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The Inner Temple Garden + The Middle Temple Garden + The Garden Room Restaurant Temple London

Paper Buildings Real Flowers

Sophie Tatzkow, Deputy Head Gardener of The Inner Temple Garden shares the evolution of the high border: “Over recent years, it has been undergoing a transformation moving away from the resource intensive management that heavily relied on annual bulbs in spring and various seasonal display changes throughout the year. The adaptation of the border is based upon detailed observation and evaluation of environmental conditions to blend beauty with sustainable cultivation.”

The Garden is only open to the public for a few hours each weekday. She elaborates, “One of the keys to this evolution is layered biodiverse planting where reliable trees and shrubs form the backbone, underplanted with resilient perennials, grasses and self seeding plants. This structure reduces the need for replanting which lessens soil disturbance. Undisturbed soils consist of a network of billions of beneficial organisms such as bacteria, fungi and earthworms which together create a wonderful environment for plant health and wildlife.”

“The High Border is now a living breathing ecosystem that thrives on resourcefulness,” Sophie relates. “The long season pollinator friendly planting with repeating patterns creates an ever changing yet harmonious space where nature and cultivation coexist. The greatest satisfaction I take away is the cultivation of a border by blending beauty with ecological responsibility. As custodians of this Garden it is important to champion a conscious approach of reducing waste, conserving resources and creating beautiful biodiverse and wildlife friendly ecosystems.”

For Sophie’s Victorian counterpart, the smog of London proved challenging and so Samuel Brome favoured hardy plants. In his 1861 bestseller Culture of the Chrysanthemum as Practised in The Temple Gardens, he recommends balsam, calceolaria, scarlet geraniums, snowdrops and tulips. He explains that shrubs do not fare well in pollution while some varieties of dwarf roses, being close to the ground, are less affected by smoke. The Plane Tree is one of his recommendations as it sheds bark each spring and “by doing, it gets rid of the soot, which sticks to other trees like varnish, and which there is no getting off”. Plane Tree allergy sufferers of the 21st century would come to regret his arboricultural allegiance.

The Middle Temple Garden is the smaller of the two green spaces. Tudor Hall dominates its northern side. The Garden Room restaurant spills onto a terrace on its eastern side. This area was once part of the River Thames. In the 1530s the land south of the Temple was drained and reclaimed to create more space for the expanding Societies. The earliest record of landscaping of The Middle Temple Garden is a 1615 “Gardener’s bill for the new knott”. At this time the level of the ground was raised and a vogueish geometric knot garden created filled with scented plants like rosemary and sweet briar.

The Temples Conservation Area includes one Scheduled Monument, eight Grade I Listings, 12 Grade II Listings and five Grade II* Listings in Inner Temple; seven Grade I Listings, four Grade II* Listings and nine Grade II Listings in Middle Temple; and two Grade II Listings on Victoria Embankment. Unsurprisingly this forms one of the greatest concentrations of historic protected buildings and structures in London.

In Roman times, the western route out of the City approximately followed what is now Fleet Street and the Strand on the higher ground north of the marshy margin of the Thames. The slope from Fleet Street to the Strand and downwards to the Thames remains a prominent feature. The religious Order of the Knights Templar was established in Holborn in the 1160s before relocating to the Temples. In 1185, Temple Church was consecrated. The Templars were suppressed by Parliament in the early 14th century and Parliament voted to handover the property to the Order of St John. At that time, parts of the Estate were already leased to law students.

After Henry VIII’s Dissolution the property went to the Crown which granted freehold to the Benchers of the Temple in 1608. The Inns of Court would become fashionable places of education during the Reformation. The other two Inns of Court are Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn, both in Holborn. They are the four professional associations for barristers in London. These historic collegiate institutions provide education, training and social networking for emerging and established barristers. Membership is mandatory for anyone wishing to practise as a barrister. There is no visible physical distinction between Inner and Middle Temple Inns except many buildings in the former display the symbol of Pegasus and in the latter, Agnus Dei.

A few buildings survived the Great Fire of 1666. Tudor and Tudoresque architecture intermingles with Georgian. The construction of the Embankment in the 19th century extended The Inner Temple and Middle Temple Gardens. Buildings damaged in the World Wars were sympathetically rebuilt in the mid 20th century. The Gardens, only open during restricted hours or when let for functions, are very much part of hidden London.

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Architects Architecture Art Design Developers People

New Town + Calton Hill Edinburgh

Ministerial Positions

Alexander John Youngson opens his seminal work The Making of Classical Edinburgh 1750 to 1840 with: “Europe is full of beautiful cities. Edinburgh is one of the most beautiful of all.” That was 59 years ago and still rings true, devoid of overstatement. “The New Town even now retains its late 18th and early 19th century public buildings, terraces, crescents, squares, palace fronts, churches and gardens almost as they were planned. They were all designed over 150 years ago, and the tour ensemble is without parallel in scale, uniformity of general style, and status of preservation.” Unlike Georgian Dublin which is so much given over to office use, most of the 12,000 properties in Georgian Edinburgh are still residential. The Robert Adam designed 6 Charlotte Street is the official residence of the Scottish First Minister, an address rather more impressive in architecture and setting than the British Prime Minister’s official residence in London of 10 Downing Street. Corner ground floor units are more likely to be commercial use such as Cairngorm Coffee Shop on the corner of Melville Street and Randolph Place or The Magnum Wine Bar at the junction of Albany Street and Dublin Street.

While the medieval Old Town of Edinburgh is surprisingly tall – many buildings are eight or more storeys – the New Town is mostly three or four visible storeys. There are lots of later dormer additions. Horizontality of neoclassical architecture versus high gradients of topography. Glimpses can be captured of the Firth of Forth at intervals – nature is never far away in Scotland. Even the built form often resembles rocky outcrops. Retained details hint at the social hierarchy and habits of times past. Rough stone for the servants’ basement; smooth stone for the masters’ piano nobile and accommodation above. Trumpet shaped openings in the cast iron railings would have once been used by ‘link boys’ to snuff out the flamed torches they carried to illuminate residents’ journeys home after dark. Very high double kerbs permitted easy access to carriages from raised pavements.

New Town is all the more remarkable as it was designed by a 27 year old. James Craig, the only surviving offspring of a family of six children, won the Edinburgh Town Council competition in 1766 to design the New Town. It would be a 15 year long project. “The principle reason for Craig’s success is the excellent use of the site,” Alexander reckons. “The two outer streets – Princes Street and Queen Street – have houses on one side only, and these look outwards across the street, in the one case over the low ground towards the Castle and High Street, in the other down the slope towards the Firth of Forth and the distant hills of Fife. The feeling of spaciousness combined with order is no doubt enhanced by the good proportions of the streets and buildings.”

Archibald Elliot’s Waterloo Place of 1819 provides a Greek Revival link between the earlier New Town and later Calton Hill. Regent Terrace is one of several rows of grand houses around the rise of Calton Hill, the city’s answer to the Parthenon in Athens. William Stark’s layout made use of natural contours and tree planting. It’s the ultimate architectural set piece – pure theatre in grey stone to celebrate Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar. Old Royal High School is almost Brutalist in its powerful massing. Thomas Hamilton’s 1820s Greek Revival tour de forcefulness is currently vacant. The façade looking down over the city (in theory only: it is almost windowless on this elevation) is Palladian in form with a Doric temple main block flanked by columned colonnades terminated by wings. Plans are afoot by the Royal High School Preservation Trust for Richard Murphy Architects to convert the building into a concert venue and Tom Stuart-Smith to create a new garden. The Political Martyrs Monument rises 27 metres high above Old Calton Burial Ground. Designed by Thomas Hamilton and erected in 1844, this obelisk is dedicated to five freedom fighters: Joseph Gerrald, Maurice Margarot, Thomas Muir, Thomas Palmer and William Skirving.

The Nelson Monument completed in 1816 to the design of Robert Burn is another tall slender structure: it is in the shape of a telescope pointing skyward. Alexander considers it to be “a somewhat Gothic design of dubious architectural merit”. The 1831 Burns Monument stands opposite the Royal High School, teetering on the hillside edge. Thomas Hamilton also designed this circular Corinthian temple standing on a high polygonal plinth. It was built in honour of Scotland’s national bard Robert Burns who had died 35 years previously. Another circular Corinthian temple is uphill from the Burns Monument. Designed by William Playfair, the 1831 Dugald Stewart Monument is dedicated to the Scottish philosopher. The City Observatory predates the other buildings and monuments of Calton Hill. This 1776 mock castle was designed by James Craig proving he was as good an architect as he was town planner.

The only remaining part of what was once Scotland’s largest gaol which stood to the south of Nelson Monument is the 1815 to 1817 Governor’s House designed by Archibald Elliot. Alexander clearly was not a fan of design that wandered too far from the classical fold: “Castellated and battlemented, it is rather absurd; yet it adds piquancy and variety to the scene.” Most modern viewers would surely consider it an architectural highlight of the Hill. Lawyer Henry Cockburn described Edinburgh in the opening decades of the 19th century as “the second city in the Empire.” Two centuries later, Edinburgh is the second city of the Kingdom.

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Architecture Art Design Developers Hotels Luxury People Restaurants Town Houses

The Secret Garden + The Witchery by the Castle Edinburgh

Know Your Stuff

March 2016. Getting stuffed. Maundy Thursday, quail’s eggs on a watercress stuffing nest at Mayfair regular Hush. Resurrection Sunday, fried duck eggs at Holborn favourite The Delaunay. And so a procession of lunisolar led lunches, moveable feasts, begins. An extended Easter Triduum. When a man is tired of London, there’s always Edinburgh. Easter Wednesday, squared hen’s eggs on board Virgin. York, Durham, Newcastle, Berwick-upon-Tweed … everywhere looks better when viewed from the 1st Class carriage. Rows of distant gambrel roofs punctuated by chamfered dormers announce to the visually aware the proximity of the Border.

“Oh yes I stayed in The Witchery by the Castle years ago,” a brave journalist whispered to us during the recent Making Africa press briefing in the Guggenheim Bilbao. Admittedly an unlikely moment for such a muted conversation. It was undoubtedly a memorable stay. “I woke up in the middle of the night in the most frightful sweat! It was like the bed was on fire! I was boiling alive!” She got an uninvited roasting, so to speak. The next day at breakfast the journalist voiced her concern to a waitress. “That’ll be the witches,” came the nonchalant reply. “They used to burn them at the stake on Castlehill right outside.” Presumably it wasn’t the effects of a wee dram nightcap.

Our Easter Thursday lunch in the restaurant turns out to be slightly less steamy but still hot stuff. Dr Samuel Johnson and his biographer James Boswell used to eat here. Well if it’s good enough for Sam and Jamie, both made of stern stuff … The schlep up the Royal 1.6 Kilometres past winding wynds and claustrophobic closes to the foot of Castle Rock is so worth it. We’ve arrived. Physically and metaphorically. Bewitchingly charming certainly; hauntingly beautiful definitely; ghoul free hopefully. Think Hunderby (Julia Davis’s pricelessly hysterical period comedy) without Dorothy. Or Northanger Abbey’s Catherine goes to town.

Owner James Thomson, Scotland’s best (known) hotelier and restaurateur, is evidently a follower of the Donatella Versace school of thought: “Less isn’t more. Less is just less.” An eclectic dose of ecclesiastical remnants, Gothic salvage and Jacobean antiques is healthily apropos for this 16th century building. Candlesticks galore flicker flattering light across The Secret Garden, a space even with its panelled walls and trio of fanlighted French doors and timber beamed ceiling would still induce the envy of Frances Hodgson Burnett.

The interior may flurry with wild abandon but thankfully the service and place setting don’t. Our Milanese waiter makes sure of the former. Tradition takes care of the latter. Linen tablecloths, phew. China plates (slates are for roofs), double phew. Unheated pudding (always a dish best served cold), triple phew. After a bubbly reception, the feast unfolds. Palate seducing grilled sardines followed by lemon sole with brown shrimp butter preceding chocolate orange marquise with espresso jelly raise spirits further. The huggermugger harum scarum of a prowlish ghoulish night owlish postprandial prance on the mansard tiles of Edinburgh’s Auld Toun awaits. The only way is down (hill).

November 2025. Still not sweating the small stuff. Random Friday, sôle poêlée aux graines de moutard in Mayfair’s La Petite Maison next to music producer Mark Ronson en famille. Remembrance Friday, baked Ragstone goat’s cheese gnocchi up the BT Tower in Soho. And so a procession of dinners towards the waxing crescent moon, moveable feasts, begins. An extended Advent. When a man isn’t tired of London but needs a weekend change of scenery, there’s always Edinburgh. Feast of Christ the King of the Universe Eve, double devilled hen’s egg on board LNER. Newark-on-Trent, Doncaster, Northallerton, Darlington … everywhere looks better when viewed from the 1st Class carriage. The snowcapped Cleveland Hills announce to the observant the proximity of the North York Moors.

Nine years ago the three course Table d’Hôte Lunch Menu at The Witchery was priced at £35. Today, we’re after the two course Light Lunch Menu, £34.50. Packed agenda: so little time, so many galleries. After a bubbly reception (déjà vu; déjà ivre; plus Bourgone Blanc Domaine Leflaive Burgundy 2017 – a good year), the feast unfolds. Appetite satisfying basket of bread rolls with smoked butter accompanying celeriac velouté then salmon, cod and smoked haddock fish pie. We’re stuffed. But as the great Scottish aristo actress Tilda Swindon (first seen in three dimensions dining at L’Ambroisie Paris; last seen in two dimensions in her ex partner John Byrne’s painting in the Edinburgh National Portrait Gallery) would say in her hushed dulcet tone, “This lunch is delicious!”

Our driver Eleftherios Galouzidis pulls up outside on Castlehill. The only way is downhill. We’re just in time for the brilliant recital of Moonlight Sonata by Candlelight in St Gile’s Cathedral. British impresario Ashley Fripp’s fingers dance across the grand piano. He opens with Johannes Brahms’ Intermezzo in A Major. “Next I will play a pair of Chopin Nocturnes – tone poems,” he states. “E Flat Major which was influenced by the Irish composer John Field followed by C Sharp Minor. The latter was fortunately discovered by one of Chopin’s students after he died.” There’s wild applause for Sergei Rachmanioff’s Prelude in D Sharp Minor, the Moscow Waltz. “And now for the one you’ve all been waiting for!” Ashley takes a bow after the dramatic third movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata climaxes to its conclusion. Nothing quite completes an evening of culture like prawn toast and chilli tofu at Jimmy’s Express Chinese Restaurant on South Bridge.

At last week’s St Martin in the Fields London Informal Eucharist the Right Reverend Oliva Graham preached, “Holy omnipresence is not a casual knowing. It is impartial and unconditional. We are called to live fully and love faithfully.” We’ll soon discover Chessel’s Court, a rare survival of 18th century tenements hidden behind Canongate on the slope from The Witchery by the Castle. The mansion blocks, to use a befitting but more southern term, were assertively restored in the 1960s. A heart shaped ivy enlivens the ground floor of one of the blocks. Always living more fully, loving more faithfully.

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Architects Architecture Art Country Houses Design Developers

Straffan House + The K Club Straffan Kildare

Riveting Pivoting

On 28 February 1990 the Irish Directors of Christie’s (Desmond FitzGerald the last Knight of Glin of Glin Castle in County Limerick and Danny Kinahan the last in the line to own Castle Upton in Templepatrick County Antrim) held a sale of contents of Straffan House which had been acquired by The Kildare Hotel and Country Club led by Michael Smurfit. It opened with Lot 1 “A plated cruet frame containing seven bottles and stoppers”, £50 to £80. Punts not pounds. It closed with Lot 515 “A mahogany crossbanded and ebony lined two tier occasional table, the moulded rectangular top on turned and fluted supports, the base fitted with a drawer to one side. 25 inches wide and a similar occasional table 15.5 inches wide”, £80 to £210.

Standout pieces included Lot 154: “A carved giltwood wall glass of early George III design, the shaped rectangular mirror plate in a rockwork acanthus caved and pierced foliate frame, the pierced surmount carved with rockwork and C scrolls, the base carved with C scrolls and foliage. 19th century. 46 inches high by 23 inches wide.” £3,000 to £5,000. Also Lot 160: “A kingwood burr walnut and floral marquetry commode of Louis XV style, the rounded rectangular pink veined marble top above a frieze mounted with circular floral painted porcelain panels enclosed in gilt metal laurel frames with ribbon tied surmounts and fitted with a drawer above a panelled cupboard door and flanked on either side by a bowed cupboard drawer inlaid in a trellis either side by a bowed cupboard drawer inlaid in a trellis parquetry with fleur de lys and divided by cast brass acanthus, mounts on cast brass paw feet. 55 inches wide by 22 inches deep.” £1,500 to £2,500.Unexecuted plans by Dubliner Benjamin Hallam dated 1808 (copyright of the Irish Architectural Archive: reproduced here for non commercial educational purposes) illustrate proposed two storey pavilion like wings in a refined neoclassicism to the original three storey Straffan House. The house would burn down a few years later. Under new owner Hugh Barton, the current Straffan House was constructed in 1832 to the design of Frederick Darley, another Dublin based architect. Its design was apparently based on the Château de Louveciennes near Paris. It’s not quite Waddesdon Manor (a Loire Valley château transplanted to Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire) but Straffan House does have its Franglais moments. Vintage photographs show there were once a set of five unusually ornate chimneystacks symmetrically arranged across the roof of the main block. A storey height chimney masquerading as an obelisk marks the spot where the house meets the 18th century heavily quoined stable block. Box hedged formal gardens fill the courtyard of the stable block which was converted to guest suites.

Modern art in the auction included Lot 299 Gerald Dillon’s The Escape Artist, £5,000 to £8,000; Lot 294 Paul Henry’s Mullary Beach, £15,000 to £20,000; and two pieces by Louis de Brocquy: Lot 288 Lemon II, £3,000 to £5,000; and Lot 286 Reconstructed Head, £15,000 to £25,000. There were no fewer than 13 paintings by Brummie artist Edgar Hunt ranging from £5,000 to £8,000 up to £12,000 to £18,000. That’s a lot of ducks, donkeys, goats, cows and chickens. Lot 349 was a George II white marble chimneypiece after a design by Inigo Jones and William Kent, £50,000 to £80,000. It was formerly in the collection of the Earls of Gosford, Gosford Castle, County Armagh. A salvaged piece that was retained is an early 18th century timber doorcase, now in a curved corridor of one of the later blocks.

This year, the estate celebrates 1,475 of recorded history. 550: After the Anglo Normal invasion of Ireland, Strongbow grants Straffan to Maurice FitzGerald. 1500: The lands are forfeited by the De Penkiston family, who are implicated in a rebellion, and disposed of to the Gaydon family. 1600: Straffan is forfeited again and granted to Thomas Bewley. 1650: The Gaydon family are granted back the 280 hectares they originally owned and then sell up to Richard Talbot in 1697 for £700. 1720: Dublin banker Hugh Henry purchases the lands and builds the original Straffan House. 1831: Hugh Barton, who owns French vineyards, acquires the estate. He demolishes the Henrys’ burnt out home and builds a new house beside the 18th century carriage yard. 1850: An Italianate campanile is added to the house. 1937: The Bartons reduce the size of the house.1949 The Bartons sell up and it changes hands several times. 1988: The Smurfit Group purchases Straffan House and double it in size recycling a Francis Johnston granite porch from the ruinous Ballynegall House in County Westmeath to link both blocks together. 1991: The K Club opens.

In 2001 the original building was doubled in size with a new block designed by Henry John Lyons architects. It more or less replicates the appearance of Straffan House. A new north elevation entrance was created through the Francis Johnston Ionic portico: the original Ionic portico now leads into a lounge. Walls awash with white painted stucco walls. First floor and attic pedimented window surrounds repeated. And repeated. And repeated. Strung out stringcourses. The impact is powerful, only to be felt again 14 years later. The 2015 block by Henry John Lyons is even bigger, dropping another two storeys and having its very own campanile – a stylised version of the tallest component of Straffan House. It’s the hotel that never stops growing.

