Category: Design

United States Embassy Nine Elms London + American Whiskey

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date July 19, 2022

Bourbon Nights

On a gloriously sunny evening we head to the United States Embassy where the great and the very good are gathering to celebrate the removal of UK tariffs on American whiskeys. Kathy Yao, Agricultural Attaché at the US Embassy, welcomes us all to the party. Joe Pennington, Acting Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy, reminds everyone, “The US has no stronger or closer friend than the UK. Transatlantic zero to zero tariff trade is flowing again! It’s time to enjoy some Manhattans and Whiskey Sours!”

Chris Swonger, President and CEO of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, confirms, “This evening is a celebration of the strengthening of the US and UK Governments’ special relationship. Toasts not tariffs!” Next, Tom Sallis, Director of Global Partnerships at the Scottish Whisky Association, also welcomes the return of tariff-free trade for whiskies on both sides of the Atlantic. There are 17 American whiskeys to sample from Golden Moon to Wild Turkey accompanied by canapés galore: asparagus and cheddar; mushroom and parmesan; salmon, mint, ginger and coriander; and tuna and soy sauce.

Landscape! Architecture! Art! The American Embassy famously moved south of the Thames in the second decade of this century. It’s a contemporary fort so naturally is protected a moat. Competition winning Philadelphian firm Kieran Timberlake designed the 12 storey glazed cube enveloped on two sides by a transparent film of ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, a form of plastic, to minimise solar gain. This is after all, the sunny southeast.

“Our challenge for the embassy was to encompass the values of transparency, openness and equality,” explain the architects, “drawing on the best of American architecture, engineering, technology, art and culture.” It’s the largest American embassy in Europe with 800 staff and around 1,000 daily visitors. As for that moat? Well, it’s actually a pond designed by landscape architects Olin and forms part of the site’s stormwater strategy.

A vast artwork dominates one wall of the double height atrium. ‘We The People’ is a 2017 site specific painting by Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford. The painting is made up of 32 square panels, each one nine metres square. It depicts fragments of the United States Constitution, illuminated this evening by the setting sun. Right now, we the people continue to party.

Tags american whiskey, architect kieran timberlake, chris swonger president ceo distilled spirits council united states, joe pennington acting deputy chief mission, kathy yao agricultural attache, landscape architects olin, lavenders blue, los angeles artist mark Bradford, stuart blakley, tom sallis scottish whisky association

Architecture Art Design Fashion Luxury People Restaurants

Masterpiece London Art Fair Preview 2022 + Pol Roger

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date July 5, 2022
16 Comments on Masterpiece London Art Fair Preview 2022 + Pol Roger

Well Seasoned

London in summer has an added layer of attraction: ‘The Season’. This is a series of high society events, many of them sporting, from tennis at Wimbledon to rowing at Henley Royal Regatta. The Chelsea Flower Show in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea is for the more horticulturally inclined. Also held in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea is Masterpiece London Art Fair. Only established in 2010, it is a latecomer to The Season.

At this year’s Masterpiece there are 127 stands in the vast marquee with its canvas printed in the style of the original 17th century Royal Hospital building. “Masterpiece is a world class fair bringing together exceptional works encompassing all periods and cultures,” summarises Clare Jameson, Director of Potterton Books, an exhibitor at the fair. Potterton Books are international specialists in books on art, culture, design and the decorative arts. She adds, “It is a convivial meeting place for collectors and connoisseurs. We have seen a growing interest in requests for assembling book collections and personal libraries.”

The fair is more than just art. There’s the Pol Roger Champagne Preview. And yes, there are multimillion dollar Impressionist paintings for sale (La Seine à Port Marly by Pierre-Auguste Renoir at Dickinson) and contemporary collages (Stately Home by Chris Jones at Marc Straus New York) but it’s also the place to buy a vintage Ferrari (DK Engineering) or a state-of-the-art yacht (Ventura). There’s even a dinosaur skull (Triceratops Prorsus at David Aaron) on show. Offshoots of top end London restaurants – including Le Caprice which recently closed – spring up at Masterpiece.

A standout among the standout paintings is a portrait by Nelson Shanks of Diana, Princess of Wales, for sale by Philip Mould. Artist and publisher Anne Davey Orr critiques the work, “Because the brushwork is not overworked and has a fleeting quality to it, I suspect that this may have originated as a sketch or study for a larger portrait. Shanks’ technique, unlike that of his more formal portraits, has an instancy about it that conveys Diana’s fleeting, somber mood and her innate shyness.”

There’s an exhibitor at the fair called The Gallery of Everything. Masterpiece is like The Show of Everything.

Architects Architecture Art Design Town Houses

Sir John Soane’s Museum Holborn London + Alcantara + The Portal Galleries

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date June 28, 2022
12 Comments on Sir John Soane’s Museum Holborn London + Alcantara + The Portal Galleries

The Summer Show

Sir John Soane was, to put it mildly, ahead of his time. It’s 185 years since the great architect and designer died and he is still providing inspiration for the arts. The latest show at his eponymous house museum is a collaboration between Alcantara and multidisciplinary design practice Space Popular. It is a celebration and exploration of portals, both physical and virtual: guests can enter a parallel world using virtual reality headsets to interact with panels and a table covered all covered in Alcantara. Invented in Milan in 1972, Alcantara is a luxury microfibre material part polyester part polyurethane. “We are fascinated by the technical, sensory and aesthetic qualities as well as the endless possibilities offered by Alcantara material,” note Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Helberg of Space Popular, “and its potential to be the canvas and portal to our virtual experiences.” Shifts in scale, unfolding walls and playing with mirrors are just three of the Soaneian portal devices that inspired the artists.

Tags Alcantara + The Portal Galleries and Sir John Soane’s Museum Holborn London

Architects Architecture Design Developers People Town Houses

James Taylor + Georgian Islington + Greenwich London

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date June 15, 2022
9 Comments on James Taylor + Georgian Islington + Greenwich London

Tailored towards Perfection

A couple of Lavender’s Blue readers who live in one of the houses in this article have undertaken thorough and academic research into the architect under examination and, wishing to remain anonymous, have agreed to share extracts of the detailed outcome of their work. This article concentrates on the architect’s residential development oeuvre in London.

Firstly, some biographical and career development detail from our worthy contributors: “To expand the sparse information available about James Taylor the architect (circa 1765 to 1846) we need to look farther into his background. According to The Taylors of Weybridge by Katie Hotine (1985) his father, also called James (1747 to 1797), was native of Little Crosby in Leicestershire, a tenant on the ancient, vast estates of Sir William Molyneux, the Catholic 7th Viscount Molyneaux (1684 to 1759), who built Croxteth Hall near Liverpool. Sir William became a Jesuit priest and was succeeded by his nephew Charles William Molyneux. James Taylor senior married Ann Harrison in 1764 and left the Sefton parish for London in 1771.”

“James Taylor senior seems to have been successful, so when his son showed youthful promise at Old Hall Green Academy near Ware in Hertfordshire, young James, aged 12, was sent to the English College in Rome. He remained there until 1783, when illness prompted his transfer to the English College of Douai, 80 miles southeast of Calais. He moved to London in 1786 and took a house in Bandyleg Walk, Southwark (now Great Guildford Street, behind the Tate Modern Gallery), where he established a small Catholic mission in 1788.”

“Unsuited for the priesthood, young James Taylor trained as a surveyor and married Ann Green by licence in 1789 at St Mary’s Church Islington. A young man with great drive, Taylor was able to purchase a desirable plot beside an old inn at Park Vista, Greenwich, and build a short terrace of three houses. The central one became the Taylor family home. It is slightly salient from the other two and has an additional fourth floor surmounted by a pediment. This carries an oval date stone inscribed ‘Park Place 1791’. Park Place faces south over Greenwich Park and its rearward view originally extended to the Thames.”

“By 1790 he had bought part of Clay Pitt Field in Islington, west of the New River from Robert Vincent. He was able to raise mortgages and arranged to have 10 modest houses built that became Charlton Place (north side). On the opposite side of the street, Taylor soon started building a further 14 houses that became Charlton Crescent.”

Next, our contributors critique these schemes, “At first glance it might be assumed that Taylor’s houses in Islington and Greenwich are typical of late Georgian architecture. Considered in their historical context, they reveal a distinctive Taylor style. This drew inspiration from features already common in the grander mid Georgian terraces of the West End of London, Bath and elsewhere but was adapted to the needs of smaller dwellings. Grand classicism was reduced to quiet simplicity, preserving mathematical proportions of windows, doors and an exactly calculated volume of room space, to create a feeling of balance and harmony on a human scale.”

“The most obvious Taylor features are symmetry expressed in the terrace façade, round headed windows at entrance level with proper Palladian glazing bars, semicircular fanlights above the doors and lightwells (colloquially termed ‘areas’ or more properly ‘airies’) in front of the basement level. These features arrive at a satisfying conjunction in New Terrace, where the regular three by three fenestration falters only in No.50, but is immediately redeemed by the double bays that complete the picture there. Taylor’s solutions were copied and adapted in various Regency and early Victorian terraces, but never with the flair apparent in his early creations.”

The researchers note that James Taylor’s first project in Islington was the three storey Charlton Place built in parts from 1790 up to 1805. Charlton Crescent opposite dates from 1791: “The crescent has a radius of seven chains (141 metres) and rises over two metres along its length. It is a possibly unique example of a bilaterally symmetrical ‘palazzo’ arrangement in a rising crescent. Door transoms mostly have a modest round fanlight style that echoes the shape of companion windows…”

“Concurrently with Charlton Crescent construction, Taylor was also developing another terrace around the corner that he called New Terrace… James Taylor retained No.7 (now 56 Duncan Terrace) for his own use from its completion in 1793 until 1803… Unusually, the original York stone pavement in front of New Terrace is raised well above street level so that the basement floors would be above the level of water in the New River. That early aqueduct, dating from 1613, ran just beyond the vaulted cellars until it was arched over in 1861. The raised pavement originally extended to steps rising directly from the street. In 1963 it was lowered by two feet opposite No.50 to improve illumination for its basement flat and steps reinstated to their present position.”

“These nine houses have an aura of restrained astylar elegance, following a ‘palazzo’ rhythm of one-three-one-three-one in its façade elements. This pattern is accented by the discreetly salient central house, with its shallow central pediment. The tympanum has an underlining string course and an oval date stone. Its level moulding extends along the terrace as a parapet capped with simple coping that hides low valley roofs, some converted to roof terraces late in the 20th century. The salient terminal houses at either end are accented with a cornice moulding of the coping and an additional string course. The central and terminal houses were further distinguished by small balconies embracing all first floor façade windows. The other houses had simple balconettes fronting individual windows as a precaution for child play. These ironwork embellishments were removed before the 1930s and replaced with neat and appropriate horizontal rails.”

“On each house, the double sash windows in the façade form a regular three by three fenestration grid. All houses have two round headed windows with Palladian astragals at ground level, where the third element is formed by a fan lit Georgian door. Each door has six raised and fielded panels, central brass knob and knocker, and post 1840 letterboxes. The leaded tracery fanlights are surmounted by attractive Coade stone ‘macaron’ keystones that follow three designs. No.50 has the cheerful bearded face of an old man. Nos.51 and 53 have a young female head with coronet. No.52 and Nos.54 to 58 all have young male heads with pomade and helmet. The fanlights are braced by moulded Coade stone impost blocks joined by a frieze across the door. Each block has three anthemions on the fascia and one on the return. At No.50 they have two rosettes on the fascia and one on the return.”

“No.50 is distinguished by projecting full height rounded bays on either side of the lateral front door. These have sympathetically curved window frames fronting an oval staircase on the left and an oval plan sitting room on the right. The two blank enclosures over the front door were due to a then prevailing Window Tax. To the northern end of No.58 its side wall is also carefully detailed. It has three round headed blind windows at ground level, three rectangular blind windows at first and second floor levels and at basement level there is even a blind doorway between two blind windows.”

Heading south of the River Thames, our contributors report, “As work progressed on New Terrace, building began on Taylor’s home in Park Vista, Greenwich. Park Place forms a group of three similar houses built on a confined site beside an old inn. The ground floor is raised above street level so that the doors are reached on a half flight of stairs, while basements received extra daylight from the south because of their shallower lightwells. All three houses have round headed sash windows on the ground floor and rectangular sash windows elsewhere on the entrance front. Stringcourse and coping are carried across the three houses but Coade stone embellishments are absent. Ground floor fenestration is offset from that of the upper floors and residual symmetry fails because of the central door dilemma. These houses are more akin to Charlton Place compromise than to New Terrace elegance and mark a milestone on Taylor’s learning process as he progressed from simple to rather grander houses.”

“The central house in Park Place achieves prominence by having wider frontage and by supporting a rather inharmonious extra floor level with pediment and plaque. It also is slightly salient and has a wider and more elaborate front door with fanlight, narrow pilasters and sidelights. This, and the matching wider ground floor window are overarched by external embrasures above its piano nobile windows – an interesting and commendable design solution.”

Back north of the Thames again, “In 1793 Taylor bought more of Clay Pitt Field in Islington. He extended the line of New Terrace onto the east side of Charlton Crescent with four rather larger houses (590 square feet footprint)… Originally this group was 10 to 13 New Terrace, numbered from the Charlton Place end, opposite No.1. From 1806 it became 10 to 13 Colebrooke Terrace until it was renumbered 46 to 49 Duncan Terrace in 1891. They also face the New River across a raised pavement.”

“These Colebrook Terrace houses form a graceful, coherent composition that pays careful attention to symmetry. On the main terrace façade, like No.50, both end houses have just two lights at each level. The elements that terminate this façade each form a full height salient bay with windows arranged vertically in arched recesses, cleverly disguising the change in window spacing. These projections are emphasised by rusticated stucco at ground level and by a cornice and stringcourse at roof level. They have round headed façade windows inset within additional external embrasures. The rearward aspect too was carefully considered, as it would be visible from Charlton Place. It has large sash windows braced by narrow sash sidelights on the three principal levels. The two central houses form a rearward salient that reflects the fascia salient on the end houses. The two central houses form a rearward projection that reflects the fascia salient on the end houses. Some of these features demonstrated by James Taylor were adopted in later built parts of Duncan Terrace and became commonplace in Regency developments elsewhere.”

“No.49 has an elaborate round headed light at ground level, supported by slim Doric columns and matching rectangular pilasters. It also retains a horizontal ‘tethering’ rail to the right of its ‘mounting’ steps with another shorter handrail to the left. This house originally had three rectangular blank windows above a round headed blank in each of the salient bays that flank the front door. Both these round headed blanks were opened up and had windows installed in the 1960s. The uppermost blanks establish that the attic floor was an original feature in these houses, although attics were never intended in the earlier part of New Terrace.”

“No.46 closes the view from the City Road end of Duncan Terrace. It has an original three storey side extension, making it significantly larger than the other houses. Initially the entrance on this extension had a grand fanlight with sidelights in its setback porch façade. This fanlight was removed at a much later date and was installed as a decorative feature inside the house, to be replaced by a plain rectangular door casing with heavy lintel. Above this door are two blanks and the extension is illuminated by a lateral round head window with two windows above. On the gable end of the main terrace, at a right angle to the entrance door of No.46, there is a single blank window on each of the four floors. This house also had the largest garden, which originally extended behind five houses in Charlton Crescent. Its first occupant was William Taylor, probably a close relative of the architect.”

