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Architecture Art Design Hotels Luxury People Restaurants

Hôtel Le Bristol Paris + Café Antonia

La Façon Dont Nous Vivons Maintenant

There aren’t very many good architecture critics and there aren’t very many good restaurant critics and there certainly aren’t very many critics who know their onion domes as well as their onions. Jonathan Meades is one. Café Antonia in Hôtel Le Bristol is too new to have been included in his lively 2002 Restaurant Guide but, to give you a flavour, he critiques three of our all time Parisian favourites. Way back in 2008 we hit one of the French Capital’s most vertigo inducing restaurants: Le Jules Verne, Eiffel Tower, which he awarded 7 sur 10. “The immediate views of this vertical Forth Bridge are captivating. And even were the restaurant situated at street level, it would still be worth patronising. The cooking is precise, considered, mostly balanced. Haughtily offhand service.” Le Jules Verne was where we first tasted the delights of the vineyard of St Véran which would become our tipple of choice at the Oxford and Cambridge Club London.

A few years later, Parisienne socialite Maud Rabanne introduced us to her regular and we haven’t stopped revisiting it since: Le Meurice, Rue de Rivoli, 8 sur 10. “The hotel is a Versailles for the bourgeoise. The building is so large, so labyrinthine, and there is just so much of everything – marble, glass, mirror, gold – that cornucopia soon becomes the norm. The dining room is staffed by several armies of tailed waiters and equipped with no end of trolleys and incendiary devices. The cooking excels when it tends toward the down-home – rather incongruous in such a setting – but disappoints when going in for conventional grand hotel stuff. There’s one problem: the pianist. Shoot?”

Memorably, the day after Notre Dame went up in smoke, we lunched in L’Orangerie, one of three restaurants in the Four Seasons George V, Avenue George V, 10 sur 10. “The George V should really be called the Louis after Louis the decorator. Containerloads of tapestries, gilded console tables, marble busts, rococo mirrors and so on have been brought from Rue St Honoré. The place is bursting with everything save self restraint. It does without saying that the restaurant does swell lines in pomp and neo directoire pediments. Two sorts of salt, two sorts of butter, absolutely no chance of pouring your own wine. The cooking is sumptuous, magnificent, not least because it quite lacks the chichi that mars much hotel cooking. Wines: predictably big names at predictably big prices.”

And that brings us on rather nicely to a big name of the landscaping world. They don’t come much bigger than the Italian born Pimlico office based Lady Arabella Lennox-Boyd. She hasn’t looked back since studying landscape architecture at Thames Polytechnic. In 2018, the then 82 year old was commissioned to redesign Le Bristol’s courtyard garden. “I wanted to get away from the usual hotel good taste with the ubiquitous formal white and green theme.” Instead, she introduced a pastoral idea combining topiary with loose plantings and flowing grasses. “A countryside feeling in the city.” She also wanted “a sense of mystery so that the garden cannot be seen in its entirety from any one point”.

While the façade of Le Bristol is a serious urban presence in stone, the inner facing elevations are light creamy stucco. What would have been a blank party wall in the courtyard garden has been given the green treatment. Forget a mere green wall. This is more like a two storey green mountain of layered planting towering behind first floor level pyramidal topiary set perpendicular to the courtyard garden.

“It was quite unconventional for a Roman girl whose role it was to get married and produce children and maybe have a job as a lawyer. Instead of which I’m in gardens doing manual work and dealing with soil. I have a feel for plants; I have a connection. I sometimes put myself in their shoes: if I was them what would I want?” She smiles, “You’re never too old!”

The landscape designer selected flora native to the greater Paris region or France more broadly, including European beech and hornbeam, Gladwin iris and hart’s tongue fern. “I included plants that provide shelter and nectar in all seasons. This garden is colonised by nature.” Rectangular black slate fountains add to this sensory driven garden. “Designing a garden is like painting with plants but there is so much more to consider. I am proud to have created a space where things are planted according to their natural habitat.” Her little black book includes King Philippe and Queen Mathilde of Belgium, the Duke and Duchess of Westminster, and of course the Oetker family who own Le Bristol.

Lady Arabella’s great chum Countess Bergit Douglas, a relative of the Oetkers, masterminded the Louis XVI interior design of the three Haussmannesque buildings that make up Le Bristol. The hotel has never looked better since Hippolyte Jammet (great name!) opened it in 1923. He must have been something of an Anglophile, naming his hotel after Frederick Hervey, 4th Earl of Bristol, an 18th century connoisseur of luxury travel. The socialite Lady Victoria Hervey is a descendant although the family have long since lost their seat of Ickworth in Suffolk. The dazzling and dazzlingly talented Josephine Baker and her pet cheetah frequented Le Bristol throughout the Roaring Twenties. After a postwar spell as the American Embassy, the hotel was bought by German businessman Rudolf Oetker in 1978. Then in 2014, our Knightsbridge London hangout The Lanesborough became part of The Oetker Collection. Little wonder Le Bristol feels like a home from home.

C’est le déjeuner sur l’herbe encore une fois. That ultimate Parisienne (if not born one soon became one) is the muse of Café Antonia in Le Bristol. Yes, Marie Antoinette. Her mother’s pet name for her was Antonia. Françoise Ravelle revels in Marie Antoinette Queen of Style and Taste (2017), “She singled out creators who had the knack of lifting their art to the height of perfection, and she became closely involved in the design of her dresses, her furniture and her gardens. In the small kingdom of Marie Antoinette her ministers were her couturiers, cabinetmakers, bronze works and painters.” The 18th century Royals’ painter François-Hubert Drouais’ portrait of Marie Antoinette, part of the private collection of Le Bristol, presides over Café Antonia. Her Majesty was passionate about the arts and loved attending the Opéra de Paris where she could escape the Court’s strict etiquette. Café Antonia reflects this sophisticated yet informal outlook, flowing from an expansive drawing room through French doors into the courtyard garden.

