Month: March 2025

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Architects Architecture Design Developers Hotels Luxury Restaurants Town Houses

Radio Bar + ME Hotel Aldwych London

Norman Architecture

Chilli squid tempura, king prawn tempura and white miso pavlova on the sun kissed roof terrace are the only way to mark the 12th anniversary of Radio Bar. It’s the last Monday before Passiontide but the working week has to start somewhere. In reverse Philip Larkin, the roof terrace is shaped to the comfort of the first to arrive. A joyous shot at how things really are, wide fallen long. At the eastern end of the terrace, the ornate gable of neighbouring Marconi House rises like a curling swirling treble clef carved of stone. Norman Shaw at his most expressive. The western end reaches a crescendo with Suite ME, a legibly lined bass clef in glass. ME Hotel is an architectural duet of contextuality and originality. Giving the musical metaphors a rest, it’s over to Norman Foster to discuss his composition:

“The triangular site of ME Hotel was once the home of the Gaiety Theatre which was damaged in World War II and then demolished to make way for a 1950s office development. Our scheme completes the grand sweep of early 20th century buildings, repairing the urban grain of this crescent. Everything from the shell of the building to bathroom fittings was designed by Foster and Partners. The restoration of Marconi House to accommodate 87 apartments seamlessly integrates with the construction of this 157 bedroom hotel. The hotel building corresponds in height, scale and material to its neighbour. Triangular oriel windows projecting from a Portland stone exterior capture a vista of The Strand while maintaining similar proportions to Marconi House’s fenestration. An elliptical corner tower defines the end point of Aldwych.”

Outdoors and indoors, everything is as monochromatic as a keyboard. The triangle is a complex instrument in the hands of Foster and Partners. Lesser talent would find a wedge shaped plan restrictive. Instead, one of London’s most exhilarating angular interiors forms the heart of the hotel. A tetrahedron ascends in ever decreasing triangles soaring 30 metres from the first floor reception lobby to a glazed apex. Architecture as captured light is taken to a new level. White marble lines the inside of the pyramid; corridors lean against the black marbled outer skin.

The glazed apex pops up as a petite pyramid in the middle of Radio Bar: a transparent splayed metronome. Distant views are of trophy towers, all with sobriquets in honour of their outlines, reaching for the sky in contrapuntal consonance. The Gherkin, Cheesegrater, Shard, Walkie Talkie … A joyous shot at how things really are, wide fallen high. Intermediate views are of the quad of Somerset House. Close views are of the glasshouses and skylights and chimneypots in the valleys between double pitched roofs, hidden from street level by parapets. There’s nothing new under the sun, but there’s plenty to wax lyrical about Radio Bar.

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Architects Architecture Art Country Houses Design Developers Luxury People Restaurants Town Houses

Belvedere Restaurant + Holland House Holland Park London

Sequentia

It’s where Lord Byron lusted after Lady Caroline Lamb, Richard Sheridan wined, Charles Dickens dined, Noël Coward danced, Rosalind Cubitt (Queen Camilla’s mother) came out … before being blown to bits in the Blitz (the place not the people). Holland House and Park really are together an extraordinary survival of the fragments of a country house and estate in London. The remaining three storey wing of the house is now a youth hostel for debs on their uppers and beaus with backpacks. Various public uses fill remnants of the estate buildings. Holland Park Café is perfect for an alfresco breakfast in unseasonal sunshine of egg avocado roll then red velvet lamington.

The centuries old tradition of wining and dining continues at Belvedere. A restaurant since the 1950s, George Bukhov-Weinstein and Ilya Demichev (who own Wild Tavern in Chelsea) have relaunched it with great aplomb. Archer Humphryes’ design concept for the 2020s restoration and rejuvenation of Belvedere was inspired by an unearthed Inigo Jones sketch of the loggia. Architect David Archer explains, “The design creates an authentic interior which celebrates the original brickwork and elegant proportions of the arched arcade while creating atmospheric settings for diners. Fireplaces have been introduced on both levels and there is a two sided bar that wraps around the building’s colonnade. The restaurant becomes a summerhouse from spring onwards while in the winter months it is cosy and romantic.” The architects are no strangers to high end restaurant design. They drew up the dark and mysterious interior of Hakkasan, our favourite Chinese in London.

Tapestries have replaced the Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol artwork previously hung in the interior. Terracotta coloured walls complement the exposed brick while architectural details – especially those arches – are picked out in cream. Later accretions have been removed to let the bare bones of the building shine. Jigsaw windowpanes of intersecting hexagons and rectangles echo the timber herringbone speak. On the ground floor 60 covers are placed around an open kitchen. Upstairs is a private dining room of 20 covers. It’s always been a destination establishment, but under the new ownership, the restaurant is fresher and – to use the architects’ term – more romantic. Belvedere is perfect for a wintry indoors lunch of Apulian burrata, charcoal sweet pepper and Sicilian anchovy; vegan red lentil and coconut gnocchi; and tiramisu coated with hazelnut nibs.