Just when you think the contiguousness has sprouted full growth along comes another extension. The latest proposals are by Michael Fetherston who bought The K Club in 2020. He commissioned JNP Architects to design an extension to replace the single storey swimming pool wing with a double height flat roofed function suite. Michael has restored the 1910 weir originally built to provide power for Straffan House. It has become the first weir powered resort in Ireland by harnessing hydropower from the River Liffey which runs through the 220 hectare estate.

We know The K Club well. Very well. Those stone steps flowing from the central bow window on the south front of Straffan House through grass banks onto a path past rose and lemon coloured flowerbeds to a fountain and finally the River Liffey are familiar terrain. Our first visit to The Byerley Turk Dining Room was on a windswept winter’s evening 30 years ago. The restaurant was named after a large painting measuring over three metres wide by two and a half metres high of a famous early 18th century thoroughbred racehorse. It is attributed to the English equestrian painter Thomas Spencer. Crimson flock wallpaper provided the perfect backdrop to the dark horse. Michael Smurfit sold the painting along with art by Jack Yeats in 2020. The Chinoiserie wallpaper in the drawing room painted by Naomi McBride has survived numerous refurbishments. Our subsequent writeup formed a double page spread in Ulster Architect November 1995 and our photograph of the south front graced the Christmas edition of the same magazine.

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Design Developers Luxury People Restaurants Town Houses

Glas Restaurant Dublin + History

Dayhawks

It’s a torn newspaper cutting (The Irish Times? The Irish Independent?) that makes for fascinating reading. The article is long, but is worth taking the time to consume. “Head waiter laments the passing of the good old days of eating out” shouts the headline. “‘They have all closed – Red Bank, Dolphin and Jammet’s – restaurants that gave Dublin its Lucullan reputation up to the mid 1960s. That era has passed away. There is not the same discrimination in food,’ says Jimmy Beggan, for 40 years a water and finally head waiter in Jammet’s as he talks about the good old days to Conor O’Brien.”

Jimmy Beggan would undoubtedly be impressed by the contemporary restaurant scene in Dublin. There’s the British invasion of The Ivy and Ivy Asia (close neighbours as per this chain’s double branding location strategy) and Marco Pierre White Grill all on Trinity Street as well as Hawksmoor opening on College Green. It’s an international scene: spinach paneer in Baggot Street’s Kerala Kitchen, frequented by the urban elite on Friday evenings, is pure Patna on a plate.

At least one restaurant has made a comeback. The Unicorn, an Italian restaurant down Merrion Row was established in 1938. It was The Place to Be Seen at the turn of this century thanks to its flamboyant flame haired owners Simon and Christian Stokes, known as the Bang Brothers after their beautician mother Pia Bang. The restaurant was the victim of the Great Recession – and some extravagant spending. Chef Patron Kristian Burness has reopened The Unicorn.

In contrast to Hawksmoor’s carnivorous draw, Glas has a majority vegan minority vegetarian completely gluten free menu. This Michelin recommended restaurant is on Chatham Street under the shadow of St Stephen’s Green Centre. A three course €30 lunch (Carrot Mosaic, Hazelnut Gnocchi, Chestnut Mousse) is as joyful as the slightly nutty interior. Every colour is the new black in the maximalist decoration. Prints of Edward Hopper paintings add a sense of calm to the bathroom walls.

The article on the restaurant that had a strangely placed apostrophe continues: “Nothing, perhaps, illustrates the change in eating and drinking as Jimmy’s move from gracious living at 46 Nassau Street to the French Wine Centre in the basement of a Georgian building in Baggot Street. The basket chairs have been replaced by functional benches, the starched table linen by bare tabletops. Food takes the form of snacks but the wines, chosen by the French Ministry of Agriculture, form the main attraction. The Centre, in fact, represents France’s effort to cultivate an interest in the wines for which it is so famous. And that suits Jimmy Beggan, a member of the Guild of Sommeliers, a group dedicated to ‘the better service of wine’ as he puts it.”

“But it is in reminiscing of the old days that Jimmy’s eyes really light up. The shock of living in a Dublin devoid of its former famous restaurants has left him bemused, as if he had woken up one morning to find St Stephen’s Green replaced by a supermarket. ‘Dublin can ill afford to be without a restaurant like Jammet’s,’ is his verdict. Jimmy reflects a loyalty for the restaurant which he will never lose and which comes through in his conversation, laughing as he remembers the shouts of the French head chef and the pride with which he points out that all game served in Jammet’s was wild, unlike the great Tour d’Argent in Paris, where, he hints darkly, ‘Some of the duck is domestic.’”

“All dishes on the menu were à la carte; no question of table d’hote. And even though the list would not form a 10th of the Tour d’Argent’s, it had its speciality, Sole Jammet, steamed on the bone and serviced with a white wine and lobster sauce Americaine. Jammet’s I learnt has contributed greatly to gastronomic history, but in a rather obscure way. Lobster Burlington, lobster baked in the shell with a cheese sauce, owes its origin to the original Jammet’s known as the Burlington Restaurant and Oyster Saloons which was run by two brothers, Louis and Michel, at 26 St Andrew Street. That was before Louis moved to Nassau Street and Michel bought the Hôtel Bristol in Paris. Louis had previously been Chef to Lord Cadogan at what was then the Viceregal Lodge, now Áras an Uachtaráin.”

“In contrast with the present day, when a shop can turn into an office block overnight, the survival capacity of Jammet’s through the Great Depression and the stringencies of the Economic War are to be admired. The restaurant set its standards and kept to them. The international reputation helped so that wealthy visitors like the ‘old’ Aga Khan always dropped in. Jimmy reels off the names of the famous – Grace Moore the actress and opera singer who bought a special bottle of sherry there two days before she was killed in an air crash, Tyrone Power, Robert Donat, Burgess Meredith and of course, William Butler Yeats and his family. Yeats, his wife, daughter Anne and son Michael, were waited upon, Jimmy remembers, by Tom Kavanagh, whose claim to fame lay in his attending the Irish delegation to the Treaty signing in London in 1921 as official food taster. ‘Just to make sure they were not poisoned by the British.’”

“Jimmy Beggan first went to work in the restaurant as a commis waiter in 1928 and had progressed to head waiter by the time the place closed in 1967. He had been trained by a Swiss instructor in the first waiters’ course at the Technical School in Parnell Square. In 1932 he made an exploratory foray to Paris, but that was in the depths of the Depression so he decided to remain on in Dublin and Dublin certainty had its advantages. How did a top class restaurant obtain its supplies, the whitebait for instance, and the gulls’ eggs served as an appetiser? The whitebait came from ‘a family in Ringsend and they would be jumping out of the bucket when brought into the kitchen’. The gulls’ eggs came strangely enough from Raheenleagh in the Midlands. Lord Revelstoke sent some too from Lambay Island. But the really exotic foods like caviar and escargots were, naturally, imported.”

“The War brought changes and in fact Jimmy blames that conflagration for the change in eating habits. Gas rationing meant that the cooking had to be done at a certain time and this put an end to the long, drowsy meals which used to stretch into the afternoon. ‘People had to eat and drink by the clock,’ he says. There is art and skill in being a waiter, as Jimmy demonstrates. In the first place you had to time your dockets for the chef so that the dishes appeared in the correct order, and that was not always easy when things were busy. Then you had to know how to prepare the crêpes suzettes at the table – ‘the less butter the better and six pancakes at a time’.”

“The ingredients were exotic – kirsch, crème noyaux, brandy, Curaçao. You’d reel out satisfied after that. And then there was the caneton à la presse, duck compressed in the handpress and served in a kind of pâté with the legs, fried diable, on the plate. Recalling the routine made one’s mouth water. Jammet’s were fortunate, too, in that both Louis and Madame Yvonne, his wife, were the descendants of restaurateurs. Madame Jammet had other talents too as an artist, sculptress and woodcarver, producing the Stations of the Cross for churches in Dun Laoghaire and Limerick. She was also a dress designer and patron of the theatre.”

“Yes, undoubtedly talent of that sort and the easy sophistication of those days is sadly missing. Just think of the care which went into preparing a dish which we take for granted, the ubiquitous prawn cocktail. In Jammet’s it was Prawn Cocktail Marie Rose made with their own mayonnaise, tomato purée, white wine and a little fresh grapefruit juice. Nor did Jammet’s make any concessions to Women’s Lib. All the staff, except for the cashiers, were male. The head chef until shortly before the closure was always French. Then there were the others, the sauce, vegetable and entremets chefs, the kitchen porters, commis and full waiters, bar staff and doorman, all fitting into place, all part of a crew.”

“The minimum price of a meal at the Tour d’Argent is now something over £20 a head. To provide food and service of the quality of Jammet’s might well cost that amount in a comparable restaurant here. Slightly inhibiting, perhaps, which makes it all the more pleasant to recall the days when one could actually afford, about once a year or so, to try the rable de Lièvre sauce grand veneur after a dozen huitres Galway and followed by bombe glacée accompanied by a good burgundy. Jimmy recalls that the wine buyer was a Burgundian from Dijon, a man who had been a cooper in his youth. ‘And what could be better than that?’ he asks. What, indeed.”

Jammet’s was Ireland’s finest French restaurant from 1901 to 1967 run by two generations of Jammets: brothers Michel and François and then Michel’s son Louis supported by his wife Yvonne. A regular customer, the painter and broadcaster John Ryan, recalled “the main dining room was pure Second French Empire with a lovely faded patina to the furniture, snow white linen, well cut crystal, monogrammed porcelain, gourmet sized silver plated cutlery and gleaming decanters”. Opposite the side entrance to Trinity College, 46 Nassau Street is a central location. Lillie’s Bordello nightclub opened on the site in 1991 and for the next 28 years was The Place to Be Seen Dancing after dining in The Unicorn. Ever since, various pubs have taken over the premises.

It’s easy to become misty eyed about days of yore but the reality is that 60 plus years ago the choice of restaurant in Dublin was thin pickings and Jammet’s closing was a big loss. More poignant is the ephemeral nature of fame highlighted by this newspaper cutting. Only one of the mid 20th century celebrities is still a household name: William Butler Yeats. What about the actress and opera singer Grace Moore? Did she get to enjoy her special bottle of sherry before tragically dying? Now – in place of Red Bank and Dolphin and Jammet’s – fresh memories are being made in Kerala Kitchen and Glas and a myriad other restaurants. Some day some writer will reminisce on the Lucullan Twenties restaurant scene in Dublin below the parapets and pediments, namedropping long forgotten celebrities. Tour d’Argent is still going strong under third generation ownership.

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Architecture Design Developers People Restaurants Town Houses

Rémi Lazurowicz + Comptoir Lazu + Restaurant Lazu Paris

Boulevardiers on the Boulevards

Due to circumstances within our control – Paris encore une fois – we’re heading for Queer Street adjacent. We’re not over the moon about it but such is the price of expended ebullient social energy. Well beyond the faded tapestry of dawn, long after lunch, we will witness the slow transition of dusk; silver planes will be seen escaping, bright in the last sun above the darkening city. The streets will lose colour to the night. “The French take their pleasures very seriously; French chic is a high art form,” writes Ada Louise Huxtable in The Eighties, New York Review of Books, 6 April 1995.

The 9th, to coffee in Lazu (Comptoir), lunch in Lazu (Restaurant), pray in Notre Dame de Lorette (Church) and play in the bars around the casual Place José Rizal, far away from the carefully pollarded symmetries of the Jardins des Tuileries. We’re here super early in this restaurant so it’s quiet: front of house is acting waitress and sommelier. She’s fab. This is going to be a terrific lunch. Les Vins Blancs list is divided into Provence, Savoie, Alsace, Jura and Corse. It might not be ski season just yet but we’re feeling Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes so order the perfect sip from that prefecture. Domaine Louis Magnin Roussette de Savoie 2018 is bright, fresh, smoky, sharp and very good. It appears nacreous in the soft noon light. Fly Me to the Moon sung by a chanteuse is playing in the background. This is going to be a totally terrific lunch.

There are four entrées, five plats and five desserts on the menu. Our new multitasking friend produces the favourites of the day board but we’re glued to the menu. We’re always versatile so go vegan starter, pescatarian main and vegetarian pudding. Holy cow! But first a creamed cauliflower on parmesan cracker amuse bouche to commence our culinary adventure. A sack of bread and cayenne dusted butter quoin stones put the rustic into rustication.

Tartelette sablée au parmesan, pickles de girolles, Romanesco, champignons séchés, courgettes au safran, carotte et vinaigrette algre doux. A noble theme. Wow! Fillet de cabillaud Skrei rôti, cocos de Paimpol, vierge de radis roses et noirs, emulsion raifort. Wow wow! And the Norwegian Atlantic Cod even comes with our favourite bow to Michelinism: foam. As Hervé This scribes in Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavour (2002), “Low in fat because they are essentially made of air – foams came to prominence with the rise of Nouvelle Cuisine in France in the 1960s and then gained broader popularity as a consequence of the growing interest in lighter foods on both sides of the Atlantic. Today, with the advent of molecular gastronomy … they are very fashionable among connoisseurs.” Mousse au chocolat Lazu: éclats de chocolat, fleur de sel et piment d’Espeletter, huile d’olive. Wow wow wow! A coconut shortbread surprise, more nuanced than a triple entrendre, ends our gourmet voyage.

What does Monsieur Michelin have to say about Lazu? “The Chef, who was well schooled (Bruno Docuet’s second at Le Régalade), composes a well crafted bistronomique cuisine with judicious associations. While the menu changes every week, specialties such as carmelised sweetbreads and potato pâté en croûte have been enjoyed since the opening.” We say witness this materiality, solidity and substance! Well, well, how did we miss those favoured sweetbreads? Return visit required. The baked chocolate pudding served straight from the pan at our table with a side portion of olive oil is return visit worthy in itself. On y va!

Rémi Lazurowicz appears halfway through lunch for a chat even though the restaurant is now filling up with staff and customers. The charming Head Chef owner dashes across Rue Marguerite de Rochechouart from Le Comptoir to join us, full of the joys of comptoiring and restaurateuring and living. “I wanted to become a chef first and foremost,” he relates. “My cuisine is all about honesty, simplicity and freshness. I do want lots of textures and contrasts as well. I get quite a lot of English customers as we’re close to Gare du Nord.” With food, as with faces, there are moments when the forceful mystery of the inner being appears. Inwards and outwards, the lunch’s character with its inherent beauty, is in its portions and its sureness of style.

We’re entrenched in a metaphoric city continually reinventing itself to remain vital, a constant layering of cultural atrophy. Pushing beyond that immediate hinterland of desire, Eden restored. Everything tastes better in Paris. Wind inducing cauliflower becomes the breezy taste of autumn. Everything sounds better in French. Take “bricolage”: so much classier than “DIY store”. Valorisation is easy. Recalling our lunch in the 9th is like freeze framing that key moment in a film around which the whole of the narrative pivots before a spiral of hypnogogic descent. You witnessed it through us, dwellers in history. Now look: summer has turned, autumn has dropped. Lazu the moon.

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Charlotte Blease + Dr Bot + Yale University Press + Bedford Square Fitzrovia London

Hot Press

Bedford Square and Russell Square. The Duke of Bedford – family name Russell – still owns swathes of the golden postcodes of central London. Both developed in Georgian times, the former square is mainly intact; the latter, mostly rebuilt. Each side of Bedford Square was treated as a single unit in construction and design terms. The terraced houses have brick elevations, Coade stone quoins decorating the doorcases, and wrought iron balconies to the piano nobile. The centre of each terrace is stuccoed, pedimented and pilastered.

Eleanor Coade invented and produced the eponymous artificial stone which was one of the most widely used building materials of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A ceramic material made of a secret recipe, Coade stone is exceptionally resistant to weathering and erosion. Such versatility made it popular for architectural details and sculpture. In later life Eleanor was an active philanthropist. She stipulated to women benefactors named in her will that none of their husbands were to touch the bequests.

Bedford Square now has prestigious occupiers such as the Architectural Association Bookshop, Consulate General of the Republic of Angola, Magg Brothers Rare Books and Manuscripts, and Spparc Architecture. The northeast side backs on to the British Museum with its Enlightenment Room celebrating the age of reason, discovery and learning. St Gile’s Hotel bravely raises its Brutalist head over the southwest corner of the roofscape of Bedford Square, contrasting with the neoclassical architecture below. Fitzrovia was and is an area of knowledge and culture.

Number 47 is the stuccoed midpoint of the southeast side and is the address of Yale University Press, especially known for Pevsner architecture guides. Printing, the art preservative of all the arts, takes centre stage on Bedford Square. Depth of classical knowledge, brutally honest expression of form, a female trailblazer in her chosen field … a segue is barely required such is the connective tissue to the launch of Dr Charlotte Blease’s latest book.

She is a Northern Irish philosopher of medicine whose research concentrates on the ethical, psychological and social dimensions of healthcare innovation with a focus on the use of AI technologies in clinical settings. Charlotte is currently an Associate Professor in the Medical Faculty at Uppsala University Sweden and a research affiliate in the Digital Psychiatry Programme at Beth Israel Deaconess Harvard Medical School.

Dr Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us – and How AI Could Save Lives has received glowing reviews from the right (Daily Mail) to the left (The Guardian). International coverage has included interviews on CNN Washington, The Times Radio London and Ireland’s most listened to radio show, Pat Kenny on Ireland AM. She explains, “There are very human problems with medicine. For example, keeping up to date with information. I made a calculation a couple of years ago that there’s a new biomedical article published every 39 seconds. If doctors were to read just two percent of these it would take them 22.5 hours per day. AI can crunch through information at breakneck speed. That doesn’t mean to say that AI is without problems.”

Heather McCallum, Managing Director of Yale University Press, opens the book launch: “Charlotte has a gift for making the very complex accessible. She is producing and digesting mountains of cutting edge work and translating it into a form for people to understand and be appreciate of the ideas. That is a huge talent! I think Charlotte is a luminary. She is also fun and charismatic. I was absolutely thrilled that she chose to commit her book to Yale to publish. This is a heartfelt book for today. Charlotte’s star is in the ascendant.”

Leading academic and former general practitioner Dr Richard Lehman is the guest speaker: “The great message of Charlotte’s book is it’s not because doctors are fallible beings and therefore should be dissed. It’s because they need support of the kind that has never been available before. This is an amazing opportunity. I think it’s absolutely marvellous that Charlotte has packed so much in that has real intellectual clout and depth and personal research together with a catchy title and this superb style which can be hilarious at times. This book deserves a conference in its own right!”

Charlotte posits, “The key issue is who or what could do a better job of delivering healthcare. My book isn’t, though, a love letter to technology. My background is philosophy so I’m thinking about this in a balanced way. We’ve got to consider the fact that AI can be people pleasing, it can be obsequious – there’s a whole cluster of biases that can persist. The opportunity here however is to see if we can find ways to debias these tools to reduce inequality in healthcare.” Patients are at the centre of this book: the reader is reminded that the care of the patient is the purpose of medicine. She poses and answers the key question: who or what might do a better job of delivering that?

Dr Bot is the first book to deeply consider the diverse range of physical and psychological pitfalls associated with traditional medical visits. Two underlying arguments are “The belief that we live in the best of all possible worlds takes the path of least resistance” and “To improve medicine, we should expect to do things differently”. The surveys underpinning her views are original (for example, investigating American psychiatrists’ use of commercial generative AI bots) and expansive (such as interviewing 1,000 British general practitioners about the future of their job).

There’s a smorgasbord of delicious titbits in this book. For starters, a delightful description of verbal discourse, “Among strangers, the flow of conversation can vary considerably: sometimes chatter courses like a bounteous brook, other times it sputters like a faulty faucet.” For mains, “Whether as a clinician or a patient, we enter the consulting room equipped with a suite of inbuilt algorithms sculpted for life on the savannahs of Africa.” And just desserts, “Medical doctors gulp down many bitter pills too.”