Françoise Ravelle reveals, “Perhaps Marie Antoinette’s personal touch is her association with a forever bygone epoch, described by her artist friend Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, ‘Women reigned at the time – the Revolution dethroned them.’” Females are taking central roles at Le Bristol, from the garden creator to the garniture stylist to the beau monde guests. True to form, there are plenty of Catherine Deneuve and Kristin Scott Thomas doppelgangers holding court in Café Antonia making elegance an art form. And some gentlemen of class as well. “De riens, messieurs,” waves our waiter. Lunch is all about crème d’asperges vertes, avocat; oeuf poché sur toast et saumon fumé; and patisserie du jour (chocolat, beaucoup de chocolat!).

Bob Middleton arrives and whisks us off on a whistlestop tour of the hotel. “I am the Manager of 114 which is one of three food offers in Hôtel Le Bristol excluding the banqueting and the room service. The name comes from its address: 114 Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré. We opened in 2009 and the restaurant has one Michelin star since 2013. There is also the three Michelin star restaurant Epicure overlooking the courtyard garden. Vincent Schmit is our Head Chef in 114 and he is assisted by 25 people who work in the kitchen. Then we have 30 people who work in the restaurant itself. We have a great place, we have a great team, we have great customers, what more can I say?” Vincent Schmit waves up from the lower level kitchen. “Bonne journée!”

And how would Jonathan Meades mark Café Antonia? Bien sûr 10 sur 10.

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People Town Houses

Jardin des Ambassadeurs Paris + Josephine Baker + Simone Seguoin + Françoise de la Guerre

We Would Do it All Again

Embassy world Paris. Amidst these hallowed hectares is an exhibition to the female fighters of the Resistance. Josephine Baker defied definition. Actress, dancer, spy, war heroine, adoptive mother of orphans. Oh, did we mention beauty? And nobody has ever looked hotter with an MP40 machine gun than her compatriot Simone Segouin. Before Simone died in February 2023 she would say, “If I had to do it all again I would do it. I have no regrets.” Fellow freedom fighter Françoise Bigon looks on bemused: “You found the best place. I am France!”

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Art Design Hotels Luxury People Town Houses

Hôtel Le Temple de Jeanne Paris et Les Mecs

Et Puis le Printemps Est Arrivé

Paris is the friendliest city ever. It does help if you’re beautiful photographing well from every angle and speak a little French.  Who said the medieval era was all about torture? Named after Queen Jeanne de Bourbon wife of Charles V, Hôtel Le Temple de Jeanne proves it wasn’t all bad. We’re doing Paris! But first there’s a quadruple upgrade to the quarter hectare bedroom (in relative Parisian terms) to be had.

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Art Design Fashion People Restaurants Town Houses

Zoop Retro + Free the Gallery + Haynes Lane Crystal Palace London

Great Exhibitions

Crystal Palace has always had edge. Last century it was a favoured hideout of pirate radios thanks to being one of the highest places in London. MSM radio comes from the Eiffel Tower lookalike transmitting station that pierces the sky. These days it’s The Triangle below the mast (time to rebrand it TriBeMa?) that’s getting all the attention. The revival of this angular patch on a plateau radiating off Church Road, Westow Hill and Westow Street has avoided the slips of gentrification and gone straight to urban authentic.

Brimming with life, flowing with ambience, frothing over on fun are its 48 restaurants, 37 wellness shops, 11 antique stores, 10 clothes shops, 10 pubs, nine giftshops, eight gyms, seven interiors shops, six charity shops, six convenience stores, three beer and wine shops, three flower shops and two pet shops. Most of the pubs are fine examples of Forget Temperance Victorian architecture.

An exciting vertical and rear extension has transformed Westow House, a pub overlooking Crystal Palace Park with an uninterrupted view of the transmitter. Two extra storeys and a substantial return wing designed by Daria Wong Architects contain function space and 23 bedrooms attached to the pub downstairs. This reinstates the building to its original four storey height and proportions pre World War II bomb damage. Haddonstone replicated historic stone details using 3D scanning technology.

In contrast to Westow House, Haynes Lane is one of Crystal Palace’s hidden gems. Tucked behind Sainsbury’s off Westow Street, it’s lined on one side by a pretty Victorian terrace stepping down the hill. On the other side, brick warehouses wedged into the hill around a courtyard are now a lively vintage market. Free the Gallery occupies the upper level: it’s a pop up space. Zoop Retro has taken it over along with an exhibition by artist Nick Slim.

Peter Raistrick, owner of Zoop Retro, relates, “I’d just arrived in London from Middlesbrough in 1990 to study for a graphic design degree at the London College of Communication and I found a discarded Levi’s denim jacket that looked unusual so I tried to repatriate it and nobody in the immediate area wanted it. So I went to a specialist retailer on Kensington High Street and they gave me £60 for it. That spurred my interest in dealing in vintage clothing. I opened my shop in Crystal Palace three and a half years ago. One rail turned into two turned into three. I have 12 rails in this pop up. I also have my permanent shop downstairs.”

“Nineties Levi’s jackets still sell well,” he notes. “As do Adidas Originals not to be confused with newer variants. Denim is always popular. Zoop Retro is about going back in time to Nineties club culture. I also sell quirky stuff like South Korean graphic prints.” Haynes Lane is quite the social hub and no time more so than on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

Nick arrives over from his studio on Westow Hill. He shares, “I create distinctive multilayered paintings, collages and prints. My photographic and digital artworks are reflective of my interests in pop culture and vintage erotica, as well as my often provocative sense of humour. My artworks are playful and dark at the same time, inviting the viewer to ‘peel off’ the layers and reveal their hidden message. My attention to detail highlights the finesse of methods and technique be it digital or painting. Drawing on my training as a fine artist, I break the rules in order to create a symbiosis of mixed genres and media resulting in my trademark slick punchy use of colour, form and satirical narrative.”

