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Corinthia Hotel Whitehall London + Crystal Moon Lounge Sparkling Afternoon Tea

Midday Follies

“Love is patient, love is kind.” Corinthians 13:4

The Victorians were radical about town planning. In 1874 the Jacobean Northumberland House just north of the Thames opposite Waterloo in central London was swept away to create Northumberland Avenue. It would be another seven decades before Listing to protect British heritage would come into place. Manolo Guerci records in London’s Golden Mile (2021), “Northumberland House is the westernmost of the Strand palaces, one of the last to be erected and the last to disappear, with a history that spans nearly three centuries.” Tall buildings sprung up along this broad boulevard running from Trafalgar Square to Victoria Embankment. Metropole Hotel would soon become one of the impressive additions to this new townscape.

Francis Fowler (circa 1819 to 1893) and James Ebenezer Saunders (1829 to 1909) are not household names but they were clearly talented architects. Metropole Hotel commissioned by the Gordons Hotels Group was their design. Both men were members of the Metropolitan Board of Works (the forerunner to London County Council) although later removed for corruption. The 600 bedroom Metropole Hotel swung open the doors in 1886 to Savile Row frock coated gentlemen and their Liberty parasol holding ladies. “Meet at the Metropole” became a high societal signifier saying.

The hotel’s proximity to Whitehall Government Offices and the Palace of Westminster meant it was commandeered in both World Wars. In 1936 the building was purchased by the Ministry of Defence and remained in government use until the Crown Estate sold it in 2007. Four years later, the 283 bedroom Corinthia Hotel swung open the doors of the former Metropole building and the adjoining 10 Whitehall Place to Boss suit wearing gentlemen and their Balenciaga bag holding ladies. “Call by the Corinthia” has become a high societal signifier saying.

A storied site history includes Sir Winston Churchill watching the end of World War I street celebrations on 11 November 1918 from the windows of the building. In the 1920s the Metropole was well known for its Midnight Follies cabaret. Spies used one of the rooms and a network of underground tunnels led to government properties nearby. Another room was dedicated to monitoring UFOs. Sir Conan Doyle was a frequent guest: The Sherlock Holmes Pub on Northumberland Street is named after the author’s most famous literary creation. The press conference in James Bond movie Skyfall is set in the hotel.

Corinthia Hotel is an urban château, an impressive wedge of late Victorian architecture terminated by a bowed corner overlooking Whitehall Gardens. A double height oriel bay window projects over the main entrance on Northumberland Avenue. Pairs of Ionic (not Corinthian!) pilasters with swagged capitals frame the fully glazed doors. The basement and double height ground floor of the main block are faced in white stone; the upper five floors are faced in golden stone. The adjoining block is fully faced in white stone. Francis and James Ebenezer didn’t hold back on ornamentation, designing heavily decorated elevational grids of cornices and pilasters and window surrounds. A double row of dormer windows in the steep pitched roofs (some covered by fish scale tiles) is sandwiched between two storey high chimneystacks.

Afternoon tea is one of the truly quintessential British traditions. Top London hotels like to give it a quirky take and Corinthia is no exception. A chilled bottle of Lysegrøn, a Copenhagen Sparkling Tea, is the original accompanying elixir for the dry curious. As the sommelier pops the cork, a fresh citrus and green tea scent is released. The lively taste has notes of lemon grass and orange peel. There are long lasting hints of Darjeeling and green apple.

Hierarchically uniformed staff lead guests up and into the Crystal Moon Lounge named after the 1,001 crystal Baccarat chandelier hanging from a central seven metre diameter glass dome. “There’s just one red diamond orb,” the restaurant manager points out. “That’s appropriate for Valentine’s Day! We are using red striped fine bone china today too.” Ah, Valentine’s Day, the celebration of romance named after the saint whose remains are in Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church, Dublin. Romantic gestures will end with the party favour: a red box of English breakfast tea. “Would you like newspapers?” The Financial Times and Telegraph are delivered to the table. So is The Column, the hotel magazine. One of the waitresses is a fellow Emerald Fennell fan. “Wasn’t Saltburn just the best film? I’m off to see Wuthering Heights on my own later. I can’t wait!”

A glass of hot black Alfonso tea is the liquid amuse bouche. And then a neat row of finger sandwiches arrives (crusts are for starlings). Clarence Court egg mayonnaise with truffle on sourdough bread; Secret Smokehouse smoked salmon, nori and lime on brioche bread; and salted cucumber, chilli and coconut yoghurt on onion bread. Turns out coronation pepper is the new coronation chicken. The sandwich selection is bottomless: this is gonna take time. Cancel the matinée!

