Love in a Hot Climate
“Now let my lord send his servants the wheat and barley and the olive oil and wine he promised, and we will cut all the logs from Lebanon that you need and will float them as rafts by sea down to Joppa. You can then take them up to Jerusalem.” II Chronicles 2:15 to 16
The sun stands still. Gazing across the Mediterranean shoreline (273 kilometres stretching north to Lebanon and tipping Egypt to the southwest), astonished by our own brilliance, mingling with the coastal elite, we are delighted how well the afternoon has turned out. “You will die! The Jaffa is gorgeous,” coos Parisienne Maud Rabanne, une dame cultivée. “Coucou! Have coffee on the roof terrace. It’s got the best view! The Jaffa is one of my favourite places. It’s fabuloso! C’est la vie! That’s what we say in Paris. We always mean it in a positive way. Montagne de baisirs. Remplie de joie d’amour et de bonheur. Tchin-tchin!” Cinq à sept. Coûte que coûte. Le paradis, c’est les autres.
Moshe Sakal describes a similar view in his novel The Diamond Setter (2018), “Tel Aviv sprawls out on the right, the rocks of Jaffa on the left, and straight ahead lies Andromeda’s Rock, a plain looking rock that juts out of the water with an Israeli flag billowing on its peak.” International architect John O’Connell hints, “Should you arrive at the hotel, go further up and down the hill, as the Roman Catholic church will be on your left, and nearly opposite it is a very fine and abandoned Ottoman building. A robust ensemble. Try to see the internal court, where I have failed to do so! Such supreme life and joy!” Ah, that will be the Old Saraya House taken over by clubbers, bats and thespians. Abandonment begone!
We’re enjoying a Mitfordesque moment (Love in a Cold Climate heated up from 1949) on that terrace: “So here we all are, my darling, having our lovely cake and eating it too, one’s great aim in life.” We’re feeling “very grand as well as very rich”. The pleasures of passing hours. It helps that this heroic hotel is emphatically designed by everybody’s favourite minimalist maestro, master of the monastic John Pawson, along with Israeli architect and conservationist Ramy Gill. Oracle of our own orbit, balancing on a notional pedestal, we don’t need a doctorate in aesthetics to appreciate John Pawson’s masterwork. John O’Connell is on a roll: “Mr P’s oeuvre is so restrained. Everything’s resolved.” It’s a breath of fresh air, or at least an intake of the coolest sea breeze imaginable. Soon we will be expounding riddles with the grand piano and dwelling on Gertrude Stein (Tender Buttons, 1914), “Cold climate. A season in yellow sold extra strings makes lying places.”
The 1870s Saint Louis V Hospital, built by French businessman François Guinet to the design of architectural practice Grebez and Ribellet and managed by the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Apparition, has been sharply reimagined under John Pawson’s crisply contained direction. Delamination of extant solid form – from the remnants of a 13th century Crusaders’ bastion in the lobby to the peeling paint of the dusky pink loggias – leads to a richly layered intertextual discursively informative spirited patina of the raw and the worked throughout the revelatory restoration and clever conversion and audacious augmentation and sensual solution. Faded lettering over the arched doorways lining the loggias reads: ‘Communaute’, ‘Tribune’, ‘Salle Ste Elizabeth 2me Don Blesses, ‘Salle Ste Clotilde 2me Don Fievreux’, ‘Salle Ste Marie Pensionnaires’, ‘Orphelinat’. As Hans Ulrich Obrist (Ways of Curating, 2014) would interject, “… conversations … are happening between various narratives”.
Beyond the lobby with its Ligne Roset corduroy sofas and Damien Hirst spin paintings and lacquered backgammon tables lies a courtyard garden of sacred and human geometry (an unflowered greenscape) linking the ancient with the old with the new with the futuristic. John Pawson venerates yet challenges the original architecture, creating an unfolding sequence of voids and vistas and virtuosic visions. There’s an endless tightly choreographed play between past and present, architecture and art: a nuanced paradox of togetherness and oneness. As Elizabeth Bowen contends in The Heat of the Day (1948), “To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.” There lies the definite ascetism – to be freed from oneself. Not even an Israeli Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden, 1911) could summon up such discreet walled splendour. Corrugations of percolated sunshine ripple across the stone floor, climbing over chairs, falling over tables. Beyond the courtyard lies the Chapel Bar. The beyondness of many things. This world is our oyster and ours alone. It’s all it’s cracked up to be. Postcard home material. We’re checked in; we’ve checked out. Being here; doing it.