Nick won the Reece Martin Prize for Painting at Camberwell College of Arts and went on to study Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University in the Nineties where he embraced the city’s rave subculture. He was appointed Art Director for Transcentral Rave Parties. Slim trailblazed responding artistically to the new dance music scene using screening, video projection, 16 millimetre film and 35 millimetre slide shows. He has exhibited his work with the lingerie brand Coco de Mer and his work is for sale in The Paxton Centre on Annerley Hill to the east of The Triangle.

Singer musician storyteller Violetta Vibration rocks up to Free the Gallery. “On a quantum level all matter is vibration so nothing is really real,” she considers. “Your thoughts are vibration and if you think you want to do something and go an get an onion and chop it into soup you’re creating soup. You’re basically creating your reality with your thoughts. If you think everything’s going to be awful and nobody likes you and that there’s something wrong with you you’ll probably meet people who reaffirm that belieft. So you have to think that you’re great and amazing and love who you are to attract people that are on that frequency. I’m supposed to be meeting you today!” Later, Violetta will put her amazing vocal range and songwriting talent to very good use. It’s not over till the fab lady sings.

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Architecture Art Country Houses

Mount Congreve House + Garden Kilmeaden Waterford + Ambrose Congreve

What a Fad

We visited Mount Congreve on a very sunny spring day in 2014 while staying nearby at Gaultier Lodge in Woodstown, County Waterford. The exterior of the house and the gardens were pristine, glistening in fact, but the interior was closed. Not any more. While the priceless collection of art and antiques is now history, the main rooms opened as a visitor centre in 2022. A café is now in the stables. Even more excitingly, visitors don’t have to go home: there is overnight accommodation in forest eco cabins and four gatelodges called Acorn, Damson, Oak and Rowan. Revisit overdue!

First it was Farmleigh, then Lissadell, next it was Mount Congreve. Historic Irish houses lived in by the original families with intact interiors and gardens that could have been saved in their entirety for the nation. The Guinnesses’ former Dublin home Farmleigh was eventually purchased by the Government after its contents had been sold. Lissadell in County Sligo, once the home of Countess Markievicz who helped establish the Republic of Ireland, was sold on the open market and its contents auctioned despite the Gore-Booth family offering it to the State. At Mount Congreve, it is the gardens that have been saved. The last owner, Ambrose Congreve, struck a deal with the former Taoiseach Charlie Haughey that in return for tax exemption during his lifetime, the gardens would be left to the people of Ireland. The house is still there, stripped naked of its phenomenal collection of furniture and art, still surrounded by one of the finest gardens in the country, if not the world.

It took just one day in London in May 2012 and two days in London in July 2012 for Christie’s and Mealy’s to auction the entire contents. At the time, George Mealy explained, “There are lacquered screens and vases from Imperial China, rare books, Georgian silver, vintage wines, chandeliers and gilt mirrors and enough antique furniture to fill a palace. Everything is on offer. It’s a complete clearance of the entire estate. He did his art shopping in London. He got most of it through London because he had spotters for items that he might be interested in. Mr Congreve loved collecting. He loved nice things and he had unbelievable taste.” Chinoiserie takes on Versailles.

Andrew Waters, Head of Private Collections at Christie’s, writes in the auction catalogue, “Mount Congreve stands in a splendid position above the River Suir, not far from the city of Waterford in the southeast corner of Ireland. The name is internationally known today for the astonishing gardens among the greatest in the world … Much less well known than the garden, indeed largely unknown, is the magnificent collection of decorative arts in the house that was formed concurrently with the garden. The neoclassical house was built circa 1760 for the Congreve family by the leading architect John Roberts. From the mid 1960s the house was restored with the addition of a deep bow with a baroque doorcase on the entrance front. This created some magnificent additional spaces in the house for the growing collection. Among them was the Chinese wallpapered drawing room, the elegant setting for much of the superb French furniture in both sales.

“The furniture collection was begun in 1942 and was still being added to in the early 21st century. Although a taste for French furniture was to be a constant theme during the formation of the collection, full advantage was taken of the dispersal sales after 1945 of English furniture from great country houses,” continues Andrew. Robert Adam pieces from Croome Court in Worcestershire are some of the highlights.

Jim Hayes, former Industrial Development Agency Director, records a visit to Mount Congreve in his autobiography The Road from Harbour Hill, “We were received on arrival by Geraldine Critchley, the social secretary and long term assistant of Ambrose Congreve. The ornate hall was decked with a number of gloves, walking canes and a variety of riding accessories. We were escorted into a large drawing room, the walls of which were covered in 18th century, hand-painted, Chinese wallpaper. Three large Alsatian dogs lay asleep in the corner of the room. A liveried servant then appeared with a silver tray and teapot and antique bone china cups and saucers. This young man, of Indian origin, was one of the last few remaining liveried servants of Ireland’s great houses.” Sheila Bagliani, doyenne of Gaultier Lodge, recalls, “Gus, Ambrose’s Alsatian, had full run of the house.”

Ambrose was in London rather aptly for the Chelsea Flower Show when he died in 2011, aged 104. He had no children so eight generations of his family’s enhancement of Waterford came to a close. Geraldine Critchley, who was actually his partner, survives him. The son of Major John Congreve and Lady Irène Congreve, daughter of the 8th Earl of Bessborough, Ambrose inherited Mount Congreve in 1968 and restored and redecorated and revived it to within a square centimetre of its being. The good life took off, on a whole new level. Ambrose divided his time between Mount Congreve and his townhouse in Belgravia. He employed a succession of fine chefs de cuisine including Albert Roux who went on to co found Le Gavroche restaurant.