It all began with the well endowed Sir Henry Rich who lived up to his name. Later known as the 1st Earl of Holland, he inherited 200 hectares from his father-in-law and decided to erect stables befitting his status and estate. The existing mansion, named Cope’s Castle after its builder Sir Walter Cope, had been started in 1605 and by 1614 had wings added by architect John Thorpe. Its strong Jacobean presence – bay windows, balustrades, Dutch gables, loggias and towers in red brick and white stone – remained intact (including being Italianised by the 4th Baron Holland) until World War II. The architecture was a stylistic forerunner, albeit a more refined version, of the Norfolk Royal residence of Sandringham House. Sir Henry splashed out £4,000 on new stables which would become a ballroom with a viewing gallery (then eventually Belvedere) and orangery in the Victorian era, joined to the house by a covered walkway. The surviving pieces of built form stretching 180 metres from Belvedere to the youth hostel resemble a stage set, an appropriate backdrop to Opera Holland Park held every summer.

The last private owners of the house and estate, the Ilchester family, sold up to London County Council in 1952. Their name lives on in Ilchester Place, London’s finest neo Georgian address where everyone lives up to Inigo Jones. This part of the estate was developed in 1928 for two and three storey townhouses and villas. An entry level house will set you back £20 million. Such is the price of possession and early enjoyment. Sir Henry Rich would approve. He would also be impressed by our lunch expenditure. Belvedere doesn’t do cheap: the rich eat cake and the not so rich drink the cheapest bottle of white (2022 Sensale Grillo from Sicily: £52). Alas Sir Henry didn’t get a happy ending – as a Royalist he lost his head in 1649.

In 1986, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea took over the remaining undeveloped 22.5 hectares of Holland Park, maintaining and enhancing the culture and horticulture. We enjoy preprandial and postprandial tours through its varied gardens. The remains of the 17th century Wilderness. The Pleasure Grounds designed by William Kent 100 years later. Green Walk planted by designer Charles Hamilton, also 18th century. Lady Holland’s 1805 Dahlia Garden. The 1876 Lime Walk replanted after the Great Storm of 1987. A 20th century arboretum. But it’s the latest addition which blows us away. The Kyoto Garden was a gift from Japan in 1991 to honour the friendship between Japan and Great Britain. In 2012, it was extended by the Fukushima Garden. Strutting among the stone lanterns, peacocks admire their reflection in the water feature. The richness of nature.

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Architects Architecture Country Houses People Restaurants

Marble Hill House + Marble Hill Beach + St John’s Church of Ireland Church Ballymore Lower Dunfanaghy Donegal

Paradise

There are stunning houses with stunning views and then there is Marble Hill House overlooking Marble Hill Beach. The Barclay family clearly had taste. A three bay two storey over basement façade, grey as marble and high on a hill, is early 19th century neoclassical perfection. The central first floor tripartite window is in numerical harmony with the shallow triple inset formed by the two Ionic columns on either side of the entrance door hooded by a pair of pilasters with Soaneian recessed rectangular and circular panels supporting an entablature under a pediment. Roundheaded recesses define the ground floor windows flanking the portico. The slant of the portico pediment runs parallel with the hipped roof. Overhanging eaves are supported on paired console brackets. A materials palette of shades of grey is calming: ashlar, cut stone, render, slate.

Marble Hill House has an L shape plan. The longest elevation, all four bays, faces the coach house and outbuildings, enclosing a south facing garden hidden from public view. The substantial mid 18th coach house is almost as large as the house. It’s formal architecture: a two storey symmetrical façade confidently handled. A pair of central double height carriage doors under a fanlight is set in a shallow pedimented breakfront. On either side are three bay portions each with self contained symmetry. Both portions have a central arched carriage access (now fully glazed) and two first floor circular windows like architectural games of noughts and crosses.

Due to the sharp decline of the land, the coach house becomes three storey to the six bay rear elevation. This south front has a French look with its projecting eaves course supporting a hipped roof, arch heads to the upper floor windows (except the middle two) and a metal walkway wrapping round the first floor leading to garden level heading north. A row of carriage doors under fanlights opens off the lower ground floor into a walled courtyard. The grey materials palette continues: coursed stone, render, slate. Built by the Babington family, the distinguished neoclassicism of the coach house suggests the accompanying house (demolished by the Barclays) was of considerable merit.