Drawing on patients’ and personal experience, heartwarming and sometimes heart wrenching stories are balanced with light heartedness. Lady Gaga’s lesson on the benefits of hard work (spoiler alert: it often leads to success) is an unexpected find in a book about doctors and technology. As is a well known American brasserie chain: “When a doctor introduces herself, she will not say, ‘Hi, my name is Sandra, I will be looking after you.’ This is not Hooters. In fact, it’s unlikely that she (or he) will use their first name.”

Charlotte’s stance is objective: this is neither a love letter to technology nor medical doctors. “The risks and benefits of what technology can offer, and how it can be tamed,” she opines, “will need to be pursued actively and robustly, with moral imagination.” Provocative yet respectful, cleverly written but highly readable, robust and entertaining, written with a “splinter of ice” (author’s words) while filled with uplifting anecdotes, Dr Bot is a gripping read and an intriguingly insightful vision of the future of healthcare.

There are quite a few blue plaques on the houses of Bedford Square dedicated to men of distinction: William Butterfield, architect; John Scott, Lord Chancellor; Thomas Hodgkin, philanthropist; Sir Anthony Hope, novelist; Sir Harry Ricardo, mechanical engineer; Ram Mohun Roy, scholar; and Thomas Wakley, reformer. A blue plaque to a woman of distinction is now required outside number 47: “Charlotte Blease, philosopher and writer. Birthplace of the publication of her literary masterpiece Dr Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us – and How AI Could Save Lives.”

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Joia Restaurant + Rooftop Bar Battersea Power Station London

Yarden

It’s a table with one of the best views in London, rivalling that of Decimo in King’s Cross. The bricks of Battersea Power Station are practically within touching distance while PLP Architecture’s Nova development across the Thames in Victoria appears as an improbable pyramid. On the 15th floor of Art’otel, the chain with a penchant for lower case font and upper end modern art, Joia brings Portuguese food to the English Capital. Head Chef Henrique Sá Pessoa is known for his two Michelin starred Alma restaurant in Lisbon.

The Joia vibe is The Great Gatsby or at least Baz Luhrmann’s film version of the novel. Luxury hotel specialist Russell Sage Studio uses a peach and pink led palette of pastels which works especially well under the glow of sunset. It’s an updated Twenties look chiming with the construction date of the Power Station. Porthole like circular mirrors reflect the view. The curved northeast wall is distractingly fully glazed. A sweeping staircase fit for Daisy Buchanan to descend in style links the 85 cover restaurant to the double height bar.

Stretching the literary metaphor, the food is up to East Egg meets West Egg party standards with a heavy dose of Iberian flavour. Somehow the modish plates (as opposed to three standard courses) work in this setting. As the mercury lowers Henrique’s kitchen proves its salt with Padron peppers, asparagus, monkfish, patatas bravas, and crema Catalana with burnt orange ice cream. Surely Henrique will be awarded coveted étoiles en Angleterre. A rooftop bar and infinity pool above Joia is straight out of a Jazz Age book.

Head Sommelier David Nunes explains, “Our wine list offers a wide selection that celebrates the rich heritage, diverse terroirs and centuries old winemaking traditions of Portugal and Spain. Each bottle tells a story of craftmanship and passion from the sun drenched vineyards of Douro valley to the rolling hills of Rioja. Each bottle tells a story of craftmanship and passion. Savour the bold structured reds of Ribera del Duero. Explore Portugal’s distinctive varietals from the deep complexity of Touriga Nacional to the crisp freshness of Vinho Verde.” Or Gaintza Txakolina, Basque rosé colour coordinating with the pink sunset.

Local estate agent Gabriel Cunningham of Dexters sums up the 17 hectare regeneration site, “The Battersea Power Station redevelopment is now the epicentre of the wider area. It ticks every box in terms of bars, restaurants, shopping, children’s activities and social events.” Monumentality on a modest scale is a contradiction so everything about the blocks surrounding the Power Station is big. Really big. Frank Gehry’s two trademark tipsily topsy turvy twisting towers are like his Düsseldorf RheinHafen Arts and Meda Centre on steroids.

Adam, Pugin, Wyatt … the great British architectural dynasties. Plus the Gilbert Scotts. Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811 to 1878) designed St Pancras Renaissance Hotel which has been recycled and upcycled. The output of his grandson Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880 to 1960) has fared just as well. Liverpool Anglican Cathedral still serves its original purpose. His Bankside Power Station on London’s Southbank is celebrating its 25th anniversary as Tate Modern. After closing in the Eighties, Battersea Power Station is now one of the largest multipurpose buildings in Britain.

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Passage des Panoramas + Musée Grévin Paris

A Lesson in Skiagraphy

It’s a diorama come to life. The past is present in Passage des Panoramas. A timeline as permeable as an Alice Rohrwacher film (La Chimera, 2023). It’s straight out of an Émile Zola novel. Literally (Nana, 1880). Built in 1799, this was the first covered arcade in Paris, oozing period character and historic authenticity. It combines beauty with functionality with rarity. Elegant white arches support the glazed pitched roof over rows of exquisite wooden shopfronts with colourful painted panels. Passage des Panoramas is a shortcut between Palais Royal and Montmartre. Only 17 such arcades have survived Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s rebuilding of the city.

There’s quirky and there’s Victoria Station Wagon Restaurant which is like a railway coach derailed at the entrance. A winged wolf and a bejewelled lynx peer through the windows of Caffè Stern in the centre. Philippe Starck designed the interior of this petite restaurant owned by the Alajmo group which runs the three Michelin star Le Calandre in Padova. Postcards of flooded streets and reclining kittens can be found in Maison Prins. On the opposite side of Boulevard Montmartre is Musée Grévin which opened in 1882. It’s where celebrities come to life – in wax.

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The Flask Pub + Highgate London

Raising the Roofs

It’s the part of London associated with the dead but there’s also plenty of life in Highgate. England does pubs well and The Flask is an oasis for thirsty – and hungry – travellers. The pub blends in so well with its Georgian neighbours it could easily be mistaken for one of the grand houses. A stone plaque on the five bay three storey redbrick façade displays the date “1663” which must predate the current building. A rabbit warren of bars and dining rooms, some under low vaulted ceilings bending all sorts of modern building regulations, has all the atmosphere of a coaching inn. Highwayman Claude Duval might just swing by for a pint.

Or a glass of Champagne. She may have had a vested interest but a chalk message on a blackboard in The Flask quotes the sage words of Lilly Bollinger, “I only drink Champagne when I’m happy and when I’m sad. Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I am not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it – unless I’m thirsty.” A faded print of Queen Anne hangs on the ladies’ lavatory door; Henry Prince of Wales beckons the gents.

Opposite The Flask is The Grove, an early 18th century suburban residential development in leafy environs. Poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Leigh Hunt; spy Anthony Blunt; singer George Michael; musicians Annie Lennox, Yehudi Menuhin and Sting; actors Gladys Cooper, Robert Donat and Jude Law; and model Kate Moss have all called The Grove home across the ages. It’s the sort of Georgian enclave that can only be found in London’s classier outlying villages such as Blackheath, Clapham and West Dulwich.

Across the road, or is it down the hill, or maybe over the brae – Highgate’s attractiveness is matched only by its confusion of layout – stands Lauderdale House. Vicky Wilson writes in London’s Houses, 2011, “An unattractive pebbledash building with an uninspiring five bay Georgian entrance front, a surprisingly unthought-out arrangement of windows on its long southeast side and a fine Doric colonnade at the back, Lauderdale House is nevertheless endowed with a history – both architectural and social. One of the few surviving large timber framed London houses, Lauderdale was built in 1582 by Sir Richard Martin, Warden and Masterworker of the Royal Mint, for his younger son Richard, probably with a rich bounty of Spanish gold earned from financing Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigatoin of 1577 to 1580.”

She summarises the evolution of the house: “The Martins’ home was designed to be a U shaped plan around a central courtyard. The long southeast flank was probably divided into three rooms with a traditional great chamber on the first floor; the present entrance hall in the northeast wing was probably a dining room. A single storey building at the open end of the courtyard, connected by a corridor to the dining room, contained the kitchens. The construction is timberframe infilled with wattle and daub, with the larger upper floor frame resting on projecting joists, a method known as continuous jetting. The slight projection of the the upper floor today and the asymmetrical fenestration on the long front are the clearest clues to the building’s Tudor origins.”

Professor Finola O’Kane of University College Dublin has a slightly more positive view of the house, “Lauderdale House is an attractive, rambling, not very distinguished looking building which conceals a much earlier timber house. It has a few vestiges of its early garden including a parterre and mount. St Paul’s Cathedral could be seen from the garden. This is a suburban house closer to the City than the West End. Highgate wasn’t very fashionable in the 17th century and it really only got going in the 18th century.”

Both commentators criticise its mostly casual appearance resulting from a Georgian cloak draping over a Tudor frame. The lawn front is symmetrical from the first floor five bay jettied projection upwards. A second floor Diocletian window is surmounted by a pediment and flanked by half gables. The garden backs onto Waterlow Park which in turn abuts Highgate Cemetery. Lauderdale House is now an arts and education centre. Sunbathers catch rays between crawling ladybirds and fluttering white butterflies. A sky of awnings provides respite from the summer heat. An ice cream parlour is handily located off the lawn front.

Northwest of Lauderdale House is the former residence of the 19th century explorer Mary Kingsley. She was brought up in Avalon, a late Georgian two storey over basement redbrick villa with an elegant prostyle Roman Doric porch. The only window on the façade is over the porch. Four blind windows complete the balanced elevational composition. Wide windows capture views of the Capital on the garden facing south front. Opposite Avalon is a long single storey redbrick block with a double height centrepiece. A plaque under the central pediment reads: “Anno 1722. The si almes-houses founded by Sir John Woolaston being very old and decayed were pull’d down and these 12 built in their room together with a schoolhouse for the charity girls at the sole charge of Edward Pauncfort, one of the governours and treasurer of the Chapell and Free School of Highgate.”

In contrast to its Georgian neighbours, Holly Village is very High Victorian Gothic. An archway on one side and a gateway on the other side linked by holly hedgerows provide tantalising glimpses of 12 highly ornate large cottages grouped around a green. Built in 1865 by the property developer William Cubitt to the design of Henry Astley Darbishire, the four villas and four pairs of semi detached houses are – to use modern property parlance – highly spec’d, from Portland stone to teak wood. Gated developments are very Highgate: luxuriously appointed apartment and housing schemes behind cast iron railings would arrive in the 20th century on nearby Hillway.

Another piece of non neoclassical architecture is the Catholic Church of St Joseph on Highgate Hill. It is known locally as “Smoky Joe’s” after the high church religious order which runs it. The Passionists built the current monastery and chapel in 1858 in a Neo Romanesque style to the design of Albert Vicars (potentially some nominative determinism going on with that surname). The powerful white gone grey brick complex with copper domes over a dominant octagonal tower and smaller octagonal corner turrets dominates the townscape southeast of Lauderdale House.

The cemetery can wait.

Postscript: we know many of you missed out on the limited first edition of our bestseller Sabbath Plus One. But fear not: Daunt Marylebone may have sold out but north London’s top independent literature retailer House of Books in West Hampstead is now stocking the second edition. And the most flattering compliment of the month comes from said retailer about the 30 year old opening portrait in the fabric covered hand stitched 300 GSM paper heavyweight book, “That’s still you!”

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St Pancras Renaissance Hotel + Victor Garvey at The Midland Grand Dining Room St Pancras London

No Rotten Tomatoes

So long ago. Back in 2011, we interviewed Harry Handelsman, the visionary replacing ossification with revivification at the majestic St Pancras Renaissance Hotel. Rewinding 14 years: a Polly Morgan taxidermy of a fox snuggled in a glass dome in the reception is a sign this is no ordinary office block. The Edison Building on Old Marylebone Road is named after the world’s most prolific inventor Thomas Edison. Its 1930s Art Deco exterior has been reinvented by architect David Adjaye who’s cloaked it in his trademark charcoal grey rendering. The client was Harry Handelsman of Manhattan Loft Corporation, the property developer who brought loft living to London before reinventing the Capital’s best Victorian railway hotel.

“This could have been a cool apartment building but I wanted to do something more exciting,” starts Harry. He’s clad in a charcoal grey suit, no tie, sitting in his charcoal grey top floor corner office. So far, so suave. Sliding doors open onto a huge decked terrace. “I called on my friend David. He designed an amazing transformation.” Adjaye Associates now occupy the ground floor of the Edison Building which has filled up with design companies. Munich born Harry worked as a financier in New York before arriving in London in 1984. He soon realised the potential for American style loft living in Britain. “Lofts are the concept behind giving buildings a new lease of life – they’re exciting and wonderful places,” Harry enthuses. He set up Manhattan Loft Corporation in 1992. To date around 1,000 apartments have been completed in the UK and Germany.

“We’ve no concerns about building something new though,” he adds. “Even our first scheme in London – Bankside Lofts next to what is now Tate Modern – was part newbuild. So much other new development seems too simplistic. It needs to be more energetic, more dramatic. We want to give our developments a bit of punch!” There’s nothing unenergetic or undramatic about St Pancras Renaissance Hotel. And it literally has punch – as we will discover later.

Two decades after he brought loft living to London, he’s also the best man to know what’s next in the residential development world of 2011. “High rise apartments. That’s the way things are going,” states Harry. “London is the most exciting city in the world. Development can make such a positive contribution. It’s not all about commerce. Each of our projects is different. An exciting thing is that we can make a positive difference to the cityscape. We are incredibly privileged. My team is second to none, combining creativity and commitment. I wish the planning regime would be simplified but any issues aren’t insurmountable. There’s enough appreciation of design quality. If it was all smooth sailing I wouldn’t have any grey hairs!”

Also in 2011, a busy year, we reviewed the hotel opening for Luxury Travel Magazine. Paris in two hours. Amsterdam in four hours. Lobby in 2.4 minutes. Those are the travel times from the First Class platform of the Eurostar train in London to St Pancras Renaissance Hotel … and so we continued, the excitement lifting off the screen. The motif of the hotel is the peacock which represents rejuvenation – and not just vanity (although with such architectural beauty that would be justifiable). When a peacock loses a feather it grows back perfectly. St Pancras is more like plume replacement. In 1865 Sir George Gilbert Scott won a competition held by Midland Railway to design a hotel for St Pancras Station. The client’s vision was for an understated building. The architect had other ideas.

A Gothic Revival extravaganza, his gargantuan fairytale confection of towers, turrets and terracotta tiles overwhelmed visitors when it opened in 1873, did once again in 2011, and still does in 2025. The verticality of a 72 metre high clocktower is balanced by the horizontality of a sweep of 150 metre wide frontage and the third of a kilometre depth including engineer William Barlow’s railway terminus behind the hotel. If the hotel is all about design and detailing, the terminus with its 800 cast iron columns and 2,000 wrought iron girders is a pure expression of structure and function – the sort of thundering modernity captured on canvas down the line in Joseph Turner’s 1844 Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway.

Sir George’s design incorporated all the latest fittings too: the first lift in a British hotel; the first revolving door in Britain; 40 centimetre thick fireproof walls. The latter was to contribute to its downfall. Time stands still for no architect or builder or hotelier. Not long after it opened, en suite bathrooms became all the rage for grand hotels. Thick internal walls did not adapt well to the insertion of bathrooms. The hotel eventually closed after just 62 years of operation and was downgraded to British Rail offices. It was even threatened with demolition in the 1960s before Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman successfully campaigned for its retention.

This Grade I Listed Building was finally saved by Harry Handelsman. A labour of love, albeit an expensive affair. His company Manhattan Loft Corporation spent £100 million converting the three upper floors to 67 apartments and a further £150 million rejuvenating the remainder of the building back to a hotel. It’s a physical embodiment of joie de vivre. The peacock’s feathers have truly regrown. Such rare and colourful plumage! The original entrance hall is now a bar with a polychromatic corniced ceiling, encaustic filed floors and walls dripping in gold leaf. Upstairs, the Renaissance inspired ceiling of the Ladies’ Smoking Room cost nearly £1 million to restore. It was the first place in Europe where females could acceptably smoke in public. This room now aptly leads onto a smoking terrace (or at least did until the boring ban was introduced).

The St Pancras Railway Terminus designed by engineer William Henry Barlow was – wait for it, another record breaker – the single largest railway structure of its time. The former taxi rank between the railway shed and original hotel (originally the pedestrian entrance to the railway platforms) has been converted into a cavernous glass roofed lobby lounge. The adjacent Booking Office is now a brasserie and bar serving traditional English delights such as quail’s eggs with anchovies. Victorian drinks like Garrick Club Punch and Moonlight White Tea are served on neverending bar. The grand staircase is the interior pièce de resistance. It’s a cathedral of colour with hand painted fleur de lys walls framed by Midland Stone arches and vaults. Exposed structural ironwork under the flights of stair fuses romance and technology. Harry’s workforce even aged the carpet on the dizzying array of fanciful flights of stairs. In 2011, we observed that the limestone pillared Gilbert Scott Restaurant looked positively restrained in comparison. Celebrity Chef Marcus Wareing’s team offered its own take on nostalgic classics such as Queen Anne’s Artichoke Tart and Mrs Beeton’s Snow Egg. The Gilbert Scott Restaurant was the setting of our first lunch with Dame Rosalind Savill, then Director of The Wallace Collection, London’s best museum.

Harry carved 38 bedrooms out of the old building and inserted 207 into a new sympathetically designed extension. Once more, the hotel caters for the demands of five star guests. A subterranean spa occupies the former steam kitchen. Our Luxury Travel Magazine 2011 article ended with Stairway to Seven (Facts). A double storey apartment is housed in the clocktower. English Heritage only allowed a 20 colour palette which includes Barlow Blue and Midland Red. The latter hue has a tomato tinge to it, an augury of our 2025 dinner. On Thursday nights in 2011, DJ Eloise rocked the Booking Office and on Friday nights it was the turn of DJ Zulu. The diamond shape is another motif of the hotel and 725 can be found in the Booking Office.

In 2018, Harry reminisced, “I always knew that St Pancras would be a challenge. The complexity of the structure and the Grade I Listing by English Heritage allowing only minimum intervention in the creation of a 21st century hotel was always going to be difficult. Many of my business compatriots thought that I was mad for undertaking such an ambitious project. At times I thought they were right. It was the sheer excitement and privilege of being given the opportunity and responsibility for this most fascinating building that kept me from desperation.”

That was then and this is now: 2025 to be precise. We’re staying in a modern bedroom of St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, dining in the restaurant and late night drinking in the hotel opposite. Bedroom furniture was graduated by wood when our hotel first opened. The best rooms on the first floor contained pieces made of oak or walnut. Second floor rooms had oak or teak furniture; third floor, mahogany; poor old fourth floor, ash. Decoration is more democratic this time round. Our fourth floor room is elegant simplicity: pattern free, clutter free, bad artwork free. The view is of the British Library, another vast red brick building (designed by Colin St John Wilson in the 1990s) although not quite so beloved as its neighbour. Our two paned rectangular window is set in a Gothic arch on the exterior: contemporary inside, traditional outside. Richard Griffiths’ architecture hits all the right notes. RHWL was the overseeing design practice of the development. Encaustic tiles on the floors of the long bedroom corridors draws the original hotel into the extension which fits neatly between the rear of the hotel and the side of the station.

The Gilbert Scott Restaurant closed in 2021. Two years later, The Midland Grand Dining Room by Patrick Powell (an Irish chef) opened before closing last year. And that brings us to The Midland Grand Dining Room by Victor Garvey (a mostly American chef). His CV includes working at two of the world’s most famous restaurants: El Bulli in Barcelona and Noma Copenhagen. Victor’s maternal grandmother was a personal chef for Charles de Gaulle so it makes sense the rebooted restaurant offers French haute cuisine even before you hop across the Channel on the Eurostar.