Now for some stats of the 45 hectares estate: 28 hectares of woodland; 1.6 hectares of walled gardens; 26 kilometres of paths; 3,000 rhododendrons; 1,500 plants; 600 camelias; 600 conifers; 300 magnolias; 250 climbers. All piled high on the south bank of the River Suir. The manicured gardens end abruptly next to open fields, like a beautiful face half made up. Sheila Bagliani remembers, “Piped music in the grounds kept the 25 gardeners entertained while working. Ambrose also employed The Queen Mother’s former chauffeur.” Lot Number 492 at the auction in Mount Congreve was his 1969 shell grey Rolls Royce Phantom V1, price guide €12,000 to €18,000. It sold for €55,000. At his 100th birthday lunch, Ambrose Congreve declared, “To be happy for an hour, have a glass of wine. To be happy for a day, read a book. To be happy for a week, take a wife. To be happy forever, make a garden.” His garden lives on in perpetuity, making plenty of people happy.

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Architecture Design Developers Luxury People Restaurants

Plateau Restaurant Canary Wharf London +

Haute Cuisine

Luxury brands Aston Martin, Baccarat, Bentley, Clive Christian, Dunhill and Lalique have all held launches here. So we’re in good company. If it’s the chauffeur’s day off and you’re feeling like more than one tipple, Canary Wharf is well served by public transport (ignore Wallis Simpson’s diktat that anyone seen on public transport over the age of 30 is a social failure – she didn’t have to cope with the Capital’s standstill traffic). The fastest way to arrive at Plateau restaurant is by Docklands Light Railway from Bank Tube Station. Just a 15 minute journey; the best seats are in the front carriage with wraparound views thanks to fully automated driverless trains.

When staying at The Savoy, hop on the river bus which only takes eight minutes longer. You can take in all the riveting sites of the Thames along the way, sailing past London Bridge, St Katherine’s Dock and Surrey Quays. Upon arrival at Canary Wharf it’s a two minute walk past sharp edged architecture and sharp suited financiers to Canada Square. A dedicated lift (just like Le Jules Vernes restaurant in the Eiffel Tower) scoops you up a few levels to Plateau.

A dedicated lift isn’t the only thing the two restaurants have in common. Allan Pickett, Head Chef of Plateau, prepares modern French food albeit with a twist of British ingredients and European influences. Both restaurants have retro scifi interiors. Although Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea they ain’t: high rise views are what they enjoy (despite Plateau only being on the fourth floor it is the penthouse level of a block adjoining One Canada Square, the most iconic tower of Canary Wharf). Mammon’s metallic monoliths are cloaked in nature’s golden lighting as the sun sets.

The layout of Plateau optimises its panoramic setting. A long symmetrical sequence of spaces has continuous glass frontage on one side as well as overhead glazing. Taking prime position in the centre is the restaurant itself alongside a bar and brasserie. These are balanced on either side by tented terraces ideal for a post dinner cigar.

Going strong since 2003, Plateau continues to set a very high standard which makes competitors pale in comparison. Conran and Partners’ interior embraces modernity but with more than a hint of mid 20th century nostalgia. Eero Saarinen’s white tulip chairs could be straight off the Barbarella filmset and the cutlery is made to a 1957 design by David Mellor. Plateau is the place to be seen – and to see; a bit like an upmarket Rick’s Café in Casablanca.

Achille Castiglioni’s Arco lamp of 1952 placed at regular intervals provides flattering lighting as the sun disappears. The inspiration behind Conran’s muted colour scheme was the olive tree. Gentle tones of green, grey and brown create an oasis of calm away from the frenetic cityscape below. A shock of fuchsia contrasts with the marble tabletops. As darkness falls, the angular architecture outside is illuminated by blue neon lights. The atmosphere changes from subdued to electric.

Staff are attentive and very well informed without being intrusive. The Sommelier assures us that harmony with food and wine is his chief goal. He achieves it, seemingly effortlessly. Attention to detail is evident in the tablescape from rolled butter in silver foil to fishbone volutes. It’s good to see fresh towels in the loo rather than ghastly airport type hand dryers.

And then the food. Declining the foie gras amuse bouche, a delicious garden salad arrives instead. Each course is a highlight in itself. The food looks as good as it tastes. Scallops fitted snugly in a bowl have a freshness as if plucked from the Scottish seas that instant. Holy mackerel! The crab is divine. Accompanied by a shell razor clam, this is edible art and that’s before the pudding with its intricate design arrives. Or rather puddings for there are three to get through on the Gourmand Menu. Allan and his team excel from amuse bouche to petit fours, from mellifluousness to adventure. The restaurant at Plateau is haute cuisine at its best. The height of its location is matched by hight levels of service, food and wine. We’re here to serve platitude for Plateau puts the right sort of attitude into latitude.

That was fine dining, 2011. Plateau, once one of D and D Group’s most prominent establishments, closed in 2023. Allan Pickett left to become part of the opening team of The Standard Hotel and has held several high profile roles since then. There are plenty of other D and D restaurants still on the go from Bluebird Chelsea on King’s Road to German Gymnasium in King’s Cross. In 2024, the unit formerly occupied by Plateau is now Wahaca, a Mexican eatery. The floor below is part of the upmarket Japanese chain Roka. Reminiscing, what all was on that now historic Gourmand Menu? A lot!

Rosemary and tomato breads; Laurent-Perrier Champagne. Roast beetroot salad, creamed goat’s cheese, pea shoots; 2007 Chardonnay Gran Reserve, Nostros, Casablanca Valley, Chile. Gazpacho, cucumber and basil oil; 2009 Sauvignon Blanc, Mantel Blanco, Ruedo, Spain. Nage of Scottish sea scallops, vermouth velouté, soft herbs; 2008 Sancerre La Vigne Blanche, Henri Bourgeois, Loire Valley, France. South Devon crab ravioli, vine tomatoes, crab vinaigrette. Sauvignon Blanc, Domaine Ribante, Vins de Pays d’Oc, France. Seared fillet of seabream, aubergine caviar, slow cooked onions and peppers; Muscat de Riversaltes, Languedoc-Roussillon, France. Set bourbon vanilla cream, macerated strawberries, basil essence; Castelnau de Suduiraut, Suaternes, France. Warm bitter chocolate tart, kalamansi sorbet, Oreo cookie crumb; Cape Muscadel, de Wetshof Estate, Robertston, South Africa. Crème brûlée, elderflower sorbet, dehydrated raspberries. Macaroons, meringues, cookies, jellies.