“The two central houses have a three by three fenestration on the façade but lack Coade stone embellishments of brickwork around their doors. The front railings are plain. They originally had the same elaborate lamp holders seen in the earlier part of New Terrace but these were removed at some stage. Except for No.49, the graceful wrought iron bow balconies at first floor level still survive.”

After that thorough analysis of James Taylor’s lasting work in Islington and Greenwich, what’s our experience of the houses on the ground? First to Islington: Charlton Place and Charlton Crescent lead straight off Camden Passage, a popular pedestrianised street packed with cafés and antique stalls. The two terraces are relatively plain but well proportioned and finely detailed. A mid terrace house was demolished in Charlton Place to plunge an entrance through to later housing to the rear. The truncated gable elevations on either side of this gap are essays in incidental brutalism. The bow windows and blind windows of the side elevations of the two sections of New Terrace frame the far end of Charlton Place. New Terrace is on a significantly grander scale and style. The elevated pavement and wooded grass banks create a desirable enclave.

Secondly, we’re off to Park Vista on Park Place, which is a discreet mainly residential road well named for its views over Greenwich Park. The upper floors of Park Vista in particular have long reaching views across the open space. James Taylor’s contribution to the streetscape is short – a mere six bays – although it is still the tallest at a maximum five storeys. The height of Park Vista dwarfs the two and a half storey Plume of Feathers pub next door. Heavy planting at piano nobile level blurs any asymmetrical anomalies. The round headed piano nobile window of the middle house looks like it would have lit the architect’s own office. The first floor windows of the left hand house plus the first and second floor windows of the right hand house have been reduced from three panes wide to two panes at some stage. James Taylor’s legacy is one of truly sustainable residential development. How many of today’s houses will age so well?

Architecture Design Hotels Luxury People Restaurants

Shandon Hotel + Marble Hill Beach Dunfanaghy Donegal

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date May 27, 2022
11 Comments on Shandon Hotel + Marble Hill Beach Dunfanaghy Donegal

A Country Kilometre

There’s a wee drop of aul’ rain in Lifford and it’s bucketin’ in Letterkenny so it is, but by the time we get to Marble Hill the sun is splittin’ the trees. It’s gone from Baltic to boilin’ so it has. All in good time for a dead on wee bite of lunch in Shandon’s overlookin’ the empty beach with not a wee’ne in sight. It’s dead posh. Not like the Carrig Rua Hotel in Dunfanaghy which is dunderin’ inn. Anyone up for a wee trip in Bert’s boat later on Killahoey Beach?

Running out of Ulsterisms it’s time to enjoy a celebratory pescatarian feast in Shandon Hotel which has had the greatest revivification since avocados were mere vegetables or fruit or whatever they used to be. There are views and there are views and there’s the framed golden strand of Marble Hill with the white tipped frothy spray of waves almost lapping up to our table. Across the water on the far side of Sheephaven Bay lies Downings.

Next stop the jolly town of Dunfanaghy. It’s all abuzz around the august Market House. “This Building was erected by Alex Rob Stewart of Ards House AD 1845,” marks a plaque between its first floor windows. On the ground things are more relaxed. There’s a coffee bar, antiques store and yoga venue. And a farmers’ market in the Diamond in front of the Market House.

Opposite the Diamond is McAuliffe’s Craft Shop. It has evolved over four generations of the same family since opening in 1920 as Sweeney’s Drapery. Romantic Stories and Legends of Donegal by Harry Percival Swan, 1965, is one of several local interest books for sale. It opens with, “Donegal calls you. Situated in the North Western corner of Ireland it is one of the most fascinating playgrounds in these islands. It is part of the nine Counties of Ulster, and is the largest County in the Province (1,865 square miles). Donegal belongs to Eire, but is separated from it by County Fermanagh. Donegal’s key note is variety.”

Tags alex rob stewart, ards house, downings, killahoey beach, lavenders blue, marble hill beach, market house, mcauliffes craft shop, romantic stories legends donegal harry percival swan, shandon hotel marble hill dunfanaghy donegal, sheephaven bay, stuart blakley, sweeneys drapery

Design

Barony Road + Drum Road Cookstown Tyrone

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date May 22, 2022
8 Comments on Barony Road + Drum Road Cookstown Tyrone

The Spaces In Between

Tags bogland, cookstown road omagh tyrone, lavenders blue, stuart blakley

Architecture Art Design Hotels Luxury People Restaurants

The Dorchester Hotel + Rooftop Restaurant Park Lane London

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date May 18, 2022
9 Comments on The Dorchester Hotel + Rooftop Restaurant Park Lane London

High Living

We’re the first guests of the new season so the Veuve Clicquot is on ice. Just in time for sunshiny days, The Dorchester Rooftop has reopened for those who like to see the bigger picture, or at least take in a sweeping panorama of the better half of the Capital. We’re going up in the world: a lift to the ninth floor of the hotel opens into a former penthouse which is now a suite of lounges with pleated satin hung walls, deep pile carpet and velvet sofas. The Rooftop Restaurant sweeps around the lounges.

Lunch isn’t cheap, but what price decadence? Executive Chef Jean-Philippe Blondet and Head Chef Bastien Bertaina pass with flying colours: crushed olive amuse bouche; multicoloured seabass ceviche, citrus and cucumber; golden and silvered seabream, fennel and pastis; red berry vacherin. A jazz singer and keyboard player serenades us with “Georgia”, “Love is a Losing Game” and “Isn’t She Lovely”. Just as the waitress gleefully smashes the perfect meringue disc atop our pudding, the singer bursts into a timely rendition of “Oh Lovely Day”. Alfresco lunch reminds us of Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris except this time we’ve been elevated from courtyard to parapet.

Tags chef bastien bertaina, chef jean philippe blondet, dorchester hotel park lane london, dorchester hotel rooftop restaurant review, hôtel plaza athénée paris, lavenders blue, stuart blakley, veuve clicquot

Architecture Art Design Hotels Luxury People Restaurants

The Megaro Hotel + Magenta Restaurant + Hokus Pokus Alchemy Lab King’s Cross London

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date May 16, 2022
11 Comments on The Megaro Hotel + Magenta Restaurant + Hokus Pokus Alchemy Lab King’s Cross London

Working Magic

Unusually for London, King’s Cross and St Pancras are two major railway stations located next to each other. King’s Cross provides public transport from the English capital to the rest of the country right up to Scotland; the Eurostar links St Pancras to mainland Europe. A transport hub in its fullest sense. Little wonder such a dynamic location has attracted a miniature galaxy of five star hotels. But one stands out: it’s wild, whimsical and whacky. And that’s just the mural cloaking the building’s exterior like a psychedelic Joseph’s Coat of Many Colours.

The Megaro Hotel appeals to the luxury traveller with a sense of fun and an appreciation for the novel. An inscription across mezzanine windows overlooking the entrance foyer reads: “Our hotel was inspired by Victorian quack doctor James Morison who in 1828 opened the British College of Health just a few doors down from here…” The interior is based on, “An alchemy lab, esoteric literature, and an anchoring in King’s Cross heritage.”

“Retro-futuristic steampunk” is the official hotel style. A reimagining of olden days but with advanced technology. Public spaces are filled with cabinets of curiosities and illuminated by neon signs. Chain curtains in one of the Design Room bedrooms continues the engineering theme while stage lights, minibars disguised as speakers and stage platforms acting as headboards pay homage to the nightlife tradition of King’s Cross. Charcoal grey tiled wet-rooms are a pure indulgent touch. Charcoal grey is the new black.

Charcoal is having a fashion moment in culinary circles as well as with interior types and The Megaro Hotel’s recently opened restaurant Magenta is on trend. Charcoal steamed sourdough bread is the first item out of the kitchen for dinner. Magenta has a northern Italy inspired menu curated by Executive Head Chef Manuele Bazzoni. It is open for lunch and dinner Tuesday to Saturday with an à la carte menu of two courses for £32, three for £42, or four for £52. But ‘when in Rome’, it would be rude not to opt for the four course evening menu with matching wines for £85. Walk-ins are welcomed at breakfast for an unlimited portioned breakfast costing £25.

There are four evening menu choices for Antipasti, Primi and Secondi, and five for Dolci (four desserts and a cheese board). Beetroot amuse bouches come on charcoal grey plates. Wild sea bass tartare and Sicilian orange gel provide splashes of colour and lightness against black sesame ice cream. Smoked buffalo ricotta and egg yolk ravioli with English asparagus and black truffle contrast texture and flavour, emphasizing the kitchen’s prowess. Good looks and great taste continue with Cornish monkfish cooked over charcoal, barbequed leaks, rock oyster tempura and Amalfi lemon gel. Maldon sea salt and caramel ganache with Vecchia Romagna jelly and Piedmont hazelnut form an edible sculpture. Dinner is all about fresh British produce revved up a notch or two by Italian additions and style: London meets Milan.

The phrase ‘poison of choice’ is played out in The Megaro Hotel’s basement bar. Hokus Pokus Alchemy Lab takes the James Morison theme to its extreme. Staff work their magic conjuring up torched and fizzing cocktails. It’s like being in a time machine reversing to the future. ‘Tempered Prescriptions’ are on standby for those guests who want to enjoy the alchemy without the alcohol. Bar Manager Greg Chudzio explains, “Today, at Hokus Pokus we like our botanicals to be distilled and served with a large lump of ice or at room temperature. While we make no claims of health benefits, we are confident that our potions and elixirs might do wonders to your mood!”

Service in The Megaro Hotel is international, very attentive and well informed. The evening waiter from Seville, Spain, confirms, “We only serve Italian wines. Our restaurant interior was designed by British artist and designer Henry Chebaane. Actually he was responsible for the entire hotel interiors! A magenta coloured butterfly is the restaurant motif.” The Londoner mixologist advises, “I can offer you five different types of ‘potions’. Our flamed potions are heated with fire to bring out the finest aromas! We’ve 41 cocktail recipes and 18 brands of gin.” The breakfast waitress from Marash, Turkey, relates, “This building used to be a Barclays Bank. The yellow brick former bank vault is now a wine cellar. We’ve two first floor private dining rooms: The Mauve Private Carriage takes its cue from a view of St Pancras Station; The Victory Room is named after the state rooms of HMS Victory with a table made from the timber of that historic ship.”

The inscription in the entrance foyer ends with, “What is time? Time is free but it’s precious. You can’t own it but you can spend it. You can’t keep it but you can use it. Time is priceless don’t waste it. It’s time for the weird and the wonderful. It’s time for a drink with friends.” The weird and wonderful Hokus Pokus is the place in King’s Cross for a drink, Magenta for a timely meal, and the timeless Megaro for a luxurious night’s sleep.

Architects Architecture Art Country Houses Design Developers Fashion Luxury People Restaurants

Dorinda The Honourable Lady Dunleath + Killyvolgan House Ballywalter Down

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date May 12, 2022
50 Comments on Dorinda The Honourable Lady Dunleath + Killyvolgan House Ballywalter Down

Life and Times

Dorinda loved discussing the many Irish country houses she knew well. “I could write a book about my experiences in country houses. Maybe you should for me!” One of her earliest memories was visiting her uncle and aunt, Major Charlie and Sylvia Alexander, at the now demolished Pomeroy House in County Tyrone. Dorinda also enjoyed visiting Springhill in County Londonderry (now owned by The National Trust) – she was married from there in 1959. There was a painting of Springhill in the sitting room of Killyvolgan House. It was her Great Aunt Mina’s home. Mina Lenox-Conyngham was the last owner of Springhill. “Staying at her house was always enormous fun.”

“I remember aged six being taken against my will to dancing lessons at Lissan House. It was absolutely freezing! I lay on the ground screaming and kicking my feet in the air. Such a dull house, don’t you think?” She was great pals with Diana Pollock of Mountainstown House in County Meath and recalled good times there with Diana and her sisters. “I could never love Mount Stewart. Dundarave has an interesting vast hall but the reception rooms are plain. I remember the auction of Mount Panther’s contents. Everyone was standing in the entrance hall and up the stairs when the staircase started coming away from the wall! Cousin Captain Bush lived in Drumhalla House near Rathmullan in Donegal. He’d a parrot and wore a wig. I remember he threw his wig off when he went swimming in the cove end of the garden. I was absolutely terrified to jump in after him!”

One of Dorinda’s most memorable stories combines several of her loves: country houses, fashion and parties. “It was the Sixties and I had just bought a rather fashionable tin foil dress from a catalogue. I thought it would be perfect for Lady Mairi Bury’s party at Mount Stewart. It was so tight and I was scared of ripping it so I lay down on our bedroom floor, arms stretched out in front of me, and Henry slid me into it.” She gave a demonstration, laughing. “Unfortunately I stood too near one of the open fires and my dress got hotter and hotter. I thought I was going to go up in smoke! So that was the first and last time I wore it!” Dorinda always managed to look stylish, whether casual or formal. Her suits were the envy of fellow Trustees of the Board of Historic Buildings Trust. Her ‘off duty’ uniform of polo neck, sports jacket, jeans and boyish shoes was effortlessly chic.

When it came to finding her own country house after her tenure at Ballywalter Park ended, things proved challenging. “I searched for two years for a suitable property. There’s a country house for sale in Keady. Nobody lives there! I’d be driving up and down to Belfast non stop!” Eventually Dorinda would build her own house on a site just beyond the walled estate of Ballywalter Park. At first, she wanted to rebuild the double pile gable ended two storey three bay house occupying the site called McKee’s Farm but when the structure proved unstable, a new house was conceived. Despite being known as a modernist, Belfast architect Joe Fitzgerald was selected to design a replacement house of similar massing to McKee’s Farm, adding single storey wings in Palladian style. Like its owner, Killyvolgan House is understated, elegant and charming. She was pleased when the council planners described Killyvolgan as the ideal new house in the countryside. It displays a distinguished handling of proportion and lightness of touch.

“I bought the Georgian grandfather clock in the entrance hall from Dublin. I’m always slightly concerned at how fragile my papier mâché chairs are for ‘larger guests’ in the drawing room. I guess the chairs were really meant for a bedroom? I’ve painted all the walls in the house white as the shadows on them help me see around.” And then there was the urn in the courtyard. “The Coade stone urn I found in the 19th century barn was much too grand. So instead I bought this cast iron urn on the King’s Road in Belfast. Fine, I will leave the Marston and Langinger pot you have brought me in the urn so that I remember that colour. Oh, Farrow and Ball are very smart! They’re very clever at their marketing.” In the end, the much debated urn would remain unpainted. “Henry wouldn’t deal with snobs. That’s why I liked him. Henry took everything he got involved in very seriously. Henry was the only Alliance Party member in the House of Lords. He strongly promoted the Education (Northern Ireland) Act 1974 which provided greater parity across the sectarian divide.” Later, “Oh how exciting, is it full of good restaurants and bars? Great! I’ll be an authority now on Ballyhackamore.”

She recalled an early drama at The Park. It was a tranquil Sunday morning in 1973 and unusually Dorinda was at home rather than at Holy Trinity Church Ballywalter. “Henry was singing the 23rd Psalm at Eucharist when he heard six fire brigades go by. Poor people, he pitied. I’d warned our butler not to interfere with the gas cylinders of the boiler, but he did, and the whole thing exploded, lifting off the dome of the Staircase Hall like a pressure cooker. The Billiard Room disappeared under a billow of smoke and flames. I rang the fire brigade and said, ‘Come quickly! There’s a fire at Ballywalter Park!’ The operator replied, ‘Yes, madam, but what number in Ballywalter Park?’” The estate of course doesn’t have a number – although it does have its own postcode.

