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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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The Hamiltons + Hamwood House Dunboyne Meath

Taking Refuge in the Shelter of Your Wings

Stephen Odlum sums up the origins of Hamwood House in his book Eva, Letitia and The Hamilton Sisters: Class, Gender and Art (2021): “The Hamiltons originally came from Scotland in the early 17th century and initially settled in the north of Ireland. The first of these settlers was Alexander Hamilton (1690 to 1768) who was MP for Killyleagh in County Down. In a tradition followed by many subsequent generations of the Hamilton family, he became a land agent. He seems to have been particularly successful in this role and left his five sons land worth £50,000. His son Charles Hamilton (1737 to 1818) moved south to Dublin where he first traded as a wine merchant. It appears that this business flourished, as he decided to build a house reflecting his new status. He chose to build in an area to the east of the village of Dunboyne in County Meath close to the border with County Dublin and only about 15 miles from the centre of Dublin.”

The writer details, “The Hamilton sisters remained attached to the old Ascendancy social monies and traditions. Letitia, Eva and Connie, who developed a gardening consultancy business, and Ethel, up to her death in 1924, pooled their resources to live in refined but declining style in a series of large, rambling houses in the Castleknock and Lucan areas of County Dublin from 1920 onwards. Manners mattered more than money – dinner was a formal event which the ladies dressed for and were summoned by a gong. In a world which would become increasingly dominated by Catholic dogma, Letitia and Eva would have had a liberty that was not often open to their Catholic sisterhood. Those who did choose to pursue modern feminist ideas were seen as being ‘West Brit’ or pro British. Indeed, Catholic women who were educated and middle class were more likely to join forces with their Protestant counterparts to achieve social and political recognition, as seen in the suffragette movement in the early part of the 20th century.”

It’s an unseasonably cool and overcast spring morning to meet Charles Hamilton VII for a private tour of his splendid home. The four bay two storey over basement under attic entrance front or perhaps it is the garden front (to be explained later) has curved wings extending out like crab claws grabbing pebbles – the end octagonal pavilions. “The house was built by Charles I in 1777 for £2,500,” introduces his descendant. “Ham comes from Hamilton and Wood comes from his wife Elizabeth’s maiden name Chetwood. Charles II’s wife Caroline found the house draughty – the original entrance on the side or west elevation opened straight into the reception rooms – so that’s how the current arrangement came about. A corridor now separates the entrance door from the living quarters. The driveway used to access what is now the garden elevation – really the house is back to front. In very hot dry summers the ghost of flowerbeds appears opposite the current entrance front.”

A set of early 1900s photographs from the Irish Architectural Archive includes a picture of the garden. And sure enough it is filled with flowerbeds. Other pictures show the house with window shutters and the house with the shadowy ghost of window shutters. Previous generations pose on the lawn and in the library.

Charles adds, “Caroline insisted on many more trees being planted to help create shelter for the strong winds. Remember that when she arrived at Hamwood in the early 1800s it was a cold and bleak situation and very exposed being 300 feet above sea level. That may not sound particularly high but in relatively flat Leinster there was nothing between the house and the east coast! Caroline and her husband were greatly involved in the interior design of the house too, adding furnishings, artwork and ornaments.”

“The architect is unknown,” he explains, “although a surveyor Joseph O’Brien is mentioned in family papers. During the 1798 Rebellion the agent for nearby Carton was hanged. So my ancestor Charles I took over as agent and my family continued in the role from 1800 to 1950. This supplemented the income they made of the 165 acres at Hamwood. The family have always been very active in the community. They set up agricultural societies to create work and during the famine they ran a soup kitchen. My father Charles Gerald was the last agent of Carton. The Duke of Leinster sold it to Lord Brocket and then eventually it was turned into a hotel. We will walk round to the other side of the house, down the long garden which has unbroken views across the countryside. Unbroken thanks to a nine foot wide haha.”

“The 1911 Census records a butler, three yard men, coachman turned chauffeur and five indoor servants. I remember as a child we still had seven glasshouses filled full of peaches and nectarines,” says Charles. Upon entering the house through the ocean blue coloured door, visitors are greeted by a Canadian moose head in the octagonal hall. The corridor ahead feels early Victorian: it is lined with tongue and groove wooden panelling and encaustic tile floored. It leads into an elegantly furnished double drawing room spanning the full four bay entrance front. The pale sea green blue walls are filled with paintings and drawings.

There are two corresponding reception rooms on the garden front. The two bay dining room is painted deep shell pink. Two similar oil paintings hang side by side: Mrs Charles Hamilton by Sir William Orpen (the subject dressed in back with white frills writing a letter) and Portrait of Louisa Mrs Charles Hamilton by Eva Hamilton (the subject in the same outfit reading a book). “Eva and Letitia both trained at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art,” Charles confirms, “where the prominent Irish artist William Orpen taught. Eva was especially influenced by Orpen’s style.”

Bright and airy even on a dull day, bedrooms fill most of the first floor. A roof lantern lit corridor extends off the staircase landing. “The two storey library wing was built by my great uncle,” notes Charles. “It disrupts the symmetry of the garden elevation.” The two pane Victorian glazing has been replaced on the principal front with 12 panes on the main block and intricate gothic topped panes on the arched windows of the wings. A painting of another country house hangs in the staircase hall. He states, “That was our family estate at Ahakista in West Cork. The television presenter Graham Norton lives there now. We used to have a townhouse in Dublin too – 40 Dominick Street Lower.” This four storey three bay terraced house, built in 1760, is now a language school. Hamwood House still stands proud as the family seat of the Hamiltons.

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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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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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Festive Afternoon Tea + The Caledonian Hotel Edinburgh

Sword Fight

Fun and games at The Cally. Afternoon tea has never been this exciting. Or dangerous. Table for two vegetarians in The Court – a covered over former courtyard of this gargantuan temple of Edwardian hospitality interior designed by Fox Linton. Drawings by John More Dick Peddie and George Washington Browne, the original architects of the red sandstone building, line the bathroom walls in place of the usual cartoons. There are seasonal twists and tales to this festive version of the 7th Duchess of Bedford’s favourite meal from a Santa Claus’ belt to wish list letters all in icing.

The full works. Lapsang Souchong smoked Chinese Tea, Fujian Province. Curried chickpeas, mango chutney, carrot slaw, spinach. Nut roast sausage roll, spiced apple. Sweet potato fritter, roasted red cabbage, maple and mustard. Vegan cheese, pear and candied pecan quiche. Vegan chicken, chipotle mayo, pickled cucumber, avo. Vegan club sandwich. Plain and double chocolate and orange scones, three fruit marmalade. Chestnuts Roasting: chestnut, blackcurrant and whisky, pâté de fruit. Holly Jolly: winter spiced butterscotch, treacle travel cake. It’s Cold Outside: coffee, hazelnut financier and dark chocolate tart. Jingle Bell Rock: tonka bean, green apple confit, Speculoos cheesecake. Merry and Bright: yuzu ganache, black sesame, praline macaron. Mistletoe: kirsch mousse, sour cherry compôte, flourless chocolate sponge.

So far so genteel. Then the restaurant manager strides over to our table and declares, “You look game! Fancy taking part in our art of sabrage?” To mere mortals that’s slicing off the top of a chilled bottle of Laurent-Perrier La Cuvée Brut with a full length ceremonial sword. “We’re one of the very few establishments left in Scotland licenced to do this,” she comfortingly adds. Holding the bottle at a 35 degree angle as instructed: sliding the sword down the bottle towards the top first time round; sliding it a second time; then sliding it down a final time and keeping going. Hey presto … slice! The cork and glass rim ricochet across the floor. “Perfect!” admires the restaurant manager turned martial art instructor. A swashbuckingly useful addition to the arsenal of party tricks. Celebratory glasses of Laurent-Perrier are poured.

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Castle Stewart Papers + Irish Country Houses + Glebe Houses

Plantation Shudders

The Public Records Office Northern Ireland is an Aladdin’s Cave for those of an architectural heritage bent. It’s in a coolly contemporary commercial building conveniently close to Titanic Hotel in Belfast’s Laganside. Super helpful staff deliver bundles of archive material to designated desks. The Castle Stewart Papers form a significant collection. They comprise about 6,000 documents dating from 1587 to 1960 mainly relating to the County Tyrone estates of the Earls Castle Stuart, their genealogy, their military service, and the building and rebuilding of their houses. The Stewarts were originally a Scottish clan: the surname is derived from the role of steward.

An orthographic issue needs explaining. The family name of the Earls Castle Stewart is Stuart. Their other titles are the Barony of Castle Stewart, the Viscountcy of Castle Stewart and the Viscountcy of Stuart. Confused yet? The petition which the 1st Earl Castle Stewart, then Andrew Thomas Stuart, addressed to the Irish House of Lords in 1768 in substantiation of his claim to the Barony of Castle Stewart sheds light on family history from 1619:

“James I, by his letter of 1619 to the Lord Deputy and Chancellor of Ireland, authorised them to create Andrew Stewart, Lord Stewart, Baron of Castlestewart in the county of Tyrone, to hold the said honour to him and the heirs male of his body. Andrew, the 1st Lord, left issue Andrew, John, and Robert. No Parliament having sat from the year 1615 to the year 1634, Andrew, the 1st Lord, never voted in Parliament, but constantly enjoyed the title. He was succeeded by Sir Andrew, his eldest son and heir, and many entries in the Journals of the Lords in the year 1634 prove his enjoyment of the dignity, in consequence of letters patent issued agreeable to the letter of King James.”

“This Lord died in or about the year 1639, leaving issue Andrew, Robert and Josias, and was succeeded by Andrew, his eldest son and heir. This Lord married one of the daughters of Sir Arthur Blundell, by whom he had issue one child only, a daughter named Mary, who married Henry Howard, afterwards 5th Earl of Suffolk, and this lady carried away almost the whole family estate. Andrew, the 3rd Lord, died without issue male, and Robert his brother being dead without issue, he was succeeded in the honour by Josias, his youngest brother. Josias died in or about the year 1662, without issue, and was succeeded in the honour by John, his uncle.”

“John, the 5th Lord Castlestewart, died without issue in 1685, and after his death, the descendants of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Stewart were the rightful successors to the barony of Castlestewart, [which remained dormant and unclaimed until 1774]. Lieutenant Colonel Robert was the brother of John, the 5th Lord, and consequently a son of the 1st Lord. Robert Stewart of Irry, died 1686, son and heir to Colonel Robert, married Ann Moore, daughter of William Moore of Garvey in the County of Tyrone. To him succeeded Andrew Stewart [1672-1715], his eldest son and heir, then an infant, and to him Robert Stewart [1700-1742], whose son and heir the petitioner is.” Andrew Thomas Stuart was successful in his claim to the Barony of Castle Stewart in 1774.