A late Victorian three bay single storey gatelodge completes the three centuries of built form in this bucolic landscape on one of the most northerly tips of Ireland. It may be symmetrical but the gatelodge has an Arts and Crafts rusticity thanks to cottagey casement windows, a canopied porch supported on timber posts on the south elevation and a Roshine slate roof. The roof and porch canopy rest on sprocketed eaves with exposed rafter ends. Locally quarried Roshine slate is usually seen in vernacular buildings of this era. A bow window protrudes from the west elevation.

In 1987, Doe Historical Committee published A Guide to Creeslough-Dunfanaghy, “In the year 1894 a young barrister from Dublin, Hugh Law, married Charlotte Anne Stuart, daughter of the Rector of Ballymore. Hugh was the son of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. He bought Marble Hill House, a stately Georgian mansion that stands in idyllic surroundings overlooking Marble Hill. It was a happy marriage. Hugh, a man of independent means, did not have to practise his profession. Instead, he entered politics as a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party, and was elected MP. Hugh was best known for his hospitality towards artists and men of letters … including William Orpen, Patrick Pearse and William Butler Yeats.” Marble Hill House, coach house and gatelodge are currently being restored and will be available to let for short stays. The band of trees blocking views of the strand have been removed.

It’s reckoned to be the finest Georgian church in Donegal. It certainly has the largest Venetian window in the County. St John’s Church of Ireland Church stands on a hill accessed off a bend in the road between Creeslough and Dunfanaghy nearly opposite the road down to Marble Hill Beach. Dating from 1752, the church is attributed to Michael Priestley of Derry City on stylistic grounds. The raised quoins and heavy rustication of the Gibbsian arch headed window surrounds are similar to the architect’s distinguished Lifford Courthouse built six years earlier. Doe Historical Committee records that the church was built for £300 gifted by the Board of First Fruits.

Grey roughcast rendered walls and a grey cut stone bellcote and a grey slate roof anchor the design in this rocky coastal terrain: Muckish Mountain is the dramatic backdrop. That Venetian window (all 92 panes of it) faces east across Marble Hill Beach towards Sheephaven Bay. A more normally sized Venetian window (with a modest 42 panes) lights the west elevation of the porch. The small vestry with latticed windows was added in around 1853 to the northeast. It was designed by Joseph Welland who was responsible as architect for the Board of First Fruits for several churches in northwest Ulster such as St Patrick’s Church of Ireland Church in Gortin, County Tyrone. Isabella Stewart, wife of the local Anglo Scots Irish landowner Alexander Stewart, demanded a tenants dodging privacy tunnel was burrowed from the church to her nearby residence, Ards House.

Inland Fisheries Ireland promotes 53 places in County Donegal for sea angling. In clockwise order from the south: Mullaghmore Head; Mullaghmore Harbour; Bunduff Strand; Mermaids Cove; Tullan Strand; Creevy Pier; Rossnowlagh Beach; St John’s Point; Black Rock Pier; Fintragh Strand; Shalwy Pier; Trabawn; Tralore; Teelin; Silver Strand; Glencolmcille; Loughros Point; Dawras Head; Portinoo Pier; Illanafad; Termon Point; Burtonport Pier; Cruit Point; Kincaslough Pier; Bunbeg Harbour; Magheraclogher Point; Bunaninver; Ballyness Pier; Dooros Point; New Lake Estuary; Ards Friary Pier; Downings Pier; Derrycasson; Pollmore; Tra-Na-Rossan Bay; Glashagh Strand; Fanad Head; Portsalon Pier; Rathmullan Pier; Buncrana Pier; Dunree Head; Lenan Pier; Pollan Bay; Doagh Isle; Trawbreaga Bay; Portronan Pier; Portmore Pier; Bunagee Pier; Culdaff Strand; Tremone Bay; Kinnagoe Bay; Moville Pier; and Carrickaroy. Marble Hill is closest to Portsalon Pier.

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Architects Architecture Art Country Houses Design People

Preston Manor + Preston Park Brighton East Sussex

Brighton Rocks

It’s East Sussex’s most haunted house! Absolutely riddled! Pure fear lurks within those walls! Preston Manor has reopened to visitors in 2025 after half a decade of closure when only the dead were present in the stately rooms. Hedley Swain, the CEO of Brighton and Hove Museums, confides, “The house is steeped in ghostly mystery with spinechilling hauntings and tales of eerie sightings and unexplained incidents.” There are now guided tours of the house and garden, taking in history and ghosts. A medieval nun named Sister Agnes, the White Lady and the Lady in Grey are just some of the departed who have returned. Hedley adds, “Preston Manor provides a unique opportunity to journey back in time to the grandeur of early 20th century aristocratic life, exploring the upstairs downstairs lives of the eminent Thomas-Stanford family.” The reopened house now has a tearoom serving traditional Edwardian cream tea.