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Art Design Fashion Luxury People

Mary Martin London + Janice Blakley + The Green Dress

Destiny Hall

Landed circles. Every day is extraordinary. Every moment is an haute couture one.

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Architects Architecture Art Country Houses Design People

Elizabeth Cope + Shankill Castle Paulstown Kilkenny

Period Drama

Easter 2014. There are whistlestop tours and there’s a 30 minute stopover before racing to Terminal 2 Dublin Airport before the departure gates close on the last flight out to London Gatwick. Just half an hour to check out a centuries old castle complete with famous gates, a gatelodge, even more famous stables, cottages, a walled garden, an orchard, church ruins and a graveyard. Oh, and did we mention squeeze in a coffee in the kitchen with the owners (an artist and an historian), their film director son and dogs? Welcome to Shankill Castle, a 45 minute drive from the airport. That is, if the heel is very firmly to the steel up the M9.

The house (it’s really a castellated house rather than fort) is full of surprises. A playful 1820s Gothic exterior courtesy of local architect William Robertson gives way to a wintry panelled entrance hall. “The 17th century chimneypiece without a mantelpiece is of an unusual design,” points out Elizabeth Cope, the bold and brilliant artist in permanent residence. “There’s a similar chimneypiece in The National Trust house Dyrham Park just outside Bristol. This one’s of Kilkenny marble. Did you now Kilkenny marble is actually polished limestone? Look at how tall and slim the Queen Anne doorcases are. They’re so elegant.” The hall, like all the rooms, is a wonderfully eclectic mix of period details, antiques and of course Elizabeth’s vibrant paintings, bursting with life – and in some cases, death. In the middle of the hall is a traditional drum rent table with several dummy drawers for security and symmetry.

Beyond the entrance hall lies the dining room with its great boxy bay overlooking the geometrically shaped lake at the back of the house. Dozens of wine glasses are laid out on the dining table. “It’s our son Reuben’s 30th birthday on Friday. The theme is The Great Gatsby. You must come! I love throwing parties. I love throwing parties. I always think no one will come and then at the last minute everyone turns up. This house is made for parties. There’ll be dancing through the night.” The drawing room is a gloriously summery space with wide windows opening onto the driveway and side garden reflected in four metre tall mirrors. Faded Edwardian wallpaper is the perfect backdrop to several of Elizabeth’s life size nudes. They’re as colourful and vivacious as the artist herself. “I’d love to paint you!” she exclaims.

Through the former billiard room and ante room, now an interconnecting study and art store, to the bow ended staircase hall. “Look at the walls,” directs Elizabeth. “They were lined with Sienna marble in 1894.” We descend the precariously angled stairs to the basement. “Keep to the left!” Along a veritable rabbit warren of domestic quarters: boot room, gun room, lamp room, scullery, wineless wine cellar – “We’ve drunk all the wine and need to quickly restock!” – past a row of numbered servants’ bells we eventually arrive in the kitchen, once the servants’ hall. “Different rooms have been used as a kitchen down the years,” explains Elizabeth. “Owners tended to move the kitchen in tandem with wherever they used as a dining room.” Flagstone floors are gently worn by the passage of time. Coffee is served.

The tour continues outside. “The nine sided sundial next to the lake is 36 minutes behind London time. My husband Geoffrey says more like 36 years behind London!” Elizabeth sighs wistfully, “London is the only place. We’ve sold our house in Kennington but I still exhibit in London. I recently had a show at Chris Dyson’s gallery in Spitalfields. Tracey Emin came. She wanted to buy the sofa in the gallery. I should’ve partied more in London when I was younger. What a waste!” she laughs. The Copes bought Shankill Castle in 1991. “It was if the house was destined to be our home. We know the previous owners, the Toler-Aylwards. In fact they’re our daughter Phoebe’s godparents. Phoebe lives in Scotland – she’s an artist too.”

Time is pressing; we’ve broke into a run. Elizabeth cuts quite a dash. “Come quick and see the stables. They’re by Daniel Robertson as are the gates.” She strikes a pose. Even though Elizabeth has a studio in a stone outbuilding which would be the envy of any artist, she relates, “I paint everywhere: in the garden, on the bus, you name it. I paint through the chaos of everyday life. If I was to wait for a quiet moment I’d never paint. I believe painting should be like dancing. The real work of art is not so much the canvas when the paint is dry. Rather, it’s the physical rhythm of the process of painting it.”

Beautifully restored estate cottages and the east wing of the castle are available to let. “The things you do to keep a place like this going,” she says as we leap through the ruins of the church to the side of the front lawn. “Shan-kill” is derived from the Irish for old church. “We throw a ScareFest every Halloween when I dress up and lie in a coffin to spook visitors. What people don’t know is it’s my real coffin. I was ill a couple of years ago so I thought I better get fitted out for one just in case.” A full calendar at the castle includes the Midsummer Fair, Murder Mystery, Drawing Marathon, Wand and Quill Making Workshop, artist residencies and a new music festival Light Colour Sound. But now, it’s time for us to go – to drive by the haha and the trees planted in the 1820s to frame the view of Blackrock Mountain, leaving behind Shankill Castle, truly a world of its own.

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Architecture Country Houses People

Altamont House + Gardens Tullow Carlow

The Other Side of Eden

Imagine 16 hectares of gardens teeming with character lying between an empty country house and a lake on a 40 hectare estate. Welcome to paradise. The gardens are open all year round save Christmas Day for free. It’s November 2014 and there”s nobody around. The journey to Altamont Gardens past country houses, the smart Ballykealy Manor (hotel) and the very smart Sherwood Park House (takes guests), is a reminder that County Carlow is as horse and hound, or at least horse and lurcher, as a centrefold in The Field. Ireland for the Anglo Irish.