“A spare room full of china collections fell through the roof. Well, I guess I’d always wanted to do an archaeological dig! It was so sad, really. As well as the six fire brigades, 300 people gathered from the village and around to help lift furniture onto the lawn. Fortunately the dome didn’t crack. Isn’t life stranger than fiction? The Powerscourt fire happened just one year later. Henry was philosophical and said we can build a replacement house in the walled garden.” In the end the couple would be responsible for restoring the house to its lasting glory. Ballywalter Park is a mid 19th century architectural marvel designed by Sir Charles Lanyon.

“I arrived over from London as a young wife and suddenly had to manage 12 servants. I used to tiptoe around so as not to disturb them. There was a crazy crew in the kitchen. Mrs Clarke was the cook. Billy Clarke, the scatty elderly butler, mostly sat smoking. Mrs Clarke couldn’t cook unless he was there. I was too shy to say anything!” Dorinda once briefly dated Tony Armstrong-Jones who would become the society photographer Lord Snowdon. “We met at pony club. He got me to model sitting next to a pond at our house in Widford, Hertfordshire.” One book described Dorinda as being “very pretty”. When questioned, she replied, “Well, quite pretty!” She was more interested in her time bookbinding for The Red Cross. In those days The Bunch of Grapes in Knightsbridge was Dorinda’s local. “Browns Hotel and The Goring were ‘safe’ for debutantes. After we got married we went to the State Opening of Parliament. We stayed in Henry’s club and I haled a taxi wearing a tiara and evening dress. Harrods was once full of people one would know. We would know people there. ‘Do you live near Harrods?’ people would ask. I’ve heard everyone now lives southwest down the river, near the boat races. You need some luck and then you’ve just got to make your own way having fun in London.”

As ever with Dorinda there were always more great stories to relate. “I bought the two paintings from the School of Van Dyke in my dining room for £40. I knew they were rather good landscapes so I decided to talk to Anthony Blunt about them. We arranged to meet in The Courtauld for lunch. Halfway though our meal he disappeared for a phone call. He was probably waiting for a message, ‘Go to the second tree on the left!’ He never reappeared. Next thing I heard he was a spy and had gone missing! I think he turned up in Moscow. I’ll remember other interesting things when you’re gone.” Occasionally colloquialisms would slip into her polite conversation. “The funeral was bunged! He’s completely mustard! She’s a pill!” One of Dorinda’s catchphrases, always expressed with glee, was, “That’s rather wild!”

“I called up to The Park. It was so funny: for the first time in history there were three Lady Dunleaths including me all sitting chatting on a sofa! One lives in The Park; the other, King’s Road and I don’t mean Belfast!” Dorinda made steeple chasing sound so riveting. A dedicated rider and breeder, she was Chairman of the Half Bred Horse Breeders Society. The Baroness’s contribution to Northern Irish culture and society is unsurpassed. She was Patron of the Northern Ireland Chest Stroke and Heart Association and the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education, as well as being a Committee Member of the Royal Ulster Agricultural Society. Dorinda was a Director of the Ulster Orchestra and a founding member of the National Trust in Northern Ireland and the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society. Along with Sir Charles Brett she laboriously carried out and published early ‘Listings’ of buildings in places such as Downpatrick, Dungannon and Lisburn. The Baroness’s legacy lives on in the Dorinda Lady Dunleath Charitable Trust. This charity was started by her late husband but after he died it was changed into Dorinda’s name and she added to it every year thereafter. It supports education; healthcare and medical research; the arts, culture, heritage and science; the environment; alleviating poverty; and advancement of the Christian faith. The Dorinda Lady Dunleath Charitable Trust continues to donate to charities that she would have liked, with a focus on Northern Ireland.

One of the last heritage projects Dorinda supported was the restoration and rejuvenation of Portaferry Presbyterian Church, not far from Ballywalter. It’s one of the best Greek Revival buildings in the United Kingdom. “Prince Charles came to the reopening. I curtsied so low I could barely stand up again! Afterwards, a few of us had a very grand supper at Ikea to celebrate!” She voiced concern about the future of the organ at Down Cathedral. Music in May at Ballywalter Park was an annual festival of organ music started by the newlyweds. The Dunleath Organ Scholarship Trust was set up by her late husband and she continued to support it for the rest of her life, attending its concerts each year.

“It’s so exciting… I can’t say how exciting it is you’re here! Tell me, who is this David Bowie everyone’s talking about? I feel like I’m about 100! It’s like when my father asked me, ‘Who is this Bing Crosby?’ The House of Lords used to be full of country specialists like experts in bees or men who loved linen. They used to give the most marvellous speeches. Each generation must do something. It would be great to write this down.” Later, “Gardens should have vistas, don’t you think? They need focal points; you need to walk for an hour to a place of discovery. Capability Brown and Repton knew how to do it.”

In latter years, there were memorable times to be had at The Wildfowler Inn, Greyabbey. Those long, languid lunches. “Portavogie scampi? I’ll have the same as you. And a glass of white wine please. We can have sticky toffee pudding after.” Dorinda would don her yellow high viz jacket, pulling the distinctive look off with considerable aplomb. Her eyesight failing, she would claim, “It helps people see me in Tesco in Newtownards!” Much later, balmy summer afternoons in the sheltered courtyard of Killyvolgan House would stretch long into the evening. There was Darjeeling and more laughter. Those were the days. Halcyon days by the shore. Days that will linger forever. On that last evening at Killyvolgan, Dorinda pondered, “Is there anyone left who cares about architectural heritage?”

Tags anthony blunt, ballywalter park, bing crosby, browns hotel, courtauld, david bowie, diana pollock, dorinda lady dunleath 4th baroness mulholland, dorinda lady dunleath charitable trust, down cathedral, drumhalla house rathmullan, dunleath organ scholarship trust, farrow & ball, goring hotel, harrods, henry lord dunleath 4th baron mulholland, historic buildings trust, holy trinity church ballywalter, joe fitzgerald architect, killyvolgan house ballywalter county down, lady mairi bury, lavenders blue, lissan house, lord snowdon, major charles alexander, marston langinger, mckees farm, mina lenox conyngham, mount panther, mount stewart, mountainstown house, national trust northern ireland, northern ireland chest stroke heart association, northern ireland council integrated education, pomeroy house, portaferry presbyterian church, prince charles, royal ulster agricultural society, sir charles brett, sir charles lanyon, springhill londonderry national trust, stuart blakley, sylvia alexander, tony armstrong jones, ulster architectural heritage society, ulster orchestra, van dyke, wildfowler inn greyabbey

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Lavender’s Blue + The Castle Castletownshend West Cork

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date April 29, 2022
17 Comments on Lavender’s Blue + The Castle Castletownshend West Cork

Grand Tourism

A few years ago Frank Keohane gave a lecture to the Irish Georgian Society London based on his ongoing research which would later be published as the 2020 Pevsner Architecture Guide, The Buildings of Ireland: Cork City and County. A monumental achievement by any measure. “There are so many buildings at risk in Cork City and County,” he warned. “The southeast of England hasn’t enough country houses to go round. In contrast, Ireland has one of the lowest population densities in Europe. There’s plenty of talk but action is needed too.”

“There are 345 identified buildings at risk in County Cork of which 67 are country houses,” he added. “But there are good news stories too. Monkstown Castle has been restored and Jeremy Irons famously restored Kilcoe Castle near Ballydehob. Cork naturally has the biggest asylum in the country!” One country house that thankfully isn’t at risk (the owners restored it six years ago) is The Castle, Castletownshend.

Frank summarises it as, “A house of several parts, the seat of the Townshends. The earliest, described as ‘newly built’ in 1780 by the Complete Irish Traveller, is presumably the two storey five bay rubblestone centre block, with dormers over the upper windows and a two storey rectilinear porch. Taller three storey wings with battlements carried on corbelled cornices and twin and triple light timber mullioned windows. The east wing was perhaps built in the late 1820s; the west wing was added after a fire of 1852. Modest interior. Large low central hall with a beamed ceiling and walls lined with oak panelled and gilded embossed wallpaper. Taller dining room to the rear, with a compartmented ceiling, a neoclassical inlaid fireplace in the manner of Bossi, and a large Jacobean sideboard. 19th century staircase with barley twist type balusters.”

“Oh please don’t ask me what’s my favourite Irish country house. That’s such a weak question!” jested Min Hogg, Founding Editor of The World of Interiors, giving us her last interview. The Castle has to be in our own top 10 (and we get around). “We’re the 11th generation of the family to live here,” welcomes our hostess Sharon Townshend. Guest rooms are named after people or events connected to the house. On the ground floor is the Gun Room. On the first floor, Chavenage, Deans and Studio. On the top floor, Archbishops, Army, Navy and our party room, Abigail.

Dark panelling and glass fronted bookcases stretching up to the ceiling enhance the character of the interior. Books include The Poems and Plays of Robert Brown; The Early Romances of William Morris; The Poems of Alfred Tennyson; The Plays of Richard Brinsley Sheridan; Northanger Abbey and Persuasion by Jane Austen; Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Nicholas Nickleby, Old Curiosity Shop and The Pickwick Papers. Keeping it local are Old Ireland Reminiscences of an Irish K C by Serjeant Sullivan and Last Memory of a Tenderfoot by R B Townshend.

The entrance front overlooks Castlehaven Bay, a spectacular setting by any standards. The northwest elevation backs onto the hillside. At its deepest part, the triple pile return wing almost touches the hillside. A 40 pane double height window adds natural light to the gallery-like staircase corridors and landings which line the north elevation.

Behind the ground floor Honesty Bar, a sepia tinted advertisement reads, “Castle Townshend, County Cork, has been the seat of the Townshend family for many generations, and is now run as a guesthouse by Mrs R M Salter-Townshend. It is situated on the borders of Castle Townshend Harbour. It certainly affords every variety of pleasure that guests could require. Mains electricity (A C current 220 volts).”

“Interior sprung mattresses and hot and cold running water in all bedrooms. Guests are welcomed to this castle as personal friends, and the old family portraits, historical associations etc, no less than the hospitality shown by all, are a delight to visitors. The climate in this part of Ireland compares very favourably with the south of England. The passage by sea from England is both cheap and luxurious. Director air service to Cork from Paris, London, Bristol, Cardiff, Dublin and Birmingham. Air car ferry Bristol to Cork and Liverpool, to Dublin.”

“There is never a dull moment at Castle Townshend, and one visit will convince you that this is just the place for a holiday that you have always been hoping to find. Also holiday cottages and maisonette flats to let. Fruit and vegetables from our own garden; and milk from our farm.”

“What we do at Castle Townshend. Boating and fishing. Own rowing boats, free to guests. Individual rowing boats can be hired weekly by arrangement. Good facilities for sailing. Own yacht, including competent yachtsmen for hire for morning or afternoon 12/6. Whole day £1. Safe bathing from nearby coves. Picnics, teas and lunches made up to order. Riding: riding ponies available for hacking. 7/6 a ride. Golf: pleasant links in vicinity (nine hole). Shooting: woodcock, snipe and duck shooting over 300 acres private woodlands and estuary, in season. Salmon and white trout fishing in River Ilen, Skibbereen (£1 licence). Trout fishing in own lakes and streams free.”

“Hackney cars available to meet train or bus by arrangement, and for motor drives to Bantry, Glengarriff, Killarney, Berehaven Mountains, Healy Pass (1,500 feet), Pass of Keimaneigh, Glandore, Baltimore, Crookhaven, Lake of Swans and Mizen Head. Wireless, good library, books, billiards.”

“Open all the year round. April, May and June: 10 guineas a week. July, August and September: 12 guineas a week. Christmas week: 14 guineas. The remainder of the year: nine guineas a week. Per day for not less than three days: July, August and September 37/6. The remainder of the year except Christmas 32/6. Bed and breakfast (all year) 23/ a day. Garage 1/. Early tea 7/ per week. Meals served in bedrooms 1/ extra. Electric convector heaters with own meters in bedrooms, or if required, log fires at 8/ a day or 4/ per evening. No reductions made for long visits. Please pass this on to an interested friend. Dogs welcome but not allowed in the dining room or drawing room. Telegrams and phones: Castletownshend Five.”

Sharon and Justin Townshend provide plenty of their own up to date notes: “We welcome you to enjoy our home which is steeped in history and the charm of days gone by. Colonel Richard Townshend built The Castle (Castle Townshend) around 1650 and it was gradually expanded over time with the towers being added in the 1800s. The portraits, panelling and wallpaper in the Front Hall are all original and where possible, 11 generations on, we’ve tried to retain the character of The Castle.”

“Relax and enjoy the views, the village and the grounds. Take a walk to the two ruins up behind The Castle, Bryans Fort and Swifts Tower, named after the second generation Bryan Townshend and Dean Jonathan Swift who wrote Gulliver’s Travels. Swift was supposed to have stayed at The Castle. Visit the church on the hill up 52 steps (one for each weekend of the year) for the views. Open for services on Sundays, weekly in summer and first Sunday of the month in winter, catch a look at the Harry Clarke stained glass windows.”

“You’ll find warm Irish hospitality up at Mary Ann’s and Lil’s further up the hill. So take in the village as it really is like stepping back in time. The Castle is a wonderful and unique place, and we are lucky to have the opportunity to live in it and be the guardians until the next generation.” We take their advice to heart and really take in the village and, as it turns out, the village really takes in us, including for midnight wine.

Even the breakfast menu in the Dining Room is imbued with history: “The Castle itself started off as a much smaller building and was gradually added onto over time with the castellated towers being added in the 1800s. Of the portraits of the Townshend family that you can see on the walls around you, Richard Townshend MP is the earliest portrait, the 4th generation here. He married Elizabeth Fitzgerald whose brother was the Knight of Kerry: a very prosperous family alliance. Their portraits can be seen in the Front Hall.”

“Above the 400 year old sideboard you’ll see Colonel John (6th generation) on the left and his brother Reverend Maurice on the right. Colonel John fought with the Duke of Wellington in the Spanish Peninsular War around 1810, and on the opposite wall is a portrait of the Dublin Duke himself, Arthur Wellesley.”

“Reverend Maurice became the heir to the Townshend estate and wrote to the Townshends of Norfolk, England, where he requested that the whole Castletownshend family also incorporated the ‘h’ into their name. Therefore, it is speculated that, because the Norfolk Townshends have titles and can trace their heritage back further, the first Richard Townsend of Castletownshend was perhaps an illegitimate child who was sent off with the army.” This brings a whole meaning to “dropping you ‘h’!”

“Reverend Maurice married Alice Shute who had inherited a property in Gloucestershire called Chavenage (that’s where our bedroom name comes from). Unfortunately, Chavenage was later sold to pay off inheritance taxes. Interestingly, the property is used in many period dramas, the most recent being the Warleggan family house in the television series Poldark.”

“To the right of the front window is a portrait of Reverend Maurice’s son, Henry. One of his uniforms, along with the original helmet, is displayed under the sideboard. The Castle has been welcoming guests for over 60 years. Rose Marie Salter Townshend from 1947 and then by her daughter Anne Cochrane Townshend from 1997. We took over in 2015 and were delighted to win the Georgina Campbell Bed and Breakfast of the Year Award in 2019.”