A private paradise. A secret world. A hidden kingdom. Cloistered espaliered sequestered formal glory. The very essence of unexampled exclusivity. If luxury could be bottled … heaven’s scent. A multiple epiphanic realisation of complete beauty. It was as if Elizabeth Bowen was in The Jaffa and not The House in Paris (1935), “Heaven – call it heaven; on the plane of potential not merely likely behaviour. Or call it art, with truth and imagination informing every word.” Marilynne Robinson (When I Was a Child I Read Books, 2012) insists, “Call it history, call it culture. We came from somewhere and we are tending somewhere, and the spectacle is glorious and portentous.”
Ah – the Chapel Bar – from litany and liturgy to luxury and libation, à la carte over elegy, mixology supplanting doxology, heterodoxy replacing orthodoxy, every hour is happy in this soaring sanctuary for sybarites. The only blues are the saturated cerulean hues of the ribbed vaulted ceiling. Beautiful in its loftiness, this bar is an explosion of sizzling rarity, of dazzlingly dilettantish individuality. There are no equals. There were no prequels. There’ll be no sequels. The perfect pitstop to slake your thirst, it’s like being at a house party if all your friends are knowingly sophisticated distractingly gorgeous models or similar ilk rocking new threads inspired by Inès de la Fressange’s (Parisian Chic Encore: A Style Guide, 2019) “haute couture and street style” – Doron Ashkenaz shirts and skin fade haircuts – dancing in eternal graceful circles. In Tel Aviv, kitchen and club are often confused so dancing on tables is de rigueur. A real era catcher: the New Roaring Twenties. Here they come The Beautiful Ones, The Fabulists, The Found Generation, Our Milieu. As befits our subject matter, we’re looking just a little bit sparkly ourselves: all dressed up in Elie Saab attire with somewhere to go; we shall go to the ball. What Roland Barthes (The Fashion System, 1963) calls “the euphoria of Fashion”. All of life has been a dress rehearsal for tonight. For a hot minute we’re running with the fastest set in town. To reference Nancy Mitford’s Don’t Tell Alfred (1963), it’s “high-falutin’, midnight stuff”.
The hotel is all “courtesy clouds” and “honeyed luxury” in a “rococo harmony” straight from The Diamond as Big as the Ritz (Frances Scott Fitzgerald, 1922). Average doesn’t exist in The Jaffa: it’s Lake Wobegon for real and we’ve got a majestic waterside view. Such is the alchemic segue! And who should know better than us? We’re qualified connoisseurs of fabulousness with diplomas in decadence, bachelors in brio and masters in magnificence. Very Bright Young Things. We’re taking the advice of Frédéric Dassas, Senior Curator of the Musée du Louvre Paris. During the Remembering Napoléon III Dinner at Camden Place in Kent he guided us: “Be part of the room; don’t just go through it.” The Chapel Bar is full of “people one should know” to channel Dorinda, Lady Dunleath. She would say, “It’s wild!” The glitter of this mirage. “Every generation has to keep the party going,” Her Ladyship always remarked in her Belgravia meets Ballywalter accent.
Morning figs and evening chocolates bookend a day’s room service. “Upstairs is crazy with dreams or love,” purrs Elizabeth Bowen (The House in Paris again). Guest suites breathe and stretch and sprawl across six uncrowded unhurried unparalleled bedroom floors, arabesque honeycomb filigreed screens flung open to the birds tweeting roosters crowing leaves rustling church bells peeling Saint Michael’s Greek Orthodox School pupils singing car horns honking cacophony. Deliciously diffused light seeps through the open window conjuring up a crimson carpet of crushed rubies. Devoid of demanding garniture or frivolous flotsam and jetsam, passing on the passementerie, the sole artwork in our bedroom is an orange tree captured by Israeli photographer Tal Shochat. Scholar Rebecca Walker educated us at the Remembering Napoléon III Dinner: “Eugénie, Empress of the French, had a fondness for knickknacks.” The unfussy décor of our bedroom would raise her imperial chagrin. A slanted mirror doubles as a reflection of perfection and a television. The perfumed aroma of jasmine and honeysuckle intensifies in the dying heat of a balmy summer day. And so to bed. Looking back, much later, like Frances Scott Fitzgerald’s character John we “remembered that first night as a daze of many colours, of quick sensory impressions, of music soft as a voice in love, and of the beauty of things, lights and shadows, and motions and faces”. Elizabeth Bowen’s line in To The North (1932) haunts us still: “this evening had an airy superurbanity”.