Annabel Davis-Goff one of them, writer in her novel The Dower House, “I was thinking of people. You import a fairly large number of English people into Ireland. The strongest, richest men and the prettiest women tend to get first choice of who they’ll marry. From the strongest, richest, prettiest pool they look for other desirable characteristics: a good seat on a horse, wit, nerves of steel about unpaid bills, the ability to hold large quantities of alcohol, a way with words, good enough circulation to live in large, cold houses, and the ability to eat awful food. Pretty soon you’ve got the Anglo Irish. They’re not exactly not English, but they’re different.”

Altamont House boasts a cosmopolitan doorcase with a half umbrella fanlight worthy of St Stephen’s Green in Britain’s former Second City, Dublin. The joy of the entrance front lies in its eccentric gothic trappings on an otherwise straitlaced 18th century Georgian building. The first case of eclectic postmodernism in Ireland? Curious stepped gables with curiouser traceried blind windows rise from the eaves on either side of the canted entrance bay. The two wings to the right of the main block are topped by more stepped gables. Oddest of all the frippery is another stepped gable to the left cut into to make way for a balustraded balcony. This leftfield naïveté suggests an enthusiastic owner got a bit carried away following a visit to church or read an Augustus Welby Pugin tract and thought, hey why not? I’ll give gothic a go! Let’s hope the Office of Public Works gets some dosh to do it up. Clothed in Wisteria sinensis, the house is a little frayed round the edges at present.

Green, green, oh so very green fields rolling in front of the house past a pair of 150 year old weeping ash trees (Fraxinus excelsior) give no clue as to the natural, botanical, cultural and horticultural wonders that lie behind: the Arboretum, Bluebell Wood, Bog Garden, Ice Age Glen, River Slaney Walk and Temple of the Four Winds, much of them inverted in reflections in the lake. The landscape was first developed by Dawson Borrer, son of William Borrer of West Sussex, an early 19th century naturalist, botanist, culture vulture and horticulturalist. This Anglo Irish landlord employed 100 men for three years during the 1840s famine to create pleasure grounds adjacent to an existing walled garden and the late 18th beech avenue called Nuns’ Walk. A wet meadow was dug out to form the lake. But the present form of the gardens is largely due to its last private owner Corona North who died in 1999. She introduced seas of azalea and scores of rhododendron specimens like augustinii and cinnabarinum. Ever so aptly, Corona was named after her parents’ favourite hybrid rhododendron.

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Design Developers People Restaurants

The Red Setter Pub + Restaurant Clapham Junction London

Get Set Go

It’s a red letter day for Northcote Road, southwest London’s most thriving neighbourhood. Urban Pubs and Bars have opened their latest venue, The Red Setter, on this dynamic stretch. Andre Johnstone, Sales and Marketing Director, explains, “We have 42 pubs and bars and several restaurants across London. We call ourselves the biggest independent pub company in London because: one, we’re not tied to a big brewery and, two, we think entrepreneurially. We empower every manager to run the business like its their own.”

Media is swamped with stories of pubs and restaurants closing but Andre shares, “We love London and we think we have a magic formula. We’ve been lucky to find really good places, bring fine design to the local area, and install managers and staff who really care.” A striking façade has been created using high quality materials of brass, polished timber and red wall tiles. “The exterior of a pub is the shopfront, a selling point, and if you can make it beautiful it definitely sets the tone.”

Andre believes, “There are some good pubs around the Northcote Road area but I think what’s missing and what we’ve tried to do here is create more than just a traditional drinking pub. We’re serving lovely brunches, Sunday roasts, interesting cocktails, a wide beer range and providing a great dog friendly place to come and meet your friends.” The group has ongoing expansion plans for 10 to 15 sites across London for the next two to three years.

Local businesspeople are invited to the launch evening of The Red Setter as well as press. And three red setters turn up. Canapés include sun blushed tomato, goat’s cheese vol-au-vent and native lobster roll, avocado cream, iceberg lettuce. Small plates range from babaganoush on Lebanese flatbread to chilli salt and pepper squid. Love Bite pisco, Aperol, chilli syrup, bitters and Kiss the Boys Goodbye Hennessy, sloe gin, sugar, bitters are two of the six Signature Cocktails. The Sunday roasts board announces a vegetarian option of Wiltshire beetroot, pinenut and spinach wellington. There’s something for everyone at The Red Setter.

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Architects Architecture Country Houses Design Developers People

Ven House + Garden Milborne Port Somerset

Zen and Now

Reflecting on his tenure, the designer Jasper Conran describes it as “a spine chillingly real Baroque country house with a massive double height hallway and, in the front, an enfilade of rooms”. He’d bought Ven House in 2007 for £8 million from the decorators Thomas Kyle and Jerome Murray. Jasper sold the house eight years later, making a £2 million profit, to architect Mike Fisher and businessman Charles Lord Allen of Kensington. It has continually been placed in safe hands for several decades now. The 1990s maximalism has given way to classic interiors with contemporary Diarmuid Kelley portraits in place of ancestral paintings. Every en suite bathroom has been fitted out by Drummonds.

It’s as if Buckingham House (the brick nucleus of said Palace) has been transplanted into the rolling Somerset countryside. The postcard pretty town of Sherborne is a 15 minute Rolls Royce drive away. Despite its magnificence, Ven House was likely designed by the relatively low profile West Country based architect Nathaniel Ireson in the early 1700s. The educated household name of Decimus Burton was responsible for internal alterations and the glorious orangery linked to the main block by a glazed gallery.