A sign at the foot of the hill beyond the Dining Room windows, just visible from our breakfast table, states: “The private grounds cover a total of 90 acres, much reduced from the 8,000 acres originally recorded. The woodland is open to the public for walks at set times during the year. Discover the ruins of Bryans Fort, the original castle before it was destroyed, and Swifts Tower named after Dean Jonathan Swift who wrote Gulliver’s Travels and travelled and wrote here. Follow the marked paths to discover the St Patrick’s Cross hidden deep in the woods, admiring the view down harbour along the way.”

Decisions, decisions. Union Hall smoked salmon and scrambled eggs? Or vegan breakfast? Thank goodness for multiple night stays. We’ll alternate. The latter includes Clonakilty vegan black pudding. It’s from down the road in the town made famous for meaty black pudding. But to channel our inner U2, the vegan variety is “Even better than the real thing”. Clonakilty is also known as the final earthly resting place of the late Damian O’Brien, Marketing Director of Bord Fáilte and country house enthusiast. While we’re enjoying breakfast, turndown of the Abigail Room takes place: beds remade and towels replenished.

To paraphrase the words of Mrs Salter-Townshend, Sharon’s predecessor back a generation or two, The Castle certainly affords every variety of high voltage pleasure that we could desire. The West Cork weather really does compare favourably with southern England. This weekend anyway. And yes, there’s never a dull moment at Castletownshend.

Tags abigails party, castle castletownshend west cork, clonakilty vegan black pudding, damian obrien bord failte, dean jonathan swift gullivers travels, frank keohane pevsner buildings ireland cork city county, georgina campbell, justin townshend, lavenders blue, mrs salter townshend, poldark, sharon townshend, stuart blakley, union hall salmon

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Lavender’s Blue + Castletownshend West Cork

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date April 28, 2022
13 Comments on Lavender’s Blue + Castletownshend West Cork

A Glorified Trance On The Irish Shore

We’re never stopped galivanting. Our latest destination is the village where table turning and ghost writing take on whole new meanings. The shadow of authors Edith Somerville and Martin Ross (her real name was Violet Martin) looms large over the village of Castletownshend on Ireland’s south coast. Frank Keohane comments in The Buildings of Ireland: Cork City and County (2020): “As the long time home of the writer, artist and Master of Fox Hounds Edith (1858 to 1949), Castletownsend is a highly evocative place, redolent of Anglo Irish society during its swansong. The village consists of two streets, of which the main street plunges downhill to the harbour. At the junction with the second street (The Mall) stand the ‘two trees’, a pair of sycamores, in what Edith described as a ‘barbaric stone flowerpot’. Castletownsend is also notable for the number of gentry houses built within the village rather than in the hinterland on small demesnes, in the more customary fashion.”

Maurice Collis writes in Somerville and Ross A Biography (1968), “Castletownshend was an unusual sort of place, because half a dozen families of the Cork landed gentry were settled there, instead of living, as the Irish landed gentry generally did, on estates dotted about the counties, miles apart from each other, as at Ross. Here their houses clustered round the village of Castletownshend, occupying a square mile of ground or less. The site was high ground which shelved steeply to the sea, a deep inlet or haven from the Atlantic like many others in western Cork. The view from the houses down to the haven and out to its mouth on the ocean was very fine. Near the west entrance to the village, a high point on the site, stood Drishane, the seat of the Somerville family.”

Gifford Lewis explains more about the authors in Somerville and Ross: The World of the Irish RM, (1985), “In childhood neither Edith nor Martin had recognised social and class barriers and both spoke naturally to those who in England would have been termed their ‘inferiors’. So that although they were from the privileged Anglo Irish gentry, they were at home in the native Irish world to the extent that their record of native speech in English is uniquely impressive. They knew that in their novels they were recording the death throes of their class – they made an unequalled portrait of the collapse of Anglo Ireland and the rise through it of the new Irish middle class.” Uniquely, Martin’s early demise didn’t stop them continuing to write in unison.

The two streets of Castletownshend are perpendicular to one another, meeting at the ‘two trees’ (to circumnavigate this pretty obstacle by car means mounting the pavement). Main Street is beautifully bookended by Drishane House at the top and The Castle at the bottom. The Mall heads out towards the coastline, ending with The Rocket House. Both streets are lined with beautiful townhouses, mainly Georgian. We last visited Drishane House in 1992. Little has changed, except the heavy Atlantic mist of that day 30 years ago has been replaced with serene unclouded skies on this visit. Jane and Tom Somerville are the present incumbents of Edith’s former home. Martin’s family home was Ross House, County Galway, but she was a frequent visitor to Castletownshend.

Frank comments on Drishane House, “A handsome six bay weather slated house built about 1790, the seat of the Somervilles. In the Edwardian period a new entrance was created on the more sheltered side elevation. This has an unusual rock-faced limestone doorcase with a scrolled pediment of vaguely Chinese appearance. The original wide tripartite limestone doorcase, with Tuscan demi-columns, now serves as a garden entrance.”

We interviewed Captain Paul Chavasse, owner of The Rocket House, two years before he died in 1994 aged 86. “Cousin Edith and Violet Martin were two energetic, lively, independent young women who were keen hunters,” he recalled. His parting shot was, “Don’t believe any rumours about the girls’ relationship. There’s no substance to them.” The Captain converted a row of coastguard cottages into his seven bedroom home. The cut stone building was designed by architect William Atkins in 1841. It takes its name from the rocket launchers that were used to fire ropes to assist ships in danger. The ropes were then used to haul sailors and passengers to safety. The Stag Rocks in Castlehaven Bay were notoriously treacherous. The Chavasse family home was Seafield, a few metres away from The Rocket House, on The Mall. Captain Paul’s wife was Elizabeth Somerville, Edith’s niece.

Crowning the hilltop high above The Castle is St Barrahane Castlehaven Parish Church and graveyard. Frank Keohane describes it well: “Delightfully picturesque, with glorious views over the harbour and many fine monuments.” The Somerville and Ross graves are simply marked: Martin’s is a simple squarish gravestone; Edith’s is an uncarved boulder like a menhir from the neighbouring hills. There are unusual metal – now elegantly rusted – graves too.

“Everyone goes to Mary Ann’s!” smiles Sharon Townshend of The Castle. A roll of owners was unveiled in 1996 by then Taoiseach Charlie Haughey. 1988 to the present Patricia and Fergus O’Mahony. 1983 to 1988 William and Ann Hosford. 1970 to 1983 Norman and Leonore Davis. 1963 to 1970 Prudence Sykes. 1947 to 1963 Mary Ann Hayes. 1930 to 1947 Mary Ann and Willie Casey. 1846 to 1930 Hennessy Family. So it’s named after two Mary Anns. Fergus recently celebrated his 60 and a half birthday and hosted a show in the Warren Art Gallery on the first floor of the pub. It included works by Irish artists Aidan Bradley, Susan Cairns, William Crozier, Felim Egan, Mat Grogan, Matt Lamb, Patrick McCarthy, John Minihan, Yvonne Moore and Cara Nagle.

Fergus joins us for an after dinner pint. “I was the manager at Blooms Hotel in Dublin,” he says, “before coming to Castletownshend.” The Chefs join us as well, having cooked dinner to perfection. Our starter was pan seared tiger prawns with fresh ginger, garlic and chilli followed by a main course of locally caught fresh scallops in a classic mornay sauce. Nights are long in West Cork. Next stop, the historian John Collins who has lived a few doors down from Mary Ann’s on Main Street for 40 years.

“The inspiration and aspirations of a community are in their architecture,” he believes. “There are 146 people living in the village.” John restored the three storey Quay Stores overlooking Castlehaven Bay and converted them to residential use. He also helped save the vintage petrol pump and telephone box facing one another further up the hill. “The police station in Graham Norton’s Holding is actually a house on Main Street,” he points out. “That cranky old diva Brenda Fricker appears in the television series.”

It’s now midnight and the wine and conversation are flowing. John is a born raconteur, never better when talking about Somerville and Ross’s table turning and ghost writing. We’re getting that end of the line vibe. The village terminates at The Castle gates. Castletownshend goes nowhere and is going nowhere and everyone is proud of that. We’re back in Savannah again, in another world.

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Lavender’s Blue + Restaurant Chestnut Ballydehob West Cork

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date April 22, 2022
9 Comments on Lavender’s Blue + Restaurant Chestnut Ballydehob West Cork

All That Is And Was And Is To Come

Skipping the light fantastic – those southern sunsets – we zoom past the healthily rude sounding Ballinspittle and gourmet rattling Deelish to our destination. Frank Keohane writes in The Buildings of Ireland: Cork City and County (2020), “At the head of Ballydehob Bay, a small village of 19th century origin at a crossing on the Rathruane River.” In West Cork A Sort of History (1997) Tony Brehony dips in, “Ballydehob, a charming little village nestling among the hills of West Cork, lies to the east of brooding Mount Gabriel… The village itself has become the focus of the recent literary and artistic revival in West Cork and artists, writers and poets from all over the world intermingle freely with the native fishing and farming community.”

Hiding behind an unassuming Irish shopfront, the ground floor windows clad with Murphy’s Stout blinds, lies a world class restaurant. ‘Chestnut Tree’ spells the sign above the rendered ground floor and below the pebble dashed upper storeys. Welcome to 21st century rural Ireland. This is how we live – and dine – now. It’s our discovery, albeit one we’re happy to share with a Michelin inspector. We’re here for the pescatarian tasting menu. And yes you guessed it, this used to be a pub (again, welcome to Ireland). In a while we will be told, “We tried to keep the character of the old pub. The landlady of 20 years Agnes was well known for sweeping out rowdy guests with her broom!”

We dodge the entry level wines and head straight for hedonism in a bottle or three. Sparkling? That’ll be us. Larmandier-Bernier Latitude Blanc de Blanc Extra Brut from New Zealand. Red? Why not. Pierre-Jean Villa, Côte-Rôtie Carmina, Syrah, Rhône Valley, 2018. White? Oh please, we’re being spoiled. Domaine Sylvain Langoureau Puligny-Montrachet 1er Cru, Le Garenne, 2019. “Restaurant Chestnut is all about seasonal food and punchy flavours,” believes Sharon Townshend of The Castle, Castletownshend. “It’s a distinction restaurant of 100 percent West Cork fine dining. Justin and I made the trip last Saturday and loved it!” And sure enough, it is punchily on season with buckets full of distinction.

We unseal the menu: “Inspired by nature, Rob’s menus are designed around the finest ingredients that are seasonably best, from the West Cork larder, and from the island of Ireland. Rob grew up in West Cork. His father’s Polish heritage and family traditions have influenced his cooking. West Cork’s spectacular rich larder is what has drawn Rob home, home to his roots, to open a restaurant in the heart of this beautiful area.” Owner Chef Rob Krawczyk comes out from the kitchen: “We pride ourselves on provenance.”

Providence on plates. Jeden. Wheaten bread with Mila’s Fancy Cheese from Newtownards. Dwa. Grilled asparagus on a stone. Trzy. Day cheese with frozen young buck on toast. Cztery. Union Hall mackerel, Kristal caviar with buttermilk and parsley. “Rob’s dad taught him how to pickle food and use capers and vinegar. Pięć. Fizzy clove and whiskey foam palate cleanser. Sześć. Union Hall monkfish with Irish truffle and fennel pollen with brown butter. Siedem. Aubergine cooked over embers with asparagus, wild garlic bulbs and beetroot jus. It looks for all the world like sparkling quartz and melting ruby on a shimmering emerald sea. And the meatiest aubergine imaginable. Osiem. Bay leaf sherbet and dill oil with Velvet Cloud Sheep’s Yoghurt, bay leaf and wood sorrel. Dziewięć. Mead sabayon of West Cork honey, bee pollen and meadowsweet. Dziesięć. Sweets in edible rice paper and proper drip coffee.

There are just eight covers in the rear ground floor area where we dine. “We have 22 covers at peak times. We have only one sitting starting between 6pm and 8.30pm and there is no turn.”

Architecture Art Design Hotels People Restaurants Town Houses

Lavender’s Blue + Skibbereen West Cork

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date April 14, 2022
9 Comments on Lavender’s Blue + Skibbereen West Cork

The Capital of the Carberies

It’s 30 years since our last jaunt but The West Cork Hotel has barely changed – it’s under new ownership (the latest generation of the Murphy family having retired) but there’s still the same relaxed country vibe. Seafood chowder and beer battered fish and chips are served with the obligatory West Coast Coolers in the bar overlooking the old railway bridge crossing the River Ilen. It is what it was.

In his comprehensive 2020 book The Buildings of Ireland: Cork City and County, Frank Keohane describes Skibbereen as, “A substantial market town, the southernmost in Ireland.” And The West Cork Hotel as, “A four storey, four bay Italianate block built alongside the bridge in 1902. Stuccoed, with string courses and a hipped roof. First floor windows with architraves and flat cornices. Upper floor windows with chamfered jambs. At street level the façade is articulated by pilasters and paired round arched windows.” At four storeys in height, the hotel is a skyscraper in West Cork terms, visible from the fields around. A cast iron balcony stretching across the first floor of the façade lends it a Deep South – America not Ireland – quality.

Why say three syllables when one will do. Skib has gone a tad hipsterish – more of that in a moment – but Dick Draper, the local optometrist who died a couple of years ago aged 104 would still recognise most of it. His friend and fellow Gospel Hall attendee Lillian Clerke is still around. Her very sweet shop (she sold the best clove rock in town) on Bridge Street may have closed but her surname is clear for all to see on the fascia. Our driver from Dolphin Taxis remembers Dick well. Chauffeuring us through the countryside as the hazy pink haloed golden circle of the sun sets, he recalls as a child having an accident and when he woke up in hospital, Dick was praying over him. “A very holy man. Did you know the Brethren have their own separate cemetery in Skib?”

On things hip, there’s a foodie farmers’ market on Saturday mornings in the town centre car park next to Abbeystrewey Church of Ireland. The Methodist Church is now a restaurant; architecturally it’s all show: a tall gabled red brick façade conceals a cement faced low pitched block behind. Trance music vibrates from The Mardyke Maggie antiques warehouse, a treasure trove of bygones ready to be revived. Then there’s the Antiquity Bookshop and Vegan Deli where you can have cruelty free edible treats while browsing for bestsellers. “Skib is the hub for small villages around like Baltimore,” confirms our driver.

Mona Best owns Bridge House, a long low two storey gaily painted bed and breakfast in the heart of Skib. She muses, “My perfect day is a day when I make other people happy; it’s in the giving that we receive. So when people come to stay with me I welcome them to a world full of magic as I like them to enjoy and experience something truly unique and memorable. My home is an installation representing my creative artistic temperament and eclectic bohemian taste for quirky Victorian objets d’art and antique furniture. This is my stage where I take people on a journey and transport them from the ordinary to the extraordinary. I’m a fun loving person: I love to entertain and bring happiness into people’s lives. It is not how much we give but how much love we put into giving. Every day is beautiful and it is our responsibility to ourselves to pursue and experience all that is magical and wonderful in our lives.”