Amongst the many papers is an exclusive find. Opening the green covered book Photographs of Armagh and Tyrone Scenery by John McGie reveals faded photographs mainly of country houses. It’s undated; the archivists estimate the book to date from between 1868 and 1874. Dame Rosalind Savill, la grande Directrice of The Wallace Collection in London, once commented how she disliked the phrase “hidden gems” but that’s what springs to mind looking at these photographs and, in some cases, lost gems. Stewart seats featured include Ballygawley Park and Stuart Hall. Other country houses photographed also had Plantation of Ulster connections such as Aughentain Castle, Augher Castle, Cecil Lodge, Roxborough Castle and Tynan Abbey.

The Irish Architectural Archive on Merrion Square has another great wealth of material. In contrast to the modern spaces of the Public Records Office Northern Ireland, drawings and documents are laid out in an 18th century double reception room with elaborate plasterwork ceilings. In among various folders are a coloured illustration of Reverend Beresford’s proposed glebe house, a photograph of Moynalty Glebe House and a photograph of Lismullen House, reproduced here for non commercial educational purposes.

Ballygawley Park is a landmark ruin on the Belfast to Omagh A5 road. The formal façade with its Ionic columned breakfront is a romantic distraction to drivers motoring up the hill from Ballygawley roundabout. Remnants of the entrance pillars, railings and gatelodge continue to crumble year on year. The severely elegant neo Grecian mansion was built in the 1820s to the design of John Hargrave. The photograph is of the side elevation which overlooked a sunken garden complete with pond. The Stewarts never returned to the house when it was seemingly accidentally burnt in the 1920s. A not uneventful decade for Irish country houses.

Stuart Hall was the vast country house built on the outskirts of Stewartstown by the abovementioned Andrew Thomas Stuart no doubt to celebrate his social rise from Viscount to Earl. A two storey dropping to three storey Georgian block was attached to a Plantation tower. In Victorian times the building was dressed up with a castellated parapet added to the Georgian block and mullioned windows inserted in the tower. There are two photographs of the house in the book: one of the mainly two storey entrance front and one of the mostly three storey side elevation. Stuart Hall was an architectural victim of The Troubles: it was destroyed by the IRA in 1972.

Usually spelt with an E at the end, the photograph of Aughentain Castle (as it is labelled) shows the house in all its Italianate glory. Why settle for one campanile when you can have two? Haystacks stand between trees on the sloping lawn. This sprawling mansion was demolished in 1955 by then owner Colonel John Hamilton-Stubber who replaced it with a Continental classical style house. The current Aughentaine Castle, while smaller than its predecessor, is still a substantial and stylish building.

Augher Castle on the outskirts of the village of the same name and, like Ballygawley Park, is a showstopper for motorists, visible beyond a lake. Unlike Ballygawley Park, it is in excellent condition. The photograph shows the two storey entrance front range which is attached to a three storey lakeside toy keep. Dating from the 17th century, the castle is now mainly a Victorian rebuild. The people posing next to the exterior are probably fin du siècle dernier owners John and Elizabeth Carmichael-Ferrall and their son.

Many of the Big Houses of Ireland were plain boxy houses. Elizabeth Bowen’s family home in County Cork is a famous example. Cecil Manor, a neighbouring estate to Augher Castle, is another house with strong perpendiculars. Parapet free, hipped roofs rest on a distinctive dentilled cornice. It was designed by the architect William Farrell who had a flourishing country house and church designing practice in the first half of the 19th century. The photograph shows the magnificent backdrop of Knockmany Mountain. It was demolished in the 1930s.

Last but very much not least is the incredibly dotty Roxborough Castle, a Château Chambord by the Bann. The scale is as barmy as the design. Located outside Moy in County Armagh, it was the seat of the Earls of Charlemont. The original 18th century house can be seen in the Georgian glazed recessed portion of the entrance front. Architects William Murray then William Barre transmogrified the house into an enormous hotel like building with chunky four storey towers topped by steeple gradient roofs. The IRA burned Roxborough Castle in 1922, not a good year or indeed decade when it comes to architectural conservation.

Tynan Abbey was situated 18 kilometres south of Roxborough Castle. It was a large Gothic country house belonging to the Stronge family. Church like architecture included a spire rising over one end of the long garden front. The photograph shows a formal terrace dotted with yew trees – which have long been associated with graveyards. In one of the most infamous cases of The Troubles, Sir Norman Stronge and his son James were shot dead in their library by the IRA in 1981 and the house set ablaze. Tynan Abbey stood as a ruin until 1998 when it was demolished in its entirety. The site is now a featureless field devoid of architectural marvels.

The last image in John McGie’s book Photographs of Armagh and Tyrone Scenery is a view of a lake. An archivist has scribbled on the side “Camlough?” In the foreground are two well dressed gentlemen getting ready to row a small boat. In the background, is a high gabled single storey with attic lodge. A porch projects towards the lake. Pure tranquillity. Camlough Lake is a popular tourist attraction, a picturesque narrow strip of water 2.7 kilometres long and only less than half a kilometre at its widest point.

The Church of Ireland Board of First Fruits funded a glebe house at Fenagh, County Leitrim, in 1829. This two storey over raised basement stone building is of a type that pops up all over Ireland in the ultimate years of the Georgian period. The elevational drawing shows a mid storey landing roundheaded window: the executed arrangement regularises it into a ground floor window and first floor window matching the rest of the rectangular openings on the rear elevation. Fenagh Glebe House is three bays wide; these ecclesiastical dwellings are almost always three or four bays wide. Reverend George de la Poer Beresford, to give him his full name, was a relative of the owner of Curraghmore in County Waterford.

A mid 20th century photograph of Moynalty Glebe House in County Meath shows it to be in a poor state of repair. The entrance door of this well proportioned two storey over raised basement house is set in a chamfered bay window. Similar to Fenagh Glebe House, it has a tall grouped chimneystack, but is an earlier version of the Board of First Fruits clerical house model, dating from 1792. Moynalty Glebe House has been restored in recent years, the render painted a deep grey, and was sold in 2014 for €550,000. It cost £847 to build. The sale included the 275 square metre house, nine hectares of pasture, a gatelodge and a courtyard of stables and outbuildings.

Lismullen House (as it is spelt on the photograph labelling although more commonly Lismullin) in County Meath was the seat of the Dillon family. Presumably it is the Dillons who are playing archery in the faded photograph. The main block had a five bay three storey entrance front. Intriguingly, two storey Ionic pilasters just about visible on this front presumably once formed part of a tetrastyle portico. The IRA burnt Lismullen House along with its furniture and art in 1923. A Sir Joshua Reynolds painting was one of the few belongings the elderly Sir John Dillon and his family were able to rescue, cutting the canvas out of its frame. There is a metaphor lurking there about not seeing the whole picture.

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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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Architecture Country Houses People

Seskinore House + Forest Seskinore Tyrone

Negative Volume

The name Seskinore is derived from the Irish Gaelic seisceann mhór which means big marsh or bog. Tracing its roots back to the early 17th century, the population is still just a few hundred. To the north of the village is Seskinore Forest. Only remnants of an Ulster Plantation country estate can be traced: cast iron gates minus a gatelodge and outbuildings without a country house. Seskinore House was demolished in 1952 when the Ministry of Agriculture took over the 47 hectare estate. Up until 1941 it had been the seat of the Anglo Welsh Perry family and then through marriage the Anglo Scots McClintock family. Seskinore House was used by American soldiers during World War II.

An advertisement appeared in the Belfast Newsletter on 10 July 1940, “For sale by private treaty by the executor of Captain Wilfred Joynson-Wreford, deceased. Seskinore, County Tyrone. Beautiful country residence with about 120 acres land, portion of which is well wooded with valuable timber. The residence has modern conveniences and contains large entrance hall, inner hall, drawing room, dining room, library, smoke room, 11 bedrooms, servants’ apartments, kitchen, sculleries, pantries etc., six WCs, bathrooms. The out offices are most extensive, forming a large inner and outer yard. There are five cottages on the lands. The entire buildings are in splendid condition. The residence is situated in a good district, amidst beautiful surroundings, with nicely laid out grounds and gardens; and the entire property is held free of rent forever. Further cottages in the village of Seskinore can be included in sale, if so desired. Further particulars from McCoy Solicitors, Omagh, County Tyone.” There were no private takers.

A Garden of Remembrance lies deep in the forest. It marks the resting place of the last people to live in Seskinore House: Amelia “Leila” née Eccles-McClintock Joynson-Wreford (1898 to 1937) and Wilfred “Tony” Joynson-Wreford (1896 to 1940). Leila died of meningitis aged 38 and her husband Tony died three years later of tuberculosis aged 44. Their gravestones are surrounded by a colourful carpet of autumnal leaves. A third gravestone is of Tony’s son Patrick Anthony Joynson-Wreford (1928 to 2015). Tony was married three times – Patrick was the child with his second wife Olive née Trainor. Leila and Tony had one child: Xenia.

On 6 October 2005, Jonathan Rainey reported in the Tyrone Constitution, “The people of Seskinore recently welcomed back a long lost member of one of the village’s most respected families – over 65 years after she vanished from village life. Mrs Xenia Lewis, aged 70, from Townsville in Australia made an emotional return to Seskinore to try to answer some of the any questions that surround her childhood. Within the last year, Xenia has discovered that she is the granddaughter of Colonel John Knox McClintock, who contributed much to the life of Seskinore during his lifetime, including building the local primary school, before his death in 1936.”

“She has also discovered that she spent much of her early childhood in the village, even though today she has no memory of that time,” Jonathan records. “Both of Xenia’s parents died when she was still a young girl, leaving her in the care of an English guardian, who moved her to London, and then Sussex. As she got older, her guardian never revealed anything about her family or her life, in Seskinore. And in another twist to an already fascinating story Xenia has also met the half brother she never knew existed while she has been uncovering the truth about her past.” Xenia and Patrick restored the neglected Garden of Remembrance during her visit.

He concludes, “During a party organised in her honour at McClintock Primary School, Xenia told the assembled villagers, ‘It’s been a very emotional journey, but everyone has made me feel welcome, and I feel like I’ve come home. I think my father was really devastated when my mother died. According to an obituary published in the Tyrone Constitution, and from what numerous people have told me in Seskinore, my father used to go down to the Garden of Remembrance in the McClintock estate, where my mother is buried, at 6pm every single night with my mother’s dog, no matter what.’”

Seskinore House was rebuilt in 1862 to the design of the illustrious Sir Charles Lanyon. A formal symmetrical east facing façade had two bays on either side of a pedimented breakfront with three narrow roundhead windows above a balustraded Ionic portico – its outside columns coupled. Wide rustication in the form of stretched quoins terminated each end of the elevation. The side elevations had full height canted bay windows. The main block was two storeys with lower two storey ancillary wings to the west and north. Horizontal glazing bars creating four panelled windows were a popular fad of the second half of the 19th century and appeared in residences across Ulster including Seskinore House.

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Art Design People

The Italian Party + Madame Tussauds Marylebone London

Ciao London

To roughly quote Oscar Wilde, always give into temptation. So when an invite arrives mentioning the Italian Embassy and the art of hospitality there’s only one response possible. Dining, drinking and dancing in the company of celebs and royals too? A dancefloor rammed with Damiano David lookalikes and young Sophia Lorens? What’s not to love.