The tranquil gardens are as fine as the house and form a series of interconnected yet standalone works of horticultural art. Over afternoon tea in the stables, Mike mentions that he has commissioned the garden designer Iain MacDonald to refashion the west courtyard. He enjoys showing people round the property: “Houses like Ven need to be used and should be part of the community. Ven has been an important part of village life for three centuries and we want to maintain that.”

Ven House – inside, outside and all around – has entered its golden era.

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Art Design Hotels Luxury People Restaurants Town Houses

The Standard Hotel King’s Cross London + Decimo Restaurant

Post Vernal Equinox

After the elevating experience of Messiah in the Royal Albert Hall we’re off again to The Standard, a short cab ride away in King’s Cross. Fusion food or at least that of twinned origin is the whole rage right now. Japanese Peruvian is still going strong at Nobu Park Lane. Mexican Japanese at Azteca Öme has just opened on Battersea Rise. And then there’s Spanish Mexican at Decimo reflecting the Michelin starred Bristolian Chef Peter Sanchez-Iglesias’s family heritage. “Decimo” is Spanish for 10th. We’re back in the red bubble lift to the 10th (of course) floor.

We have friends in high places: all the staff greet us like long lost relatives thanks to a rather lively party in the hotel on the Monday of the same week. “More Veuve Cliquot?” You mightn’t have to be a model to work here but it certainly helps. The best table in the house, the southwest windowed corner, is even better this evening thanks to a golden sun setting over the rooftops below. The cacti and beading of the Andalusian meets Pacific Coastal interior is all aglow.

How can such simple ingredients taste so good? The clarity of the evolving tablescape just emphasises the perfection of the food: smoky marinated red peppers on a marble block; spicy monkfish and pimentón on a wooden board covered with parchment paper. There is bread and oil and there is Decimo bread and oil. Same goes for the fried potations and alioli. Pear with Foursquare spiced rum (Trés Leché) deserves a Michelin star in its own right. This restaurant is next level.

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Art Design Fashion People

Design Museum London + Enzo Mari

An Exhibition Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Francesca Giacomelli

Fashion: Alexander McQueen. Art: Ai Weiwei. Design: Enzo Mari. The Design Museum does it all. CEO Tim Marlowe opens the press launch celebrating the work of the late Italian designer: “Enzo Mari is an absolutely major figure in 20th and 21st century design. He’s one of the giants of the design world and yet in this country, present company excepted, he’s nowhere near as well known as he should be. This is the first solo show of any note dedicated to Enzo Mari. It’s about time it happened. There are over 300 objects in the exhibition. My own reductive view is I feel it’s like walking into the mind of a great creative thinker. That’s my initial response to it. This is a show that’s been an extraordinary collaboration … beginning at the Milan Triennale. But now at the Design Museum it’s the essence of that show. Mari’s whole view I think of the world of design was that design should be in service to society rather than in service to design per se. This is a great thing to remind ourselves in a world of mass production. It’s essential for us that we do these shows and we start to bring to a broader audience not just the designers that aren’t well enough known but also the ideas they embody. Mari is one of the great originals in the history of design as well as design itself.”

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Architecture Art Design Luxury People Restaurants

The Standard Hotel King’s Cross London + More Weddings

In Love

Romance starts across the road with artist Tracey Emin’s giant pink LED love letters “I want my time with you” over the Eurostar arrivals in St Pancras Station.

It’s London’s most exclusive inclusive wedding venue. The penthouse level of The Standard Hotel. Decimo restaurant is the perfect setting for holding your licenced ceremony (up to 60 guests) and wedding breakfast (up to 140 guests) before heading across the 10th floor hallway for Champagne in Sweeties bar (up to 400 guests). Those views! Even from the loos! Far below, people scurry about like tiny stick figures in a Laurence Lowry painting, each one the main character of their own story. In the wee small hours you can crawl into a Cosy Core or sashay into a Suite Spot to retire and more.

The in-laws won’t fail to be impressed by indie design stationery from With Bells On. Award winning event planning company Whole Lota Love will make sure the only hitch you’ll have will be getting hitched. My Lady Garden, empowerment through floristry, will transform the restaurant into a horticultural wonderland. Francesca Strange from east London bakery The Proof will make your cake, whether white or rainbow, sponge of chocolate. Shag (named after the carpet, not something else) is their signature style. As for your bridesmaids, Rewritten will dream up contemporary boho dresses for any shape or size of gal. Canapés upon arrival are a must. Baby artichoke, tostada, rose harissa, basil; pea and leek with hollandaise sauce; and spiced fishcake with XO sauce signpost the quality of Michelin starred Chef Peter Sanchez-Iglesias’ handiwork.

Cool party hot crowd. Or is it hot party cool crowd? Either way, The Standard’s resident DJs will provide the soundtrack from remixes of Tyla’s Water to mashups of Lola Marsh.

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Art Design Hotels Luxury People Restaurants

Four Seasons Hotel Park Lane London + Pavyllon Restaurant Afternoon Tea

A Why for an Eye

“Time, the great surprise. The tribulations of disguise,” cries musician, fashionista and philanthropist Daphne Guinness. In contrast to the Japanese Peruvian fusion of its neighbour Nobu, Pavyllon restaurant in the Four Seasons is all about Anglo French old school glamour. Park Lane is the second most valuable address in the London edition of the board game Monopoly, only beaten by the adjacent Mayfair. Inn on the Park London which would later be renamed Four Seasons opened in 1970. It was the group’s first European hotel, having started in Toronto nine years earlier. The architect was the Austrian born American Michael Rosenauer who had offices in London and New York.

The 11 storey 193 bedroom hotel has been materially and metaphorically elevated into the 21st century by the crack team of Reardon Smith (structural rebuild), Eric Parry (rooftop spa and Presidential Suite extension), Pierre-Yves Rochon (public areas interiors), Tara Bernerd (guest rooms and suites interiors) and Chahan Minassian (Pavyllon restaurant and Bar Antoine interiors). The first stuffed morels with duxelles sweetbread were still warm when Chef Yannick Alléno scooped up a Michelin star for Pavyllon (and his own 17th), the launch of the British expression of his trademark French cooking. Daphne Guinness: “You can blow out the candle in this chimera of time to end the beginning transcending a new paradigm.”