“… and he has filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills – to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood and to engage in all kinds of artistic crafts.” Exodus 35:31 to 33
(Extract with alternative imagery from the bestseller SABBATH PLUS ONE Jerusalem and Tel Aviv).
Half a century ago, on 11 November the elegant Georgian mansion Malone House, owned by Belfast City Council, went up in flames. It would later be rebuilt and the ground floor restaurant reopened. The costume and textile collection of around 10,000 objects destroyed on the first floor was irreplaceable. Only one significant item was saved: the precious 1712 Martha Lennox Quilt. The Ulster Museum had moved its collection to Malone House only a few months earlier due to lack of storage space in its Botanic Gardens building.
Later that fateful day the Belfast Telegraph reported, “Two bombs were planted in the building by two men and a girl. The gang ordered staff to lie down saying it was a raid. Three minutes after disappearing, as staff scrambled clear, the bombs, one in an upstairs room, exploded soon after each other. 30 members of the Ulster Tourist Development Association were just beginning a meeting when a bomb warning was shouted and they managed to get out in time.” It was an IRA attack.
Firefighters were striking at the time for hazard pay to deal with paramilitary attacks. Upon confirmation that no lives were in danger, full time firefighters refused to respond. It took 13 minutes before the blaze was tackled by part time crews from Lisburn, by which stage the building was gutted and most of its contents lost. Just another long forgotten incident in the seemingly neverending political and uncivil unrest of 20th century Northern Ireland.
A staff memo of that day reads: “10,000 or so items destroyed along with their records. The specimens lost included one of the best collections of linen damask in the world, a rare Elizabethan embroidered jacket, a costume collection with items from nearly every year from the 1700s to the 1970s, and a very good collection of 18th century dress. Irish, English and Continental lace, Irish and foreign embroidery including 17th century embroidery. Fans, toys, dolls, needlework tools, fashion plates, photograph albums, foreign costume and all costume accessories.”
Enter Elizabeth McCrum, then Curator at the Ulster Museum. No need for tired phoenix metaphors – with intelligence, determination, stoicism and more than a little grit – Elizabeth began collecting anew and today the Ulster Museum has around 6,000 exquisite dresses, textiles and jewellery items. Her drive continues to influence the Ulster Museum’s approach.
In the aftermath of the greatest fashion crime in history, Elizabeth was faced with how to record the loss of a national collection and how to start a new one. She compiled an inventory of the vanished pieces, working with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to verify the significance and monetary value of each item. In 1977 a public appeal was launched which attracted 400 donations from across Ireland and Britain. Northern Ireland Office compensation money for malicious damage allowed for new acquisitions.
Elizabeth’s aim was to create a collection that told the story of fashionable dress from the earliest period possible to current times. In that era few museums were acquiring contemporary fashion which meant 20th century couture such as Yves Saint Laurent could be bought for reasonable prices at auction. Historic purchases included the embroidered 18th century coat and breeches belonging to the Anglo Irish aristo George Augustus Rochfort, 2nd Earl of Belvedere.
Ashes to Fashion is a new exhibition making waves at the Ulster Museum. Many of the 50 fashion pieces are the result of Elizabeth’s collecting strategy acquiring two new outfits – one high street, one from an international designer – for the two seasons every year. Educated household names’ fashion at the exhibition includes pieces by Sybil Connolly (Irish), Lorcan Mullany (Irish), Elie Saab (Lebanese) and Gianni Versace (Italian).
Who are those beautiful monochromatic ladies in the photographs on display? Did they enjoy their polychromatic lives in Belfast? One in a photographer’s studio, the other two outdoors. Were they not sweltering in their bonnets and shawls and crinolines? At least the two outside had their parasols ready to spring open once they had finished posing.
Next door in the permanent art collection gallery is a clever hang juxtaposition. The muted hues and stillness of Paul Henry’s seascape (Dawn, Killary Harbour, 1921) contrasts with the stronger colours and movement of Bridget Riley’s waves in motion (Cataract IV, 1967). The Ulster Museum itself is a clever stylistic juxtaposition. Brutalism (Francis Pym, 1963) collides and entwines with neoclassicism (James Cumming Wynnes, 1913) to form the best fusion architecture in Ireland. Closer to the City Hall, Verona Bridal offers contemporary fashionistas the chance to buy their own designer threads. And then have a celebratory sip in Bert’s Jazz Bar.