Tags antiquity bookshop vegan deli, baltimore, dick draper, dolphin taxis, frank kehane pevsner buildings ireland cork city county, lavenders blue, lillian clerke, mardyke magpie, mona best bridge house bed breakfast, river ilen, skibbereen gospel hall, skibbereen west cork, stuart blakley, tony brehony west cork history, west cork hotel

Architects Architecture Art Country Houses Design People

Lavender’s Blue + Bantry House West Cork

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date April 13, 2022
24 Comments on Lavender’s Blue + Bantry House West Cork

Owning It

The iconic garden front graces the dust jacket front cover of Frank Keohane’s 2020 publication, the latest in the Pevsner series, Buildings of Ireland: Cork City and County. His description opens with some understatement, “The house is extensive.” The Chartered Building Surveyor and architectural historian continues, “At its core is a three storey, five bay block, known originally as Blackrock, built by Samuel Hutchinson circa 1730. The Whites acquired it in the 1730s but did not take possession until the 1760s. They renamed the house Seafield, and undertook improvements following the marriage of Simon White to the heiress Frances Jane Hedges Eyre in 1766. In 1790 the heroic Richard White made an advantageous marriage to Margaret Anne Hare, who possessed a dowry of £30,000. Soon afterwards, he added bow ended two storey wings, the same height as the three storey centre. The 2nd Earl of Bantry, Viscount Berehaven, was responsible for the house’s great mid 19th century transmogrification.”

Julie Shelswell-White lives at Bantry House and a couple of years ago along with her brother Sam took over its running. She suggests, “Take a guided tour or wander about at your own leisure to learn about the history of this family home. Relax with a light lunch or tea and cake in our tearoom overlooking the sunken garden. For a special treat enjoy an afternoon tea in the Library. Our bed and breakfast in the East Wing of the house has six rooms all en suite, with beautiful views of the formal garden. Guests are welcome to enjoy a drink from the honesty bar by the open fire in the Library or take a fellow guest on, in the Billiards Room. The estate is the perfect setting for weddings and celebrations. From a simple ceremony or intimate dinner to full estate rental, the house and garden offer many options.”

Old photographs show how little the house has changed in the last 100 years or so. One part that has disappeared with a trace or two is the huge conservatory that once arched and vaulted and summer salted its way across the six central bays of the garden front. The red brick pilasters topped with Corinthian Coade stone capitals between these six bays were chopped off in line with the top of the piano nobile windows at the time of the conservatory’s construction. This has left these pilasters ‘floating’ in perpetuity, a charming idiosyncrasy. The now white window frames of the house were once painted seaweed green. There’s a sublime Mediterranean feel to the whole estate from its loggia verandah to the balustraded prospect over Bantry Bay.

But there’s an inherent fragility despite the air of apparent permanence. Raghnall Ó Floinn, Director of the National Museum of Ireland, explains, “Bantry House is a major tourist asset in the southwest of Ireland but action by the State to secure its future and that of its contents should be undertaken for the public good. Such an action by the State to protect our much diminished cultural heritage contributes to the national sense of health and wellbeing; it is the right thing to do… In the overwhelming majority of cases the contents of these great Irish houses have been broken up and sold, ending up scattered throughout the world in museums, galleries and private hands. Once sold, such collections can never be replaced. Successive owners of the house have been forced to sell parts of the contents of the house piecemeal.”

The Bantry House Report of 2015 by the Director of Crawford Art Gallery in Cork City, Peter Murray, investigated a plan for the gallery and the family to work together to ensure the survival of the important historic house and its collection of paintings, sculpture, tapestries and decorative arts. “While the Guardi paintings have gone, sold in the 1950s, and while some of the tapestries and paintings have also been sold, Bantry House is remarkable in that much of the wonderful collection amassed in Europe in the 1820s by the White family, still remains in situ two centuries later. However, the financial viability of Bantry House remains a personal challenge, and in October 2014, the Shelswell-White family announced, with great regret, that the remainder of the collection would have to be sold, to meet bank debts. In the event, the sale did not take place, but the future of the collection remains very much in jeopardy.”

“The proposed solution for Bantry House is for its collection to be acquired by a donor, an individual or a company, and then donated to the Crawford Art Gallery. The donor can then avail of tax relief under Section 1003 of the Finance Act. The Crawford Art Gallery would then lend the collection back to Bantry House on a long term agreement, subject to the house remaining open to the public. The outcome would be very similar to that of the Wedgwood Collection in Britain. This would ensure the collection remains in Ireland as an important cultural tourism attraction.” Solutions continue to be sought, but for now, the house, its contents and estate are together.

Ireland just doesn’t have a country house visiting tradition. It’s a very British thing. Calke Abbey, a National Trust property in rural Derbyshire, is so popular that it has timed entry tickets and queues wrap round the house at weekends. Chatsworth House, also in Derbyshire, the main home of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire (their holiday home is Lismore Castle in County Waterford), opened to the public in 1946 around the same time as Bantry House did the same thing. And numbers over the threshold of Chatsworth? Around two million visitors a year. And Bantry House? Circa 25,000. Admittedly Calke Abbey and Chatsworth are close to conurbations but still.

Architecture Design People

Lavender’s Blue + Mizen Head West Cork

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date April 13, 2022
7 Comments on Lavender’s Blue + Mizen Head West Cork

Sweetie Darling

Charles Haughey, thrice Taoiseach, and his lover girl Terry Keane were well known patrons of the arts in the closing years of the 20th century. Rather more obscurely, Charlie was once shipwrecked in heavy fog off Mizen Head. “We were sailing our former boat Taurima back to Howth at the end of September 1985 after she had spent most of the summer around the Blaskets. As night fell, a thick dense fog came down reducing visibility to zero. Due to a malfunction of our radar system, Taurima went on to the rocks at Mizen Head… She went down very quickly – in about five minutes – but we had time to send out a May Day and launch the life raft and small dinghy which was kept aboard.”

Things went from the their worst to not so bad. “Our May Day was picked up by the Shannon Marine Rescue and Coordination Centre, Valentia Radio and the lightkeepers in the Mizen Lighthouse. The rescue services went into operation immediately and both the Valentia and Baltimore Lifeboats were launched… I shall always remember the warm friendly atmosphere aboard the lifeboat; her crew were just marvellous. Listening to their good natured banter, repartee and wit, it was difficult to remember that they all have their services voluntarily and had been dragged from their homes or their socialising in the early hours of Sunday morning and put to sea.”

This story is recorded in a 1994 framed copy of the Sunday Independent on the wall of the meteorological lodge at Mizen Head. On the edge of the world, followers of the Shipping Forecast will know Mizen Head falls under Fastnet. The other sea areas around Ireland in an anticlockwise fashion are Shannon, Rockall, Malin and Irish Sea. Frank Keohane opens his 2020 epic book The Buildings of Ireland: Cork City and County, “Cork is the southernmost and largest county in Ireland…” This is the Very Wild Atlantic Way. Marine mammal spotting – for those strong enough to hold onto binoculars in the ever prevailing winds – includes Risso’s Dolphins (March to May), Minke Whales (March to November), Basking Sharks (April to June), Common Dolphins (April to December), Humpback Whales (May to December), Atlantic Sunfish (June to August) and Fin Whales (June to December). Stormzy. Stormby. Stormy.

Sharon Townshend, châtelaine of The Castle at Castletownshend, a few kilometres west of Mizen Head, describes it well, “At Ireland’s most southwesterly point, cross the iconic Mizen Bridge to the signal station and enjoy the spectacular sea views out to the Fastnet Lighthouse. The Mizen Head visitor centre with a café and gift shop is positioned hight on a cliff and exhibits all sorts of maritime paraphernalia, the station keeper’s living quarters as well as an amazing photographic collage of the wildlife and underwater life.”

Tags blasket islands, castletownshend, fastnet, frank kehane pevsner buildings ireland cork city county, lavenders blue, mizen head west cork, shannon marine rescue, stormby, stormzy, stuart blakley, taoiseach charles haughey, terry keane, valentia radio, wild atlantic way

Architects Architecture Art Design Luxury People Restaurants

Baroness + Sessions Arts Club Clerkenwell London

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date April 8, 2022
24 Comments on Baroness + Sessions Arts Club Clerkenwell London

Sizing up the Assizes

“Before Angelo drove his car off the ravine, he was having one of the best nights of his life.” Cut to the chase. It’s the hippest hangout in town right now and we’ve nabbed the hottest table somehow. Everybody and we mean everybody is here: full of the type of people one should know. There’s no sign for the entrance to Sessions Arts Club. That would be just too prosaic. The red entrance door (matching the Giles Gilbert Scott telephone box on the pavement) opens to reveal a curated world of enigma and intrigue. A sunshiny day gives way to a literally and laterally dark space – the unwindowed entrance hall was once a holding cell. And it’s here that things start to go a little crazy. Zany has a new. Rhubarb Bellinis please! “She had endless moral fortitude.”

Performance artist Sarah Baker’s book Baroness Versace Holiday Saga sits on a shelf in the hall. Next to it is her bestseller cassette in a glass dome. Over to the story, “Calling the shots from beneath her Versace satin sheets, Baroness is back for the holiday season with her scintillating book Baroness by Sarah Baker – with our esteemed guest editor, Donatella Versace. Baroness serves a scorching holiday cocktail, mixing lust, jealousy, and greed. Following the lives of five outrageous characters as they navigate tumultuous affairs, the story begins when American music mogul Angelina Marina, played by Baker, receives an unwanted holiday gift, inadvertently opening a sordid, seasonal tale of tangled lives and treachery. Everything is at stake – Angelina’s freedom, the loyalty of her daughter, her friendship with the Baroness, and worst of all – the royalties of her hit single, ‘Spritz Me With Your Love’. Baroness is a riotous whirl of Versace style, rosé Champagne, scandalous associations and the sexiest men in town. But be careful when admiring your own reflection… someone may be plotting behind your back!”

“Baroness Ruby was the epitome of elegance. She possessed an arresting quality of beauty and an aristocratic bearing and worldliness that seemed unobtainable to Angelina.” Swedish owners Sätila Studios’ pioneering entrée into the London scene is astonishing in its brilliance. A dark gorgeousness unfolds on every level – well especially the fourth – as a wood and brass lift whisks us heavenwards to the former judges’ dining room. The restaurant is carved out of this space with a mezzanine added and topped by no fewer than three intimate roof terraces. It’s all faded grandeur and free of – so sorry Angelina! – spritzed up bling. The Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen’s bathroom is lit by an internal Diocletian window looking for all the world like a fanlight on steroids. The view earthwards is of all four storeys of the vast void of the former court atrium. Visual drama has replaced the legal variety. Suits us. Architect Thomas Rogers’ 1782 Palladian place of reform part remodelled by Frederick Hyde Pownall in 1860 reinvented for the swinging 2020s.

“She was a world class spy who had been working undercover since she was a teenager.” Chef Florence Knight goes to town and back on seafood supreme. Lunch is a little hazy – Friday is the new Friday after all – and flows from panisse and cod’s roe pane carasau to cavolo Nero and anchovy via beetroot, goat’s curd and olive crumb before landing on eel, rocket, crème fraîche and more roe. “Such a good wee thing,” comes our Glaswegian delivered pudding. Rhubarb and vanilla ice cream with shortbread.“Little did Angelo and Jack know that Angelo was Cairo’s father. Little did Angelina know that Angela and Jacob were plotting against her. Little did Cairo know that money and power often eclipse true love. The Baroness holds the truth. But can the truth save them?”

“Baroness Ruby had a particular fondness for bubbly and she loved a good party. Especially one with a dramatic ending.” Angelina Marina’s arch enemy, her nemesis, her absolute rival, is Baroness Ruby played by model Helena Christensen. A whole new world of desire, Sessions Arts Club is like an orchid blooming. A fine, rare, dramatic moment in time. As for that name, well, sessions aren’t just legal history they’re what Friday afternoons are all about; it’s clubby but it’s not a club; and oh ah it’s so very artsy. Wow here comes the Baroness! Espresso martinis thank you! Cut. Can life get any more fabulous? Absolutely! After Evensong at St Bartholomew the Great Cloth Fair London we’re off to The Castle. “One thing was certain, Angelina needed to look flawless.”

Tags artist sarah baker, baroness ruby, baroness versace holiday saga, chef florence knight, donatella versace, evensong st bartholomew great cloth fair, frederick hyde pownall, giles gilbert scott, helena christensen, lavenders blue, satila studios, sessions arts club clerkenwell green london, stuart blakley, suits, thomas rogers

Architecture Art Country Houses Design Developers Hotels Luxury People Restaurants

The Evelyns + Wotton House Hotel Wotton Surrey

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date April 1, 2022
5 Comments on The Evelyns + Wotton House Hotel Wotton Surrey

Very Grand Tour

It’s an absolute hamlet of a house: sprawling’s the word. Every century since the 17th, the Evelyn family enlarged and embellished Wotton House. Following a late 20th century stint as a school for firefighters, it has been a country house hotel of considerable renown and taste. John Evelyn, landscape architect and diarist, created the first Italian Renaissance garden in Britain. It still remains, along with a – what’s the collective noun? – let’s say a feast of streams and bridges and temples and grottoes and griffons. A river runs through it (the Tillingbourne). Although the Evelyns’ kangaroo paddock has gone. Incredibly this is all just an hour’s limo ride from London.

The three storey collegiate looking brick elevations around the entrance forecourt are topped by Dutch Billy gables. The garden front is lower rise in nature, punctuated by chamfered bay windows, and stretching the full length of the terrace. Overlooking the Italian Renaissance garden is The 1877 restaurant and bar. This double space combines a mirrored and frescoed reception room and an adjoining orangery. A plaque over the external door confirms: “Built about AD 1670 by George Evelyn Esquire. Enlarged and restored AD 1877 by W J Evelyn Esquire.” InterContinental Hotels Group has aptly named the bedrooms and meeting rooms after a botanical theme: Geranium; Heather; Hosta; Ivy; Japonica; Magnolia; Marigold; Poppy; Primula; Rose; Tulip; Thistle; Viola; and Wisteria.

Tags intercontinental hotels group, john evelyn, lavenders blue, stuart blakley, wotton house hotel dorking surrey

Architecture Art Design

The Church of St John the Evangelist Wotton Surrey +

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date April 1, 2022
2 Comments on The Church of St John the Evangelist Wotton Surrey +

The Beyondness of Other Things

Some buildings look like they have been there forever. The Church of St John the Evangelist in Wotton, a few kilometres from Dorking, is as case in point. Its yellowy pastel stone walls and pale grey slate roofs merge with the yellowy pastel fields and pale grey trees. The church practically has been around since the beginning of time, or at least for one millennium. This Grade I piece of ecclesiastical architecture is likely of Saxon origin (nave wall and tower) with Norman additions (chancel, north chapel, north transept and nave), a 17th century part (mortuary chapel) and completing elements dating from two centuries later (south porch and vestry). It was the estate church of the Evelyn family who owned nearby Wotton House. After admiring this spirit lifting church and daffodil’d setting, spirits can be lifted in a more material way at the Wotton Hatch Pub and Restaurant on the other side of the Dorking to Guildford road.