“There are only a few times in a chef’s life when they get handed a dining room,” says Victor, “and I’m extremely honoured and privileged and excited to be able to embark on this journey in something like this. The idea behind the menu here stems from respecting tradition but innovating and making it lighter and making it more streamlined and making it more concise and finding a way to tell the story of that incredibly deep French culinary heritage and respecting it but updating it. Old world, new ideas.” The sausage shaped Dining Room has a robust neoclassicism of the mid Victorian muscularity ilk befitting its original use as the Smoking Room. The Midland Grand isn’t the only French newcomer in town: a week later we will venture to the wildly popular Joséphine Bouchon in Fulham for cabillaud au beurre blanc à l’é chalote. Chef Claud Bossi of Bibendum South Kensington fame is once again putting the Lyon into lyonnaise in the English Capital.

Tick tock. It’s Pimm’s O’Clock on the Champagne Terrace (we’ve worked up a thirst strolling through the wetland habitat of Camley Street Park). One of London’s hidden gems, the Champagne Terrace is perched below the back of the hotel entrance tower and looked down on from the modern bedroom wing. Oysters are only to be consumed in months with an R and Pimm’s are only to be downed in months without an R. James Pimm’s recipe of liqueurs and herbs remains a warm weather winner 185 years after it was trademarked. In The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982), Peter York and Ann Barr order, “May: at the first sign of summer, Pimm’s.” But no accompanying oysters.

We’re all on for tenuously excused partying and it doesn’t come much better than the 5.05pm Punch Ritual in the Booking Office for guests to celebrate the 152nd anniversary of the original hotel opening. It’s a few days off the actual date (5 May) but we don’t fuss about detail. Historic fountain penned letters from the hotel’s archives are shared while the sommelier stirs his cauldron of elixir. We’ve barely ordered more drinks in the main hotel bar when we’re ushered to our window table in The Midland Grand Dining Room. Oh the anticipation! The à la carte caters for the carnivorous so our waitress suggests vegetarian alternatives. In between pretty amuse bouches and freshly baked bread we’re served a sliced tomato starter and a diced tomato main. We’re all on for retaining our Parisian waistlines. Minimalist plates in maximalist architecture. Pudding is l’Opéra which turns out to be a delightfully deconstructed coffee cake.

A quick dash across the road and we’re soon zooming up 11 storeys in the external lift of The Standard Hotel to Sweeties bar for Power Play cocktails (Belvedere Vodka, Dry Vermouth, Sweeties Savoury Brine). We skip the Bloody Marys: enough tomato for one day. Sure enough, against a darkening pink sky, St Pancras Renaissance Hotel looms in all its pinnacled silhouetted glory. But it’s not over till the fat lady sings or the slim girl walks: before stepping onto the First Class Eurostar to post paschal pastures anew in Paris we’re off to Lightroom (a Louboutin’s throw from the hotel and Central St Martin’s Art College) for a Vogue installation. A tomato red Mercedes roars up and the fashion artist Dame Mary Martin emerges to join us – from the hemline to the frontline of fashion. So now.

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Sir John Soane’s Museum Holborn London + Richard Rogers

Architectural Communication

The extraordinary townhouse that is Sir John Soane’s Museum has played host to many exciting exhibitions drawing synergy from the riveting interiors. Highlights of the last nine years include shows featuring Alcantara (microfibre fabric) and Space Popular (multidisciplinary design practice); Emily Allchurch (artist); William Shakespeare (a certain playwright); and Sarah Lucas (artist). The latest is the first UK retrospective since his demise of the work of Richard Rogers, leading exponent of High Tech architecture. And so, at 13 Lincoln’s Inns Fields two architects who had a passion for materials, light and life meet posthumously.

Will Gompertz, Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum, opens the exhibition: “Rogers Pink completely fits with the vibe of the good weather and also aesthetically fits with the vibe of Soane as next door in the South Drawing Room there is this extraordinary colour field of yellow which is called Turner Yellow – not Turner the painter but Turner the designer – which he very specifically chose and then you’ve got the Rogers Pink in this exhibition. I think Soane would approve of this enormously and also he would have loved Richard as a man. They would have had so much in common.”

“The exhibition started three weeks after I began as Director here and Richard’s son Ab got on the phone and said, ‘Can I come round with an idea?’ He came round and five minutes later we had a show! Ab’s idea was for the Soane to show the first retrospective of Richard Rogers in this country since he sadly passed. And the answer was emphatically yes.”

Ab provides a tour of the exhibition Talking Buildings: “It’s a simple show based on eight pivotal projects across his career. It’s really about this escalating idea how the buildings talk to each other. I think Richard really wanted his architecture to talk to the people, to improve the quality of the citizens’ lives, to celebrate the streets, to get people to look up at the sky, to enjoy the public space and to really look at the responsibility of the building to respond to its uses.”

“This ongoing conversation started with the Zip Up House which is a solution to social housing. It is an object made out of prefabricated units, incredibly well insulated, that can continuously grow and expand. He was looking at sustainable issues before there was awareness of them in 1969. The house he designed for his mother and father also in 1969 creates this very open space where there’s no specific programme and you’re free to play with it as you will. You can roll out of the building and into the grass – it’s very free, almost boundaryless.”

“And that plays into the Pompidou Centre in Paris where 50 percent of the site is given to the public; you see all the services taken from the inside to the outside to free up the programme of the interior. And you can argue that this free programme that exists inside the Pompidou also exists inside the Zip Up House. This escalation goes on and then he creates Lloyds Building – this shining armour sitting in the historical setting of the City of London. They’re both very brave and radical buildings. Lloyds was the youngest building to be Listed in the UK.”

“We go on to the Millennium Dome, a building which was quite controversial at its time although it came in on budget and on time. This huge roof held a world beneath it. The Dome was meant to be up for one year but instead 25 years later like the Eiffel Tower it becomes this icon of the capital. And from there we go back to social housing looking at The Treehouse which is a collection of ‘shoeboxes’ fabricated from cross laminated timber, rapidly assembled as a tower and very low cost. The roof of one becomes the garden of the next creating these ‘shoeboxes’ with free programmes.”

“We see this conversation and idea continue when we finally end up in the drawing gallery which takes us back to the Zip Up House’s very muscular cantilevered box. It is designed like a telescope with a straight line of viewing out to the landscape. Talking Buildings is a quick journey really trying to work around this conversation and Richard’s passion for creating civic architecture which is generous to the citizens and generous to the streets, while trying to provoke the role of the developer and the council to be bigger and more integrated.” This show adds yet another layer of brilliance to the immersive multimedia experience that is Sir John Soane’s Museum.

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Fleet Street Quarter + Lady Lucy French OBE + Oskar Zięta + Whispers

Wielka Sztuka

“Good morning. Dzień dobry. Deputy Ambassador, honoured guests, ladies and gentlemen,” welcomes Lady Lucy French OBE, looking very on brand in a salmon pink and blush orange outfit in New Ludgate. She is CEO of the Fleet Street Quarter. “It is really fantastic to see so many people here in the Fleet Street Quarter for a very special moment: the unveiling of Whispers which is a collaboration to mark the UK Polish Season and to launch the London Festival of Architecture. This project has been a real coalition of the willing, of people coming together.” The Polish Cultural Institute sits right at the heart of the Fleet Street Quarter on Bouverie Street.

Lady Lucy continues, “This has been such a privilege to get to know you all! The UK Polish Season is very much a celebration of our two countries’ enduring collaboration highlighting cultural dialogue and opportunity. And the art of the possible! The Festival theme of Voices and Polish artist Oskar Zięta’s Whispers echo the ethos of this season: cultural dialogue, discussion, debate. As Dr Johnson, our esteemed former resident and father of the UK dictionary once said, ‘You raise your voice when you should reinforce your argument.’ I would suggest that perhaps we need more whispers around the world right now. So it is a wonderful thing to have Whispers in this part of London!”

Fleet Street Quarter is a Business Improvement District that represents the voice of business across 43 hectares of the western side of the City of London. Established three years ago, it has four strategic aims: putting Fleet Street Quarter firmly on the map; being clean and green; promoting safety and security; and creating connected communities. Lady Lucy relates that when she visited Oskar and his wife Agata Świderska-Zięta in Wroclaw: “I was just blown away by the extraordinary magic they create in their studio! It’s a compound of science, technology and art.”

She concludes, “This technology will change and is changing the world. And you are shortly going to witness a little bit of modern alchemy. I cannot think of a more fitting location for this installation. We are in the shadow of the great St Paul’s Cathedral, a wonderful monument by Sir Christopher Wren. And indeed like Sir Christopher Wren, Oskar is very much an expert in science and engineering and art. So Oskar you have a lot in common with Sir Christopher Wren and it’s such a pleasure to have you here today.”

But first there’s breakfast in New Ludgate, a reinvented urban block designed by Fletcher Priest and Sauerbruch Hutton formed of two office buildings separated by a passageway named Belle Sauvage after a 15th century coaching inn that once operated nearby. A tradition of six centuries of good hospitality continues with Purpose Catering’s buffet. Scottish smoked salmon blinis; Provençale cake with mozzarella, sundried tomato and basil; and orange and olive oil cake all maintain the brand colourway of salmon pink and blush orange.

Oskar ushers everyone outside New Ludgate for the street performance to begin. Dignitaries from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Republic of Poland join Lady Lucy and Oskar on the pavement to pump up a piece of flat steel using Zięta Studio’s pioneering FiDU metal inflation technology. Minutes later – and much to the fascination of passing commuters – a two metre long boxy steel sculpture is added to the two cylindrical forms already erected on the pavement. The quiet collection is complete.

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Micky Damm + Studio Baukunst Düsseldorf

Rethinking Urban Space Through Architecture and Art: Innovation, Preservation and Sustainability in Modern Design

“Coming from the Art Academy we want to have a little bit of art always incorporated into every project. It’s always different: it can be something typical like art integrated into the building or meanwhile uses such as exhibitions before we start to build,” says Micky Damm who founded the architectural practice Studio Baukunst with fellow alumnus Philipp Bilke and their former professor, Karl-Heinz Petzinka. They now have 15 employees. “I studied architecture and fine art – sculpture at Kunstakademie.”

Their studio on Oberbilker Allee in Düsseldorf is a case in point. The bronze wheat sheaf entrance door handle sculpted by Joscha Bender provides a clue to the site’s origins and the practice’s ethos. “This used to be a farm a few hundred years ago called Leeschenhof. ‘Doff’ is village and ‘hof’ is farm.” He jests, “That’s all the German you need!” The two storey 1950s villa was refaced in natural stone. An attached single storey bow cornered building was formerly a DIY store.

Micky explains, “I started out as a graffiti artist in my teens. It was a good connection looking with my eyes on the city for spots to spray. I am still reading the city but instead of providing text somewhere I now build houses. Since we launched Studio Baukunst in 2018 it is about building a big dream. The funny thing is there are parts of north Düsseldorf where there is no graffiti at all. Outsiders would come in and go oh this is a good area. But it’s a boring area! No one has been there. So you often have graffiti as an indicator that something is going on. There is graffiti in Bilk, this area where our studio is located.” Graffiti was written on the fascia of the DIY store when it closed down. It translates as, “We don’t want to have gentrification here.” Studio Baukunst kept the graffiti. The parking bays to the rear are going to be removed and replaced with a pocket park. Striking green tiles are currently being wrapped round the ground floor exterior of the apartment building completing this urban block.

It’s hard not to talk about Bauhaus in a German architecture studio. Micky argues, “Bauhaus is influential in terms of straight and clear architecture and having big ideas in small spaces. So it’s all about the greatness of architecture – the decisions you have over everything. You always have to keep in mind what you are working on and not lose your way. The built Bauhaus projects are so great in all sorts of different dimensions: footprint, floorplans, materials. Everything follows one idea and this has been a huge influence on our way of thinking.”

But he thinks there’s a downside: “Right now I have problems with Bauhaus today because too many people use it as an excuse to build boring things. Money is no excuse. That was the nice thing about Bauhaus: you have great architecture in economic spaces. Today when people have the excuse we need more money to make something better I am like no! Lack of money is not a reason to build something that is not good. it just sets the parameters you are working with.”

Take his latest office scheme in the city: “When we design workspace we want to make it more interesting to attract the young people back into the office. So we create spaces that are so unusual that you would never have them at home in your apartment. We want it to be a benefit for employees to be in these special spaces. We have placed a tower of balconies linked by gangways to the front of an existing 1950s building. Every 500 square metres of internal office space has a 50 square metres balcony. We want to have office space outside too. So it is like you can talk on the open deck of your boat! We want to get away from the same boring spaces.”

This innovative approach flows from outside spaces through external walls to internal spaces. Micky says, “So for example here inside our studio we had the problem that there wasn’t enough concrete over the steel. We didn’t have the required 90 minute fire protection so we had to spray three centimetres of concrete onto everything. But instead of hiding the sprayed concrete we’re keeping it exposed. Ordinarily everything is completely different and we leave it that way. The rough textures of the walls contrast with the shiny floor. It’s good to get this together. In our projects every colour is usually the result of the material. Although there is a typical industrial green and a fire protection red so we make an exception and don’t count them as colours!”

Sustainability is such an overused word but like everything, Micky has his own original take on it. “What do we have to do so that things last very long? When we talk about sustainability it’s not really about how much insulation we put into the walls. It’s about how we develop the architecture as a whole so that it remains for a very long time because it has good spaces. We’re not so much about developing new forms. There are other practices doing that. We’re about cutting things out and making new collages together. Just as a DJ starts cutting out music and arranging new songs by putting them together that’s how we think about architecture.”

Are there any modern practices he admires? “Lederer Ragnarsdóttir Oei known as LRO in Stuttgart. What I like about them is that they have different projects of different sizes and they have different answers to the site specific questions. But you can always see their handwriting on everything. So they are following a bigger idea of architecture. Then there are other big architects you can go to and ask for a Bauhaus house, a classical house, any style of house. If you do everything what is your own idea of architecture? So I do like the architects that have their own idea of practice and are not just doing development for others.”

Micky’s tour of his studio ends on a high in the new glasshouse on top of the villa building. “There are so many lines that are happening. The staircase or ‘water tower’ with the round form doesn’t care about all the structure lines of the house. It’s just here. Every rectangle aligns in this glasshouse but the round water tower is just there. You walk up the stairs through the dark then you open the door and you have the light of the glasshouse. And that’s the idea of architecture, experiencing how spaces can change. It’s about the space beyond the floorplan too.”

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Düsseldorf +

Completing the Circle

“He made a circle out of a lake; he formed two rivers from the circle; he flooded and destroyed an island, creating a sea,” writes Gore Vidal in The City and the Pillar (1949). “Dorf means ‘village’ and Düssel is a tributary flowing into the Rhine,” announces the well informed tour guide Katja Stuben. The origins of the city may lie in 7th century farming and fishing settlements where the minor River Düssel flows into the major River Rhine. In 1288 the ruling Count Adolf V of Berg granted a town charter to Düsseldorf. “Today there are around 700,000 people living in Düsseldorf but it still resembles a village. It is a friendly local community with all the benefits of a city.”

“Düsseldorf mainly developed on the east side of the Rhine,” Katja explains. “Only about 10 percent of it is on the west side in Oberkassel, Niederkassel, Lörick and Heerdt. During World War II much of the city was damaged or destroyed but the Art Deco residential buildings in Oberkassel were relatively unscathed. These are now some of the best properties in the city overlooking the riverside Rheinwiesen Meadows.” There is a surprisingly large restored and rebuilt Old Town known as Altstadt. “The cobblestoned square of Burgplatz connects the banks of the Rhine to Altstadt. In the middle of Burgplatz is Schlossturm, the remaining medieval tower of the ducal palace.”

Two of the oldest and grandest buildings in Altstadt are the Catholic Churches of St Lambertus and St Andreas. Founded in 1288, St Lambertus overlooks a courtyard behind Burgplatz. Its wonky spire, one of the many idiosyncratic glories of the city’s exhilarating skyline, is the result of an 1815 reconstruction which was too heavy making the roof tiles gradually twist. In contrast to the red brick walls of St Lambertus, the exterior of St Andreas is painted lemon yellow and pepper grey. This Baroque ecclesiastical edifice founded in 1622 stands further to the east of Burgplatz. HeimWerk is the best brasserie in Altstadt to sample schnitzel. The vegetarian option is vegetable and potato rösti in a marinade of horseradish and mustard topped by carrot flakes.

“Japanese people settled in Düsseldorf in the middle of the 20th century,” records Katja. “They came to establish businesses in the steel industry. The population of this city is now around one percent Japanese. Little Tokyo is the Japanese business district. The Michelin starred Nagaya is one of the best Japanese restaurants in Europe. There are still traditional Eastern travel agents in Little Tokyo.” Heading westwards geographically and culturally, Königsallee is devoted to luxury fashion houses and hotels. The glitzy five star Steigenberger Park Hotel overlooks this verdant boulevard. Its retail concessions include Dolce Gabbana, Givenchy, Stefano Ricci, Catherine Sauvage and Wellendorff. Everyone and everything in this postcode is preened to perfection, even the posing pondside ducks.

“Let’s go up the 240 metre high Rheinturm – the Rhine Tower!” suggests Katja heading back to the river. “The penultimate floor viewing gallery of the tower rotates a full circle once an hour like it’s on rollerblades.” Slanting windows frame an eagle eye’s view of the Landtag North Rhine-Westphalia Parliament building completed in 1988 to the design of Eller Maier Walter. Its floorplate of overlapping and concentric circles draws on an aspiration for openness and transparency in politics. A decade younger is Frank Gehry’s RheinHafen Arts and Media Centre on Am HandelsHafen in his “where’s my T square gone” trademark idiom. Each of the three curvilinear concrete volumes is individually finished. The northernmost block is white painted render. The southernmost, red brick. The middle block is coated in stainless steel. Using identical rectangular windows set in deep surrounds (except for the ground floor windows which are similar but taller) demonstrates the architect’s functionality of fenestration amidst whimsy of form. Later, the moon will rest on this tricoloured trio.

She points out, “Look down again and beyond RheinHafen is MedienHafen, the Media Harbour which was the old riverside industrial area. It mostly accommodates media, communications, IT and fashion companies now. Many of the big international architects have designed buildings there: Will Alsop, David Chipperfield, Steven Holl, Helmut Jahn,  Renzo Piano. Ok, let’s go shopping now. Schadow Arkaden on Schadowstrasse is one of the large shopping centres in Düsseldorf.” The nearest subway station is a work of art. A screen over the line records anonymised images of passengers entering the building with a few minutes delay, deriving geometries – many circular – from their movements. Called Turnstile, this installation was designed by local artist Ursula Damm.

Borrowing the words of Gore Vidal “On the warmest and greenest afternoon of the spring” Carlsplatz is where everyone aesthetically pleasing is hanging out for food and wine. It’s a downtown upmarket market. “Three guys – Philipp Kutsch, Björn Schwethelm and Nico von der Ohe – started Concept Riesling in Carlsplatz in 2017. They source from young to vintage wineries. There are 1,500 bottles to choose from priced right up to €7,000,” Katja confirms. Prost! Sláinte! Cartwheeling is the urban sport of Düsseldorf. Happiness is the city’s default disposition. Next to Concept Reisling is a potato stall; many varieties have girls’ names. Adretta, Gunda, Laura, Marabel, Rose, Theresa and Violet all vie for attention.

“Twilight and the day ended,” prompts Gore Vidal. There’s so much promise and pleasure in the air. Destination: The Paradise Now on Hammerstrasse. Co owner Garciano Manzambi shares, “I wanted to bring the holiday vibe of Mykonos to my hometown. We can accommodate 800 people who come early and stay late. Come with me and check out the nightclub.” But first there is caramel and truffle pasta to enjoy on the vast terrace. And bread. “This butter is heated and whipped to give the taste of nut and truffle,” explains the friendly waitress. Everyone is friendly in Düsseldorf. “Your wine is from the Pfalz, one of the famous regions of German vineyard production.” Sorbet is Stilllebenmalerei. The Paradise Now is open till 3am on weekends. The hot DJ is already mixing cool tunes. Everyone here is genetically blessed and materially privileged. Dining, drinking and dancing in the same venue till dawn or at least the wee small hours will unfold as a theme of this city. Fast forward 24 hours and cruising up the Rhine on the KD (Köln-Düsseldorfer) is what it’s all about. Good food, good company, good music and thank goodness two discos to shape those midnight grooves.