A waitress presents a white box of plain and sultana scones with organic strawberry jam and blackcurrant and Star Anise jam with Cornish clotted cream. For a moment, it’s like being teleported to a Week St Mary tearoom. The serving staff are all rather wonderful and good fun. Linen napkins are continually folded and laid; the tablescape constantly updated. “More Milk Oolong?” China is having a fashion moment.

Somebody strikes up chords and chromatics on the grand piano: I Can’t Help Falling In Love with You; I Will Always Love You; You’re Too Good to Be True … An unfallen avalanche of sweets appears. The yellow fruit finds a theme in lemon drizzle cake (an Irish country house favourite) and calamansi cheesecake (Philippine lemon). Apple and Speculoos (Belgian and Dutch crunchy delights) gâteau; pistachio and white chocolate cookies; salted caramel and milk chocolate tart; and vanilla religieuse all take the biscuit. In a good way.

“Afternoon tea is our signature service,” explains the Director of Food and Beverage Daniele Quattromini. “The Crystal Moon Lounge is right here in the middle of the hotel. It’s such a unique space. And we’re fortunate to have a designated time and space for afternoon tea. Our Baccarat crystal champagne flutes match the chandelier above. We have three antique trolleys from the 1920s.” A temporary display of photographic portraits by Lorenzo Agius adds familiar faces to the surroundings.

Corinthia Sparkling Afternoon Tea is one of hundreds of elevated experiences available through SupperClub Dining and Lifestyle Concierge. The Abu Dhabi based company offers members an international luxury range of buffets and brunches, tables and trips, midweek getaways and weekend spas. Just some of the other participating hotel groups include Four Seasons, Mövenpick, Raffles, Rosewood, Sofitel, Waldorf Astoria. SupperClub always lives up to its tagline: “Exclusive benefits, curated offers and frictionless bookings all in one seamless ecosystem.”

In Betjeman Country (1985), Frank Delaney writes about the poet and architecture critic Sir John Betjeman. Frank notes, “Outside in the sunlight, Whitehall shimmers impersonally … ‘Just as an old church is the history of its parish in terms of stone, so is Whitehall the embodiment of England,’ Betjeman wrote carefully. ‘The weakness of this analogy is that whereas most churches are open for the public to inspect, it is well nigh impossible to see inside Whitehall.’” The conversion of this secretive office block back to a hotel, 140 years after it first opened to the public, allows access once more to one of the vast stone buildings of this historic quarter. Corinthia Hotel has added personality, reinstating palatial glamour to Northumberland Avenue. The Financial Times review of the newly released film Wuthering Heights is a reminder love doesn’t always reach perfection. Unlike Sparkling Afternoon Tea in the Crystal Moon Lounge.

Upon leaving, the pianist Kevin Lee plays Moon River, keeping the crepuscular mood lit. He quips, “I’ve done the maths. You’re too young to remember this!” Quite the exit.

“Love never fails.” Corinthians 13:8

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Architecture Art Country Houses Design Luxury People Restaurants

Tullymurry House Newry Down + Slemish Market Supper Club

Mount Charles All Over Again

We’re getting ready to join you on this beautiful life adventure. “County Down in the holidays and Surrey in the term – it was an excellent contrast,” raved Clive Staples Lewis in 1955. We couldn’t agree more and technically we do reside in Surrey albeit the hectarage swallowed up by southwest London. Tullymurry House is only five kilometres on the Belfast side of Newry but feels a world away from everywhere and everything and everyone. There are uninterrupted views across drumlins to the irregular polygon of the snow capped Mourne Mountains.

Tullymurry, blurring the line between a grand farmhouse and a modest country house, is run by the Irish Landmark Trust, founded in 1992. The Trust’s mission is to save, share and sustain. Hearth Revolving Fund restored the house in 2012 before handing it over for use as a holiday home. The Autumn 1989 Heritage Newsletter of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society states, “Hearth has completed 55 houses and flats for rental over the last 10 years …” Tullymurry most likely originated as a single storey Scottish Planters’ house. An extension by the Weir family of circa 1700 is now the kitchen and downstairs bedroom. The L shaped two storey block with its sureness of style was then added in the late 18th century. In 1828 a farmer John Marshall bought the house and remodelled it further 12 years later. A folder beside a vase of fresh (custard yellow and raspberry red) roses on the entrance hall table details the restoration:

“Work started on the house from the top downwards; the roof tiles were taken off and replaced but fortunately the roof timbers were found to be in excellent condition and original to the house. The sash windows were taken out, repaired and painted before being put back in place. The house was riddled with woodworm so large areas of floorboards had to be replaced as necessary. The house was rewired and replumbed with the important addition of central heating and extra bathrooms. A small area of kitchen units was added with plenty of modern appliances and a utility room just across the passage for any extra equipment.”