So that’s how we find ourselves at Madame Tussauds on a rainy Tuesday night. Forever in our hearts, Diana Princess of Wales is throwing dagger looks at Queen Camilla. Or maybe Di is just checking out that mountain of Sardinian pecorino cheese? The wrinkle free future Queen Catherine the Great is as polished as ever. Such a pro!

Lady Gaga and Nicole Kidman are vying for attention. We nearly fall over a fellow photographer. She refuses to budge. Lewis Hamilton poses for us. There are a few celebs who must’ve passed their 15 minutes of Andy Warhol fame as we’re not quite sure of their names. Freddie Mercury looks great. So realistic. Flashing backdrops of the natural and architectural beauty of Italy are a reminder The Italian Party is sponsored by ENIT SPA, the tourism promotion department.

Suddenly Freddie bursts into life! He throws off his yellow jacket and starts belting out “I’m gonna have myself a real good time”. The Italian elite of London turbo charge onto the dancefloor. Next DJ Sharky B ups the tempo even more and the crowd are singing and bopping along to “Tonight’s gonna be the night”. Neon lights flash everywhere. Let’s misbehave.

Amidst an endless round of spinach tortellini and pumpkin gnocchi not to mention lava like flow of Funtanaliras Cantina del Vermnentino, the Italian Ambassador to the United Kingdom His Excellency Inigo Lambertini declares, “Our Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni speaks English fluently, and that is not always the case for Italian politicians. There is strong cooperation and coordination between Rome and London, as well as numerous common interests. Italy is the second largest manufacturer in the European economy after Germany, so we are a natural partner for London.” Go Giorgio!

“You have to really be here to experience it” is the tagline of Sardegna Turismo. The same could be said for this party. It’s so easy to wax lyrical about all things Italian. Another sign flashes up. After party. To roughly quote Oscar Wilde again, don’t just exist get living.

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Architects Architecture Country Houses Hotels People Restaurants

Corick House Hotel Clogher Tyrone + Lanyon Lynn + Lanyon

A Distant Other Place

Alistair Rowan writes in Buildings of North West Ulster (1979), “The seat of the Story family since 1697, almost completely rebuilt in a plain minimal Italian style by Lanyon, Lynn and Lanyon in 1863. It is a large scale rendered villa L shaped. Three storey tower in the angle with an Italianate hipped slate roof. The old house had a five bay two storey front of which Lanyon kept two bays, building the tower and south wing before the rest. The yards behind the house have handsome barns of 1748 and 1858, one with a late 18th century brick vaulted end.”

The rebuilt house is sober, restrained, undemonstrative, far removed from Lanyon Senior’s palazzos. Befitting for a rural residence in the landlocked County of Tyrone. Dignity over decoration. Plainness over ostentation. Smaller versions of Corick House with chamfered bay windows, whether rendered or brick faced, would spring up in suburbs of Belfast and Ulster towns. To that effect it would become more influential than the practice’s grander designs. The towers and bay windows of Barden Towers in the fashionable east Belfast area of Ballyhackamore, three decades later, had their genesis in the early work of Lanyon, Lynn and Lanyon, who in turn drew on British taste for the Italianate. Cue the campanile. Enter the acanthus leafed cornice.

Drawings signed Lanyon, Lynn and Lanyon Architects dated 28 January 1863 illustrate that originally a gabled porch was proposed on the east elevation. The three storey tower containing the main entrance door must have been a later idea. The balanced but slightly asymmetrical south elevation (the two windows to the right of the bay window are wider spaced that the two windows to the left) was built in line with the drawings. The irregular north elevation is hidden behind trees now and the equally irregular west elevation is hidden behind recent extensions.

A Specification of Work for “making alterations and additions to Corick House, Clogher, for the Reverend William Story” accompanies the drawings. One clause states, “The works to be completed immediately on the signing of the contract, and to be completed on or before the 1st day of April 1864.” A further clause states, “The whole of the work is to be executed in the most substantial and workmanlike manner, with materials the best of their several kinds.”

Corick means a confluence of streams in Irish Gaelic: it was part of the lands granted to the Bishop of Clogher in the 1610 Plantation of Ulster. The townland is where Fury Rover rising in County Armagh joins the Blackwater River flowing through County Tyrone. John Story arrived in Corick in 1697 from Northumberland a the behest of the Bishop of Clogher to become his land agent. In 1994 Jean Beacom bought the house and immediate grounds of two hectares. The Story family gone, a new chapter began. Two years later she opened the house as bed and breakfast accommodation with nine bedrooms. Her grandchildren continue to run the property which is now a 43 bedroom hotel.

In a county lacking coastline and multiplicity of tourist attractions, Corick House Hotel is a welcome hospitality highlight. Nuptuals keep the wolfish debt collector from many a country house’s door and Corick is no exception. Banqueting rooms, a spa and wedding party accommodation fill new wings and converted outbuildings. The reception rooms and bedrooms of the original house are still enjoyed for their original purpose. Views from the well kept demesne are glorious. The ancient St McCartan’s Protestant Cathedral of Clogher can be seen across the valley from the sloping Victorian Walled Garden.

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Architecture Art Design Hotels Luxury People Restaurants Town Houses

East Walls Hotel Chichester West Sussex + Civilisation

No Inelegance

A Waitrose opening used to be the sign a place is going places. Now it’s The Ivy. Chains like The Ivy (Grade II Listed Building) are architecturally elevated in Chichester: the building housing Pizza Express has two Palladian windows and four blind parapet windows. Zizzi has three blind windows under a pediment dated 1791. New Look is in old architecture – a neo Grecian temple. The city has plenty of independent restaurants as well. Jorge Kloppenburg recommends fine dining at Purchases on North Street or Piccolino on South Street.

The Barn restaurant on the corner of East Street and Little London has a notice on its flank wall: “All Goodwood produce can be traced every step of the way from field to fork. They are totally committed to the care of their livestock and to the preservation of the countryside. They use no pesticides of fertilisers at Goodwood Home Farm, ensuring that the wildlife, hedgerows and centuries old natural ecosystem is protected. Goodwood Home Farm is four miles from here and therefore as local as you can get. The farm is set at the heart of the 12,000 acres Sussex estate.” You guessed it: Goodwood Farm Shop is its number one supplier. A plaque on the façade of The Barn is dedicated to fabulous clientele including Lawrence Olivier and Elizabeth Taylor. There’s still plenty of fabulosity in Chichester.

Jorge should know about good food: he’s been cooking since age 12. After a successful international sustainable business career, three years ago he bought East Walls Hotel which he runs with his wife Anywhere Thompson. “We don’t call it a hotel it’s a home from home,” Jorge relates. “In Germany I trained in Chinese, Indian and Thai cooking at night classes. We personalise breakfast here. One New Yorker guest likes her scrambled egg made with cheese. After spending 2,000 nights in 30 years staying in hotels across Europe I recognise what I like and dislike.”

He reckons, “A nice bathroom and excellent breakfast are crucial – that’s what you need to start the day.” The bathroom products are Elysl. Bedding of course is also important. All the beds are fitted with Mitre Linen’s Savoy Collection. “Fresh flowers on the dining tables are a must. I would describe our cooking as bespoke international food.” On cue, delicious halibut and salmon (with the subtlest hint of spice) is served alongside fresh greens and Finger Post wine. “Everything is freshly made. You need 35 minutes for potato dauphinoise. Air frying not deep frying is much heathier. Our breakfast homemade bread is 50 percent brown 50 percent white – fluffy, not too heavy.  We buy food at the market two to three times a week.” The tomatoes and herbs were picked two metres away two minutes ago. Forget farm to fork. This is patio to plate.

There are chillis in the garden. “We have a 37 acre chilli farm in Zimbabwe near where I was brought up,” shares Anywhere. “It provides employment for locals and supports 50 children in education. We are in the process of buying another 37 acres. We are both very committed to our philanthropic endeavours. Education is so important whether you end up as a doctor or truck driver. We want to give others a chance in life to do well.”

East Walls Hotel gets its name from the turn of last millennium Roman city walls. Its Grade II Listing dating from 1950 states, “Suffolk House, 3 East Row. 18th century. Three storeys. Four windows wide. Red brick. Eaves bracket cornice. Sash windows in reveals in flat arches; glazing bars intact on ground and first floors; rubbed brick voussoirs. Doorway with Doric columns, pediment and semicircular fanlight. Six panel moulded door with four panels cut away and glazed; door in panelled reveals. Stone coat of arms over the doorway.” A blocked Gothick arch on the first landing and a blind rounded arch on the landing above hint at structural alterations down the centuries.

Anywhere explains, “We can’t keep up with demand! So we’ve bought 1 East Row, the house next door, to expand our guest accommodation.” Its Grade II Listing, also dating from 1950, states, “18th century. Two storeys and attic. Three windows and extension of one window on ground floor. Red brick. Brick stringcourse. Wooden cornice. One dormer. Sash windows in frames, those on ground floor with slightly curved headings; glazing bars intact. Doorway with Doric pilasters, pediment and semicircular fanlight. Six panel moulded door set in panelled reveals.”

There’s no escaping the influence of Goodwood. The hotel was once the townhouse of the country house estate owners the Dukes of Richmond. A chubby Duke’s face cast in plaster protrudes over a French door on the rear elevation. “We always have guests staying for Goodwood Festival of Speed,” says Anywhere. “And businesspeople from Rolls Royce – their plant is only two miles away and employs 1,700 people. Our repeat guests book now for next year.”

A black and white photograph of Goodwood Tourist Trophy 1959 hangs in the bar next to pictures of Aston Martins and prints of Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor. “This is a men’s space,” Jorge suggests. “We’ve 75 whiskeys and 15 gins to choose from.” Burgundy chesterfield armchairs bolster the masculine ambience. The adjoining Art Deco style restaurant is more feminine. “The collection of teapots on display – Twenties, Thirties, Seventies, Nineties and 2000s – shows how time goes on.” This year is the centenary of Art Deco: the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes was held in Paris in 1925.

One of the many cultural highlights of Chichester is Pallant House Gallery, a Grade I Listed early Georgian house famous for its modern art collection. Here’s a random sample of delights. Frank Auerbach’s Reclining Head of Gerda Boehm (1982), a lesson in portraiture. Jean Metzinger’s L’Echaffaudage (1915), a diagonally determined dynamic scaffolding. Tracey Emin’s Roman Standard (1949), her first public art project. Standing tall in the courtyard, this cast iron variation of a Roman standard is topped by a small songbird rather than a triumphant eagle. Lucien Freud’s Portrait of a Girl (1949), a study of skin surface. John Piper’s Redland Park Congregational Church (1940), a rich hued and black lined depiction of the collision of the pastoral past with the brutal bomb wrecked present.