On another day, leading journalist and trend consultant Ilona Marx cuts a dash as she shares her creative passions under the constant blue velvet sky which is crisscrossed by white streaks, a reminder that the airport lies in the city itself. Five years ago, goldsmith and jewellery designer Lisa Scherebnenko took over as Director of Orfèvre. The gallery and workshop is on the prestigious Bastionstrasse. She relates, “I use classy materials for jewellery: silver, gold, platinum but also tantalum which is a very special one. Do you know about it? Tantalum is a super nice material and not a lot of jewellers use it because it’s very hard to work with. But it’s very beautiful and really lovely on every skin.” Very fine jewellery has been made in Orfèvre since it opened in 1969. Her Rope Collection uses intertwined circular forms. Further down Bastionstrasse is Constanze Muhle’s eponymous atelier. “This is a hidden gem with collections from the likes of Nasco, Neni and Bruno Marnetti inside,” Ilona observes. “Constanze is incredibly well informed.”

Ilona states, “Ruby Luna is one of our trendiest hotels. The name comes from the popularity of the moon landing in the mid 20th century. This building started life as a Commerzbank drive through in the 1960s. It was designed by architect Paul Schneider-Esleben. You can still see the control panel of the bank which is now the breakfast bar of the hotel! Come on up to the rooftop terrace for a view of the city and the Rhine.” Upstream is Kunstpalast which celebrates art history. Mid 20th century Arno Breker figurative sculptures line the lawn. Midtown is K20, another museum, known for its modernist art such as Andy Warhol’s 1962 silkscreen ink and pencil on linen A Woman’s Suicide.

Lunch of porcini mushroom ravioli is on the stylish terrace of Schillings overlooking Hofgarten. This restaurant is on the ground floor of Schauspielhaus. The theatre with its white ribbed concrete exterior forms an enigmatic volume resting on pilotis (The City and the Pillars pluralised into physicality?) in front of the partly glazed ground floor. It was built to the design of local architect Bernhard Pfau in 1970 and has an enigmatically timeless quality. The dining room is as monochromatic as the exterior. Previously, Katya had discussed some local cuisine. “Himmel und Erde is a traditional brewery dish. It is mashed apple and potato. The name means literally ‘sky and ground’! Then there is Sauerbraten which is made of hot brown raisin. Adam Bertram Bergrath mustard or ‘ABB’ dates back to 1726. It comes in a refillable ceramic pot. Van Gogh included a pot in one of his paintings.” A circularity of existence.

Cultural hours with creative Düsseldorfers don’t come any better than learning about art and fashion and life with Hiroyuki Murase, Kaoli Mashio and Klaus Rosskothen. CEO and Creative Director of the internationally successful fashion and interiors label Suzusan, Hiroyuki has a studio in a historic former bakery building in Ronsdorferstrasse. He relates, “My family have been doing the dyeing technique called Shibori for 100 years. This traditional craft is usually for making kimonos but I use it in a contemporary way for a range of clothes as well as cushions and other items for the home.” Hiroyuki’s wife Kaoli’s studio is hidden at the end of a wisteria clad mews in the Grafenberger Wald area. Her critically acclaimed paintings and mixed media art are borne of an intense study of simplicity, nonduality and infinity. Across the city, former graffiti artist Klaus established Pretty Portal on Brunnenstrasse in 2007. His influential gallery represents emerging and established urban artists across Europe.

Later, architect Micky Damm of Studio Baukunst in the Bilk quarter will complete the circle. “We always try to develop circles. We want a client to have a bigger benefit than he would usually expect. And at the end of every project we want everyone to look with their eyes and say we would like to do another project. So that’s it. Those are the terms of the circle. We are developing properties for clients but we also support the subculture of artists and musicians. So you need the creatives and clubs to have this special space. And the other ones who pay full rent. This keeps a space alive. If you make these circles work then everyone is happy.” Everyone is happy. This is Düsseldorf turning full circle.

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Montparnasse Tower Paris +

Positive Capability

Dawn in winter 2019. Noon in spring 2025. Oh how the years go by. A century ago, Montparnasse hosted the vanguard of avant garde Paris. Writer Gertrude Stein’s partner Alice Toklas once called it “the city of boulevard bars and Baudeloire”. Poet Guillaume Apollinaire went further referring to it as “a quarter of crazies”. It was home for Marianne Faithfull from riding in a sportscar to missing the moon. Behind Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s homogeneity and square cut gentility lies the mysterious courtyard life of Paris played out in the penumbra of Montparnasse Tower. It’s a 32 second lift ride to the 59th floor of the tower to view the sacred horizontality and profane verticality.

The skyscraper in all its splendid isolation was completed in 1973 to the design of Eugène Beaudouin, Urbain Cassan, Louis de Hoÿm de Marien and Jean Saubot. The Tower’s height, all 210 metres, was not universally welcomed. It didn’t quite accord with Baron Haussmann’s rule that no building should be taller than the width of the boulevard on which it stood. Two years after Montparnasse Tower’s completion, President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing banned buildings over 32 metres in central Paris. In recent times, the limit has been relaxed to 50 metres but only on a case by case basis. Wallpaper* City Guide, 2022, provides a contemporary reassessment, admiring the Tower’s “wonderfully gridded curtain wall” before adding, “The redevelopment of the down-at-heel area around Gare Montparnasse in the early 1960s was, by and large, a piece of inspired city planning.”

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Lavender’s Blue + 1,000 Articles

Upward We Fly

The Tuamgraney born London based novelist Edna O’Brien once remarked, “There’s a very interesting thing about memory and exile. It is only when you leave someone or something that the full power if you like, the performance of it is in you, it’s inside you. So separation brings the emotions and ultimately a book. I think a book is the accumulation of emotions written in a particular, hopefully musical, way. It’s a beautiful feeling actually; it’s like the whole influx of something that is stronger than memory. Of course, it’s memory but you’re back in it, not writing it secondhand. Again, that counts for a certain derangement.”

It all started with Cliveden. In September 2012, we received an invitation to stay in the Berkshire hotel but as hard copy publications back then were disappearing faster than Veuve Cliquot at one of our soirées, we came up with the idea of publishing an article online. And so Lavender’s Blue was born. The name has triple derivation after our home (“Your house is so cinematic!” declares film director Stephan Pierre Mitchell), our location and the song by Marillion. Before long, every PR in London and further afield learned we always turn up, give good party, and even better copy. Although five parties in one day starting with an 11am Champagne reception for New York thinker John Mack in the Rosewood Hotel was pushing it even by our standards. Actually, it all really began in April 1995 with a column House of the Month in Ulster Architect magazine, edited and published by the bold and brave and brilliant Anne Davey Orr. But that’s a whole other story.

While most events are one-offs, from a vanishing crystal coach at Ascot to a vanishing guest on the Orient Express, others would become annual events. If the preview of Masterpiece (in Royal Hospital Chelsea grounds) was an early summer hit each year, the Boutique Hotel Awards (in Merchant Taylor’s Hall) would quickly become a midwinter highlight. Fortunately Masterpiece has been replaced by The Treasure House Fair and WOW!house and we’ve landed ourselves on their preview lists. We’re also proving a hit at the annual International Media Marketplace.

Behind the curtain. That’s our forte. And we don’t just mean peeping round the iron variety (think Gdańsk). We’re not only through the gates: we’re over the threshold. We gain access where others dare not tread. If it’s an Irish country house, we’ll stay with the owners and explore the cellars and attics – preferably when they’re tucked up in their fourposter (Temple House). We’ll pop into the kitchen to see what’s really going on whether in Le Bristol or Comme Chez Soi. We’ll talk to the lady of the manor and a millworker (Sion Mills). Sometimes it takes a village to raise an article: in Castletownshend the fun began over breakfast at The Castle continuing through public houses and private houses up Main Street before ending back in The Castle by dawn.

If “design” is the mauve thread that sews Lavender’s Blue together, “celebration of life” is our way of banishing anything mentally blue. Illuminated by art and architecture, fashion and the Divine, we’re mad for life, channelling that literary derangement. But if it ain’t good, it don’t appear. Simple. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some events are far too private to be published such as an impresario salon recital in one of London’s grandest houses surrounded by more Zoffanys than The National Gallery owns while sampling the owners’ South African wine cellar. Or a party in Corke Lodge, County Wicklow, with more diplomats per square metre than Kensington Palace Gardens being serenaded by the Whiffenpoofs on the folly gladed lawn.

Lavender’s Blue is all about places and people so we rarely do personal. You won’t read how we were catastrophically frogmarched out of The Lanesborough (too much catwalking) or categorically told to pipe down in Launceston Place (too much caterwauling). Or the full story of hijinks with the model Parees which one friend described as sounding like an escapade from an Armistead Maupin short story. Original writing and original photography – and occasionally original drawing (from a two minute sketch of Mountainstown House to a 10 hour floor plan of Derrymore House) – are our creative cornerstones. We never plagiarise except from ourselves: to quote from one of our most read articles, Beaulieu House, “Lavender’s Blue is the brilliant coated edition of universal facts, riveting mankind, bringing nice and pretty events.” We’ll coin the odd phrase too from “Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder” to “You can’t be this fabulous and not make a few enemies!”

What’s our literary style? Well we’re not paid up members of Plain English for starters. Lord Wolfe would blanche at such opening gambits as, “There’s nothing standard in The Standard” or “Mary Martin London fashion is more than an antinomic macédoine: it is a semiotic embrace of science and conviction made manifest in materiality, tactility and sartorial disruption”. There are a quarter of a million English words to choose from (compared to a mere 100,000 in French and a meagre 85,000 in Chinese) so why reach for simplicity when you can stretch the lexicon? We don’t like to namedrop but as Daphne Guinness shared with us about her lyrics at a party in Notting Hill, “There are some words I just really like the sound of!” A picture tells 1,000 words and sometimes we’ll deliver 1,000 words and 1,000 pictures. But how can you keep the shutter open when you’re cherishing Chatsworth or roaming round Rochester? We’re not just about obvious glitz and glamour. So we frequent Hôtel Meurice in Paris and Hôtel Meurice in Calais. We’ve explored Georgian Bath and Georgian Dover. Doubling down on clichés is avoided except in derision while downing Chapel Down south of the Kent Downs.

How long does an article take to prepare? Some flow with automatic writing on a commute or in bed or in the bath in almost unconscious reverie. Others take decades. Mourne Park House started with a memorable visit in 1992 (the boathouse collapsed and gracefully slid into the lake mid morning coffee) and continued with return visits up to 2021 (by then the house was badly burnt). Crevenagh House was photographed over two decades in every season from heavy snow to scorching sunshine. We visited Gunnersbury Park four times over a London heatwave to capture it morning, noon, evening, and after supper. We also vacationed at Murlough four times, Irish Sea hopping in search of elusive sunlight. Montevetro and Marlfield both first appeared in Ulster Architect before being resurrected on Lavender’s Blue. Marlfield is the work of genius architect Alfred Cochrane with later lodges by the talented Albert Noonan. And on that note, John O’Connell’s work (Montalto) and tours (Ranger’s House) have added an abundance of sparkle to Lavender’s Blue.

We’re always up for top drawer collaborations: polo in Buenos Aires; the Government in Montenegro; Audi in Istanbul; Boutique Hotels Club in Bruges; Guggenheim in Bilbao; Rare Champagne in Paris. Did we mention Paris? The friendliest city in the world! As long as you’re in the right set, of course. We know our French, spring, red and rings. Oh, and we’re easily dragooned to fashion shows stretching the bailiwick especially when it comes to fashion artist Mary Martin London. Vintage models (Goodwood, Carmen dell’Orefice and Pattie Boyd), modern models (Esther Blakley, Janice Blakley and Katie Ice – all beautiful, all gazelles), royalty (Queen Ronke and Catherine Princess of Wales) and pop star royalty (Heather Small) have all enjoyed Lavender’s Blue exposure. There are even occasional segues into filming (Newzroom Afrika and English Heritage) and the dreaded bashing of ivories (Rabbit).

The current culmination of Lavender’s Blue is an exquisitely printed hardback coffee table book of substance on the Holy Land. The first edition of SABBATH PLUS ONE was an instant sellout at Daunt Books Marylebone. It’s now on the coffee tables of all the best homes – including a certain Clarence House. Oh yes, King Charles III is really enjoying his copy. “Your most thoughtful gesture is greatly appreciated …” So it’s time for the second edition. Same high quality print with a reddish burgundy rather than navy blue hard back hand stitched fabric cover. We’re still gonna vaunt about Daunt. Only the finest. In all the best libraries now, not least earning its stripes at Abbey Leix House and Pitchford Hall. And lobbies: The American Colony Hotel and The Jaffa.

We do love our triple Michelin starred places (L’Ambroisie, Lasarte, Core). Champagne! Foam! Truffle! While most of the restaurants we have visited are still thriving, unknowingly at the time, Lavender’s Blue would become an archive for quite a few. Aquavit, Bank Westminster and Zander Bar, Duddell’s, Farmacy, Galvin at Windows in The Hilton Park Lane, The Gas Station (one of our regular rendezvous with fellow gourmand Becks), Hello Darling, Marcus Wareing’s Tredwell’s, 8 Mount Street, Nuala, Plateau, Rex Whistler at Tate Britain, San Lorenzo, Senkai, Tom Kemble at Bonham’s, and Typing Room all in London have disappeared. So have Scheltema in Brussels, Le Détroit in Calais, The Black Douglas in Deal, The Table in Broadstairs, l’Écrivain in Dublin, Cristal Room Baccarat in Paris, and Forage and Folk in Omagh.

Still, nothing tastes as good as skinny fries. It’s survival of the fattest! Impressive as it was, Embassy Gardens Marketing Suite was never built to last. Erarta Art Gallery, Fu Manchu nightclub (the real Annabel’s!) and The Green and Found gift shop are lost in the mists of time. We’d barely photographed Quinlan Terry’s 35 year old junior common room bungalow at Downing College before the wrecker’s ball entered the site. We’re already missing our perfumer neighbour Sniff.

Even sadder, we have become the repository for final curtain interviews. Min Hogg, Founding Editor of The World of Interiors magazine and Anna Wintour’s first boss, the 9th Marquess of Waterford and the musician Diana Rogers entertained us – and hopefully you – with their end of life witticisms. David George, a reader of our Diana in Savannah article wrote, “I was married to her for 10 years and we were together for more than two decades. When you look in the sky she is the brightest star that you will ever see! I love you sweet middle class princess! Rest in peace, all my love, David.” We featured artist Trevor Newton’s final solo show and fashion designer Thierry Mugler taking his au revoir bow at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs Paris. Now historic photographs of model Misty Bailey appeared on Lavender’s Blue. Lindy Guinness, the last Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, shared thoughts at one of her last townhouse parties full of people one should know like the international tastemaker Charles Plante. Beresford Neill reminisced on early 20th century Tyrella. And of course, two memorial pieces to the much missed Dorinda, Lady Dunleath. The last book launch of Dame Rosalind Savill, the inspirational scholar of European decorative arts and visionary museum director of the Wallace Collection, is another moving memory now frozen in time.

Readers’ comments are always of interest. Standout messages include a painting request to Ballyfin; advice on the best photographic viewing point at Dungiven Castle; revealing a shared love of Mary Delany or the Mitfords; a discussion of the meaning of Rue Monsieur; Samarès Manor relatives trying to contact each other during a Jersey storm; and an unreported baby drowning in a mansion swimming pool in Sandwich Bay. Mount Congreve attracted interesting comments including from James Sweeney who wrote, “I worked in Mount Congreve Estate for many years as a Private Chef to the Congreves. It was a joy and a pleasure and has given me cherished memories. Mr Congreve was an amazing man and I owe him a great deal for his wisdom that he kindly let me benefit from.”

Ewelina from Beauty on the Cliff poetically scribed, “Waterford is my home since 17 years and Mount Congreve was always my soft point. The moment when you enter the place is simply magical. I’ve been inside the house recently, just before yesterday. I was inside of the Blue Wedgwood Room … well … only the pale blue walls and the beautiful but sadly empty china cabinets reminded me about past grandeur of this place. It’s really really heartbreaking to see the empty rooms, stripped from everything … even the curtains … the books all over the floor in the library … totally without the respect for Mr Congreve. I hope that Waterford City Council didn’t forget that was someone else’s home. As Mr Yeats said, ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’ Thank you so much for your review. Kindest regards from Waterford.” Sara Stainsby messaged, “Really interesting essay on Stapleford Park. My great grandparents worked there, my grandmother was born there and was married in the church. In the 70s I visited my great grandparents when they lived in a flat above the stables …” Birthday wishes (Portrait) and restoration concerns (Barden Towers) are always welcome. Even more welcome was a Champers accompanied poem hand delivered to the state dining room (Hartwell House).

There are direct messages too: “I came across your Lavender’s Blue series starting from Auchinleck then Crevenagh House and Tullan Strand. I can see from your McClelland connection that you have an interest in Northern Ireland including Donegal … I found that your articles on architecture address the most erudite, meticulous and expansive aspects of the subject so perhaps the work of James Taylor in late Georgian times will fall beneath the range of your interest in the style and proportions of symmetrical Palladian buildings.” We jumped straight in a car to Islington. Likewise when tipped off about Stockwell Park. A reader enjoyed our “wonderful commentary on various aspects of Ballyshannon … tis wonderful to share your thoughts about my hometown”. We’ll accept high praise from Ireland’s greatest host: “I just love your articles striking notes of deepest erudizione to soprano and coloratura gossip! I’m so glad you were the catalyst to my party and I can’t believe it went so well.”

Amazing Grace Point inspired a declaration of faith: “Lough Swilly and Fort Dunree is one of the most wonderful places in Ireland to visit, and especially to look out across the waters where so many great ships have sailed. But most of all – to ponder the words of Amazing Grace written there by John Newton. His miraculous conversion credited to his mother’s prayers. She never gave up, like my mother, who never gave up but prayed me into the Kingdom.” Messages come from above and down under: “I hope you don’t mind me emailing you but I happened to walk into a beautiful graveyard today in Picton, Australia, and happened to come across this one particular headstone. I was instantly intrigued as my grandparents were from Donegal in Ireland and I wanted to see if this was close? Anyway I just read about Mountjoy Square and when the area become established. I’m not sure but working out the dates I think this couple might have been some of the original inhabitants? I saw an article that you wrote and just wanted to share this with you – you may or may not appreciate it but I wanted to bring this couple home!” They’ve come home.

Artist and art restorer Denise Cook crosses the rare divide from comment provider to content provider sharing her expanse of knowledge from Pink Magnolias to the Rector of Stiffkey. So does Dr Roderick O’Donnell, world authority on all matters Pugin. Another reader turned writer, the ever erudite historian and patron of the arts Nicholas Sheaff, brought Gosford Castle completely (back) to life. “There is really too much to say,” to parrot Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady, 1881. Haud muto factum.

As Reverend Prebendary Andy Rider once quipped, “You do get around.” Amsterdam to Zürich, Brussels to Verona, Channel Island hopping, nowhere is safe from the Lavender’s Blue sagacity filled patrician treatment. As for our favourite place, that’s simple: Bunbeg Beach, especially at 10.30pm on a sun drenched midsummer night. Chronicling our times, we produce the material – and sometimes we are the material. But only when shot by the likes of top cinematographer Mina Hanbury-Tennyson-Choi and shoot the shoot supremo Simon Dutson. Striking a striking pose. Fading grandeur (the interior not the model).