“As much of the existing decoration as possible was retained including the wood effect graining on many of the doors, shutters and skirting. Where wallpaper had to be replaced and painting carried out, traditional ranges from Farrow and Ball were used. Much of the furniture and pictures are 19th century and were in the house before restoration began. They were removed before work began and replaced when work was complete as close as possible to their original locations. The house is now ready to face the next 200 years and has been given a new lease of life as a holiday home.” Original items include hall chairs, an organ, a piano, a family Bible, portraits and a watercolour of nearby Narrow Water Castle by Tom Irwin.Like the Sunday school chorus, Tullymurry is “deep and wide”. The ivy cloaked south facing façade and east front are both symmetrically five bay. A very complete (custard yellow) doorcase formed of pilasters rising to brackets supporting a sprocketed hood frame the (raspberry red) door and oblong overlight with its geometric glazing. Over the façade the roof is gable ended to the west and  hipped roof to the east. Single storey older parts of the house are hidden behind these two principal fronts. The dual aspect first floor principal bedrooms each take up two bays of the façade. Coved ceilings push into the roof slopes. Floor height windows add charm to all four upstairs bedrooms.

It’s a long five kilometres from Newry: almost everyone gets lost along the dark country lanes. A Friday night feast from Dong Fang Asian Fusion is eventually spread out on the long kitchen trestle table. The Aga will rest tonight. A Saturday morning walk under low hung grey skies parallel lined with cloud and mist is County Down tranquillity at its best. The lawns on either side of the avenue are speckled with snowdrops. Grey turns to blue as the sound of agricultural machinery gearing up is a reminder this is still a working farm. The burnt red ribbed metal barrel vaulted barn may be aesthetically pleasing but it’s also functional.

Sun streams in through the open door down the entrance hall passing from the glory of the day into the dim hinterland of the back hall on this late February weekend. The Victorian wallpapered drawing room, a polite space full of bygones, is turned into a cinema for the afternoon. And then in a flash it’s Saturday evening. Pre dinner cocktails are served in the drawing room while guests are serenaded by local harpist Sharon Carroll playing Sì Beag Sì Mòr and other sweet melodies. French 75s: squeezed lemon juice and gin mixed with a little sugar and shaken on ice. Pour into Champagne glasses and top up with Champagne. Sidecars: shake equal parts of Cognac Hennessy, Cointreau and lemon juice with a little sugar. Pour into cocktail glasses and place orange peel on top. A tip is to peel the lemons and oranges into the glasses so that zest and spray go over the drinks and glass rims. So that’s two of our five a day!

Chef Rob Curley of Slemish Market Supper Club arrives with the first of the evening’s dishes (service à la Russe not à la Française of course). He explains, “Wee Bites are our style of tapas. You have vol au vents filled with wild mushrooms, parsley and garlic with egg yolk jam inside them. And then you have lovage and cucumber gazpacho. You also have smoked salmon, crème fraîche with elderberry capers pickled pumpkin and fish pancakes flavoured with dolce seaweed.” Lovage is a green plant used in soups and also for medicinal purposes. Gazpacho is a tomato and red pepper based Spanish soup served cold. So more of our five a day!

The curtains and shutters in the blue painted dining room are pulled back: there are no neighbours. Rob’s dinner courses reflect Slemish Supper Club’s commitment that, “The land, sea, rivers and lakes are really important to our gastronomy. Every ingredient is chosen to honour and pay tribute to the important local resources of our cuisine.” The starter is beetroot tortilla, goat’s cheese, beetroot, liquorice, winter leaves. The main is king scallops, Rathlin Island sea lettuce, cucumber pearls, elderberry capers, potato noisette, buttermilk whey sauce. Pudding is spiced orange cake, milk ice cream, liquorice gel. Haute monde, haute couture, haute cuisine.

Just as Rob and his team wave goodbye to a thrilled dinner party, who pulls up but American chanteuse Kara Kalua with all the pyrotechnical melisma of a diva. The highly versatile drawing room is now a disco and soon everyone is singing for their supper like a scene from Saltburn, murdering Sophie Ellis Bexter’s hit Murder on the Dancefloor. It’s an eclectic late night for boon companions, older and wilder, ending in the relaxing spa carved out of the former stables with their merry assortment of lattice, casement and sash windows. “All reality is iconoclastic,” as Clive Staples Lewis used to say.