Five minutes away from East Walls Hotel – everything is five minutes away actually – lies Priory Park. This open space is a layering of history from medieval walls on Roman foundations to a Norman mote to the 13th century Guildhall, formerly the Chapel of the Franciscan Friary. The spire of the 11th century Chichester Cathedral can be seen from the second floor bedrooms and garden cottage suite. The cathedral and its precincts are a beautiful pocket of civilisation.

“We really believe in living in the hotel and doing the cooking ourselves,” confirms Anywhere. “That way the quality becomes how it should be.” She has a Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Science and a Master’s in Medical Biotechnology both from the University of Portsmouth, now balancing a career as a clinical pathologist with co running a hotel. “All 12 of our rooms are different but they all have antique pieces and beautiful bathrooms. Work hard – it pays off.”

Chichester: England’s finest small city. East Walls Hotel: England’s finest small hotel.

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Architecture Design Town Houses

Lady Chapel + Chichester Cathedral West Sussex

A White Horse Whose Rider is Called Faithful and True

Marcel Proust’s invented writer Bergotte in The Way by Swann’s, 1913, refers to “moving effigies that forever ennoble the venerable and charming façades of our cathedrals”.

During the Family Service in the Lady Chapel on the 20th Sunday after Pentecost, being Proper 25, Canon Nigel Ashworth, Priest Vicar of Chichester Cathedral, spoke about what is important and what happens at the end of everything. He reminded the congregation that the Bible is not just a book but a library of books. There are no excuses for skipping worship at the cathedral: five services are held each Sunday.

The most famous monument in the cathedral, the early 14th century Arundel Tomb monument of Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, and his second wife Eleanor of Lancaster, is unusual as they are holding hands. This inspired Philip Larkin’s mid 20th century poem The Arundel Tomb. The poet observes “And that faint hint of the absurd – The little dogs under their feet.” The last line of the poem is “What will survive of us is love”.

One of the many memorials in the cloisters is to Oliver Whitby who died aged 39 on 19 February 1702. He was the son of the Archdeacon Reverend Oliver Whitby and his wife Ann. He achieved plenty in his short life: “Founded and endowed a school in this city, for the maintenance of a master and 12 poor boys to be carefully educated in the principles of religion as established in the Church of England. To be diligently instructed in reading, writing, arithmetick [sic], and so far in mathematical learning as may fit them for honest and useful employments with a particular regard to navigation.”

Two weeks after this visit, the funeral service of the brilliant comedic actress Patricia Routledge, forever known as Mrs Bucket, took place in Chichester Cathedral.

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Architecture Country Houses Design Hotels Luxury People Restaurants

Barberstown Castle Straffan Kildare + Lavender’s Blue

No Pale Comparison

An article appeared in The Irish Times on 23 November 1974: “Two Historic Castles Now on Property Market”. It states, “Two of the country’s most interesting castles are currently on the market – Barberstown, Straffan, County Kildare, which is being run as a hotel, and Portlick near Athlone, County Meath, which will be sold with its lakeside estate complete with planning permission for an extensive new holiday village. Barberstown’s lands were granted to Lord Fitzgerald in 1172, and it was about this time that the keep (which is still in use) and the halls (long gone) were built. Later, it was the home of the de Capella, Fanning, Perkinson, Sutton and Dillon families before the entire estate was confiscated under what is euphemistically known as the Cromwellian Settlement.”

There’s more, “It was during the Sutton family occupancy that the Elizabethan wing of the castle (still in use) was built. The castle, house and grounds were valued at £200 in 1640. In 1703, Bartholomew van Homrigh bought the property, and although he achieved considerable political and social stature in his own right, he is mainly remembered today as the father of Vanessa, the girl immortalised in Dean Swift’s writings.”

And more, “One of Barberstown’s legends concerns a man said to be interred between the top of the main staircase and the roof of the tower. His family held the castle by a lease which expired when he was ‘put underground’ and they sought this novel method of postponing that day. Barberstown, standing on five acres, is at present being run as a fully licensed hotel and restaurant. It is to be sold (by private treaty now, or auction later) by Keane Mahony Smith and the solicitors with carriage of sale are Kennedy and McGonagle of Molesworth Street. The accommodation at Barberstown includes 13 bedrooms, six bathrooms, two bars, lounges, two dining rooms, large kitchens, plus the Norman tower keep. Outside there are two furnished penthouses, stabling, garages and well kept grounds. Barberstown, only 15 miles from Dublin, is a property with great potential, Keane Mahony Smith’s Robin Palmer declared. It will be sold as a going concern, with full seven day licence.”

Five years later, the musician Eric Clapton would buy the castle. Then in an article “£500,000 for Eric’s Castle” the Evening Herald reported on 12 July 1984, “Big excitement in the international property market with the tale that popstar Eric Clapton has at last found a buyer for his restaurant. Three years ago Clapton bought Barberstown Castle after many stays and banquets there – commuting from his Surrey home. However, after spending just under £400,000 buying the stately home restaurant in County Kildare, Clapton lost all interest – as popstars do – and has not appeared at all in the Castle. Now Clapton, apparently, has a buyer for Barberstown. The buyer is said to be German, no less, and the price is said to be in excess of £500,000, no less. One way for a popstar to shake off the Irish connection.”

All the bedrooms in the 2015 wing (currently draped in a cloak of reddening leaves) are named after previous owners and the date they took over. On the first floor in clockwise order the bedrooms are Maurice Fitzgerald 1170, Eric Clapton 1979, Norah Devlin 1973, Mrs Todd 1971, Robert Middleston 1941, Sandham Symes 1908, Mr Littleboy 1881, Edward Smith 1842, Admiral Robinson 1836, Hugh Barton 1826, Hugh Cairncross 1780, Joseph Cairncross 1780, Hugh Henry 1716, James Young 1660, Bartholomew van Homrigh 1703, Nicholas Barby 1300, Richard de Penkinson 1289, Sir John Fanning 1288, Thomas Fanning 1275 and Robert de Copella 1250. Amanda Torrens 2021 can be the name of the next new bedroom. The Barton Rooms Restaurant is named after Hugh Barton who added a wing in the 1830s. Battlefield Car Park is a reminder of the strategic location of this castle within The Pale.

“Smurfit in Talks to Buy Barberstown” roared the headline in The Irish Independent on 19 January 1990. “Business tycoon Michael Smurfit is believed to be negotiating the purchase of Barberstown Castle,” exhales Cliodhna O’Donoghue, “the former Irish hideaway home in County Kildare of rockstar Eric Clapton. Just a mile away from the 17th century Straffan House, which was purchased by Smurfit in September 1988 for £4 million, it is understood that if the deal goes ahead Barberstown will become an exclusive annex to Straffan’s palatial Georgian mansion and grounds.”

There’s more, “Standing about 15 miles from Dublin, the 1172 built Barberstown has had a series of notable owners including Sir Richard Talbot, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and more recently rockstar Eric Clapton who purchased the property from the current owner of nearby Moyglare Manor, Mrs Devlin. Barberstown again changed hands for around £300,000 and its existing owner, Ken Healy has extensively refurbished and extended the premises. Barberstown is presently being run as a hotel and is extremely popular as a wedding venue. Smurfit is expected to spend about £4.5 million transforming Straffan into an exclusive gentlemen’s club and is converting the 40 stables in Straffan’s Queen Anne Yard into luxurious bedroom suites as well as building a golf course in the 300 acres of grounds.”

And more, “To encourage industrialists to take membership of the Straffan Club the property will also contain a conference centre to attract investors, particularly Japanese and Americans, who plan to take occupation in the Financial Services Centre. Straffan, which has also had a chequered history of owners over the years, was sold for £4 million in September 1988 by Scots born businessman Alan Ferguson who bought the property from the liquidator of Patrick Gallagher’s estate. Market authorities believe that Mr Smurfit is considering the purchase of Barberstown with a view to extending the Straffan Estate further and it is estimated that the historic castle will cost between £700,000 and £1 million.” Clodhna’s exclusive did not come to pass. There is no Michael Smurfit Room.

In fact the previous owner, businessman Ken Healy, had purchased Barberstown in 1987. He transformed it into a 58 bedroom hotel, more than doubling the size of the original building, adding extensions in a sympathetic neo Georgian style. Norah Devlin first converted the castle to a 10 bedroom hotel in the 1970s. It is worth more now than the £1,033 the Dutch merchant Bartholomew van Homrigh paid for it at the beginning of the 17th century. A two or three storey Georgian house attached to a taller castle is not uncommon in Ireland. Other examples are Ballymore Castle in Lawrencetown, County Galway; Blackwater Castle in Castletownroche, County Cork; and Sigginstown Castle in Tomhaggard, County Wexford. The 18th century portion of Barberstown Castle originally had a thatched roof. Later rendering has been removed from the keep exposing rubblestone which contrasts with the smooth rendering painted a lighter shade of pale on the rest of the building.

Barberstown Castle is now the setting for high society weddings (Champagne sorbet) and high energy getaways (Champagne). On a random Thursday night in October, dinner might be panfried halibut, scallop ravioli, grilled asparagus and lobster bisque preceded by Jerusalem artichoke velouté, crispy egg milk and wild mushrooms. An amuse bouche might be crab salad with lemon jam on a scalloped crisp. Fashionably flavoured butters, garlic and seaweed, are sure to make an appearance. Photogenic puddings might include The Apple (Velvet Cloud yoghurt and white chocolate mousse, Irish Black Butter apple preserve, chocolate soil) or Gianduja and Pear (chocolate and hazelnut sabayon with caramel pear, Champagne poached pear). Anyone up for a Pale Rider cocktail at 2am on the terrace?

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Architects Architecture Country Houses People

Kings of Leinster + Borris House Carlow

The Lines of Beauty

“The sun has one kind of splendour, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendour.” I Corinthians 15:41

Roger White writes in Country Life, 3 October 2011, “First time visitors to Irish country houses are often struck by two things in particular. One is the sheer quality of architecture and craftmanship, and the other is the idiosyncrasy of the families who have owned these houses. Borris House in County Carlow has both characteristics in spades. The idiosyncrasy tends to be associated with the Anglo Irish but it would not be strictly accurate to so describe the Kavanaghs of Borris, about whom there is nothing ‘Anglo’.”

Staggered up a hillside, an architectural beauty parade of picturesque cottages clinging to the gradient, a Georgian house doubling as a petrol filling station, a boutique hotel boasting a celebrated chef, and an improbably vast château emerging like a granite mirage on the horizon, Borris in County Carlow is a cut above the average Irish village. With a County population of 50,000, one third that of the smallest London Borough, driving around Carlow is a breeze. It’s off the beaten track of the touristy east coast. Despite a chalkboard at the gates announcing a house tour, we’re the only people to turn up. Just us and the owner Morgan Kavanagh. There are no National Trust style timed entry queues round the curtilage.