“The whole earth is filled with awe at Your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, You call forth songs of joy,” Psalm 65. Lavender’s Blue is between the bookends of everything that was and is to come. It’s about dealing with things as they are, not as they should be. We’re all about orchestrating a fresh approach, synthesising Baroque stridency with Palladian refinement. Our oeuvre is a sumptuous sequence of artistic compositions. On the frontline, turning to face the light. Mary Oliver always gets it right: Instructions for Living a Life, 2010, “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Thank you to all our readers. Thank you Council Bluffs. In the short now, to pluralise the words of the French Resistance fighter Simone Segouin, “We’d do it all again.”

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Blackpool Pleasure Beach + Boulevard Hotel Blackpool Lancashire

From Swerve of Bay to Bend of Shore

CEO of Boulevard Hotel, Amanda Thompson OBE, states, “Blackpool may not be the first place that springs to mind for the luxury traveller and that’s a perception we feel strongly about challenging. We believe Boulevard has addressed a gap in the market to attract luxury and business travellers to the Fylde Coast area where there is a plethora of things to do and see.”

This holiday resort in the northwest of England dates back to the 18th century when visitors started coming to bathe in the sea for medicinal purposes. Its boomtime really began in the Victorian era with the arrival of the railway – there are three stations in the town – and the opening of the Pleasure Beach in 1896 (with its Witching Waves and River Caves). Blackpool continues to evolve and Boulevard Hotel now brings elevated hospitality to the promenade.

The hotel is Amanda’s brainchild. She is also CEO of the adjacent Pleasure Beach which was founded by William Bean, her great grandfather. Allison Pike Architects designed the multi gabled five and two storey building which faces the shoreline to the west and the Pleasure Beach to the east. Use of natural stone on the exterior reflects the built heritage of the historic town. Blackpool is not short of adventurous skylines: further north is the 158 metre high Blackpool Tower (designed by Lancashire architects James Maxwell and Charles Tuke) which opened two years before the Pleasure Beach. Its first guidebook was naturally effusive: “The successful erection of the tower is in itself one of the greatest engineering feats of modern times.”

An 1897 guidebook Blackpool: The Unrivalled Seaside Resort for Health and Leisure claimed the town had 10,000 rooms when the static population was 43,000. The guidebook classified accommodation into three categories. “Hotels, hydros and boarding houses” offering inclusive rates for a room and meals. “Private apartments” for a room with meals cooked by a landlord or landlady using ingredients provided by the guests. “Company houses” for a room or bed in a room with the option to dine in at extra cost or out.

Two of Blackpool’s finest stone buildings are Sacred Heart Catholic Church near North Pier and Holy Trinity Anglican Church next to South Pier. Sacred Heart was built of dark stone in 1854 to the distinguished Decorated Gothic design of Edward Welby Pugin. Just 46 years later a large octagonal lantern with a pyramidal roof over the nave as well as a sanctuary (top lit by a pitched roof of stained glass) were added by architect Peter Paul Pugin, younger brother of Edward. Holy Trinity was built in the last quarter of the 19th century to the design of Richard Knill Freeman. It is constructed of yellow stone with red stone dressings. The church is an accomplished example of the Free Style of Decorated Gothic with a square tower forming a South Shore wayfinder. Both churches still have active congregations.

The names of bed and breakfasts lining the promenade between North and South Piers are a nostalgic throwback to British summers, conjuring up images of ice cream and sandcastles: Blue Waves; The Chimes on the Sea; Crystals on the Prom; Craig-y-Don; The Golden Cheval; Oakwell; On the Beach; 359 Roomz; Royal Ocean; Royal Windsor; Sea Princess; Skye Oceans; St Albans; Sunny Days; and Talk of the Coast.

Amanda’s vision for the interior of Boulevard Hotel is a contemporary take on Art Deco inspired by the 1930s architecture of Blackpool. There are 120 bedrooms including 18 suites. Mid 20th century art by Tom Purvis originally created for the Pleasure Beach is displayed throughout the hotel. Fabrics by Designers Guild, wallcoverings by Andrew Martin and lamps by Chelsom deliver quintessential Britishness. Details are carefully considered: the wavy hotel logo appears everywhere from waiting staff’s ties to tins of mints and stationery. It is the only hotel in the UK to have bath products by Balmain.

“We are the best hotel in the region,” confirms General Manager Klaus Spiekermann. He has worked in high end hotels all his career and recently won Best General Manager at the Luxury Hotel Awards. “Our function suite can accommodate a 240 person gala dinner. There are also three syndicate rooms. We cater for board meetings, conferences and weddings. Ballroom dancing competitions attract visitors from many countries including the US and China.”

Klaus continues, “The first and second floors have family accommodation including some rooms with bunkbeds. The third and fourth floors are adults only. Breakfast for the top storey suites guests is served in the first floor Ocean Club to give that exclusive vibe. Our Head Chef Andrew Derbyshire uses the highest quality produce such as Lanigan’s Seafood and Lancashire Cheese. There’s a 24 hour studio gym and guests have a VIP entrance to the Pleasure Beach. We are a one stop shop for the luxury lifestyle!”

The ground floor Beachside Restaurant lives up to its name with views over the Irish Sea – perfect for watching the candyfloss pink and honeycomb yellow sunsets. A square pillared covered entrance – the traditional porte cochère reinvented – overlooks the Pleasure Beach, revelling in the symbiosis of luxury and amusement. It’s not every top hotel has a rollercoaster roaring past its roofline.

Blackpool Pleasure Beach, just like its host town, is ever growing. A £8.72 million Gyro Swing will be the next addition, opening in 2026. This ride is a giant spinning pendulum swinging 120 degrees and reaching up to 42 metres in the sky. Amanda declares, “We’re thrilled to confirm the addition of the Gyro with work already underway. We’re known for doing things on a large scale so becoming home to the biggest of this type of ride in the UK makes complete sense. It’s dynamic, fast and incredibly high! We’re very excited for the future at Pleasure Beach Resort.”

In the meantime there are plenty of thrills. The Pleasure Beach has 13 shops (buy gifts or confectionary), 26 food and drink outlets (eat burgers and drink Champagne), 27 family rides (jump on a ghost train or enter a mechanical steeple chase), eight attractions (experience over 18s pure fear in Pasaje del Terror) and 11 thrill rides (buckle up for The Big One in all its 1.6 kilometre long 72 metre high 119 kilometres per hour rollercoasting glory). Designed by Ron Toomer of Arrow Dynamics, The Big One was the tallest rollercoaster in the world when it opened in 1994. The 96 year old Sir Hiram Maxim Captive Flying Machine is still the oldest continuous working amusement park ride in Europe. There’s even a Noah’s Ark dating back to the 1930s.

And thrilling architecture. “The Casino, finished in 1939, is the purest example in Blackpool of International Style Modernism,” Allan Brodie and Matthew Whitfield record in Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage (2014). “No corner of the park was untouched as Leonard Thompson gave Joseph Emberton total control of the redesign of the park with new buildings and rides constructed and older features remodelled.”

Joseph Emberton was the only British architect to have a building included in Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s groundbreaking 1932 New York exhibition The International Style. Opening one year before the exhibition, his Royal Corinthian Yacht Club in Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex, made the cut. Joseph’s Casino at the Pleasure Beach is a gigantic three storey white painted concrete drum with a 28 metre high external spiral staircase. This £300,000 building incorporated company offices and a penthouse for the Thompson family. The Casino is coastal Art Deco architecture at its finest. Move over Miami.

“Four generations of the Thompson family,” writes Vanessa Toulmin in Blackpool Pleasure Beach: More Than Just an Amusement Park (2011), “have willingly shared their ideas and experiences with other park owners, including Walt Disney in the 1950s, and have reaped the rewards by this being reciprocated. The Pleasure Beach has always strived to offer its visitors the biggest, the best, the scariest and the most innovative attractions and has brought pleasure to millions.” Early inspiration for the Pleasure Beach came from the 1887 Earls Court London Anglo American Exhibition and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

Amanda Thompson OBE concludes, “We opened Boulevard Hotel with the hope of introducing something rather unique to Blackpool: a truly luxurious hotel. Since then, we’ve won numerous awards including being named the current Best Luxury Hotel in Northern Europe for two years running. At Boulevard, luxury is defined by exceptional service and attention to detail. We pride ourselves on meticulously curating our guest experience which is complemented by exquisite accommodation, unexpectedly beautiful coastal vistas and delicious locally sourced gourmet cuisine.”

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Townhouse on the Green Hotel Dublin + Albert Noonan

Bird on the Wire

A note from the Front Office Team is in our nursery floor bedroom, “We would like to welcome you into our humble residence situated in the centre of Dublin. We hope you are going to enjoy your stay with us!” We quibble with the first sentence: it isn’t that humble. We comply with the second sentence: enjoying our stay to the max. Everybody knows St Stephen’s Green is Dublin’s joint best address (sharing that honour with Merrion Square). The south facing side is home to the prestigious Shelbourne Hotel, Kildare Street Club and Stephen’s Green Club. And now Townhouse on the Green, an intimate nine bedroom hotel with two restaurants. It’s an offshoot of The Fitzwilliam Hotel on the east facing side of St Stephen’s Green. There’s also The Fitzwilliam Hotel in Belfast next to the Grand Opera House. That’s not the only northern connection.

Number 22 St Stephen’s Green was built in 1790 by the son of a farmer from Strabane, County Tyrone. Thomas Lighton made his fortune in the East India Company and invested it in (garnet red) bricks and (moonstone grey) granite. He was High Sheriff of County Dublin in 1790 and for the following seven years sat in the Irish House of Commons as MP for Tuam. Thomas represented Carlingford in the Commons from 1798 to 1800. The three bay four storey over basement under attic home he built reflects his wealth and status. It is one of a pair likely designed by the architect David Weir. In 1885, a first floor trellis ironwork balcony was added to the design of McCurdy Mitchell. Rationalised windowpanes with external blind boxes are other rare survivals from this period. The postcard worthy doorcase is full bloom Georgian Dublin: an umbrella spoked fanlight radiates over a crinoline-wide door flanked by leaded margin lights. Number 23, now offices, fully retains its 18th century fenestration.

Elizabeth Bowen wrote the ultimate hotel guide, The Shelbourne, in 1951: “Gulls, in from the river, drift and plane on the air.” They still do in this coastal capital. “Given that Number 22 was constructed as the home for the very wealthy Thomas Lighton, it incorporates many decorative features including an ornately decorated barrel vaulted ceiling over a Portland stone cantilevered staircase,” highlights Albert Noonan, Partner at NoMo Architecture. This prestigious Baggot Street based practice was responsible for the interiors of the upper floors. “Many of the rooms have upscale elegant proportions with high ceilings and neoclassical plasterwork. Luckily a lot of these features have survived.”

He explains, “Quiet luxury is how we describe our approach. We’ve used the best of materials and fabrics layered in subtle tones to create rooms that are havens of tranquillity. Nothing in any bedroom shouts at you craving its 15 seconds of Instagram fame. These rooms are easy on the eye. They are serene and calm: transitional modern furniture seamlessly harmonises with the period building interiors. Each room has a deep pile green wool carpet, oyster coloured linen textured wallpaper and long curtains with golden ochre lining and moss coloured trimmings. The Monarch Chartreuse linen mix curtain fabric with its embroidered bees and butterflies draws inspiration from St Stephen’s Green and adds a touch of femininity to the building.” O’Gorman Joinery made bespoke dark stained bedheads with green granite bedside tabletops.

Each of the nine bedrooms has an ensuite bathroom wrapped in Calcutta Miele marble. A two man shower has curved corners decorated with emerald and bronze glass Sicis mosaics. A large classic white ceramic basin stands on nickel legs. “Given the building’s origins as a residence,” relates Albert, “we wanted to provide a distinctive homely feel of a well off friend’s house rather than a corporate hotel. To reinforce this impression, paintings, prints and objets d’art are curated for every room.” Bedside books on Morocco as well as Ireland in our bedroom are a reminder that no country is just an island.

Thursday night dinner is served in Floritz, the restaurant on the piano nobile. An Asian fusion menu takes its inspiration from Thomas Lighton’s adventures in India and the Far East. Suffolk based architecture and design practice Project Orange came up with the flamboyant interior. “I am going to make a Great Golden Grog for each of you,” announces our sommelier. “It is the most complicated cocktail in Dublin! Add full bodied daiquiri to carrot infused Bacardi, fresh lime juice, cardamom and pimento muscovado syrup, and then some magic!” No cars are required after dinner: Cellar 22 is below Floritz. This cosy wine and food bar was also designed by Project Orange and uses lots of natural earthy materials to reflect its original use as a kitchen. Tonight will be fine.

“Gay days at once ephemeral and immortal. They have a pulse of their own, and a golden mist round them which it is hard to capture in cold words – they should be lived, not written about,” scribes Elizabeth. Her words resonate so strongly with us on this sun saturated Friday after Sexagesima Sunday. We asked for signs, the signs were sent. A robin and her companions follow us on our morning walk passing through Merrion Square. Bird singing at the break of day. Hallelujah. A thousand kisses deep.

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Radio Bar + ME Hotel Aldwych London

Norman Architecture

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

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

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

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

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Belvedere Restaurant + Holland House Holland Park London

Sequentia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Clarance Hôtel Lille + Aurélie Vermesse

Fire in the Sunshine

It’s been a while since our last visit to France’s fourth largest city – Paris is ever so distracting – so we’ve dusted down our previous article and spruced it up. Of course we’re back to Aurélie Vermesse’s urban oasis and a return visit to Méert Chocolaterie. Nothing tastes as good as skinny truffles. We’re pleased to see Lille is still a little frayed round the edges. A touch crumbly. Shabby chic. What’s not to love again?

Sitting on the Nominations Committee of the 2018 World Boutique Hotel Awards was our excuse to stay in five star intimate luxury in Lille first time round. No excuse needed this time. Three blind arches on either side of a gated pedimented Corinthian pilastered archway line the pavement of Rue de la Barre in Quartier du Vieux. Beyond this most enigmatic of screen walls is a courtyard aproning the façade of a gorgeous nine bay three storey stuccoed mansion. It’s Relais and Châteaux; it’s really a château.

Clarance Hôtel started life in 1736 as the home of the Count and Countess of Hespel. Hotelier Aurélie relates, “It took me more than two years to set up La Clarance as a hotel, opening in April 2015. Today, I have 30 employees, a Michelin starred restaurant and a thriving bar! The Clarance is the result of a dream that was born during a weekend at Domaine Les Crayères in Reims, a Relais and Châteaux hotel. I quit my job to go back to school and then create the Clarance from scratch!”

Beauty and simplicity form the cornerstones of her hospitality. “Baudelaire’s poetry is at the heart of our contemporary artwork and room decoration,” Aurélie explains. “Art, gastronomy and kindness are essential to my life and, I hope, to yours too. I want to share the warmth and diversity of our cuisine and the products of our region. And the light of the north that bathes our house.”

Our coterie in this corner of the ancient capital of Flanders, we’re an outré beau monde, is at home among the soignée haute monde, overlapping social carousels in slow motion, floating through the airily graceful reception rooms. A row of French windows lighting the rear enfilade opens onto a gloriously private walled garden with the tower of St Catherine’s Church as a backdrop. Fruit trees and beehives surround a waterlilies pond that would give Claude Monet a run for his money. Clarance Hôtel is so chic.

By nightfall, turndown of our light and spacious bedroom includes a handwritten card: “There, all is order and beauty, luxury, peace and pleasure. I wish you a pleasant stay at Clarance. Aurélie.” And the all important skinny chocolate truffles on our pillow. Our room is called Le Voyage, complete with map of the world headboard. It’s one of just nine top floor rooms. The other second floor rooms are Allegorié; L’Albatros, Crépuscule du Soir, Hymne, Le Flacon, Le Jeu, La Musique and Clarance. They’re all numbered. What should be room 13 is luckily unnumbered: it’s the broom cupboard. First floor rooms include Le Cygne, La Géante, L’Horloge, L’Idéal and Le Rebelle. But no À Celle Qui Est Trop Gaie or Les Métamorphoses du Vampire. There are 27 guest bedrooms in total. An illustrated book of Charles Baudelaire’s poems placed in all the rooms is a clue to their nomenclature.

A segmental arched window set in the wide dormer of Le Voyage looks over the courtyard to a pleasing jumble of rooftops and chimneys. Directly below are seats perfect for enjoying a nightcap of Muscadet Côtes de Grandlieu 2015 from Loire Valley under the moon rapt in idle reverie. Seven years will dissolve into the thin evening air before we get to repeat the experience once again.

There were a lucky 13 categories in the 2018 World Boutique Hotel Awards: Beach or Coastal; City Explorer; Classic Elegance; Culinary Excellence; Family; Honeymoon Hideaway; Inspired Design; Newcomer; Relaxation Retreat; Romantic Retreat; Wellness Spa; Sustainability; Stunning Views. We considered nominating Clarance Hôtel for all of them. Ok, Beach or Coastal was pushing it. The pride of Lille deserves its own category: Unique Boutique.

Lille in those days was for us still a city of newness, a fount of unexpected treasures. But it’s alright to renew an acquaintance, to once more exhale the soft air of youth. We now know that Lille stands for all the things that are important in life – love, beauty, food and shopping. We have not come to tan or trade. Living is our art form. We’re captivated by it all. Encore une fois.

We’re back under the eaves and this time sleeping in Le Flacon. A similar window to Le Voyage frames a view of St Catherine’s Church. Intoxicating memories in kisses of fine linen await. But first there are visits to Méert and its neighbours Comtesse du Barry (for essential terrines) and El Market (for concept clothing). That’s shopping sorted. Love and beauty are all around and will increase in abundance as the day fades. Just food to go then.

“Fast or slow service?” asks our waitress. We’re lunching in the boiserie bedecked Michelin starred dining room. “Fast!” The Countess Hospice Museum is still to be done. There are three midday menus – L’Horloge, L’Idéal and L’Invitation au Voyage – each with varying numbers of course. L’Idéal lives up to its name. Canapés are followed by a foamy pumpkin amuse bouche. The starter is three fat and juicy St Jacques of Boulogne-sur-Mer pan fried scallops. Roasted small boat sole main course precedes steamed orange and saffron pudding. No French lunch is complete without petit fours. Isabel Ferrando’s Stella Ducit 2023 delivers a floral nose of acacia, a hearty citrus palate and a pleasant fennel finish. As our sommelier confirms. La vin des avants.

Aurélie has penned uplifting messages on the back of the menu: “Préserver les cuisines du monde”; “Partager la passion du beau et du bon”; and “Être acteurs d’un monde plus human”. This is final level food. Plus haut n’existe pas. Breakfast will be an ecstacy of eggs to see. Oeufs à la coque, au plat, brouillés, omelette nature or omelette garnie. We head back to nature. Toujours la haute monde. Polo necked fellow guests look so sophisticated. Le paradis, c’est les autres.

The Countess Hospice Museum was built as a hospital founded in 1237 in the grounds of Countess Jeanne de Flandre’s palace. Galleries and the chapel encircle a cobbled courtyard. It’s all rather wonderful. Hits of its hallowed halls include a tiled image of a man in need of a chamber pot as well as Old Master paintings of butch nuns, dying gentlemen, raucous markets and flying balloons by the likes of François Watteau and Wallerant Vaillant. It’s the chauffeur’s night off but that doesn’t matter. La Barre is Hôtel Clarance’s new bar on Rue de la Barre and is Lille’s coolest nightspot bar none. La fin de la journée.

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Kitty Fisher’s Restaurant + Shepherd Market Mayfair London

Generations Come and Generations Go

Last autumn we somehow found ourselves invited to lunches in the private dining rooms of London restaurants on a weekly basis. Nice work, and all that. Six Park Place, Green Park, was all about white truffle and parmesan risotto in an Art Deco setting. Skipping the steak at Smith and Wollensky off The Strand we went for the seared hand dived scallops in the Martin Brudzinski designed basement dining room. Upping the grandeur, we’d gnocchi, ajo blanco, kale, feta crumble and sunflower seeds in the top storey dining room of The Ned under the plasterwork ceiling with its central MB for Midland Bank. The first floor private dining room of 34 was the setting of our The Not The What invitation to enjoy wild mushroom risotto, pecorino and summer truffle surrounded by Tracey Emin paintings. Not a beige buffet in sight.