Tags church st john evangelist wotton surrey, dorking, evelyn family, guildford, lavenders blue, stuart blakley, wotton hatch pub restaurant, wotton house

Architects Architecture Art Design

Cubitt + Sons + Dorking Cemetery Dorking Surrey

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date April 1, 2022
4 Comments on Cubitt + Sons + Dorking Cemetery Dorking Surrey

Resting in Peace

Opened in 1855, Dorking Cemetery now has somewhere for everyone: it’s multi-faith. Despite its location on the busy Reigate Road, upon entering through the archway of the lodge an air of tranquillity prevails. A sculpture park for the dead has the rolling Surrey Hills as a backdrop. The pretty flint faced (red roofed) lodge, the (gable ended) Anglican chapel and the (high hipped) nonconformist chapel were all completed the following year. The builder was Cubitt and Sons; the architect, Henry Clutton (1819 to 1893). The same year the cemetery opened, Henry Clutton along with William Burges won a competition to design Lille Cathedral. But after much brouhaha and not a little anti-English sentiment, the executed scheme was built to the design of local architect Charles Leroy, despite him only coming third place.

Company founder Thomas Cubitt (1788 to 1855) was a highly successful housebuilder and developer, best known for developing Belgravia and Lower Belgravia (Pimlico). Stuccoed neoclassical terraces are synonymous with his surname. There’s a statue to Thomas Cubitt in the centre of Dorking: “A great builder and a good man.” He lived just outside the town. Thomas Cubitt has the double honour of having a gastropub named after him on Elizabeth Street, Belgravia, and being the great great great grandfather of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. Cubitt and Sons continued as a building company for several decades after his demise.

Tags camilla duchess cornwall, charles leroy, dorking cemetery surrey, henry clutton, lavenders blue, lille cathedral, stuart blakley, thomas cubitt, william burges

Architects Country Houses Design

Deepdene Dorking Surrey + Thomas Hope

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date March 28, 2022
4 Comments on Deepdene Dorking Surrey + Thomas Hope

Deep Calls Unto Deep

“We now behold a spacious mansion of pleasing colour, diversified and varied in its features, replete with interior luxuries, and exterior beauties,” wrote John Britton in his 1826 Historical and Descriptive Account of Deepdene. Architect William Atkinson and his connoisseur and collector client Thomas Hope’s Italianate country house with its must-have belvedere, a palazzo in the Surrey Hills, vanished in 1969. Mole Valley District Council has restored the remnants of the early 19th century landscaping. A replica of one of the two Coade stone lions that once guarded the entrance to the house now stands on a lawned terrace overlooked by a timber tower. Thomas Hope designed a Grecian style family mausoleum following the death of his seven year old son in 1815. The landowner himself would be buried there 16 years later. A beech avenue blazes through a hilltop woodland reserve. The edges of the estate were developed with impeccable taste at the turn of last century: property porntastic stockbroker’s Tudor snuggles in wooded gardens: homes sweet homes.

Tags deepdene dorking surrey hills, homes sweet homes osbert lancaster, john britton, lavenders blue, mole valley district council, stuart blakley, thomas hope, william atkinson

Architects Architecture Design Fashion People Restaurants Town Houses

Pilgrimage + Rochester Kent

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date March 21, 2022
6 Comments on Pilgrimage + Rochester Kent

Pilgrim’s Progression

Proverbs 4:18, “The path of the righteous is like the morning sun, shining ever brighter till the full light of day.”

Charles Dickens writes in his unfinished last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, “A brilliant morning shines on the old city. Its antiquaries and ruins are surpassingly beautiful with a lusty ivy gleaming in the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air.” The sun shines brighter in Rochester; it’s a good day for a pilgrimage, whatever that may entail. “A pilgrimage is a journey, a quest,” advises John Armson in his Rochester Pilgrim Guide (1999). He continues, “The cathedral church has been a place of pilgrimage for many centuries.” Prepare for an avalanche of pictures. The Cathedral Church of Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary is the supermodel of English ecclesiastical architecture: it’s got good features and is very photogenic. “Growing in Christ since AD 604,” states the Order of Service for Sunday Eucharist. Free of hobgoblins and foul fiends, the nave is filled with the sound of a rehearsal of Handel’s Messiah to be performed tonight and tomorrow and tomorrow’s tomorrow. The town is the catwalk of English settlements with beauties parading wherever you gaze.

According to the Rochester Pilgrim Guide, “Like most old churches, the building is based on the shape of a cross lying flat on the ground. The cross, of course, is so shaped because it had to carry the human form when people were crucified – as Jesus Christ was crucified. The cathedral is a crucifix in stone. It represents, symbolically, the body of Jesus Christ – the nave is his torso, the transepts are his arms, the sanctuary is his head. If the sun is shining it will be filled with light. The cream coloured stone from Caen in Normandy glows in the sunshine.” The writer suggests, “Christians can remind themselves of all this by making the sign of the cross on their own bodies.”

The immaculate state of the cathedral contrasts with the ruinous presence of the neighbouring castle. Coffins are piled up against the ramparts in a Larkinesque gesture: “dead lie round”. The Norman Gundulf Bishop of Rochester (1077 to 1108) commenced the construction of the castle. His contemporary William de Corneil Archbishop of Canterbury built its keep. The keep – an accidentally minimalist structure with gaping holes in place of windows and doors – has been reinvented as an adventurous walk up spiral staircases and along loggias and gangways and battlements overlooking the cavernous void below and across the former city beyond.

Looking down on the southwest front of the cathedral is Minor Canon Row, England’s best preserved terrace. It was built in 1722 for the lucky cathedral clergy. The Spitalfields Trust has taken it over and now every precious square centimetre is virtuously munificently pristinely gloriously restored. The doorsteps and basement areas of each townhouse are protected by unusual timber balustrades. A parapet rising from the brick front and side elevations conceals narrow hipped pitches visible to the rear: each three bay house is the width of two pitches. The top floor of the three storey over basement houses has casement windows to the rear. In The Mystery of Edwin Drood it is alliteratively renamed Minor Canon Corner, the home of Reverend Septimus Crisparkle and his widowed mother.

Rochester High Street does kooky (Store 104 and Victoria’s Books, Yarns, Coffee), cookery (Pastures New) and cookies (The Candy Bar). Its shopfronts are well dressed. Established in 1985, or so the sign says, is The Candy Bar with its suitably candyfloss pink shopfront. A calorific display contains dozens of Mrs Bridges pots (banoffee curd; celebration Champagne marmalade; chilli jam; mango chutney with lime and ginger; Scottish raspberry preserve) and very sweet stuff (cherry Bakewell fudge; coconut ice; fruit fondant creams, peanut butter fudge; raspberry Prosecco fudge; Rochester rock). It’s as if the “Lumps of Delight Shop” in The Mystery of Edwin Drood has come to life. Pavement presentations are nakedly ambitious: colourful tailor’s dummies pose outside vintage shop Fieldstaff. Rochester boasts England’s largest secondhand bookshop (Baggins Book Bazaar). Pied wagtails living up to their name (wagging their tails) flutter down the pavements in a fuss of monochromatism.

Occupying leaning jettied plastered buildings on High Street are The Cheese Room Deli and Café and The Cheese Room Botanicals Restaurant and Bar run by Chris and Julie Small. “We love cheese! It’s just so versatile, tasty, comforting, grownup and sexy!” Lunch is aubergine fritters with chipotle mayo followed by – naturally – the five British cheeseboard. Crackers and quince accompany Baron Bigod, Bowyers, Kent Blue, Kidderton Ash and Vintage Red Leicester. And when in Kent… Chapel Down Flint Dry 2020, a blend of Bacchus and Chardonnay. A street corner violinist serenades customers in this upper room. Pudding comes later, perfect lavender cupcakes from Hobbs and Tee’s stall on High Street. Regarding the building housing The Cheese Room Botanicals, John Oliver notes in Dickens’ Rochester (1978), “This was the home of Mr Tope, the Chief Verger of the cathedral in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It is the last building mentioned in the writings of Charles Dickens.”

It has a lot of competition but Eastgate House wins the prize for best building on High Street. Masquerading as the Nun’s House in The Mystery of Edwin Drood and as Westgate in The Pickwick Papers, “This fine Elizabethan building was erected in 1590 to 1591 for St Peter Burke, who was a paymaster in the Queen’s Navy,” according to John Oliver. Fragments of late 16th century wall painting survive in a top floor room. Eastgate House is now The Charles Dickens Centre. There’s a surprising addition in its grounds: the Dickens’ Chalet. This Swiss mountain folly is where the author penned The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It was relocated from his home Gads Hill on the edge of Rochester. Actually make that The Guildhall for High Street’s finest building. It is after all a Sir Christopher Wren masterpiece dating from 1687. The Guildhall is now a lively museum. Charles Dickens’ character Pip in Great Expectations describes its interior, “The hall was a queer place, I thought, with higher pews in it that in any church… and with some shining black portraits on the walls…”

The novelist spent some of his childhood on the outskirts of the town when his father got a job in nearby Chatham Dockyard. Dickensian is a literal adjective in Rochester. A plaque on the front wall of The Bull Hotel states “This ‘good house’ with ‘nice beds’ described by Mr Jingle in Pickwick Papers is also ‘The Blue Boar’ in ‘Great Expectations’.” It still retains a coaching inn appearance: a regular Georgian façade gives way to two return wings featuring a merry assortment of weatherboarding, half timbered jettied and gabled projections, box sash tripartite windows, Crittal windows and a rectangular oriel window. The seminal film of Great Expectations is David Lean’s 1946 version starring the Northern Irish born actress Valerie Hobson as Estella.A man on High Street hands our tracts, holding them like playing cards. One of them is titled “To Be A Pilgrim”. Its opening line is, “When we think of a pilgrim, we have in mind somebody who goes on a journey or pilgrimage to a holy site.” It then refers to the allegory of The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1678). The tract concludes, “To be a pilgrim you have to read the Bible, which is the history of mankind from the creation of the present heavens and earth to the creation of the new heavens and earth and what you need to do to enter into the latter, as written by the prophets and apostles inspired by the Holy Spirit.” Standing outside the War Memorial in front of the cathedral, the golden voiced Daniel McGuinness sings Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”.

The Six Poor Travellers House on High Street with its pointy gables was where a dozen poverty stricken pilgrims could lay their weary heads and enjoy an evening meal. Each traveller was sent on his way the following morning with 4d in their pocket. A plaque on the street front states: “Richard Watts Esq deceased Annon Domini 1579. Relief for travellers to be had after the death of Mary his wife which charity the help of Thomas Pagitt her second husband assured Anno Domini 1586. Died 21 December 1589.” Sir Richard Watts was a businessman and MP for Rochester in the late 1500s. He entertained Queen Elizabeth; when asked for Her Majesty’s opinion of his house in the shadow of the castle she elicited her grudging approval “satis” Latin for “enough”. The knight can’t have been too offended: he renamed his home Satis House. Rebuilt in the 18th century, it’s now King’s School. Charles Dickens immortalised the High Street hostelry in his story The Seven Poor Travellers, the writer being the seventh.

A plaque on the façade of a long low lying red brick building on St Margaret’s Street, above the cathedral just up from Boley Hill past the Catalpa tree (American Indian Bean Tree) reads: “This house for the reception education and employment of ye poor of this Parish was erected AD 1724. Toward which the Honourable Sir John Jennings and Sir Thomas Colby representatives in Parliament for this City voluntarily contributed £200. It was finish’d and is supported out of a perpetuall [sic] charity formerly given by Mr Richard Watts for that purpose. Mr Harnell and Church. Mr Mordaunt Warden.” Richard Watts Charities continue to operate to this day.

Rising above the almshouses is The Coopers Arms on the corner of Love Lane and hilly St Margaret’s Street. The drinking tradition on this site dates back to the St Andrew’s Priory monks of the 1100s, renowned brewers of ale and wine. The current inn opened in 1543. Whiskey and vodka aren’t the only spirits to be found inside: a ghoul rattles round, a monk who hasn’t quite crossed over yet. To echo the words of Philip Larkin’s, “ghostly silt”.

Restoration House on Crow Lane overlooks The Vines, a 19th century public park. A sign outside says, “Built in 1587. It is said that Charles II stayed here on the night of 28 May 1660 at his Restoration. The ‘Satis House’ of Great Expectations.” It’s the fabled home of the world’s most famous jilted bride. Charles Dickens writes, “Within a quarter of an hour we came to Miss Havisham’s house, which was of old brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were rustily barred. There was a courtyard in front, and that was barred, so, we had to wait, after ringing the bell, until someone should come to open it.”

“Another church,” writes Philip Larkin (1992 to 1985) in his poem Church Going. Up further from The Coopers Arms stands St Margaret’s Church commanding views across the River Medway. Like much of the town’s heritage it is a medley of ages and architects and aspirations. The tower dates from the 1400s; the nave and chancel were designed by Sydney Smirke in the 1820s; a decade later, architect Richard Hussey added the sanctuary with side vestries. “A serious house on serious earth,” as the poet observes. Gravestones have found a new use: steps up to the lawn.

All Saints Church crowns the hilltop of Frindsbury which overlooks Rochester from the northern bank of the River Medway. It stands in splendid isolation above quarried chalk cliffs that look like a manmade inland Dover coastline. There’s been a place of worship on this site for over a millennium. The current flint and ragstone and later rubble and limestone building dates back to the 14th century. Several of the graveyard tombs are Listed in their own right. The Miller Monument is an early 19th century sarcophagus design with a Greek key frieze. An adjacent cemetery includes Commonwealth War Graves such as that of Private H M Wills, “Royal Army Medical Corps, 5 November 1918.”

John Armson once more, “We live in a finite, limited space and time: we each live in a particular part of the world, and we life for three score years and 10 (perhaps more, perhaps less). We get glimpses beyond these limitations every now and again, but they are just that – only glimpses. They may be fragmentary, not very coherent, not very continuous. But they give us the sense that there is something beyond this life in space and time. This is the religious sense. It is distant and unclear, perhaps; but often, too, it is a bright and glowing impression.” He concludes, “Of course there is more travelling to do – a person’s whole life is a pilgrimage.”

I Corinthians 13:12, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face…”

Tags all saints church frindsbury, baron bigod, bowyers, bull hotel, candy bar, cathedral church christ blessed virgin mary, charles dickens, cheese room botanicals restaurant bar, cheese room deli cafe, chris small, coopers arms, david lean, dickens chalet, eastgate house, fieldstaff, gads hill, great expectations, gundulf bishop rochester, hobbs tee cakes balloons parties, john armson rochester pilgrim guide, john oliver dickens rochester, julie small, kent blue, kidderton ash, lavenders blue, minor canon row, miss havisham, mystery edwin drood, pastures new, philip larkin church going, pickwick papers, pilgrimage, pilgrims progress john bunyan, restoration house, reverend septimus crisparkle, richard hussey, river medway, rochester high street, rochester kent, satis house, singer daniel mcguinness, sir giles gilbert scott, sir richard watts, six poor travellers house, spitalfields trust, st margarets church, store 104 victorias books yarns coffee, sydney smirke, thomas pagitt, valerie hobson, vintage red leicester, william de corneil archbishop canterbury

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The Garden House + The Big House Beaverbrook Surrey

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date February 26, 2022
13 Comments on The Garden House + The Big House Beaverbrook Surrey

Journeying Mercies

We’re off to Beaverbrook. Come hail (a lot) or shine (a little) an A Class Mercedes spinning through Surrey on the stormiest day of the year is just what the doctor ordered although possibly not the meteorologist. The gated sprawling estate – legendary hectares of rollingness – is divided into The Haves (see you at The Garden House) and The Haves Even More (we’ll be calling up to see you at The Big House). Ever versatile, we’ll do both. Especially since our guests have travelled 12 hours to make if for lunch.