While we are led round the house and adjoining chapel, something magical is happening outside. It’s the bewitching hour: late afternoon in an Irish winter. The windows of Borris House are ablaze – amber, cerulean, mauve, scarlet – in reflected glory as the sun sets behind the Blackstairs Mountains far away across the Barrow Valley. So what do we learn on our select tour? Rather a lot: Morgan proves to be an entertaining and well versed guide.

Key points of his tour include: Borris House is a mostly 1830s Richard and William Vitruvius Morrison confection. Neoclassical innards beneath a Tudoresque skin. In turn, the original Georgian box had swallowed up an older castle. Morrison masterpieces stretch the length of the country from Glenarm Castle in the north to Ballyfin in the midlands and Fota House in the south. Glenarm Castle, County Antrim, is the closest in looks.

Borris is the seat of the MacMorrough Kavanaghs, High Kings of Leinster. Their pedigree is traceable back to the dawn of Irish history. King Art Mór Mac Murchadha Caomhánach was a particularly feisty ancestor who reigned for 42 years, reviving his family’s power and land in between warring with the English King Richard II. The estate was once 12,000 hectares before being broken up in 1907. On the current 260 hectare walled demesne are Lebanon cedars, fern leaf beeches and Ireland’s tallest broadleaf tree. It’s a 44 metre high hybrid American poplar down by the River Barrow.

Morgan says, “A two storey wing with a walkway over the kitchen used to connect the main house to the estate chapel so that the family could enter straight into their first floor gallery seating. My grandmother demolished that wing. Anglican services are still held in the chapel every other Sunday.” Songstress Cecil Frances Alexander, forever extolling the combined merits of Christianity and country life, donated an organ (of the musical variety) to the chapel. Her son Cecil John Francis Alexander married Eva Kavanagh, daughter of a 19th century owner of Borris House, in 1882.

Most excitingly, in 1778, Eleanor Charlotte Butler, the sister-in-law of Thomas Kavanagh fled from Borris House where she was staying to elope with Sarah Ponsonby of Woodstock in Inistioge, County Kilkenny. Eleanor and Sarah escaped to East Britain and set up home together in Plas Newydd, Llangollen. They became well known as the ladies who did more than lunch together. Morgan recently discovered an 18th century letter in the library of Borris which refers to the pair as “Sapphos”.

Local historian Edmund Joyce carried out a study titled Borris House County Carlow and Elite Regency Patronage in 2013. Extracts include: “This study focuses on Borris House, the ancestral home of the MacMurrough Kavanagh family, situated beside the town of Borris in south County Carlow, Ireland. The house sits on a hillside facing southeast towards the County Wexford border. The Blackstairs Mountains, which terminate the prospect, form a boundary in that direction of unusual grandeur. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the MacDonough Kavanagh family were amongst the most powerful in the country with up to 30,000 acres of land in Counties Carlow, Kilkenny and Wexford.”

“In the early 19th century Borris House underwent a dramatic transformation and the house as it now stands is the result of this remodelling of the earlier classical house. The architectural historian Peter Pearson describes how ‘in the 1800s the MacMurrough Kavanaghs of Borris embarked on a lavish building programme that transformed their 18th century mansion into a Tudor Revival showpiece’. The changes were performed under the direction of Richard Morrison, the Cork born architect. The remodelled Borris House was the earliest recorded property in County Carlow to adopt the Gothic Revival style. Early Gothic Revival houses such as Slane Castle, County Meath (1785), are simply classical houses with gothic details.”

“The importance of Borris House as a Regency house designed by an Irish architect, furnished by Irish craftsmen and occupied by a landed family of Gaelic descent deserves a thorough study in order to draw out a deeper understanding of its meaning in the broader context of Regency design both at home and abroad. The scale of the building project at Borris House can be categorised as considerable by any comprehensive by any standard. The veneering of the house in the Gothic Revival style brought it up to date with fashionable contemporary design. In Ireland, a building draped in a Gothic shroud provided a consciousness and awareness of defence together with a deep rooted long ancestral provenance.”

“Christine Casey in her essay The Regency Great House describes how Richard Morrison ‘created a series of starkly contrasting interiors’, stating that ‘Borris is clearly a house bristling with ideas, unresolved but full of vitality and interest’. This clearly underscores the importance of the house in the context of Irish Regency design. Casey sees Borris House as Richard Morrison’s Regency prototype that ‘whets the appetite for the Morrisons’ grandest and most mature country house, Ballyfin, County Laois’.” Richard Morrison’s son, although suffering from depression, would join him in the thriving architectural practice. Randal McDonnell, Lord Antrim, owner of Glenarm Castle, once remarked to us how Morrison junior, “Went by the rather wonderful name of Vitruvius.”

In 2022 Edmund Joyce gave a lecture on Borris to the Kilkenny Archaeological Society. He explained, “The house is missing a big chunk and that chunk is missing as a result of works that happened in the 1950s. So when you get an architect in the 1950s to give you advice they give you three options. First option to let Borris House and build a small house adjacent. Second, to demolish rear sections of Borris House and take down the top storey of the main house. Third, to demolish Borris House and build a small house adjacent, a four bedroom bungalow in the walled garden.”

The Kavanaghs’ architect was Dan O’Neill Flanaghan of Waterford City. Edmund pulled extracts out of his 1957 report: “Perhaps I will be forgiven if I say that Borris House is not an architectural gem … to completely remove the front portico I do not think the general appearance of the house would suffer by its removal … to invite tenders from demolition contractors, and the second to auction it room by room, or floor by floor, and employ one’s own contractor on the demolition.”

Fortunately any decisions on the future of the house and estate had to go through four trustees. Option two was chosen in part: demolish the long two storey subsidiary wing. This proved costly and bereft the house of its kitchen. A vintage photograph (copyright of the Irish Architectural Archive: one of several reproduced here for non commercial educational purposes) shows part of the vanished wing. The cupolas, the crowning glory of the square turrets at each corner of the main block were removed at this time.

That’s as far as the demolition progressed. Edmund ended his lecture with, “The house was going forwards then it started going backwards now it’s going forwards again. A lot of restoration work is happening and the current generation is very interested in putting back what was there before. It’s nice to see that it’s gone full circle.” The recent lime rendering washed in apricot accentuates the best parapet in Ireland, even without its cupolas. Turning the circle comes at a price: it costs the Kavanaghs about €250,000 a year to maintain and run Borris House and estate.

“The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.” Ecclesiastes 1:5

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Architecture Art People

Peter Doig + House of Music + Serpentine Galleries London

Ducks on Distant Oaks 

The colours of autumn have reached full seasonal radiance in Kensington Gardens. Serpentine Galleries to the north and south of The Long Water on the edge of the Gardens are enveloped by embraces of verdant vibrancy. To the vernissage of Peter Doig’s show House of Music at Serpentine South. Unlike its northern relative, the original building has no extensions. James Grey West’s 1934 neo Georgian red brick and stucco tea pavilion retains its original symmetrical elevations and plan.

Drawing colour indoors, Peter Doig is a meticulous colourist who uses disquieting combinations in his paintings. His use of colour is integral to the illusory quality of his work which blurs the line between figurative and abstract art. In place of photorealism portrayal is a hazy fractured vision. At times strong hues pull the viewer into the painting – a pink path here (Lion in the Road, 2015), an orange horizon there (Painting for a Poet, 2025).

Vernissage catering by Social Pantry in the Entrance Hall, café tables and chairs in the white walled West Gallery, and armchairs in the black walled East Gallery hark back to the building’s original use as a tea pavilion. The South Gallery opening off the Entrance Hall and the central clerestory lit North Gallery are hung but unfurnished. And everywhere, the sound of his record collection: 300 vinyls from Aretha Franklin to Winston Bailey play continuously on gigantic 1950s speakers.

The large Painting for Wall Painters (2010 to 2012) in the South Gallery faces the Entrance Hall. A montage of national flags includes a lion emblem representing Ethiopia. The Lion of Judah appears in the three equally large paintings in the North Gallery: Lions Ghost (2024), Rain the Port of Spain (2025) and Untitled (2025). Peter’s interest in painting lions was first stimulated by a childhood visit to the Port of Spain Zoo. Some of the lions, while majestic, are shown in a state of confinement: a metaphor for slavery and displacement in Trinidad. Born in Edinburgh, the artist lives between Trinidad and London.

One painting brings together music and art in oil on canvas. Giant speakers are piled high in front of palm trees in Maracas (2002 to 2008) in the West Gallery. In all his paintings, figurative details dissolve in heady washes and flows of painterly texture. Hazy strokes at the base of Maracas add a ghostliness to the otherwise hard lines. A small man stands on top of the middle speaker. What does it all mean? That’s the power of Peter Doig’s art: it’s as decipherable as a half forgotten technicoloured dream.

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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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Art Design Fashion People

The Africa Centre Southwark London + Mary Martin London

Black History and Futures Month

A Dame in Britain. A Queen in Ghana. A Day in Atlanta. Honour in three continents. More of Mary Martin later. The flank wall of The Africa Centre in Southwark’s cultural quarter a few blocks away from the Thames is filled with a mural of Ignatius Sancho (1729 to 1780). He was the original polymath, the seminal multihyphenate. A former enslaved African, he rose through 18th century society – no mean feat – relying on grit and talent to become a celebrated British writer, composer and abolitionist. Ignatius would also become the first person of African heritage to vote in a British general election. The portrait by London based visual artist Neequaye Dreph Dsane, known as Dreph, is loosely based on a 1768 portrait by Thomas Gainsborough. Ignatius set the bar high.

In his opening address at the Honorary Doctorate Conferment Ceremony held in The Africa Centre, Dr Matthew Godwin Mario on behalf of Myles Leadership University emphasised the importance of recognising people from diverse backgrounds who have made immense contributions to global development and continue to create opportunities and spaces for the next generation of leaders. “Myles Leadership University believes that leadership is not limited to the classroom,” he stated, “but lived through service, impact and innovation. Today we honour those who exemplify these values.”

This year’s honorary doctorate recipients were Chief Light Aboetaka (Chief Executive and Founder of African Afforestation Association in Germany). Adesegun Adeosun Junior (Cofounder of Afro Nation and Founder of Smade Entertainment Group in the UK). Henrietta Uwhubetiyi Amatoritsero (Chief Executive of Casual Queen Clothing in Nigeria). Bash Amuneni (Architect, Poet and Cultural Administrator in the UK). Bilkiss Moorad (Chief Executive of LegalWise in Botswana). Ogechi Origbe (Chief Executive Mattoris Supamart in Nigeria). Dr Tonye Rex Idaminabo (Chief Executive of Reputation Poll International and Founder of African Achievers Awards in Britain). Ignatius Sancho would approve of the list.  Miss World Angola Núria Assis said, “C’est un grand privilège d’être ici pour représenter mon pays.”

Keynote speakers were Professor Akin Akinpelu (Forbes Coaches Council in Nigeria), Dr Jola Grace Emmanuel (International Speaker and Author) and Dr Anurag Saxena (International Banker). Keynote speaker Jola Grace noted, “We are all created on purpose with a purpose: nothing just happens and aligning with your purpose brings fulfilment and peace. Your purpose was created before you was, so it cannot expire. Before we were formed in our mother’s womb, God knew us and He ordained us. He gave us our assignment, our task, our purpose way before we were formed in our mother’s womb. Sometimes God doesn’t show us the whole picture but just a snippet, expecting us to trust Him all through the journey.”

