenheim Palace Sparkling Natural Mineral Water is on tap. Always glad to support enterprising duchesses. Egg mayo with celeriac sandwiches are a particular hit. Even trumping the cucumber and mint. Although not quite up there with sketch Mayfair’s fried quail’s egg sandwiches (zany has a new). Dominik our waiter refills the plate. Oh! We’ve spotted another firm favourite. No, not the (mother’s) Ruinart. Caviar. Maybe not on the same scale as That Lunch at Comme Chez Soi but an effective enough Russian invasion of the Scottish salmon sandwiches.

The Lanesborough Afternoon Tea Chocolate © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

A careless magpie’s droppings of edible gold and silver leaf are liberally sprinkled across afternoon tea, even landing in the clotted Devonshire cream. We skip the lemon curd for strawberry preserve on the freshly baked scones (enveloped in pristine linen) but yearn for coloured sugar crystals (a dead cert at Marlfield House) to melt in the coffee. Although technically this is afternoon tea. Pastry chef Nicholas Rouzaud’s celestial array of hazelnut, caramel, chocolate and lemon meringue fantasies arrive. They quickly do a Lord Lucan.

Lavender's Blue Intern Annabel P @ The Lanesborough © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

In another quarter of a century a Victorian revival will be due. Brown will be the new black. Or at least the new greige. Expect heavy oak panelling, heavier drapes (again) and half a dead zoo’s worth of taxidermy in the revamped Céleste. It will be renamed Charlotte at The Lanesborough in honour of our newly married princess.

The Lanesborough Afternoon Tea Bill © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

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People

Diana in Savannah + Diana Rogers

Moon River

Diana Rogers Pianist Savannah © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Savannah. The setting of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. The events that unravelled around the intriguing characters of “The Book”, as locals refer to it, happened more than 30 years ago. But Savannah sure does still revel in larger than life people. In the heart of the Victorian District, which covers several squares of the city’s grid plan, sits the Gingerbread House. It’s the fretted spindled bracketed shuttered cookie cutter sweet as apple pie home of the marvellous musician Diana Rogers. One sultry Sunday morning, we arrived over to meet Diana in her kitchen. Exquisitely clad in oyster pink – summer hat, long silk gloves and real shell earrings to boot – she firstly entertained us with her witticisms, homemade sugared scones and a glass or four of bubbly. Diana herself sipped clear liquid out of a cocktail glass.

Diana Rogers and Leopold Savannah © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Her house is a collector’s paradise. Tables overflowed with vintage finds from clowns to toy frogs, glistening in the scorching sunlight streaming through the coloured sash windows. Diana was originally from Oklahoma. “All they do there is watch TV and go to church!” she howled with laughter. Rural life wasn’t for her. A classically trained pianist and singer, her wonderfully intoxicating voice, not to mention her superlative keyboard skills, meant she was an instant blues hit in New Orleans. Soon she even outgrew the Big Easy and packed her bags for the big time in the Big Apple. In New York she deftly launched herself on the music scene. Diana performed in all the top uptown hotels and downtown clubs: the Waldorf Astoria, Harry’s Bar, One Fifth Avenue, Windows on the World …

Hot in demand, Diana enjoyed a long engagement at Nino’s in New York throughout the Nineties. She played and sang at the Madison Arms in East Hampton during the summer months. Diana was flown across the Atlantic to perform at private parties in London and Cornwall. At the end of the century she released an album of hits featuring I Know Him So Well, La Vie en Rose and her own composition Middle Class Princess. In 2003 she decided it was time to embark on a new phase of her life so she packed her bags again and headed for the Deep South. For the price of her tiny Manhattan flat she picked up a five bedroom restored timber Victorian house with dripping bargeboards on the pink azalea lined East Gaston Street in Savannah. “I still return to New York every couple a’ months,” she drolled. “Last time I was there I ran up €2,000 on a hat. But it’s a real nice hat. Ya know my wardrobe takes up the whole top floor of the house.”

Savannah Georgia © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Savannah Townhouse © Lavender's Blue Stuart BlakleyDiana has fully established herself as a firm fixture on Savannah’s music circuit. And social whirl. She’s performed in more than a dozen venues and can be heard in the basement piano bar of The Olde Pink House several nights a week. In fact that’s where we first came across her. Descending the stairs from the classy restaurant above, we heard Moon River in dulcet tones floating across the heavy evening air, laced with promise and romance. Fast forward 48 hours and there we were, in her home.

Bonaventure Cemetery © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

“Come on through to the parlour,” Diana beckoned. The morning had melted into early afternoon. Keeping her gloves on – natch – she embarked on a one woman cabaret show, jauntily weaving her way through Cole Porter and George Gershwin before celebrating the present day with Andrew Lloyd Weber and John Kander. “Imelda Marcos’ daughter lives right next door,” revealed Diana. “And Jerry Spence, the hairdresser mentioned in The Book, is always calling round. ‘Honey you can find me on page 47!’ he hollers to everyone he ever meets!” Another neighbour, Patricia, arrived. “She was big in Washington!” confided Diana in a stage whisper. A medley of Johnny Mercer songs began. Outside, rain from the gunpowder grey sky beat down heavily on the veranda. But it didn’t dampen the decadent party spirit indoors.