The What House Awards are the biggest gongs in the housebuilding industry. So far, so mainstream. Much more fun are The Not The What parties contemporaneously thrown across Mayfair. After Champagne fuelled lunches everyone crashes The Red Room bar of The Grosvenor House Hotel. That’s before rounding off the night in Mount Street’s pub The Audley. Mayfair and its environs are not short of high end restaurants: Coya, Hide and Sexy Fish for starters, main course and pudding. In contrast to those three temples to Bacchus, the eateries of Shepherd Market are positively low key – and petite.

Oliver Bradbury records in The Lost Mansions of Mayfair, 2008, “Shepherd Market, named after Edward Shepherd, was laid out on the Curzon family owned waste ground north of Piccadilly and near Hyde Park Corner.” It’s a stretch to call somewhere a few dozen metres away from Green Park off the beaten track but Shepherd Market lends that impression. The short walk down White Horse Street along the side of Cambridge House (shrouded in scaffolding for years – when will the Reuben Brothers’ conversion of the In and Out Club to a hotel be finished?) opens into another world.

Narrow streets radiating off a square are lined with an array of international brasseries. In between are a few high end shops like Simon Carter menswear. Fancy Lebanese? Head to Al Hambra. Channelling Francophilia? There’s L’Artiste Muscle or Ferdi. Le Boudin Blanc closed in 2022. You can enjoy French cheese at Shepherd Market Wine House or pasta at Misto. Go Turkish at Fez Mangal. Iran Restaurant is what it says. Feeling adventurous? Try L’Autre, the capital’s only Polish Mexican. Or Middle Eastern food at our school night regular Sofra.

On the square itself is Kitty Fisher’s offering the best of British fare. Architect Chris Dyson provides some background, “Our practice’s first restaurant project was at 10 Shepherd Market for Penelope and Michael Milburn. The building is located in the northeastern corner of the market square, tucked away between Piccadilly and Curzon Street in Mayfair. In the early part of last century, Shepherd Market was a fashionable address. The writer Michael Arlen rented rooms opposite The Grapes pub, possibly this building, and used Shepherd Market as the setting for his bestselling 1924 novel The Green Hat, later made into a film starring Greta Garbo.”

“The building is essentially 18th century with a rebuilt mid 19th century brick façade.” Chris continues, “The fenestration dates from this partial rebuilding and is surrounded by alternating bands of yellow and red brick. The ground floor shopfront retains two carved stone corbels to either side. There are six floors in total. The basement extends under the pavement with two sizeable brick vaults.”

Typical of Shepherd Market restaurants, the ground floor is narrow fronted and deep in plan creating an intimate atmosphere. Precipitous stairs lead from the restaurant and bar down past the kitchen, fully on display through internal windows, to the rest of the restaurant. Cast iron ovens are retained in the basement thick walls. Cooking these days comes from a wood grill. Kitty Fisher’s was the toast of town when it opened in 2014 – one of its owners is the brother-in-law of then Prime Minister David Cameron who frequented it with his wife Samantha. The Nigella Lawson era of celebs has waned allowing this restaurant to settle into being a thriving slightly in-the-know establishment. On a Friday, especially today, the weekend before Christmas, the 75 covers are turned twice for lunch and twice for dinner. We’re perched on stools at the window in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks fashion.

This isn’t our first rodeo. Eight years ago, December 2016 to be precise, we dined on the same stools. We were surprised to get dinner without a reservation at the height of Kitty Fisher’s fame. Time to dig into the archives! Viognier Le Paradou 2015 (£30.00), dry with a hint of honeycomb. Whipped cod’s roe, bread and fennel butter (£7.50), Head Chef Tom Parry’s four fingered salute against mediocrity. A textural contrast of creaminess and crustiness. Taleggio, London honey, mustard and black truffle (£9.00), a bittersweet symphony of wood grill smokiness. There’s more. Burrata, beetroot and radicchio (£12.50), a colourful collage of purple and white. Cambridge burnt cream (£7.00) isn’t an undergrad’s baking error but a Cointreau and cinnamon crème brûlée smoothly nestling under a crackly golden lid. These plates are too good for sharing. We observed that currency signs had vanished from fashionable menus as swiftly as pounds disappeared from the wallets of the original Kitty Fisher’s gentlemen callers.

The sharing plates menu has been replaced with a more traditionally laid out version of three courses plus sides. Still currency free. Tom Fairbank is now Head Chef. We stick to Viognier, crisp with floral notes Pays d’Oc Moulin de Gassac 2023 (£34.00). Mountain Bay sardines, Oyster Leaf mayonnaise and pickled green tomatoes (£17), latitudinal extremities. Scottish girolles, lentils and walnut (£30), vegetarian wholesomeness. Chocolate ganache, salted caramel ice cream and honeycomb (£12), sweet and smoky. The boudoir like theme has stayed the same: brown and purple walls, red lampshades, jazz music.

So who was Kitty Fisher? England’s original It Girl, no less. “Without a doubt, Kitty received a good education. She was witty and always known as a good conversationalist,” suggests Joanne Major in Kitty Fisher The First Female Celebrity, 2022. This background – and her natural prettiness – helped her climb up the social ladder with surprising ease. Fame collied with infamy in Kitty’s case due to her high profile affairs and liaisons. “Gossip about her antics reached the drawing rooms, coffeehouses and taverns of every town in the land,” writes Joanne.

In the 18th century painters were the paparazzi. After Sir Joshua Reynolds finished his first likeness, Joanne concludes, “In no time at all, at least four engravers had copied the portrait and Kitty’s likeness was to be had at every print shop in the country.” She lived for a while in Carrington Street to the immediate south of Shepherd Market. Towards the end of her short yet brilliance existence, Kitty found true love and married John Norris MP, Captain of Deal Castle. She died of smallpox aged 26 while visiting Bath. Shepherd Market would continue to have a racy reputation for ladies of the night right up to the mid 20th century.

We’re still up for private dining room lunches but, like Paris, we’ll always have Kitty Fisher’s. And we’ll aim to be back before another eight years have gone.

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House of Tides Restaurant Newcastle-upon-Tyne +

Riding the Wave

“And the place where new life must start – this may be a surprise, because nobody seems to care two hoots for it at the moment – is the quayside. Whichever way you come to Newcastle, get down to the quayside first,” orders Ian Nairn in his 1967 guide Nairn’s Towns. We obey and not just because the city’s leading restaurant is on the quayside in a Grade I Listed former house opposite the Grade II* Listed Wetherspoon’s pub which was once a house and attached warehouse. Both date from the 16th century. Almost six decades after Nairn’s Towns was first published, the quayside is now a much loved tourist and cultural asset.

The House of Tides was launched a decade ago by husband and wife team Kenny and Abbie Atkinson. He’s now one of the north of England’s most acclaimed chefs. Past roles include a stint as Head Chef of Seaham Hall, Durham, then owned by Von Essen Hotels. “We didn’t want our restaurant to be in a glass box or near bars and clubs which is quite difficult in Newcastle,” relates Kenny. An historic merchant’s dwelling jammed against the gargantuan Tyne Bridge is definitely not a glass box and Wetherspoon’s is the only nearby bar. Clubland has never quite ventured this direction.

The pedestrian route from Newcastle Railway Station to the restaurant is full of intrigue and surprise. Tyne Bridge arches its way across the grounds of Newcastle Castle splitting the keep from the gatehouse. There were no Conservation Areas in Victorian times. Moot Hall is one of the visual treats en route: a Greek Revival courthouse soon to be converted into a hotel by the Gainford Group which owns the jolly decent County Hotel opposite the station. Completed in 1812, architect John Stokoe gave the entrance front a tetrastyle fluted Doric portico and the river facing front a hexastyle portico. Ian Nairn states, “John Stokoe makes the official masters of the style – Smirke, Wilkins and so on – look like pallid pedants.” Next to Tyne Bridge, steps called Long Stairs, bordered by overgrown vegetation and the backs of houses, descend to the quayside. Long Stairs feel a little isolated, a bit ghostly, a tad eery, even by daytime. Later, as dusk falls, orbs will appear.

First impressions of House of Tides – and lasting memories – are of rustic robustness. The three and four storey block has a stone faced ground floor, reddish brown brick upper floors and a pantiled roof. Some of the vertically proportioned sash windows have been reduced in size to casements leaving the original lintels charmingly floating like architectural eyebrows. Inside, the ground floor is one long open bar with informal seating. The restaurant occupies a similar space upstairs.

Rather than being hidden away, the kitchen faces onto the street. Its location adds to the drama of servers parading upstairs to the first floor restaurant, then standing to attention before waiters relieve them of their plates. That’s about as formal as it gets. “Are you enjoying the chilled vibe?” asks our waiter before methodically listing the ingredients as each course of the tasting menu arrives. “How do you remember all that?” we enquire. “I’ve no idea!” he laughs and summarises how the penultimate course, Buttermilk (pear, celery, lemon verbena), is a “journey from savoury to sweet”. A segue on the tongue. The mild vinegary tang jogs our memories of traditional pudding in the Aachen Town Hall cellar brasserie.

The first three courses – Gougère (butternut squash, miso), Goat’s Cheese Parfait (curried granola, rye crackers), Crab (spiced shrimps, crumpet) – set the scene. Refined unfussy food; accessible fine dining. A clarity of culinary vision matched by the white, off white and cream décor complementing the rusticity of the slanted windows and slanted timber floors and slanted plasterwork laden beams. Sourdough (malt butter, toasted yeast) is straight from the baker’s oven. Seatrout (kombu, trout roe, dill, dashi), Cod (mussels, Grelot onions sea herbs) and Monkfish (celeriac, onion, persillade) are three subtly sexy fish dishes. Kenny’s twists of tradition include gooseberry ketchup and wasabi ketchup. Blackberry Crémeux (apple, crème fraîche, meringue) has form and more. No wonder the restaurant snapped up its Michelin star just six months after opening.

“At House of Tides we believe our wine list is an extension of the ethos of the restaurant,” Kenny admits. “It is a collection of our favourite wines and reflects the tastes and passion of the people that have worked to put it together. Our ambition is to take you on a journey through the vineyards from around the world.” As Francophiles we are happy to go no further than across the Channel. A Peu Près Sauvignon Blanc, Loire Valley, 2020, for the savouries. Vigneron Ardechois, Coteau St Giraud, Late Harvest Viognier, 2020, for the sweets. Below at street level, during the course of lunch the bollarded space in front of House of Tides has been carpeted yellow with the fall of autumn leaves.

After lunch we will climb back up Long Stairs to inspect the Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin designed needle spired St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral on the far side of the railway station. The organist is practising for a wedding. He plays two minutes of Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria, two of Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring, César Franck’s Panis Angelicus, Richard Wagner’s Bridal Chorus and Ennio Morricone’s Gabriel’s Oboe. A musical tasting menu.

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St Mary’s Church + Stratton Park Micheldever Hampshire

Lord of the Dance

There are neither sharp right angles nor precisely shaped polygons in the domestic architecture of Micheldever – from Church Street to Duke Street and from Rock Lane to Sloe Lane. Timber framed thatched medieval cottages with wonky jettied upper floors wend and weave their way through this chocolate box village. The geometry and materiality of the Parish Church of St Mary, set back from Church Street in sylvan grounds, couldn’t be more different from its neighbours.

Behind the late Perpendicular stone tower of the church is an octagonal brick nave. Battlements over the tower; a hipped slate roof over the nave. There are earlier and later additions in between but these two components form one of the most extraordinary juxtapositions in English ecclesiastical architecture. The patron of the nave rebuilding was the banking Baring family who have two country estates nearby: The Grange and Stratton Park. The architect was George Dance the Younger.

The Barings used the same architect for Stratton Park which was completed in 1806, two years ahead of the nave. George Dance remodelled an existing house in a forceful Greek Revival style. An imposing unfluted Doric portico anchored the nine bay main front into the ground with a misleading appearance of permanence. The first floor was treated as a piano nobile with taller windows. The ground floor was like a raised basement and the second floor like an attic. A generous void to window proportion added to the sense of massiveness of the stuccoed brick exterior. In 1963 owner John Baring, 7th Baron Ashburton, demolished the house. The portico still stands and a modernist brick and glass house was built behind it.

This rearrangement had at least one admirer. “Country houses are seldom built today in the grand manner,” opined Michael Webb in the 12 January 1967 edition of Country Life, “and when they are the result is usually a dispiriting pastiche of an archaic style … The old Stratton Park was built in 1801. It was never a distinguished building, and by the time Mr and Mrs Baring took it over, it was in bad repair and riddled with dry rot. They decided to demolish it and to commission a new house on the same site from Stephen Gardiner and Christopher Knight.”

He doesn’t dance around his subject: “Of the old house, only the impressive Doric portico was worth preserving, and this became the focus of the new composition: a much smaller house, entirely modern in concept and form, but integrated with a fragment of the old, as the new Coventry Cathedral relates to the bomb scarred ruin.”

Conservation architect John Redmill, who died in Dublin in 2024, stated, “Sir Francis Baring Baronet had employed George Dance to reconstruct his country seat at Stratton. This house, only five miles north of The Grange, was built for the Duke of Bedford in 1731 by John Sanderson, and had been partly demolished some years later. Dance had added the first strictly Greek Doric portico to an English country house – in scale and conception a neoclassical landmark.”

A sectional drawing and floor plan of the nave of St Mary’s Church are in the collection of the Sir John Soane Museum. Aged 15, Sir John’s first job was in the practice of George Dance the Younger. The section – complete with preacher in the pulpit – clearly shows the influence of the Ancient Roman Diocletian Baths. Clerestory Diocletian windows light congregants rather than swimmers. The floor plan introduces the executed corner arched recesses of the octagon.

Why a nave in the shape of a Celebrations box of chocolates? The architect was 63 (he would die aged 84 in 1825) when he designed the nave so it wasn’t an experimental flush of youth. It’s a shape that does improve internal visibility lines and there is precedent. In 1759, the main body of St Martin’s Church in Stoney Middleton, Derbyshire, was rebuilt in an octagonal form to the design of James Paine. That architect also incorporated Diocletian windows into the clerestory. A later example is William Rolfe’s 1821 Picturesque Gothic octagonal nave rising to a lantern at St James the Less, West Teignmouth, Devon. William Rolfe was a pupil of Sir John Soane. Octagonal naves are rare, even if not quite “unique” as each of these places of Christian worship claims on their websites.

Dancing in the morning when the world was young; dancing in the moon and the stars and the sun; dancing; back in London, dancing.

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St Paul’s Cathedral Bank London + Party

Say Something

So when our lawyers said we’re throwing a party we were like yes and when they said we’re throwing a party in St Paul’s Cathedral we were like yes we’ll be there with church bells on. To say Sir Christopher Wren would be thrilled to see how his precipitous stone monument is faring would be an understatement. His crypt has never looked so good in neon light! It’s the largest in Europe and tonight it’s the flashiest. Architectonics. A cleverly orchestrated joyful bricolage, a dextrous project. Elegiac unbridled luxury. Below the nave, under the deodar, there’s a vibrant microcosm of London’s societal elite. The aesthetic of the axial is experienced even at this subterranean level. Crazy capers midst the vaults. The food stylists have been on overtime. We’re with Nancy Mitford’s character Paul Fotheringay in her 1932 novel Christmas Pudding, “‘Ah! Hum! Hem! Yes!’” That brings us on rather nicely to Lady Sybil Grant who went off to heavenly climes in 1955. She was a voracious writer and determined designer of ceramics. In later life, she spent much of her time in a caravan or up a tree, communicating with her butler through a megaphone. Segue over, the style of the party is beginning to reach for a contemporary baroque. Clients proposing utopias. Lawyers banishing chimeras. Sometimes life really is an esoteric panoply. More Veuve Cliquot, anyone?

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The Goldens + The Lisantis + The Circus Restaurant Bath Somerset

Golden Ratio

“They arrived at Bath. Catherine was all eager delight,” Jane Austen enthuses in Northanger Abbey (1818). Between the architectural ring of perfection that is The Circus and the arc of joy that is Royal Crescent lies the uncurved stretch of beauty that is Brock Street. This artery linking major works is mostly residential except for The Circus Restaurant which fills the ground floor and basement of a house between one of the two Beau Nash antiques shops and Cobb Farr estate agents. Brock Street is exceptionally pretty but this being Bath prettiness is actually the norm. The architecture is still grand Georgian but taken down a notch in formality compared to its heavily parapeted and haughtily pilastered geometrically daring abutting addresses. Charles Robertson notes in An Architectural Guide to Bath (1975), “John Wood the Younger deliberately kept the Brock Street elevations relatively plain.”

The owners of Beau Nash know all about chips as well as Chippendales and sherry as well as Sheratons. The Food Guide (2024) prepared by dealers Ron Pringle and Cynthia Wihardja states: “We haven’t eaten everywhere but we have tried many places. When we recommend a place it’s not only about the food. We also rate the sincerity of the service. We believe the two are essential for a memorable dining experience.” The Circus Restaurant gets their approval, “You can’t go wrong. Good food, honest prices, seasonal menus. Lovely service and very good value for money.” And The Dark Horse sounds too tempting to miss: “Our top place for pre dinner cocktails! A vast array of concoctions to suit any palette. Cosy quality atmosphere.”

The West Country’s first culinary power couple Head Chef Allison Golden and her husband Geoffrey opened the restaurant in 2007. She recalls the warm glow of that golden era, “Our busy independent restaurant served modern European food accompanied by Old World wines in a relaxed atmosphere. We cooked sincerely and straightforwardly to ensure everyone experienced the authentic taste in our ingredients. You’d never find any of the big names that turn wine into an industrial product. Each wine on our list was the individual expression of expertise.” It was the golden age of dining but time moves on and Ally and Geoff have driven off into the sunset in their gold coloured Lamborghini.

It was a gilt edged opportunity for Chef Matt Lisanti and his brother Mike to take over the restaurant – one they couldn’t resist. The staff were retained and the new golden boys are serving up the same type of modern European food and independent Old World wines. Autumn Menu highlights include Sharpham Brie Croquettes (mustard mayo, black garlic ketchup) starter for £9.30 and Cashew Massaman Coconut Curry (sweet potato, pineapple, lemongrass ginger sushi cake, puffed rice noodle) for £21.30. House White is Claude Val Pays d’Oc (fresh, green apples, tropical, creamy) priced £26.50. The food and wine are easy on the tastebuds and wallet; the service is easy on the eye. After a busy day buying first editions from George Baytun bookshop and handmade Italian jumpers from Gabucci (moda per uomo) it’s straight up from the bottom of Gay Street for dinner at the top. Squeezing in a cocktail in The Dark Horse en route of course. Friday evening in The Circus Restaurant is buzzy with a D4 (Dublin 4) feel to it. “What a delightful place Bath is,” cries Jane Austen’s Mrs Allen.

In his essay A Sense of Proportion John Julius Norwich writes, “Bath is a city of superlatives. First of all, it is the most beautiful in Britain. Next, it is the most appropriately named [unlike Bognor Regis which despite name boasts an elegant Victorian seafront] … Finally, and most gloriously of all, it is the one city in this country where fine building and inspired town planning go hand in hand, together creating an atmosphere of Palladian elegance and civilised refinement without equal anywhere.” That was 49 years ago. But as Jane Austen’s character Mr Tilney asked 206 years ago, “Oh, who can ever be tired of Bath?”

The 2nd Viscount Norwich, son of the socialite Lady Diana Cooper, continues, “The Circus, with its three splendid superimposed arcades loosely based on the Roman Colosseum, is a triumph. Still unfinished when John Wood died in 1754, it was completed by his son, who went on to create an even grander concept, the Royal Crescent, the first crescent in English architecture. In the work of both Woods we can see the principles of Palladian landscaping being followed just as much as those of Palladian proportions. In The Circus, the streets leading in are carefully arranged not to bisect it; in the same way the Royal Crescent, though less than 300 yards away from The Circus down a dead straight street, is actually invisible from it – which makes the sudden discovery one of the great dramatic moments of European architecture.”