So what’s the hotel really like? Well, take the terrace of Castle Leslie (County Monaghan), the parterre of Luton Hoo (Bedfordshire), the grotto of Curraghmore (County Waterford), the glasshouse of Walmer Castle (Kent), The Carriage Rooms of Montalto (County Down), the glamour of Corniche John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Marseille) and throw in a larger than life Kensington Palace Gardens villa (London) and you’ll get the picture.

The Garden House staff, led by the stylish restaurant manager from Battersea, are so gregarious that by the dill and beetroot amuse bouches we’re swapping film tips (Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast is very watchable but what is Dame Judy’s mangled accent all about?). It’s easy to get into the tongue and groove of rural life. There are more pictures of prize cows on the Farrow and Ball’d walls than a mar’t auction catalogue. Outside the storm is brewing again but we’re in the old fashioned sitting room propped up by Christian Lundsteen cushions and Old Fashioned cocktails. All hatches are battened down… except for The Drinking Hole.

Can life get any better? Yes it can: lunch is being served in the dining room next door. Before long we’re devouring farmers’ helpings of crispy polenta squid with smoked garlic, basil and lime, followed by Dorset halloumi and heritage beetroot with radicchio, date and parsley. Everything, and we mean everything, is freshly wild and wildly fresh. Our well informed waiter tells us about the hotel’s Sir Winston Churchill connection and the Spitfire emblem and the eponymous Lord Beaverbrook but ever so distractingly the restaurant manager arrives with salted chocolate and blood orange petit fours masquerading as “posh Jaffa cakes”.

Forbes, the only other publication to join us a few years ago in Montenegro at the behest of the Government of the former Yugoslavian state, has beaten us to today’s destination. Its verdict? “Beaverbrook is arguably England’s most beautiful new hotel.” Last week’s Sunday Times is almost as glowing, “One of the UK’s top country house hotels.” Scrawled on a blackboard in the glasshouse is a flower recipe, “Wax flower, statis, limonium, gypsophila, spag. moss.” It’s a metaphor for Beaverbrook: classy, quirky and drawing on the best that nature has to offer.

Tags beaverbrook surrey, carriage rooms montalto county down, castle leslie county monaghan, christian lundsteen, corniche john fitzgerald kennedy marseille, curraghmore county waterford, dame judy dench, farrow & ball, forbes, garden house, kenneth branagh belfast, kensington palace gardens, lavenders blue, luton hoo bedfordshire, montenegro, spitfire, stuart blakley, walmer castle kent

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Kimpton Clocktower Hotel Manchester + Alfred Waterhouse

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date February 16, 2022
19 Comments on Kimpton Clocktower Hotel Manchester + Alfred Waterhouse

It is Good to be Here

Superlux brand Kimpton has four hotels on mainland Britain. North of the border, the two hotels are neoclassical: Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, and Blythswood Square, Glasgow. The two south of the border are High Victorian: Russell Square, London, and Oxford Street, Manchester. The late afternoon winter sunlight streaming down makes the terracotta all clear: Kimpton Clockhouse Hotel in Manchester is a panoply of barley twist columns and stylised ionic capitals and naturalistic floral patterns sculpted out of the red stuff, all towering up from the sweet flow of the River Medlock. The brick walls are aglow, on fire, red on red. The trio of buildings which form the hotel are the last bloom of High Victoriana; in fact they’re an overflow of this most dramatic of styles, for the iconic 66 metre tall clocktower was only completed in 1912.

The Refuge Assurance Building was built in 1895 to the design of master of the age Alfred Waterhouse. Architect Paul Waterhouse extended his father’s design and Stanley Birkett completed the vast urban block. Across the city near the Town Hall designed by Alfred Waterhouse is Friends’ Meeting House. It wins the award for most blind windows: just two of the window positions out of 10 on the west facing Southmill Street elevation are glazed. Jean and John Bradburn write in their 2018 Central Manchester History Tour, “This fine building was designed in 1828 by Richard Lane, a Quaker architect – one of his pupils was Alfred Waterhouse. The cost of the building – £7,600 – was raised by subscription from local Quakers, one of whom was John Dalton, the famous chemist and discoverer of atomic theory who worshipped here for years.”

Another famous, or rather infamous, building in Manchester city centre designed by Alfred Waterhouse is HMP Manchester, otherwise known as Strangeways Gaol. It predates the Refuge Assurance Building by three decades. The public facing gatehouse is a red brick building with sandstone dressings. It’s French Gothic in style, as if Château du Nessay had landed on Southall Street. Cassie Britland notes in Manchester Something Rich and Strange, edited by Paul Dobraszczy and Sarah Butler, 2020, “the prison owes its distinctive radial design to the panopticon architectural concept and the ‘separate’ system of prison management”.

Delivering a lecture on The Oratory Competition 1878: Who Were The Architects? at The London Oratory, Dr Roderick O’Donnell states, “Alfred Waterhouse was appointed assessor of the competition to design a new church for The Oratory. He was an interesting choice: a Congregationalist from Manchester. His architectural career started in Manchester with the design of Strangeways Prison. Waterhouse was incredibly ambitious and a fantastic professional; he came in on price. Waterhouse designed the second Victorian Eaton Hall in Cheshire.”

In their 1998 Manchester Architecture Guide, Eamonn Canniffe and Tom Jefferies lead with, “The cutting of Whitworth Street in the 1890s results in a series of large self confident buildings along it. a monument to insurance, the mammoth Refuge Building exploits the full possibilities of architectural ceramics. Its interior employs white glazed brick for the former office space, but the exterior exploits the potential of terracotta for insistent repetitive ornament over large surfaces. Articulated frames to the high windows culminate in barley sugar columns, while the great brick tower is a landmark in many directions. The porte cochère beneath it, with its glazed dome and memorial to the company’s War Dead, is now the reception for the Palace Hotel which currently occupies this dramatic and robust building.”

A cluster of contemporary talent has worked on moulding the Palace Hotel into the Kimpton Clocktower Hotel. 3DReid Architects explain, “Our work on the hotel, the former Palace Hotel, sought to strip back poor interventions made in the 1990s and reposition is as a ‘lifestyle hotel’ worthy of the building’s history and character. In the former Refuge Assurance Hall we created a new Winter Garden as the focus of the space, surrounded by a new bar, restaurant and den. This enabled the space to be used as an ‘all day offer’. One of the key moves was improving circulation routes around the buildings that make up the hotel.” Michaelis Boyd were the interior designers and the 360 guest rooms and 11 suites are brightened by Timorous Beasties textiles.

The grander than grand ground floor spaces of the Kimpton Clocktower Hotel are all abuzz: the late afternoon winter sunlight streaming down makes the encaustic tiling all clear – and reflects off the hair curlers in female guests’ emerging hairdos. A bronze horse sculpture by Sophie Dickens, granddaughter of the writer, welcomes visitors in the marble floored stone walled glass domed entrance lobby. Up a few stairs, along a corridor – there are lots of stairs and corridorsc – and the bar and dining room have been branded The Refuge. This 930 square metre space spills into the Winter Garden which was formed by glazing over a courtyard. It is good, oh so good, to be here. Later, the bright and cloudless morning will break, eternal bright and fair.

Art Design Luxury People Restaurants

63 Degrees Restaurant Manchester + Lavender’s Blue

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date February 4, 2022
14 Comments on 63 Degrees Restaurant Manchester + Lavender’s Blue

Spinning Plates

After tiny plates, small plates, medium sized plates, large plates, supersized plates in London, how refreshing it is to head up north to order a three course set menu. Starter: Velouté de châtaignes (chestnut soup); main: Filet de dorade poêlé (pan fried sea bream fillet); pudding: Crème brûlée, correctly served with a torched top. Photogenic, subtly rich, and very French. In case diners forget this is a Parisian restaurant, the walls are hung with pictures and maps of the French capital. Chef owner Eric Moreau’s business card is emblazoned with a picture of Sacré-Coeur.

It’s the perfect temperature for serving coffee and Monsieur Moreau assures us 63 degrees Celsius is the optimal temperature for cooking. “Cooked long and low at 63 degrees, food tastes like you’ve never tasted it before. So 63 degrees represents for us the love and care that goes into all our cooking.” But before all that heat we need a chilled bottle of Sancerre. “’Au jour d’hui comme autrofois’ Domaine Daniel Brochard is a 2018 to 2019 vintage. It’s produced as Daniel Brochard’s ancestors would have done without any fining, filtration or temperature control to give an incredible intensity of flavour. The aroma is packed with intense gooseberry and nettle perfume.”

“Taxi sirs?” asks the maître d’ as we finish lunch. “Strangeways Prison please.”

Tags 63 degrees french restaurant manchester, alfred waterhouse, daniel brochard, eric moreau, lavenders blue, sacre coeur paris, strangeways prison, stuart blakley

Architecture Art Design Restaurants

Northern Quarter + Mackie Mayor Manchester

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date February 4, 2022
14 Comments on Northern Quarter + Mackie Mayor Manchester

Meet Your Meat

Manchester is gritty not pretty and all the better for it. The monumentality of its Victorian built heritage is so overwhelming it swallows up the odd ugly 20th century infill. The city’s simplistic branding works well, from Chinatown (red balloons in the sky) to the Northern Quarter (grey bollards on the ground). First year 1990s town planning degree buzzwords are at play: legibility and permeability. Another thing the city does well is subtle restoration – respecting the patina of age.

The best example of this less is more approach to conservation is Mackie Mayor in the Northern Quarter. Built in 1858, this neoclassical stone meat market hall was once at the heart of Smithfield Market. It’s now the last surviving fully intact building from that era. After decades lying empty, Muse Developments have restored it as the centrepiece of their Smithfield regeneration project. It is named after Ivie Mackie, Mayor of Manchester, who opened the market in 1858.

The cavernous indoor space with its roof lanterns has been retained with bars and food outlets along the outer walls encircling the central dining spaces. On a cold Saturday afternoon the place is teeming. Towards evening, local girls pour in unselfconsciously wearing large hair curlers in their hair. The manicured Mancunians take their nightlife seriously. Some guys are in football tops while others have opted for the boho look. In a way nothing has changed since Mayor Mackie opened Mackie Mayor all those centuries ago. It’s still a meat market.

Tags chinatown, lavenders blue, mackie mayor manchester, muse developments, northern quarter, smithfield, stuart blakley

Architects Architecture Art Design Developers People Restaurants Town Houses

Piers Gough + CZWG + Bermondsey Architecture London

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 31, 2022
15 Comments on Piers Gough + CZWG + Bermondsey Architecture London

Completing the Circle

“Why are Eger, Camp, Alsop, Gough and Cullinan the rare exceptions that prove the rule about our national dread of colour?” complains Jonathan Meades in his essay Buildings in Pedro and Ricky Come Again (2021). Moving from colour to humour, “Apart from Piers Gough and Ricardo Bofill, these postmoderns were seldom particularly funny. Gough’s work… persists in delighting this observer with its audacious levity and sheer sprightliness. It’s tectonic proof that there’s only one school that matters, the school of talent.”

The erudite critic continues, “The importance of his and his contemporaries raiding the larder of past styles is that it amended the consensus between architecture and the public. It created a public appetite for the new. We moved from nimbyism to what might be called pimbyism: please in my back yard. Postmodernism is habitually assumed to be dead, consigned to the status of period piece along with big shoulders and big hair. I prefer to believe that postmodernism, having ransacked classicism, the Gothic, the baroque and just about every other idiom one can think of, elected to revive early modernism.”

Jonathan Meades sums up Piers’ oeuvre: “Gough described his work as ‘B movie architect’, which gets it precisely when one recalls that the second feature was frequently superior to the main attraction. He designed England’s most famous public lavatory, in Westbourne Grove, as a shrine to Joe Orton. His early masterpiece was in the then hardly ‘regenerated’ warehouse area of Bermondsey: The Circle comprises rounded apartment blocks strikingly and overwhelmingly tiled in International Klein Blue. In its centre stands a life size sculpture of a horse by Shirley Pace, which recalls the creature that wanders dreamily through La Strada. There is no school of Gough. His work is quirky to the point that it resists imitation.”

The grey tweed kilted Arts and Crafts Revivalist architect Roderick Gradidge, scribing in Country Life in 1986, had mixed views on postmodernism. He sniffed, “The postmodern style was developed in America – oddly enough by architects who had been looking at the work of Sir Edwin Lutyens. This was not the Lutyens of the Surrey ‘dream houses’, but the cynical Lutyens of the later years, when he was willing to face a façade in an inappropriate pattern if it amused him, like the flats in Page Street, Westminster, which he covered in a chequerboard pattern… This bored whimsy appealed strongly to men like Michael Graves when they were attempting to find an alternative to the Modern Movement and trying to create a new style by moulding modern with traditional.”

Roderick Gradidge had a disdain for what he quaintly called “speculative housing” and in the same article tars Piers’ Eaton Terrace in Mile End with the “bored whimsy” brush while acknowledging “his work is extremely popular with the public”. Sutton Square fares slightly better, “… younger architects are leading speculative builders towards a much more restrained, and indeed a more genuine Georgian style. One of the earliest of these schemes was CZWG’s Sutton Square in Hackney, where an entire square was designed for a speculator in a straightforward London Classical style similar to that of many squares built in the 1830s. Even here, the architects seem to be worried about following precedents too closely, and they use a number of self conscious illiteracies: stucco shapes to suggest removed balconies (a pleasant conceit) or a single, narrow Classical column perilously supporting an overlong and inaccurately profiled cornice.”

In reality Eaton Terrace is all about the G in CZWG reinventing the Victorian and Georgian terrace for modern times and having fun in the process. The townhouses share amenity space to the front (very 21st century) and 14 metre long private walled gardens to the rear (very 18th century). The kitchen has been raised to ground floor while a basement (concealed from the street frontage) has been reallocated as a man cave or family room or something equally suitable for accessing the garden. The rear ground floor drawing room, great for parties, is elevated to piano nobile level. Both upper floors contain two bedrooms and a bathroom.

A taller four storey apartment block faces Mile End Tube Station. A vast glazed and cladded swoop, as if a Pterosaur has flown through the yellowy London stock brick block, dramatically breaks the façade. A pediment pops up above the swoop and a squarish freestanding columned pagoda parading as a portico marks the entrance. The three storey over hidden basement terrace extends like a return wing to the rear of this street facing block. Piers takes neoclassical features and makes them his own, playing with scale and detail, from big ball finials to oversized lintels. Blind windows, a common conceit of yesteryear, maintain the second floor fenestration rhythm. A semicircular columned pagoda dash portico marks the middle, roughly, of the terrace. Roderick Gradidge was right on half a point: there’s plenty of whimsy but it’s never bored or, almost 40 years on, boring.

Piers Gough owns the silhouette. A decade after Philip Johnson’s swan neck pediment broke the New York skyscraper at 550 Madison Avenue, Piers employs a broken corniced pediment to define the roofline of the five storey apartment block at the entrance to Sutton Square. The development displays as many shapes of arch head as the gravestones stacked up against the stone walls in the adjacent St John of Hackney churchyard garden. Sutton Square followed Piers’ acclaimed design for the Sir Edwin Lutyens retrospective at the Hayward Gallery sponsored by the Arts Council which brought him to the public’s attention in 1981.