The Ceremony united leaders, visionaries and changemakers under one roof to honour service, education and the spirit of global leadership. Attendees included the ultra successful businessperson Anywhere Thompson, owner of East Walls Hotel Chichester, and Jeremie Alamazani, Founder and Chief Executive of Wealth Partners Ltd. Jeremie shared, “I understood that my colour could be an issue, could be a problem with certain people but the way to minimise your colour is to increase your skill. When you get on a plane you don’t ask the colour of the pilot or his faith. You want a professional. And when you reach a certain level people are checking more your value – what you are bringing to the marketplace – more so than your colour.”

Jeremie continued, “So I knew that my colour could come as a way to explain why I was not given something, why I was slowed down in a process. Still, try to be the best you can and they will not be able to avoid you regardless of what they think of you. So I don’t expect to be loved, I don’t want to be loved. I want you to respect me because I’m good at what I do.” A Myles University Initiative discussed after the Ceremony was Project Educate 1,000. This initiative supports worldwide access to higher education for underprivileged children. Its mission is to empower five million youths by 2045. Jeremie is a Trustee of the African Caribbean Leukaemia Trust and has many community commitments in Africa including financially supporting the Mere Teresa de Calcutta Primary School in Kisangani, Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Dame Mary Martin, Founder and Chief Executive of Mary Martin London, the international fashion house, also supports many charitable causes including teaching underprivileged children in London to sew and make clothes. At the Ceremony, Mary was recognised with a Golden Plaque for her leadership and continuing contribution to British and international fashion. Earlier this year she was made a Dame of the Knightly Order Valiant of St George. Even earlier this year Mary was crowned Diaspora Queen Mother Mama Nenyo I by the Ewe Kingdom Chiefs of Benin, Nigeria, Togo and Ghana. Last year, Atlanta City Council declared the first Saturday in December to be Mary Martin Appreciation Day. The third Monday of January every year in Atlanta is Martin Luther King Junior Day.

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Art Design Fashion People

Marie Antoinette + Victoria + Albert Museum London

Tomorrow is Not Another DayHigh camp and high treason, glamour and gore, makeup stories and made up stories, big wigs and bigwigs, political incorrectness and incorrect politics, the Marie Antoinette show at the Victoria and Albert Museum is a fitting and well fitted tribute to la dernière Reine de France. It’s the first ever British exhibition dedicated to the anglophile royal.

“Marie Antoinette is the most fashionable queen in history,” sparks curator Dr Sarah Grant so there are plenty of frocks on display. Long before she was incarcerated in Temple Gaol, Marie Antoinette was a prisoner of the largest gilded cage in history. Shipped off aged 14 from her home in Austria to be married to her cousin, becoming Queen at 18, she was never allowed to leave France. Courtiers updated her on the latest London trends.

“This was a woman whose choices practically generated the industry around couture and jobs for thousands of people,” barks Manolo Blahnik, one of the show’s sponsors. Hers was a rarefied vision unrivalled by subsequent regal patronage. Yet when she opted for simpler muslin dresses and straw hats in the 1780s over the ostentatious court gowns she had previously popularised, the silk merchants accused her of abandoning their industry.

More than 230 years after her death it’s hard to distinguish between the wild fiction and wilder truth. Myths are immortal. She almost definitely didn’t suggest the poverty stricken should stick to calorific sweet stuff but wouldn’t it be fun if she really did quip “I do take little care of my appearance”? Real letters trump fake news. Marie Antoinette’s mother, Empress Maria Theresa, admonished her in a letter of September 1776, “All the news from Paris is that … your finances are in disarray and weighed down with debt.”

Frivolity not form follows function when it comes to her choice of gardening tools. But hey a girl has to look good even when digging up soil! Her harpsichord is a reminder that Marie Antoinette was more than a clotheshorse. She was an accomplished musician and popularised the salon concert. A chair represents her interest in interior decoration: the Louis XVI furniture style is named after the wrong marriage partner. Seize that Seize!

But a headless dressed dummy is a harbinger of the horror ahead. Turn the corner into the penultimate exhibition space and in place of a crinoline is a smock. Next to a guillotine. A neon sign contains her words of August 1793 “Nothing can hurt me now”. She would be killed two months later. Aged 37, the Queen of Arts lived one year longer than the future Queen of Hearts.

Turn the next corner for a posthumous party. Today is a new day. True fashion never dies. Just ask John Galliano.

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Design Luxury People

Autumn Collection + Kartell South Kensington London

Intelligence Service

Trust Phillippe Starck to be ahead of the curve. The trailblazing French designer has collaborated with leading Italian brand Kartell to produce the first ever chair design to be conceived and drawn up by AI. Philippe asked the computer programme Autodesk: “AI, do you know how we can rest our bodies using the least amount of material?” The outcome is a stylish curvaceous seat based on an injection moulding production that uses 100 percent recycled plastic.

Generative design is an explorative technology that allows creators and engineers to input their goals along with parameters such as materials, manufacturing methods and cost constraints. Autodesk then explores all the possible permutations of a solution to generate design alternatives. The software tests and learns from each iteration what works and what doesn’t. The AI Chair is a fitting addition to the Kartell London store. Kartell’s Autumn Collection includes Philippe’s sleek super glossy HHH Chair. Also made of recycled plastic, the seat is available in reused leather or Liberty fabrics. The initials stand for Her Highest Highness. A dauphine worthy piece of furniture.

The flagship London store is fittingly opposite Brompton Square where Min Hogg, the innovative Founding Editor of The World of Interiors, once called home. There are instantly recognisable pieces on display (Philippe’s Louis Ghost and Victoria Ghost Chairs) as well as new pieces (his Cap Table Lamp). Other designers represented include Ludovica Serafini and Roberto Palomba (Albert Table) and Patricia Urquiola (Aaland Pouff). Rodolfo Dordoni, Ferruccio Laviani, Piero Lissoni and Fabio Novembre are the masterminds behind the Kartell Eyewear Design Collection.

AI continues to affect every aspect of modern life. Leana Wen wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post 7 October 2026 “AI might be our best hope to fix healthcare”. She stated, “Now, however, the country has a new reason for hope: artificial intelligence. That’s the big idea in health informaticist Dr Charlotte Blease’s new book Dr Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us — and How AI Can Save Lives. ‘The medical community needs to show leadership here,’ Blease told me. ‘We’ve got to stop sticking our heads and stethoscopes in the sand.’” Philippe Starck and Kartell are sticking their heads above the AI designed parapet.

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Art Design People

Brompton Design District South Kensington London + Tender Revolution

Another Place

Sunday afternoon painters have their place – usually with still lifes and landscapes – but how riveting to see the cutting edge of contemporary art in Brompton Design District. A Softer World, this year’s curated strand, is directed by British Italian writer and gallerist Alex Tieghi-Walker. Exhibitions, installations, talks and workshops explore design through empathy, tactility and interdisciplinary collaboration. His emotionally resonant approach challenges how we experience and respond to the material sphere. In a world that often demands certainty and control, A Softer World posits: what if design moved with care and made space for us to do the same?

A most exciting exhibition – or is it multiple installations? – is at 237 Brompton Road. Tender Revolution showcases furniture, textiles and objects by designers, artists and makers from the Royal College of Art. It presents design as an act of care, connection and rebirth. The participating creatives challenge rigid systems that suppress complexity and erase stories beyond the binary. They embrace contradiction, vulnerability and embodied experience as powerful sites of renewal.

“The designer of today reestablishes the long lost contact between art and the public, between living people and art as a living thing. Instead of pictures for the drawing room, electric gadgets for the kitchen. There should be no such thing as art divorced from life, with beautiful things to look at and hideous things to use. If what we use every day is made with art, and not thrown together by chance or caprice, then she shall have nothing to hide.” Not a contemporary commentary but rather 29 years old relevance written by Bruno Munari in Design as Art. Tender Revolution succeeds by inviting us in thought provoking and sometimes even humorous ways to reimagine the role of design in shaping more compassionate futures – that are free of chance and caprice.

Featured exhibitors: Ana Maria Alarcón, Carmen Danae Azor, Alexander Clark, Avis Dou, Natalie Dubrovska, Ruwanthi Gajadeera, Audra Grays, Linlin Guan, Menghyan Guo, Miyuki Guo, Ruikun Guo, Lydia Hill, Shino Hitosugi, Sahym Hussain, Huili Jin, Patrycja Koziara, Hyein Lee, Maxim Lester, Lydia Lin, Alexandre Manko, Luca Maremmi, Eileen Morley, Ellen Nacey, Sofia Ortmann, Sarah Tibbles, Rosalie Valentino, Yang Xiao, Yidan Xu, Zhibo Yang, Chenrui Zhang, Zinjin Zhang, Shaming Zhang, Shumeng Zhang.

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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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Architects Architecture Art Design People

Serpentine Galleries London + The Delusion + Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley

Human Engineering

Kensington Gardens is home to two exquisite pieces of sculptural architecture: one carved in stone; one moulded in coated glass fibre. The William Kent designed Queen Charlotte’s Temple is a 1730s symmetrical eyecatcher best viewed from the Serpentine Bridge. The Zaha Hadid designed restaurant added to the Serpentine North Gallery in 2013 takes an asymmetrical organic form which is echoed in the fluidity of the surrounding garden planned by Arabella Lennox-Boyd. Now Kensington Gardens is temporary home to an extraordinary piece of …

Enter Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of the Serpentine, to talk about the latest exhibition in the North Gallery which pushes all the boundaries when it comes to definitions. He says, “We are thrilled to provide Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley with a platform for her groundbreaking live experiment. The Delusion embodies everything Serpentine stands for: a place of exciting experimentation where new connections between artists and audiences come to life.” Bettina Korek, CEO of the Serpentine, adds, “Braithwaite-Shirley’s visionary use of gaming and participatory performance to explore polarisation, censorship and hope reflects the urgent conversations shaping the world today.”

The gallery is divided into a series of dimly lit spaces like twisted takes on Victorian mediums’ parlours. Handwritten questioning messages written on doylies are pinned to cushions; framed cartoons of monsters hang on the walls. London born Berlin based Danielle provides instructions: “You can experience the exhibition through three different emotional states called Delusion Loops. Each loop presents scenarios inspired by the emotional states of hope, fear and hate. Which loop comes next depends on how visitors interact with the games in the exhibition space. Each loop is accompanied by its own soundscape, different versions of the games and changing elements in the gallery environment. You will find one multiplayer game in each room. Collaborate with other players. Three games. Three loops. Infinite ways to participate.”