The Olde Pink House Savannah and Planters Tavern © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Leopold, her grand tortoise shell cat, looked on attentively. “She guards the house!” exclaimed Diana. The cat got her name before her gender was determined at the vets. “My workman Mr Tiles is built like Tarzan! He was workin’ upstairs and I was away and he rang me sayin’, ‘Diana I can’t get down the stairs! You gotta help me. Your cat won’t let me past!’ He had to jump out the bedroom window and slide down the porch roof!” Late afternoon, we declined a lift from Diana in her Cadillac to Oglethorpe Mall. We air kissed our goodbyes. Diana’s phone rang. More guests arrived. The party was just getting into full swing. A competitive cacophony of church bells and thunder claps erupted but it went unnoticed, drowned out by the echo of laughter, clinking of glasses and Diana upping the tempo with All That Jazz.

The Olde Pink House Savannah Sign © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Categories
Architecture Art Hotels Luxury

Hotel nhow Berlin + David Bowie  

Right Here Right nhow | Take Two

Hotel nhow Berlin © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Hard edged dockside architecture meets playful futuristic design. Nowhere is the status of a city and its wellbeing better reflected in its music than Berlin. The two are intertwined. Think the Weimar Republic and its jazz cafés. Of course the legend of a libertarian culture destroyed by fascism was propagated by the film Cabaret. Fast forward a century and post war Berlin’s inherent appeal was again its openness. It was an anomaly, an oasis of extremity created by the Cold War. Here, anything could happen.

David Bowie arrived in Berlin towards the end of the 70s. He became immersed in the German music of the period. It was saturated in absence, loss and distance. Bands such as Kraftwerk influenced his craft, his work. Bowie’s piece V 2 Schneider reverberates to the rhythm of an S Bahn train. He recorded two thirds of his Berlin Trilogy – Low and Heroes but not Lodger – at the city’s legendary Hansa Studios. As the curtain fell on communism and the 20th century, techno music would emerge, climaxing with the euphoric blaze that was Love Parade.

Which brings us to right here right now. nhow Berlin is iridescently present, a tangible addition to the waterscape, a representation of contemporary immediacy. Its roots materialise from the city’s relationship with music – more anon. With the hotel’s opening, a new layer of meaning is added to the decadence and disharmony of the not so distant past.

Positioned along the River Spree, the old line between the East and West, nhow Berlin is a fusion of Sergei Tchoban’s architecture and Karim Rashid’s design. Russian born Sergei’s creation is a cubist arrangement of boxes piled high, the top one perilously cantilevering over the others by a gravity defying 10 metres. The underside is clad in reflective steel. Sergei says he is seeking to “convey the image of a ‘crane house’”. Other planes are covered by an aluminium or brick skin punctured by square windows. It’s all about clean lines, perpendicular angles and understated colourways. Enter the tinted glass doors – white outside; pink inside – and a whole new world unfolds.

New Yorker Karim’s interiors celebrate the German capital’s zeitgeist. He employs a progressive language to describe his oeuvre. The terms ‘infostethic’, ‘blobject’ and ‘technorganic’ are given three dimensional form. Karim says, “My vision engages technology, visuals, textures, colours, as well as all the needs that are intrinsic to living in a simpler less cluttered but more sensual environment.” Strata of irregular lines, asymmetric shapes and psychedelic patterns constantly redefine the hotel experience. Here, anything can happen.

Take the reception desk. It’s a pink amorphous sculpture with inset lighting. Beyond lies an expanse of white space stretching to a glazed wall overlooking the river. A giant continuous profile of Mussolini made of gold lacquered fibreglass hovers over the bar. Piped music radiates across the ground floor by day; live gigs rock it by night. Art or seating? The luminous voluptuous organic and ergonomic sofas are both. The restaurant is segregated from the bar by sheer curtains lined with a radio wave digipop pattern.

The hot pink rooms of the East Tower take their cue from sunrise. Sky blue dominates the rooms of the West Tower. The rooms of the 10 storey Upper Tower are calming grey to counteract the vertigo inducing views. Televisions double as radio wave shaped mirrors. Floors are acoustic friendly laminate painted with the digipop pattern. Guests can rent a keyboard or guitar in their room.

Two recording studios on the eighth floor of the Upper Tower are run by the co directors of the Hansa Studios. An adjacent music lounge is equipped with the latest multimedia technology – and a pink jukebox. The lounge, conference rooms and even the roof terrace are all directly wired to the studios. This allows for impromptu recordings.

nhow Hotel is in Osthafen, a destination of the new Berlin. It’s between the offices of MTV and Universal Music. Yet history is on its doorstep. Fragments of the Berlin Wall are a stone’s throw away. David Bowie could easily have been gazing out over the dizzying panorama from the music lounge when he penned Thru These Architect’s Eyes, “All majesty of a city landscape | All the soaring days in our lives”. Back in London, a few years ago David Bowie called in with Tracey Emin to Christ Church Spitalfields. He was there to see the Richard Bridge Organ, once played by Handel. Bowie voiced the desire to play the organ once it had been restored. The Richard Bridge Organ was restored in 2015. David Bowie died in 2016. Here, anything may happen.