“We are very catholic in our designs,” says Piers Gough CBE today. “None of our buildings are the same; we are always reinventing the wheel. We don’t bring formulae but respond to both clients and the zeitgeist at the same time. We are a well grounded firm while our work appears rather exuberant and even fun!” The Glass Building in Camden is one of his all time favourites. “I am so proud of that building. Friends of mine bought an apartment in it recently. The first Wagamama in London opened on the ground floor of The Glass Building!” This branch of the Japanese restaurant is still going strong.

Piers told Ulster Architect in 1999, “The design of The Glass Building is based on qualities often found in loft conversion schemes. Qualities of light, space and materials. But here, because the building is new, with added advantages in quality, practicability and amenity. The visual effect is of a series of curved bays… these bay widths coincide with the curves of the apartments. Thus the rhythm of the façade is a direct consequence of its internal arrangement. A building that tries to be beautiful by being true to itself and its site.”

“The top two Listed Buildings of the postmodern period are by CZWG,” Piers Gough confirms. In fact, six buildings by the practice make it into the 24 postmodern buildings Listed by Historic England: Aztec West Business Park outside Bristol; Cascades apartment block on the Isle of Dogs, London; the CDT Building at Bryanston School, Blandford, Dorset; China Wharf apartments in Shad Thames, London; The Circle apartments in Bermondsey, London; and Janet Street-Porter House, 44 Britton Street, Clerkenwell, London. Bermondsey has some of the best late 20th century architecture in London from warehouse conversions to warehouse style schemes by a range of architects complementing but never competing with The Circle. The awards keep coming. CZWG’s part-restoration part-newbuild mixed use development in Angel, Islington Square, won a New London Award in 2021.

Tags aztec west business park, cdt building bryanston school, china wharf, circle southwark, czwg, glass building, islington square, janet street porter house, joe orton, jonathan meades pedro ricky come again, lavenders blue, new london award, piers gough, ricardo bofill, shirley pace, stuart blakley, wagamama

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Musée Nissim de Camondo Paris + Winter

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 18, 2022
22 Comments on Musée Nissim de Camondo Paris + Winter

L’Assez Grand Trianon
It’s time to get MAD (Musée des Arts Décoratifs) and go Camondo. The 4th Edition of the Michelin Guide to Paris (1960) states, “The building and its contents were left to the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs by the Comte de Camondo in 1936, in memory of his son Nissim, killed during the 1st World War. The visit will fascinate amateurs of 18th century furniture and works of art. The museum is arranged as an elegant 18th century home, and is furnished with remarkably sure taste and objects of great beauty.” An explosive profusion of riches.

It’s international art dealer and collector Charles Plante’s favourite house museum. Amsterdam boasts Museum van Loon. Barcelona has Casa Amattler. Lisbon, Medeiros e Almeida House. London, the Wallace Collection. Musée Nissim de Camondo was designed by architect Réne Sergent taking inspiration from Le Petit Trianon in Versailles; it backs onto Parc Monceau in the 8th Arrondisement. In Letters to Comondo, 2021, artist Edmund de Waal describes Parc Monceau as being “… in the English manner with a little lake and bridge and smart flowerbeds full of annual flowers that need to be tended and renewed and weeded so that there are always gardeners head down and meandering paths…”

This three story house built in 1911 to 1914 by divorced financier Moïse de Camondo is separated from the street by a typical Parisian courtyard. The stern steel coloured paint of the casement window frames contrasts with the welcoming honeyed hue of the stone façade. A relatively flat front – a three bay central set back flanked by single bay chamfered links leading to single bay projections – conceals an intricate layout: a butterfly plan spreads out to the rear towards Parc Monceau. This arrangement creates a jigsaw to be filled with geometrically varied rooms within the confines of the external walls.

All three floors are on show from the functional (bathrooms with porcelain sanitaryware by Kula) to the decorative (the Porcelain Room with more Sèvres than a Rosalind Savill book launch) and a collection of salons in between all linked by a fantastical marble staircase hall. The Buste de Négress by sculptor Pierre-Philippe Thomire in the dining room is just one of a myriad pieces of period art. Being here. Doing it. Incessant winter rain emboldens the colour of the stonework, softens the light, intensifies the ambience, creating ghosts in the shadows.

Such beauty from such tragedy. In 1944, Nissim’s only sibling, Béatrice, the last surviving Camondo, and her family were killed by the Nazis for being Jews in 1944. The Camondo family tree was ripped asunder, a dynasty destroyed. The house museum resonates with happier times though. A menu card for déjeuner on the dining room table is dated 2 June 1933: “Melon glacé; Filets de soles Murat; Pouleta pochés à l’estragon; Ris créole; Pièce de boeuf à la gelée; Salade de romaine; Petits pois à la Française; Paillettes au parmesan; Fromage; Granit à la cerise.” Lunch, 11 years earlier…

Tags beatrice de camondo, charles plante, comte de camondo, dame rosalind savill, kula, lavenders blue, mad musee des arts decoratifs, michelin guide, moise de camondo, musee nissim de camondo, nissim de camondo, parc monceau paris, petit trianon, pierre philippe thomire, sevres, stuart blakley, versailles

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Le Louis Vins Bar + Restaurant + Rare Champagne Paris

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 14, 2022
38 Comments on Le Louis Vins Bar + Restaurant + Rare Champagne Paris

The Beautiful Changes

It was the best of times, then it got a little bit better. We’re on the uprise. “You will die!” expresses our recommendation earlier that day. We do. Le Louis Vins. Heaven is a place on earth in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Le paradis, c’est les autres. “I booked a table for you at Louis Vins. An exquisite restaurant in the 5th close to Notre Dame. Let me know when you get there. Bisous.” Co owner Bertrand greets us, “It’s all about the wine!” Well yes it is, especially when you’re serving Rare Champagne, but later it turns out it’s all about the wine and food. And people. And décor. And ambience. And style. This is, after all, le Paris, a beautiful city full of brilliant people. Bienvenue. La cave has gone all ground floor. We’re raring to go. On it like a Renoir bonnet. Nancy Mitford wrote in her 1954 biography, “Madame de Pompadour excelled at an art which the majority of human beings thoroughly despise because it is unprofitable and ephemeral: the art of living.” We’re all on for a bit of Pompadour circumstance.

A chouqette’s throw from the Seine Embankment, the Latin Quarter earns a mention in the 4th Edition of the Michelin Guide to Paris, 1960, that tale of one city, “The legends and memories of the old district of the medieval schools, the highly interesting church of St Séverin and the small religious building of St Julien-le-Pauvre, the wonderful view of Notre Dame from the Square Viviani, the Museum of Cluny and the magnificent building in which it is housed, lend a special charm to this tour.” Louis Vins’ canopied façade lines the historic Rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. By happy happenstance, Shakespeare and Company bookshop is close by.

“We sell happiness!” smiles Bertrand Guillou-Valentin, “till 2am.” The menu is divided into Entrées, À Partager Pour l’Apéritif, Plats and Desserts. There are plenty of carnivorous thrills but as always we go pescatarian. “Pour nos amis végétariens la cheffe se fera un plaisir de proposer une alternative, il suffit de demander.” Tonight, Rare Champagne and more vintage than Rétromobile accompanies them all. Les jeunes endives en salade, Roquefort, noix et pommes Granny Smith (chicory salad, Roquefort, walnuts and Granny Smith little New Yorks). Les poireaux vinaigrette en mimosa, oeufs de harengs fumés (leeks in mimosa vinaigrette, smoked herring roe). Les noix de Saint Jacques justes saisies, dans un bouillon detox au curcuma et aux petits légumes (seared Saint Jacques scallops in a broth, turmeric and miniature vegetables). Les poires carmélisées, brownie aux noix de pecan et crème fouettée (carmelised pears, pecan nut brownie, whipped cream). It’s all incredibly bistronomique.

We’re whisked off on a whistlestop tour of the wooden panelled restaurant and the stainless steel fitted kitchen. A sign is scrawled across a door, “Skinny people are easier kidnapped. Stay safe, eat croûte au Louis Vins.” Co owner Chef Mélanie Serre compliments and complements Bertrand’s vinological verve. Son of a restaurateur and grandson of an oyster farmer from the Oléron Island on the French Atlantic coast, Bertrand was born and bred and bound to open somewhere like Louis Vins. It’s impossible to leave without downing a Pornstar Martini: “Vodka Mamont infuse à la vanille, fruit de la passion, sucre vanille, shot de Champagne.” The creator of the cocktail Douglas Ankrah is a friend of Bertrand and Mélanie. At this rate of consumption, we’re gonna end up seriously unkidnappable. The bar and restaurant live up to their catchphrase: “Au Louis Vins le service est toujours impeccable.” C’est la vie. La vie en Rare Rosé. Life à la mode.

Tags bertrand guillou valentin, charles dickens tale two cities, chef melanie serre, cluny museum, douglas ankrah pornstar martini, jean paul sartre, latin quarter, lavenders blue, louis vins bar restaurant paris, montagne sainte genevieve, notre dame, rare champagne, square viviani, stuart blakley

Art Design Fashion Luxury People

The Pink Coat + Mary Martin London

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 12, 2022
34 Comments on The Pink Coat + Mary Martin London

A Blush of Winter

“Your writing brings my events alive – it’s like being there. You do with your writing what I do with my fashion. You bring things alive! Everyone keeps asking who is this talented writer who writes so movingly and wittily about your shows Mary. I just loved your piece ‘The City Doesn’t Sleep Tonight’. Everyone does! Everyone in Ghana was asking who is doing all this wonderful writing? And I say, it’s you! Lavender’s Blue!” Mary Martin 2022.

“We came from somewhere and we are tending somewhere, and the spectacle is glorious and portentous.” Marilynne Robinson, 2012. Call it history, call it couture. The new Queen Charlotte is breathing life into costumery. The new Queen Elizabeth is promenade royally ready. “No Irish people – Irish or Anglo Irish – live a day unconsciously… for generations [they] have been lived at high pitch.” Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen’s Court and Seven Winters, 1942. A few London Welsh do too.

“The Pink Coat is really heavy; it’s like an old fashioned military coat. It’s the opposite of throwaway fashion; this coat is designed to last and last. My clothes are all so sustainable. There’s faux fur running down the back of it to keep you warm when you sit down! Janice Blakley, with her red hair, looks great in it.” Mary Martin 2022.

Tags elizabeth bowen bowens court seven winters, janice blakley, lavenders blue, mary martin london, stuart blakley

Architecture Art Design Fashion Hotels Luxury People Restaurants

Luton Hoo Bedfordshire + Katie Ice

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 11, 2022
26 Comments on Luton Hoo Bedfordshire + Katie Ice

The Franco Files

Hoo’s Who. Seriously. It’s that good. The revivification of Countess Markievicz. Luton is the new Paris. Katie Ice swapped a (not so plain) runway for the (plane) runway. The revolution has begun. Game on. As for that legendary niche leap…. the model as ballerina! The hotel’s all it’s cracked up to be and more. Postcard home material. Luton Hoo is to Luton what Versailles is to Paris. Luton Hoo. The country house that looks like a French hotel and is now a Frenchified hotel. Just when things couldn’t get more glamorous, they do. Katie pulls up in a chauffeur escorted Bentley. She looks, as ever, as if she has just stepped off a Parisian photoshoot. Turns out she has. Lady in red and fuchsia pink. Louis Roederer Brut Premier filled volutes in hand, with a lust for living and a gusto of giving it our all, we breeze through the French doors and begin dancing like dervishes across the lawn, spinning in wonder at the infinite beauty of the place and life itself. Is it a lawn? No, it’s a dancefloor this evening. Is that a path? No, a catwalk. A niche? Podium. Pleasure Gardens? Pleasure Gardens. Luton Hoo is a playground for the beautiful and restless.

The estate is some 400 hectares (the same size as Castle Leslie in County Monaghan) with boundary belts of woodland cushioning the impact of the M1 and Luton Airport a couple of kilometres away. It’s amazingly tranquil with lots of wildlife – muntjac deer graze in the grasslands in full view of our bedroom balcony. The River Lea runs along the whole length of the estate and widens in two places to form lakes. We make a variety of photogenic horticultural discoveries from the elevated formal terrace to the sunken rock garden. The 1760s Robert Adam designed stable yard lies south of the house set back from the avenue amongst woodland. A monsoon erupts as we ensconce ourselves in Adam’s Brasserie in the converted stable block. Knickerbockers-returned-to-their-former glory. The walls are hung with stills of actors from the many films set at Luton Hoo: Stephen Fry in Wilde; Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral; Julianne Moore in Surviving Picasso; Sophie Morceau in The World is Not Enough; Jonathan Rees Myers in Vanity Fair.

In 1767 John Stuart the 3rd Earl of Bute, who’d been Prime Minister for barely a year, employed architect Robert Adam to design a country house for his newly acquired estate. Robert Adam (1728 to 1792) was the Robert Adam (1948 to still going strong) of his day. The following century, it was Smirked (Sir Robert Smirke gave it a Greek revival makeover) under the direction of the 3rd Earl’s grandson, burnt, and then re-Smirked (new owner businessman John Leigh rebuilt it much the same as before). At this time, the Ionic portico dominated entrance front resembled that of Mount Stewart in County Down. South African diamond magnate Sir Julius Wernher and his wife Lady Birdie bought Luton Hoo at the turn of last century. The pair really went to ville, appointing The Ritz Paris refurb architects Charles Mewès and Arthur Davis (who’d met at the École des Beaux Arts) to transform the house into a Louis the Hooey château with more oeils de boeuf than a cattle mart. It became a country Haussmann.

Elite Hotels acquired Luton Hoo in 1999 and following a restoration and rejuvenation of the house and estate, opened it nine years later to paying guests. The greatest change to the main house was raising the roof from single pitches to mansards – how terribly French! This allowed the insertion of dormer windowed guest rooms on the second floor. In addition to the 38 bedroom suites in the main house, architect Andrew Clague designed a standalone neo Georgian block hidden in the woodlands to provide another 38 suites. Further guest accommodation was created in the converted stables. The Aurora Group bought the hotel and estate in 2021.

Robert Adam architecture; Capability Brown parkland; Fabergé eggs; Gobelin tapestries; Grinling Gibbons woodwork; John Sargent portraits… all the class signifiers are ticked and present. If it was good enough for Queen Mary… There’s even a sapphic staircase. The bulk of the Wernher Collection, more than 650 works of art, is how housed at Ranger’s House in Blackheath. Over Buffalo mozzarella with avocado, Giant Israeli cous cous and mint, and Chocolate orange tart with fresh macerated strawberries served in the drawing room, Katie exclaims, “I love Paris!” In England she models for Mary Martin London. “Mary is like Vivienne Westwood. She is creating fashion for everyone. Mary and Vivienne are both wildly talented – and eccentric! I love hats like my mum. I love when people wear heels, when they dress up. I’m originally from Kielce – it’s such a huge leafy city. I miss Poland but I love England. I’m very sentimental.” It’s all a bit like The Hotel, Elizabeth Bowen’s novel published in 1972, “Gratifying how one’s intimate world contracted itself, how one’s friends always wove themselves in! Society was fascinating, so like a jigsaw puzzle!”

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