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Architects Architecture Art Country Houses Design People

Saltburn + Drayton House Lowick Northamptonshire

The Go Betweeners

The beautiful Rosamund Pike is such a talented comedic British actress that somehow channelling Lady Elspeth Catton she even makes naming a gravestone font “Times New Roman” sound hilarious. If you’ve heard that the film Saltburn is Brideshead Revisited on a high, The Go Between on a low or The Shining somewhere in between, think again. Writer Director Emerald Fennell’s dazzling genius is to create her own genre of thriller-comedy-romance-drama-gorefest while breaking taboos you didn’t even know existed. And then to line up la crème de la crème of British acting (Rosamund, Carey Mulligan and co) and emerging Irish talent (Barrie Keoghan and Allison Oliver). Only Emerald could musically bookend to perfection a film using Handel’s Zadok the Priest and Sophie Ellis Bextor’s Murder on the Dancefloor – from majestic hauteur to killer moves.

Daughter of the jewellery and silverware designer Theo Fennell, she confides, “I love my name. I think it’s all the things perhaps that I am which is unironic, unsubtle and slightly over the top!” True to form, Saltburn is unironic, unsubtle and, begging to differ, wildly over the top. Emerald goes forth, “I don’t think irony is helpful because it’s a lie, it’s double talk. Things do not have to be all done in the same way. You can be earnest, you can earnestly love things, you can be unsubtle, you can be overwrought, you can be melodramatic and gothic, you can be all those things. In terms of dramatic narratives, you’re looking to find the thing that gets inside you in a way that’s truly sexy and disturbing.”

Saltburn’s a period film set mainly way back in ye olde days of 2007 when everybody smoked indoors and got wings downing Red Bull and eyebrow piercings were à la mode. The opening scenes are all about antics in an Oxford college before things really hot up at the voluminous country house of Saltburn. Emerald chose Drayton House next to the picturesque village of Lowick in Northamptonshire to be Saltburn. She wanted somewhere that wasn’t well known or on the tourist trail. Drayton House is all that and more – it never was and never will be open to the public. The cast and crew spent a full summer here; then the six metre high wrought iron gates were locked for good. Artistic integrity is secured by shooting every Saltburn scene at Drayton. This avoids the visual confusion of Julian Fellowes’ Gosford Park film flitting between the exterior of Luton Hoo (Bedfordshire), the reception rooms of Wrotham Park (Hertfordshire), the bedrooms of Syon House (London) and a film studio kitchen at Shepperton Studios, London.

“A lot of people get lost in Saltburn,” warns Duncan the butler. The characters get lost in the mansion, lost in the maze, lost in the madness, but never in translation. There are references within references in the dialogue. Saltburn heir Felix Catton (played by Australian Jacob Elordi who delivers another masterful triumph of capturing the upper class English accent), nonchalantly boasts, “Evelyn Waugh’s characters are based on my family actually. Yeah, he was completely obsessed with our house.” Turns out Brideshead was really based on Saltburn not Castle Howard in Yorkshire! His father Sir James Catton amusingly played by Richard E Grant organises a house party and listing names of the invitees complains, “Stopford Sackville has cried off.” The Stopford Sackvilles are the owners of Drayton House.

To say Saltburn is beautifully shot is to say a Gainsborough portrait is well lit or Grinling Gibbons knew a thing or two about framing. The symmetry of reflection is just one technique used to great effect, whether a candlelit dinner table or moonlit pond. Those Caravaggio like stills. Shooting on squarish four by three aspect ratio film captures the height of the architecture and interiors. The closeted cloistered class obsessed quad of the Oxford college followed by the country house courtyard emphasises the exclusivity of this upper echelon world. There’s symmetry in the writing too: Felix takes his guest Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan accelerating from mellow to moody to murderous) on an introductory whirlwind tour of the house starting in the great hall. At the end of the film Oliver will dance the same route sans vêtements in reverse, ending in the great hall. What could possibly go wrong in such gorgeous surroundings? The clue is in the script notes, “It’s all beautiful but it’s about to get messy, fast.”

Drayton House was the cover girl of the March / April 1987 edition of Traditional Interior Decoration, a seriously seminal well written fabulously photographed short lived much missed magazine. The cover money shot of the swirling staircase was accompanied by a 14 page spread salivating over the ravishing rooms. “The grey stone Elizabethan east wall of Drayton,” writes Michael Pick, “masks the baroque façade of 1702 covering a late 13th century great hall which forms the core of the house.” The medieval hammerbeam roof of the great hall is concealed by a 17th century baroque barrel vaulted ceiling designed by William Talman, architect of Chatsworth in Derbyshire. The writer concludes, “It has never been a setting for country house parties …” Rarely has an ellipsis worked so hard or been so ominous.