He ends, “Yet the beauty of Bath and its uniqueness lie less in these individual triumphs than in the ensemble – in the squares and crescents and parades, ranging from The Circus to many a secluded, unpretentious street behind. The life they were built to sustain was vacuous, vapid and, one suspects, quite shatteringly dull; but they themselves embody very different values – strength, reason, humanity, permanence. This is the paradox of Bath. When the guidebooks call it ‘a monument to bygone elegance’ they are wrong. Only the perishable has perished. The elegance remains.” People come and go; the golden hued architecture is still on show. “The bright genius of Bath is hardly more than a beautiful display, the whim or flourish of an era,” argues Jan Morris in the introduction to Charles Robertson’s An Architectural Guide to Bath. “Edited to the smallest detail of perfection,” to use a phrase of Min Hogg, Founding Editor of The World of Interiors.

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The Royal Crescent Hotel + Montagu’s Mews Bath Somerset

The Silent Banshee

In the late 20th century Cotswolds based neoclassical architect William Bertram converted one of England’s greatest country houses into a hotel and a pair of England’s greatest townhouses into a hotel. At one time, both were owned by Von Essen Hotels. Cliveden House Hotel, Berkshire, and The Royal Crescent Hotel, Bath. Two of the three centremost houses of Royal Crescent were combined and a Dower House built in the mews in the early 1980s. In his book Bath (1944), Tony Smith sums up the country’s most majestic concave semi elliptical piece of architecture: “The whole conception and plan of this dazzling achievement is eloquent of the halcyon days of Bath.” Professor David Watkin describes it in The Practice of Classical Architecture: Quinlan and Francis Terry (2015) as “a half crescent facing down a grassy slope”. In 2010, the Terrys even designed their own crescent of retirement homes in Danbury, Essex.

“As the black of a dinner jacket sets off the bright colours of a dress, so the squares, crescents, quadrangles and circles of bath provide a geometric stage for the flow of life,” reckons Jan Morris in the introduction to An Architectural Guide to Bath by Charles Robertson (1975). William Lowndes notes in The Royal Crescent in Bath, (1981), “The central house of the Crescent is Number 16. It is one of the largest houses, and the adjacent houses also come into this category. There are two distinguishing features about the façade of Number 16 which emphasise its commanding position at the apex of the great curve of the Crescent. Four columns are grouped in pairs, and there is an arched first floor window from which both arms of the Crescent can be viewed in all their elegant symmetry.” There is a third distinguishing feature: it is the only house with single pane wide hall windows flanking the entrance door.

The treatment of the centre of the Crescent has been the subject of much scholarly debate. Charles Robertson notes, “The colonnade is not perfectly continuous; in the middle there is the most unobtrusive of breaks, four of the columns being grouped in pairs with a round headed window in between. This method of marking the centre has been variously criticised as being either unnecessary or insufficient. The former view was voiced as early as 1773, as quoted by Walter Ison, ‘The wretched attempt to make a centre to the Crescent where none was necessary is absurd and preposterous, in a high degree. The pairing of the pillars is too small a difference to be noted in so large a building …’” This 18th century critic radically suggests a chapel should have been placed in the middle of the terrace.

“The houses have had some notable occupants,” opines William Lowndes, “particularly during the first 50 years of their history. Elizabeth Montagu, who rejoiced in the spaciousness of their rooms, entertained many of the outstanding literary figures of the late 18th century there … The first dramatic change for over 100 years came in 1950, when Number 16 became a guesthouse. In 1971, together with Number 15, the guesthouse designation was abandoned, and The Royal Crescent Hotel was launched.” He records the presence of a ghost in Number 15: a lady in a long blue silk dress at the top of the stairs. She graciously descends, bestowing a warm smile on guests and staff, before disappearing. He guesses it is the social reformer and patron of the arts Elizabeth Montagu still enjoying her home from beyond the grave. “I believe unique places and people are what give the fabric of our lives richness,” says Edward Gabbai, Founder and Director of the Boutique Hotel Awards.

A hotel is the perfect alternative use and does not require subdivision: these houses were built for entertaining. John Haddon frets in Portrait of Bath (1982), “Conversion is not easy and some of these flats are not particularly convenient, although others are rather splendid. After all, these houses were built without electricity or gas, upstairs piped water, bathrooms, or, in many cases WCs, and they were heated by coal fires, so that to provide separate entrances, kitchens, lavatories and bathrooms on each floor calls for a good deal of ingenuity, although more recent conversions to what the selling agents like to call ‘prestigious apartments’ is made easier by gutting the building and rebuilding behind the original façade. Moreover, subdivision of Georgian rooms destroys their proportions and creates units which tend to be too high for their width. On the other hand, if a room is left as originally built it is expensive to heat.”

John Wood the Younger employed several builders on the 30 houses. They were all constrained by defined dimensions and designs on the cut limestone ashlar façade while allowed to run amok inside and to the rear. Over the course of eight years starting in 1767, the 152 metre long 15 metre high 114 engaged six metre tall Roman Ionic columned terrace took shape in all its geometric sophistication. The columns support a continuous returned balustraded parapet, modillion cornice and frieze. The occasional plate glass window, blind box and metal balconette are almost the only later derivations from the architect’s original concept. One other variation counteracting the powerful elongated temple front is found in the fanlight glazing bars including single pane; three vertical panes; diamond, oval and fish eye patterns. The number of entrance door panels also varies. Clever maths is at play to allow a central door in a terrace of an even number of 30 houses: 95 windows are shared unevenly. Number 1 is three bays wide on the curve; Number 2 to 13 are each three bays wide; Numbers 14 to 16 are each four bays wide; Numbers 17 to 29 are each three bays wide; and Number 30 is four bays wide on the curve.

The architect stipulated that the exterior woodwork must be painted white in perpetuity. Two centuries later, Annabel Wellesley-Colley broke the covenant much to the horror of her neighbours. In 1972 she painted the front door of her house yellow, and to make matters even worse, hung yellow blinds either side of it. She then took to sunbathing on her balcony wearing a yellow bikini. Naturally, Annabel chose the same hue for the suit she wore to the consequent public inquiry at Bath’s Guildhall. She won. “I am a descendent of the Duke of Wellington whose favourite colour was yellow and I regard it as my duty to uphold the tradition!” declared Annabel Wellesley-Colley. The door of Number 22 is still yellow. Charles Robertson wasn’t impressed: “The yellow door and blinds demonstrate how idiosyncrasy can spill over into bad manners.”

Lunch in Montagu’s Mews overlooking the gardens is an incredibly stylish affair. The delicately decorated ground floor reception rooms of William Bertram’s building flow into each other with grace and charm. Elizabeth Montagu would approve if she ever ventures beyond the staircase hall of Number 15. After the geometric perfection of the famous façade, the rear elevations of the Crescent are a glorious asymmetric jumble best viewed over Cornish day boat fish. “A fascinating disharmony,” observes Richard Morriss (on the architecture not the food) in The Buildings of Bath (1993). “A hodge podge, job lot look, an enthralling muddle,” adds Jan Morris (still on the architecture).

Julia Kent provided a review for House and Garden in May 1987, “The restaurant at The Royal Crescent Hotel is an elegant setting for elegant food, the style of which is contemporary yet classic. First courses have recently included gâteaux of wild mushrooms (a crisp potato galette with creamed spinach and girolles) with timbale of trout with a ragout of shellfish and a rich langoustine butter sauce. For the main course, you might opt for fillet of salmon steamed with cucumber and chive cream sauce. A three course meal from the à la carte menu costs about £27.00.” Lunch is a trifle (or two) more expensive these days.

A lifetime ago, Min Hogg, Founding Editor of The World of Interiors, shared her thoughts that interiors can be classified as either cluttered, hot climate, designer decorated, minimal, ancestral, simple, shabby chic or eccentric. Her London home was definitely “shabby chic” (a term she’d invented) while her Canary Islands retreat was of course “hot climate”. Min did admit, “To subdivide all the glories of interior design into a mere eight categories is shockingly presumptuous but they are fundamental.” The original drawing room of Number 16 currently falls into “modern” unlike the “ancestral” interior of the great fun museum in Number 1 Royal Crescent, one of the two five bay fronted end houses. The middle bay of each of the two end houses is defined by a wider gap between the engaged Roman Ionic columns either side of the central first and second floor windows above a pedimented Doric doorcase. This could have been an alternative solution to the central treatment of the Crescent. The corners of the end houses are emphasised by paired engaged columns on the principal elevations.

Who could forget the cartoon amidst the ancestral decoration of Number 1 Royal Crescent sitting room of a gentleman performing the Dicky Dangle Dance? Back at The Royal Crescent Hotel, the modern art of the drawing room recalls The Snob Spotter’s Guide by Philippe Jullian (1958), “Molly was telling me that at the beginning of his career Picasso used a lot of blue in his pictures. She calls it his Blue Period.” Truer to form, Montagu’s Mews is subtly “designer decorated”. Min often commented, “Beautiful interior decoration will always be one of life’s greatest pleasures.”

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The Landmark Trust + Marshal Wade’s House Bath Somerset

Unvernacular

“I can well remember the first time I entered Bath. It was a very hot day in the summer of 1937 … towards the evening I came to the hills which engirdle the Queen City of the West. Tired and footsore as I was, I lost nothing of that breathtaking moment when the eye first catches sight of that lovely terraced city. Lying, so to speak, in a vast amphitheatre, surrounded by hills of enchanting beauty, it seemed like a city out of an Eastern romance, a new Jerusalem built by some magic hand in England’s green and pleasant land.” That is how Tony Smith reminisced on the Pride of Wessex in his 1944 book simply titled Bath. Hyperbole becomes reality in this city.

Four decades later Kenneth Hudson notes in The Fashionable Stone, “The development of the Combe Down quarries at Bath in the 18th century was due almost entirely to the enterprise of Ralph Allen, who went into the stone business immediately after the Avon navigation was completed in 1727. The improvement in communication by water from Bath made it possible to ship stone by barge to Bristol and from there by ship to anywhere in Britain. It was the Avon navigation that broke the virtual export monopoly that Portland had held for so long.”

The Landmark Trust’s central Bath property predates John Wood the Elder and John Wood the Younger’s developments. This remarkable 1720s townhouse built for Ralph Allen’s friend Field Marshal George Wade – swapping his military life in the Scottish highlands for political life as MP for Bath – was rescued by the Trust in 1975. The ground and first floors are retail use. The top two floors of this now single aspect (save for one landing roof window) south facing building are holiday accommodation. Two reception rooms evenly occupy the four bays of the second floor. A freestanding octagonal kitchen (sink, cooker, fridge and cupboards all in one waist height compact unit) in one of the reception rooms is parallel with five of the walls including the chamfered chimneypiece wall. This allows the panelling and bolection mouldings to remain intact. Two bedrooms on the storey above have floors so slanted that walking across them is like being tipsy on a rocky boat.

All seven main windows (one of the windows in the outer bathroom wall is a dummy) of the palazzo façade overlook Abbey Churchyard. Thankfully it’s a car free space unlike The Circus and Royal Crescent. The angels climbing up and down Jacob’s Ladder on the west elevation of Bath Abbey are almost in touching distance. Directly opposite are the roofs of The Pump Room. The best view is from the loo on the top floor. Unusually for this hallowed and documented city, the provenance of Marshal Wade’s House is lost in the mists of time. The architect was certainly familiar with Andrea Palladio’s Libri dell’Architettura of 1570. “The Ionic pilasters are the first in Bath of the giant order,” Richard Morriss confirms in The Buildings of Bath (1993), “rising through two storeys.” Charles Robertson records in An Architectural Guide to Bath (1974), “The attic storey is somewhat different and may have been added or altered at a later date. “The building next door to the east clearly has a later top floor.

Heading downhill and arriving four decades later, Robert Adam’s Pulteney Bridge is a lighter version of neoclassicism in contrast to the virility of Marshal Wade’s House. Richard Morriss ponders, “It is said to reflect Palladio’s proposal for the Rialto Bridge in Venice.” Charles Robertson isn’t so sure: “Walter Ison suggests that the design may be adapted from a drawing in Palladio’s Terzo Libri dell’Architettura but the resemblance is not at all close, and Adam would presumably have regarded imitation of Palladio as old fashioned. There is really no reason to consider this simple but masterly design as anything other than original.”

So who was the first occupant of this house? George Wade’s family had settled in County Westmeath in the 17th century. Clearly at some stage he crossed the Irish Sea to settle in the West Country. Denise Chantrey records in George Wade 1673 to 1748 (2009), “Wade was a man who made and kept many friends who might easily have been his enemies. He was straightforward and honest, and made a point of seeing the other man’s point of view. He was a flamboyant character and he loved cards, wine, women, comfort, good furniture and art. He had friends in high places but gambled in low dives. He was vain and often commissioned portraits of himself which he gave to family and friends.” It would be rude not to continue the established partying tradition then in his not so humble Palladian abode.

Director of The Landmark Trust Dr Anna Keay explains, “Over 50,000 people now stay every year in The Landmark Trust’s buildings and experience the pleasure of carrying the key of the door in their pocket, ‘a stimulus more powerful than a mere ticket of admission’, and the possibility, for which Landmark was founded, that they ‘might go back home with an interest awakened that would grow, and perhaps last them all of their lives’.” An awakened interest it is then but not before afternoon sherry is decanted at a stop off in Corkage. Life is a stage behind the velvet curtains of this intimate restaurant and bottle shop on Chapel Row. “There is a poignancy,” writes Jan Morris in the introduction to Charles Robertson’s Guide, “to this diminutive side of Bath, or if not a poignancy, a wistfulness.”

In The Landmark Handbook (1988) the then Prince of Wales wrote in the forward: “While I am fortunate to be the Patron or President of a great many charities, I have always been a particular enthusiast for the work of The Landmark Trust. Its philosophy accords closely with my own convictions that historic buildings need – indeed deserve – sympathetic and skilled repair and a viable contemporary purpose both to survive and thrive. It is wonderful that the Trust’s restored buildings give much enjoyment, as well as earn the income to support themselves and the charity that cares for them.” Much enjoyment – taking his now Majesty’s advice the toons are turned up! Min Hogg, Founding Editor of The World of Interiors, liked to have the last word, “The most successful houses reflect their surroundings.”

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St Augustine’s Grange + St Edward’s Presbytery Ramsgate Kent

All Saints

It’s the 172nd anniversary of the death of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, an important day to arrive at St Augustine’s Grange, Ramsgate, where he died on 14 September 1852. Despite his considerable contribution to architecture, he was only 40. But there is nothing morbid about our sun soaked visit to the Gothic Revivalist’s home and adjoining property, St Edward’s Presbytery, high above the shoreline of east Kent. This Grade I Listed enclave has been pristinely preserved and rationally revived as holiday accommodation by The Landmark Trust, that keeper of follies and other quirks of built heritage.

The interrelationship of the two houses set in the wider context of St Augustine’s Church next door (by Augustus) and St Augustine’s Monastery opposite (by Augustus’ eldest son Edward) is best experienced from the viewing platform of the tower (which houses water tanks and WCs) of The Grange. It’s a complex and clever Gothic jigsaw. Glorious built form, glorious urban scenery. Excitement of architecture is matched by thrill of geography: a sweep of coastline takes in Sandwich Bay and a distant Deal.

In his Introduction (2003) to The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture and An Apology for The Revival of Christian Architecture (1841 and 1843) Dr Roderick O’Donnell writes, “Pugin was to be at his most influential in reforming the practice of the Gothic Revival and domestic architecture of what, in another context, he called the ‘middle class’ home, and his revolutionary influence on its construction, planning and decoration was first demonstrated in his own house, St Augustine’s Grange, Ramsgate (1843). Pugin thus stands at the wellspring of 19th century architectural and design reform, which was to be reflected in the institution that would become the Victoria and Albert Museum, the publications of Ruskin, and the architecture and decorative programme of William Morris … the paternity of the 20th century Modern Movement can be tracked back to Pugin and to True Principles.”

To the early 21st century eye The Grange and The Presbytery may appear to be simply high quality Victorian architecture, but to the mid 19th century eye the elevational subservience to the plan would have appeared as a radical reversal of the neoclassical norm. A striking honesty is at work: no blind windows or screen walls; instead a proliferation of asymmetric window arrangements and visible buttresses. Augustus’ work is the antithesis of the contemporaneous symmetrical Italianate pair of villas closer to Ramsgate Royal Harbour called Vale and likely built by the developer William Saxby.

The Grange, a family house, looks across to the English Channel over the West Cliffs. The Presbytery, a secular priest’s house which came seven years later, is tucked between The Grange and St Augustine’s Road. Both were designed by Augustus; both have light filled additions by Edward. The porch of The Grange and the first floor studio of The Presbytery, each glazed above dado height, are second generation Pugin.

There is weight to the choice of materials: the unknapped flint of The Presbytery symbolically straddles the secular and religious: St Augustine’s Church is built of knapped flint and Whitby stone; The Grange, of London stock brick with Caen stone dressings. Dr Anna Keay, Director of The Landmark Trust, sums up the two properties as “Gothic heaven and available to all of us to book for a stay”. Upon entering through Edward’s gates to be greeted by a pair of heraldic stone lions on top of the gateposts, we’re enjoying Augustus’ oft quoted “delight of the sea with Catholic architecture and a library”.

The internal layout of The Grange was just as quietly groundbreaking as the exterior. A practical arrangement of main rooms clustered around a central staircase hall without any servants’ corridors would prove to be the forerunner of later Victorian suburban housing. Subsequent architects like Sir Edwin Lutyens would be inspired by Augustus’ thoughtful design such as the positioning of windows based on capturing the optimal light and framing the best views.

The family chapel, reception rooms and bedrooms are richly decorated with a wealth of pattern and colour provided by stained glass windows, wallpaper and encaustic tiles. In contrast, the uncontrived simplicity and solidity of the kitchen dresser would herald the honesty of workmanship of the Arts and Crafts movement led by among others Philip Webb and Charles Voysey. Augustus believed features should be decorated but must be functional. According to Stephen Coote in William Morris His Life and Work (1995), “Pugin declared, ‘Ornament should be no more than enrichment of the essential composition.’” This dedication to functionality as a starting point would sew the seeds of Modernism in the following century.

Dr Roderick O’Donnell wrote the entry for Edward Welby Pugin in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004): “Edward Welby Pugin (1834 to 1875), architect, was born on 11 March 1834 at Ramsgate, the eldest son of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812 to 1852) and his second wife, Louisa Burton (circa 1813 to 1844). He was trained by his father and at the age of 18 found himself in charge of his father’s practice, which he developed with many pupils and various partnerships, most importantly with his brother-in-law George Coppiner Ashlin in Ireland (1859 to 1869) and his brother Peter Paul Pugin (1851 to 1904) … Edward Pugin’s practice was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. He worked initially in his father’s preferred Decorated Gothic style … From 1856 his style became more elaborate but his church plans simpler by widening the span of the arcades, diminishing chancel arches, and abolishing rood screens, so as to achieve simple sightlines set in shallow apses.”

Edward died unmarried in the arms of his brother Cuthbert Welby Pugin at his home on Victoria Street, Westminster. He was more outgoing than his father, frequenting Turkish baths and attending charitable functions. Roderick argues he was less important an architect than his father yet notes his style and plans became normative for Roman Catholic churches in the British Isles in the latter half of the 19th century. We reckon Edward’s surviving additions provide another layer of interest to The Grange and The Presbytery. The family firm continued as Pugin and Pugin.

Surrendering to the familial draw of Ramsgate, Cuthbert retired to The Grange where he died unmarried on 25 March 1928, outliving the combined age of his father and older brother by five years. The Landmark Trust decisively removed most of Edward’s additions to The Grange including a drawing room extension, conservatory and several chimneypieces. Cuthbert’s 1880s alterations to The Presbytery were also demolished. We depart Ramsgate with a newfound understanding and appreciation of Pugin the Elder and Pugins the Younger.