The seaside city of Brighton is undeniably raucous but a mere five minute car drive inland takes one from the crazy coastline to the peaceful Preston Manor where all is leafily quiet: serenity prevails, tranquillity reigns, calmness rules, otherworldliness lingers. The house exudes more than a whiff of American Colonial architecture thanks to a generous splattering of green shutters and a liberal smattering of white verandahs. Mount Vernon-on-Sea. The area of Preston is now suburban Brighton’s answer to Belfast’s Malone, Bristol’s Clifton, Munich’s Schwabing.

Country Life covered the house in the 6 July 1935 edition just after it opened as a museum. The article rambles: “Preston Manor is the youngest in date and the most domestic of public museums. By the wish of the donors, the late Sir Charles Thomas-Stanford and his wife, their house at Brighton, with its fortuitous accumulation of household furniture and ornaments, is preserved very much as they left it, and at its opening in 1933 nothing was in the house except their possessions. It looks still a house that is lived in; most of the furniture is still in the same rooms as in the donors’ day, and even their little personal possessions, boxes and ornaments are either in their original places or preserved in cases in the actual rooms in which they were on view.”

The article includes 18 images of the gardens, the architecture and the interior. A further 15 were left unpublished: mainly photographs of individual items of furniture as well as a few alternative exterior views. The magazine goes into detail about the owners down through the centuries. “In 1925, Sir Charles Thomas-Stanford made provision that (subject to the respective life interests of himself and his wife) Preston Manor and four acres of the adjoining land should vest in the Corporation of Brighton in perpetuity, to be used for the purposes of a public museum and public park, the ‘house to be preserved as a building of historic interest to the public, and to be used exclusively as a museum … and as a reference library containing works relating to such subjects’.” Sir Charles and his wife died eight months apart in 1932.

The rendered exterior provides a visual coherence to a house that has organically grown. An 1818 sketch shows the five bay two storey over high basement entrance front with slightly lower flanking single bay wings, each with its separate hipped roof. Thomas Weston was the architect for the 1783 rebuilding of a 17th century house. About 1867 a porch faced with knapped flints in a distinctive geological nod to this East Sussex location was added to the south facing garden front. In 1905 Charles Stanley Peach (an architect better known for designing electricity generating stations) designed a two storey extension to the west end of the house (with the present dining room on its ground floor) and glazed verandahs in front of the wings on the north front. The verandahs have awning style copper roofs, a nod to Regency Brighton.

The drawing room is the grandest internal space with its coved ceiling and stucco ornament dating from the mid Georgian period. It has a later 18th century marble chimneypiece and timber pedimented door surrounds of 1923. Country Life records, “Little is known of the origin of the furniture in the house.” Masterpieces and bric-a-brac maketh the mansion. “In the entrance hall is collected walnut furniture, a bureau and cabinet veneered with oyster pieces and inlaid with circles. The fine early Georgian bookcase in the dining room holds a large collection of Dogs of Fo in Fukien ware, collected by Lady Thomas-Stanford.”

Little has changed of Preston Manor in the 90 years since it opened to the public. The ivy has gone and the entrance front render painted white. The two glazed panels in the entrance doors are now solid. That’s about it outside. Moving indoors: more Edwardian, less Georgian. More cluttered, less staged. Otherwise, it’s just a game of spot the difference. The interior is atmospherically charged: creaking sloping floorboards weighed down by history. Servants bells’ lining a basement corridor are labelled: Front Door; Front Door Steps; Back Door; Hall Right; Bedroom Number 5; Library; Dining Room; Stanford Sitting Room; Hall Left; Cleves Room; Bedroom Number 2; Bedroom Number 1; Bedroom Number 4; Drawing Room; Nurse’s Room. Ring-a-ling, ring-a-ling. Late at night, invisible hands pull the bells to beckon long deceased servants.

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Art Design People

Preston Rock Garden Brighton East Sussex +

Take Two

On either side of the busy Preston Road which connects the Victorian suburb to the Regency city are tranquil horticultural delights: Preston Manor Walled Garden and Preston Rock Garden, both now Council owned. The latter is much more recent. It was built in 1935 by Captain Bertie Hubbard MacLaren, Superintendent of Parks, on a one hectare wooded railway bank. The Captain was a landscape architect whose post World War I era efforts have established a lasting heritage for Brighton. He recognised the benefits to the populace of public parks and playgrounds. Suburban legend has it that the layout of Preston Rock Garden is based on the blue and white Willow China pattern. There’s certainly a chinoiserie look to the waterfall splashing over a rockery into a pool dotted with stepping stones set below a cottage orné.