Ever since Carsten Höller’s 2006 installation at Tate Modern – when visitors slid down self exploratory slides – interactive art has been a progressive component of London’s art scene. In place of the sheer physicality of Carsten’s work, The Delusion invites visitors to mentally engage in hot topics through gaming machines. While it’s not guaranteed to solve geopolitics, this crossover between video games and the visual arts sure is fun.

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Architecture Art Design Fashion Luxury People Restaurants

Supporters’ House + The National Gallery Trafalgar Square London + Christmas

The Art of Buying

In 2023 it was the reboot of the National Portrait Gallery. This year it’s The National Gallery which holds the world’s preeminent collection of paintings made in the Western tradition starting in the early 13th century. Following the landmark reopening of the Sainsbury Wing in May came the launch of Supporters’ House and two newly created retail spaces. The Christmas 2025 range features many products designed inhouse and available exclusively at The National Gallery. Consumerism with a conscious: every purchase directly supports the art collection

The entrance door to Supporters’ House is to the immediate left of the portico overlooking Trafalgar Square. A rabbit warren of offices, stores and stock rooms have been opened up into four large spaces: a lounge and bar, restaurant, private dining room and salon event space. Interior designer Job Hoogervorst of Studio Linse says, “We wanted it to feel like it’s always been there. The initial wish was that it has an echo from The National Gallery.”

Revealed internal arches add a strong sense of structure to the corridor and spaces. Deep colours inspired by the permanent collection are used to saturate each space from the walls and window shutters to the ceiling. Job comments, “The place is quite architectonic so it is as if each room has been dipped in a colour.” Furniture from the archives has been repurposed and reupholstered. The original parquet floor has been restored. Studio Linse’s cultural hospitality space designing experience includes the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

The Gallery is also launching an international architectural competition for a new wing. This has already attracted £375 million of cash pledges including the two largest ever publicly reported single cash donations (£150 million each) to a museum or gallery. Director Sir Gabriel Finaldi states, “We are hugely excited by this development and are immensely grateful to our donors for their support – on an unprecedented scale – as The National Gallery steps into its third century. We look forward to an ever closer collaboration with Tate on this significant new initiative.”

The Painter’s Tree is a set of Christmas decorations handcrafted by Cambodian women. Felt figures include Caravaggio, Gainsborough and Rubens. The new scented edit offers soaps and hand creams traditionally made in Sussex with wrapping based on details from National Gallery paintings. Scents include Fig and Grape, Pine and Eucalyptus, and Jasmine. Details of paintings also feature on this season’s fashionwear such as Van Gogh’s famous hat embroidered on a jacket.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year … to visit The National Gallery and get shopping!

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Architects Architecture Art Country Houses

Chartwell + Country Houses Westerham Kent

West Oast Cooler

South of Westerham lie wooded hills and valleys dotted with delightful country houses. Many of them exhibit the Tudorbethan characteristics of early 20th century domestic architecture. Others have highly distinctive roof shapes which display their origin or inspiration. Over to Sir William Addison’s Farmhouses in The English Landscape (1986), “The farm buildings associated with the new agriculture of fruit growing were oast houses, delightfully built in local vernacular style. It was appropriate that it should be so since ‘oast’ means ‘kiln’ and Kent had limekilns in the 14th century. They also integrate into the historical scene because they belong to the same tradition of mechanical ingenuity as windmills. Hops were introduced into Kent north of the Downs in 1525, but drum shaped oast houses, capped with a pivoted timber cowl with a flyboard controlled by the wind in the way weathervanes are, were not invented until the 1830s, so were a 19th century innovation.”

The most famous country house in the locale is Chartwell, once the home of Sir Winston and Lady Clementine Churchill and now a very popular National Trust tourist attraction. John Newman explains in his Pevsner Guide 1969, “Created in 1923 to 1924 for Sir Winston Churchill, who wanted a family house and was captivated by the site: high, but enclosed by wooded slopes and opening out to a panoramic view of the wooded Weald. The red brick mid Victorian house on the site was drastically reformed by Philip Tilden to create two narrow, towering wings to the east and south, both crowned by crowstep gables. In the angle between them a square staircase tower. Viewing terrace below. That was the grouping that mattered. Long, indecisive entrance front close to the road. The mighty timber doorcase with oakleaf columns was bought from a dealer; likewise the fancy wrought iron weathervane on the stair tower.” A rather odd naked squared trellis snakes across the entire highly visible gabled side wall.

There are two standout paintings in Chartwell. A strikingly flattering portrait of a young Sir Winston in oils hangs over a narrow staircase. It was painted by the wildly talented north Belfast born Sir John Lavery. The painting depicts the war hero as Lieutenant Colonel of the 6th Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers which he commanded on the Western Front of World War I in early 1916. The artist employs his trademark technique of a brightly lit figure in a dark surround. Rather different but still of interest is Sir Winston’s oil painting of Clementine hanging in the hallway below. It’s his best painting by a country kilometre. Clementine’s joyful face joyfully beams upwards against a rough hewn surround creating a sketched appearance. He created it aged 80 using a photograph mirror imaged and enlarged on a projection.

The environs of Westerham overflow with greenness and pleasantness on Diary Lane and Froghole Lane and Hosey Common Lane and Puddledock Lane and Spout Lane. One house brings a little Strawberry Hill to Crockham Hill. The prettiness of Mariners has evolved over half a millennium. A seven bay Georgian brick main block is enlivened by a Gothick porch and end turrets with lancet windows. Asymmetrical wings add yet more eclectic charm. This is how the other half of the one percenters live. Even the goats look posh.

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Art Design Fashion People

Design Museum London + Blitz Club

Old Romantics  

In the late Nineties early Noughties it was The Frames in Belfast, The Pod in Dublin and The End in London. The definite article was a clue you were definitely going to have a good time. In the beginning, before these epochal nightlife venues tripped the light fantastic, there was Blitz Club. Or at least in the early Eighties. David Bowie, Siobhán Fahey, Boy George, Gary Kemp, Zandra Rhodes, Peter York … they all cut loose on its dancefloor in Covent Garden. Spandau Ballet was the house band. The latest show at the Design Museum London celebrates this tiny short lived yet influential Club (just 18 months of fun filled nights) founded by Steve Strange and Rusty Egan.

Clothing, textiles, artwork, records, music videos, ephemera and best of all an immersive nightclub complete with clubbers and discarded bottles of Blue Nun make for an escapist visitor experience.  Produced inhouse, Senior Curator Danielle Thom worked with many of the clubbers who loaned their belongings. “Almost all of the material in this exhibition has come straight from the original sources,” she confirms. “Take the dresses – they are not generic. They are things that were actually worn to the Club. That immediacy adds a valuable layer to the exhibition.”

Visitors can dial a rotary telephone to listen to interviews by Blitz Kids (the name given to frequenters of the Club by the media). Danielle says, “We are the Design Museum so are interested in design in all its facets – all its creative outlets. We wanted to capture that moment when visual design, fashion design, culture and the media start to shift at the opening of the decade.” She notes that cultural influences on Blitz ranged from architectural futurism to the Weimar Republic.

“The exhibition’s emphasis on fashion isn’t on the designer output that would emerge from the Club but on how people were actually styling themselves,” Danielle confirms. “Their clothes were gathered from jumble sales and theatrical costumiers and also pieces their friends would run up for them on sewing machines. It was necessarily very rough and ready because they had little in the way of money. But what they did have was ingenuity and creativity.”

ID and The Face magazines were birthed from this scene. Many of the editors, photographers and writers were Blitz Kids who featured clubbing contemporaries on their pages. Danielle highlights this symbiotic relationship of coverage creators and content. She says, “There was a shift in emphasis from fashion which is trend led and top down to style which is personal and idiosyncratic.” This individualistic marrying of stylistic and aesthetic awareness divorced from the mainstream with music would become the engaging singular legacy of Blitz Club.

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Architecture People

Quebec House Westerham Kent + Sarabande in D Minor

Handel With Care

Astounded, bedazzled and mesmerised are just some of the non hyperbolic reactions to the impromptu performance on the 1788 early English square piano in the first floor reception room. Such textural gossamer playing defies belief when combined with elevated clarity and determined dexterity of movement. Shooting up and down the dynamic spectrum pedal free, the pianist’s fingerwork of polyphonic transparency immediately strikes the balance between articulation and atmospherics. He finds an almost Celtic lilt in George Frideric Handel’s courtly triple time dance on John Broadwood’s tightly tuned instrument. The resultant robust soundscape ripples with Promethean masculinity. Monetising this concert level of piano playing will surely keep the Wolfe from the door.

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Art Design Luxury People

Raw Echo + de Le Cuona Design Centre Chelsea Harbour London

The Poetry of the Earth is Never Dead

“A love of linen and attention to detail first fired my desire to create beautiful fabrics,” says Bernie de Le Cuona. The Founder, Chief Executive and Creative Director of the luxury textile house de Le Cuona grew up in rural South Africa, developing an early love of nature. All of de Le Cuona fabrics are woven in European mills using the world’s finest natural fibres: alpaca, cashmere, flax, silk and wool. Established in 1992, there are now two showrooms in London (Design Centre Chelsea Harbour and Pimlico Road) and one in New York (Design Centre 200 Lex).

“This collection is called Raw Echo,” introduces Lisa Dunlop, Field Sales Executive at the Design Centre Chelsea Harbour showroom, “and it’s all about the juxtaposition in nature between something brutal and something soft. So if you think of the Sahara Desert it has beautiful soft sand but it’s a hard environment too – that’s the inspiration for the collection. All our colours are derived from nature. We don’t use unnatural dyes.”

Lisa explains, “Four of these eight new designs are sheers. We’re findings sheers are really popular for clients at the moment because they want that lighter look. They are all 97 or 100 percent linen. All our linen is from Belgium. Sustainability is a big thing for us. Linen itself is highly sustainable. It’s very biodegradable yet lasts a lifetime. That’s the cool thing about linen! You can use lots of our fabrics on the reverse. Sahara is a reversible stonewashed linen with subtle twills. It’s rub tested on the back at 20,000 rubs and 25,000 on the front.”

As well as Sahara, there’s Desert Etching which is a linen sheer with an eroded carvings style motif; Mirage, a jacquard sheer with a texture ombré stripe; Petra, a linen jacquard with space dyed warps; Saba, a linen alpaca blend sheer with rippling threads; Sandstorm, a sheer in multi shaded mélange yarns; Strata, a linen wool blend with twisted yarns; and Tumbleweed, a linen upholstery fabric with interlaced yarns.

The company also has a bespoke interior tailoring service which covers made to measure bedspreads, curtains, cushions, throws and upholstery. Everything is crafted in Britain by inhouse specialists. The sustainability ethos doesn’t stop with the original textile making. The company also has a revitalising service which transforms vintage de Le Cuona fabric furnishings and accessories into upcycled pieces.

Bernie de Le Cuona concludes, “Raw Echo is a collection about emotion as much as it is about materiality. It captures that moment in nature where everything is both powerful and peaceful, where the landscape feels alive but still.” The Design Centre Chelsea Harbour showroom of de Le Cuona, minutes from the busy Kings Road, is an oasis filled with exquisite fabrics inspired by ancient terrains, golden sands, wilderness landscapes and weathered stone.

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Architecture Design Developers Hotels People Town Houses

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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Architecture People Town Houses

Sir Winston Churchill + General James Wolfe + Westerham Kent

The Trials and Triumphs of Troublemakers

“Do not traffic in clichés,” warns the brilliant American commentator and author Maureen Callahan. “Writers and clichés: never the twain shall meet.” We’re in Westerham: such a chocolate box town, a Cadbury tin full of surprises. Lo these many years, a gift for the ages.  There are no statues of Buddha but there are sculptures of the town’s two most famous sons: General James Wolfe and Sir Winston Churchill. “People need to have more grit these days,” Maureen believes. Those men had grit in bucketfuls. They had plenty of nerve. The late Perpendicular St Mary the Virgin Anglican Church is perched high above its sloping cemetery. All the historic houses are restored to their former glory. General James Wolfe’s home Quebec House in the town centre. Chartwell, Obriss Farm and Squerryes Court and Sir Winston Churchill’s home Chartwell on the periphery. Just our opinion. Just saying.

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Architects Architecture Art Country Houses Design People

The Wellesleys + Stratfield Saye House Not Too Near Reading Hampshire

The Continuation of Humble Elegance

Henry James (1910), “You first discovered yourself in England, just as I first did myself.”

In the days before everything was organic, authentic and artisanal; when experience was lived by default; gaslighting involved illumination; ghosting had a supernatural connotation; deep dive involved water; extra referred to additionality; mankind included women; bad actors were thespians who weren’t good at their job; there was Caesar, Greek and Niçoise but no word salad; only trains were cancelled; and catfish was just an animal, hero projects were all about winning battles.

Let the poor eat carrot cake. Such a relief the architect Benjamin Dean Wyatt didn’t get to “out Blenheim Blenheim” with his dream of a palace of ceremonial pomp and circumstance. The 1st Duke of Wellington had a rather better idea after for the estate he bought in 1817, two years after his Battle of Waterloo victory. Keep the old house and add on a couple of bedrooms above the orangery wings. So in the end Benjamin only got to see his design for a porch realised – albeit a rather smart Greek Doric one. Ever inventive, in 1831 the Duke added secondary glazing, central heating and WCs to the existing house (the latter naturally lit by tiny single pane casement windows like the type you get in 20th century Berlin flats). Stratfield Saye House is large by most people’s standards but it’s not ducal in style or scale. Fit for a baron and all the better for it. Tate Britain has Tracey Emin’s installation My Bed. Stratfield Saye has the Great Duke of Wellington’s Campaign Bed.

Mark Girouard comments in Historic Houses of Britain (1984), “One can see why Wellington developed an affection for Stratfield Saye. It is certainly not a stately home but it has a great deal of character and charm. It was originally a long, low, red brick house, built in about 1650 by Sir William Pitt, James I’s comptroller, and decorated with the so called Flemish gables (with curved sides and pedimented tops) which were in fashion at the time. Two matching stable blocks front the house and give it a forecourt and a pleasant air of formality.”

An elephant used to mow the lawn. The stables are now apartments, an archives office and a museum to the 1st Duke. There are a few false windows on the entrance front. The external walls were once painted buff and the window surrounds green. And so they remain. Clocks chime indoors. Apollo magazines sit on chests in the Entrance Hall. That room is the volume of a five bay three storey house. Well stocked drinks trolleys are in the corridors. Country Life magazines sit on chests in the Library. When you’ve finished browsing the back issues there are 3,000 books to read. The silk wallcovering dates from 1953. A jib door in the Study with its Chippendale desk and replica of the chair on which the 1st Duke died in Walmer Castle in Kent leads through to a private suite of a bedroom and spa bathroom.

The centrepiece of the museum is the 1st Duke’s catafalque made of bronze cast from melted down French cannon captured at Waterloo. It was designed and constructed in just 18 days by the wonderfully named Department of Practical Arts. The height of the car was limited to 5.2 metres to pass under Temple Bar on its procession through central London. It was drawn by twelve black dray horses leaving Horse Guards at 9.25am on 18 November 1852 and arriving in the yard of St Paul’s Cathedral at noon.

The Illustrated London News reported at the time, “The eight cavalry bands, too, being in motion along the Mall, contributed their notes of measured grief. The ‘trumpet’s silver sound’ still discoursed Handel’s music, and the ear found a new beauty in every accidental combination by which the breeze or the distance imparted novelty to the effect. The soldiers having filed off, the Kings-at-Arms, in their gorgeous tabards, marshalled the mourning coaches in their due order of precedence.”

The 8th Duke inserted a swimming pool into the Orangery off the Library. Logs are piled up in the chimneypieces of the main rooms: the Wellesley family might call in at any moment. The wine box in the Dining room holds 250 bottles. The 7th Duke designed the Gold Room carpet which was made in 1946. Once the Housekeeper’s Room, the Breakfast Room is filled with 60 place china including arsenic blue Meisen. In Mrs Arbuthnot’s Bedroom upstairs there are two corner cabinets. One is a wardrobe, the other a WC. There’s a freestanding roll top bath in the bedroom. Someone has been using Ren shampoo. And reading Nancy Lancaster: Her Life, Work, Her Art (1996) by Robert Becker. The Print Room was created by the current Duke and Duchess using Boydell prints found in the attics.

John Cornforth writes about the 7th Duke in The Inspiraton of the Past (1985), “Lord Gerald Wellesley, one of the most interesting figures of his generation, who explained in his Collected Works (1970) that he had always wanted to be an architect, but his parents had considered it a hazardous and uncertain career for a younger son who had his own way to make; and it was only after World War I that he was able to fulfil his ambition. By nature a scholar and possessing a finely tuned, fastidious taste, he became involved in many projects relating to the improvement of the arts of design, public taste and later preservation, particularly of country houses, and through his friendships and his houses he had an influence on a considerable number of people. Indeed Mrs Lancaster says that he and Lady Juliet Duff were the people in England who understood the arrangement of furniture and works of art best.”

John continues, “Lord Gerald Wellesley was drawn to the Regency period both for aesthetic reasons and for personal ones too, because it was the period of his ancestor, the Great Duke of Wellington, but as an architect he was concerned with the present and the future, and it is interesting to see in his work and in a great deal of what Christopher Hussey wrote in the late 1920s and early 1930s that they were concerned with the future of classicism.” Gerald designed the tall cupola crowning the roofscape of Stratfield Saye.

The dashing moustachioed brunette Henry Valerian Wellesley wasn’t as fortunate as his famous ancestor, dying in battle aged 31. Born Earl of Mornington in 1912, he was styled Marquess of Douro between 1934 and 1941 before spending the last two years of his short life as the 6th Duke of Wellington. He was killed in action in World War II and is buried in Salerno close to where he died. His uncle Lord Gerald Wellesley would succeed him as the 7th Duke of Wellington.

In early Victorian times Chelsea was transmogrifying from a village into an area of London. St Luke’s Anglican Church celebrated its bicentenary last year. It was the brainchild of the Reverend Gerald Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington’s brother, who held his office from 1805 to 1832. He conducted the marriage of Charles Dickens and Catherine Hogarth in 1836. The 1st Duke married Kitty Pakenham of Tullynally Castle, County Westmeath who attracted good, bad and ugly critique. Kitty’s rooms were in the northeast corner of the first floor of Stratfield Saye; the Duke’s, in the southwest corner of the ground floor.

Playwright Lady Elizabeth Yorke observed, “Her appearance, unfortunately, does not correspond with one’s notion of an ambassadress or the wife of a hero, but she succeeds uncommonly well in her part.” Novelist Maria Edgeworth commented, “After comparison with crowds of other beaux spirits, fine ladies and fashionable scramblers for notoriety, her graceful simplicity rises in our opinion, and we feel it with more conviction of its superiority. Philosopher Germaine de Staël thought Kitty was “adorable”. The Great Duke’s closest female friend Harriet Arbuthnot, who sounds like she had a vested interest, said Kitty was “a fool” and he had “repeatedly tried to live in a friendly manner with her but it was impossible and it drove him to seek that comfort and happiness abroad that was denied him at home”.

Kitty was a prolific letter writer. In a letter to Elizabeth Hume, daughter of the 1st Duke’s doctor, dated 22 August 1824, she mentions various animals including a canary called Crispino and her husband’s famous horse Copenhagen: “It was at Broadstairs that I was first called Viscountess Wellington. It was on a Sunday for the Gazette came out on a Saturday night. I recollect holding the plate at church on that day in my new character, for a charity sermon. I have nothing more to say dearest girl except that little Crispino is quit ewell, so is the emew and as for Copenhagen he trots after me eating bread out of my hand and wagging his tail like a little dog. Are you very good? What are you reading?”

The Heritage of Great Britain and Ireland edited by Melanie Bradley-Shaw and Jacqui Hawthorn (1992) records, “On each side of the house lie the Pleasure Grounds with may rare and interesting trees with a particularly fine group of Wellingtonias, named in honour of the Great Duke in 1853. In the Ice House Paddock lies the grave of Copenhagen, buried with full military honours after living out his days in retirement at Stratfield Saye, frequently ridden by his master and a multitude of children. The spreading Turkey Oak which shelters his grave grew from an acorn planted by Mrs Apostles, the Duke’s housekeeper.”

A 550 metre straight avenue leads from the gatelodges to the forecourt in front of the northwest facing entrance front of the house. The southeast elevation looks across a vast lawn stretching down to the River Loddon which acts as a haha. A rustic wooded Roman Temple built in 1846 to commemorate a visit by Queen Victoria is an eyecatcher in the North Pleasure Gardens. The South Pleasure Gardens stretch out in the direction of St Mary the Virgin Church and The Old Rectory. The Duke and Duchess-in-Waiting’s home, The Old Rectory is a highly attractive pale brick house with a late 18th century core. A lunette window over a Tuscan columned projection looks over formal gardens. The house was later twice extended so appears as three distinct phases of development. The Pheasantry Lodge is a larger than normal mid 19th century Italianate gatelodge marking the entrance to the St Mary’s and The Old Rectory. The Great Duke’s beautifully planted formal gardens are laid out on one side of the north avenue.

An Anglo Irish atmosphere somehow still permeates Stratfield Saye House – Curraghmore (County Waterford) meets Mount Stewart (County Down). The Wellington connection lives on in Ireland. Annadale Grammar School for boys opened in south Belfast in 1950. It was named after the childhood home of Anne, Countess of Mornington, mother of the Great Duke, which had once stood on the school site. The school adopted the Duke’s motto Virtus Fortunate Comes: Fortune Favours the Brave. The family connection became even more apparent when Annadale amalgamated with Carolan Grammar School for girls in 1990 and Wellington College was formed.

Henry James (1905), “These delicious old houses, in the long August days, in the south of England air, on the soil over which so much has passed and out of which so much has come, rose before me like a series of visions.”