The design of Pavyllon and the adjoining Bar Antoine are all about blocks and stripes of calming colours to generate a Parisian apartment meets London club ambience. And a touch of Manhattan sophistication: Park Avenue reborn as Park Lane. Murano chandeliers comprising interlocking Cs designed by Chahan illuminate marble and lacquered panelling to establish a sense of understated luxury. New York artist Peter Lane’s pair of ceramic stoneware sculptures in a verdigris glaze pay homage to Michael Rosenauer’s penchant for incorporating artworks into his designs. At his Grade II* Listed Time and Life Building on Bruton Street, Mayfair, completed in 1954, the architect inserted an open base relief by Henry Moore on the second floor elevation.

Born in 1961 in Lebanon, Chahan’s family moved to France when he was 15. After a stint as European Creative Director for Ralph Lauren, he launched Chahan Interior Design in 1993. “Monochromes and textures mark a lot of my interiors,” he discloses. He always has more than 20 projects on the go, involving four to eight international flights a week. “Those days get intense between site visits, overlooking floorplans and designs, planning schedules and designing along the way. No lunch breaks. I read my 350 to 450 emails on my phone and manage to coordinate answers between my team and suppliers. I dine around 10am and sleep at 2am after catching up on work reports.”

Afternoon tea in Chanan’s relaxation inducing environment might cost an arm and a leg but life is for living. A breeze of staff in sandstone hued uniforms serve pistachio then sunflower seed nibbles. The well trodden afternoon tea sequence has variations on the theme. It’s all about differentiation in London five stars, whether The Goring’s Pink Panther with its bottomless curried cauliflower sandwiches or Sanderson’s Mad Hatter’s and its cuckoo cakes. Three finger sandwiches are oak smoked salmon sandwich with shiso butter and teriyaki sauce; Hafod cheddar sandwich with tomato condiment and spring onion; and devilled egg with watercress and mayo. Petite cubic scones come with raspberry compote, orange marmalade and vanilla cream.

Pastries are apple coriander tartlet (green apple ganache, pickles, black lemon); Jaffa cake (orange, caramel); marble cake (vanilla, chocolate, gianduja); mini baba (cachaça, mint, lemon); pavlova (sugar free meringue, fruit); and vanilla caramel cookie (almond praline, hazelnut). Moonlight Yunnan white tea proves to be the perfect accompaniment to the savouries and sweets. What better way to spend a Saturday afternoon in early spring? Daphne Guinness would approve: “Life is a dance and time is the key from the dawn of creation to the twilight of humanity.”

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Architecture Art Design

Christ Church Cathedral Crypt Dublin + Crotchet Cross

Lacrimosa Sola

All the globe is dead to us.

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Art Design Fashion Luxury People

Mary Martin London + Anglo Irish Art de la Haute Couture

A Muse

“The things we truly love stay with us always, locked in our hearts as long as life remains,” Josephine Baker, 1954

Mary Martin London is freedom, protest, a love letter, a manifesto, a shaking of the shoulders, a twisting of the ankles; looking closer, wider and more expansively at the world around us. There is always so much more to the fashion house. It’s about reclaiming agency, asserting subjectivity, authoring a new visual lexicon. As for the lead fashion artist herself? She can do it all: design, draw, cut, drape, fit, model. Both sides of the Atlanta not to mention the Mother Continent are enthralled by her living legacy. Stateside, Atlanta City Council led by its President Doug Shipman dedicated Saturday 9 December 2023 as Mary Martin Appreciation Day. Closer to home, there’s a muse in a mews to be schmoozed. The pedestal worthy cap, tunic and trouser combo may be Afro Caribbean in outline but the robust materiality of tweed with handwoven felt shamrocks is firmly Anglo Irish. Mary Martin London is dancer, legend, green, global.

“I believe we are created by God. In the beginning, God created heaven and earth and everything in them. So, if He created us in His image, we are creators like Him. We create, and God is my creator and inspiration.” Mary Martin, 2024

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Art Design Fashion Luxury People

Mary Martin London + Anglo Ireland

The Tullymurry Set

It’s fine to wear your birthday suit in the countryside. Especially when the view to the horizon is uninterrupted by anyone or anything. Mary Martin London is in fashion anywhere and everywhere.

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Architecture Art Design Hotels Luxury People Restaurants

The Lanesborough Hotel Knightsbridge London + The Garden Room

This Room’s On Fire

We’re back in town and we mean business. Straight off the hot mess express. Owning it. Cutting deals. Not just gadding about. Chop chop. We’re pumped up and pimped up between the plumped up poshness. In a basement next to the bright lights’ busiest roundabout. Sounds glam? It’s The Lanesborough’s Garden Room, darlings. Antiques and antics, busts and bust ups, teas and tiaras.

“A sky full of stars a room full of cigars,” postdebutante Annabel P wistfully murmurs before sinking behind the smoky haze into a Napoléon II club chair. The Garden Room’s impeccable Manager Neil Millington and his team are on it like a Selina Blow bonnet in this exclusive Cuba-on-Thames. “I’m going to keep the table as authentic as possible.” Bolney Estate Bacchus magically appears and reappears. Bad Pollyanna. Bad. And a legacy’s worth of Hoyo de Monterreys. “There are three cuts: punch, straight and V.”

Fresh from VIP seats applauding the thrillingly talented singer Noah Francis Johnson (the late Dodi Fayed’s brother-in-law) bring the (Soho) house down in White City (London not Tel Aviv), we’d glided past a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II en route to The Garden Room. Her painted lips parted: “We are so bemused.” An image of Salisbury’s Wilton House carried our reflection. People do say we’re a pair of oil paintings. “Welcome back!” chime Neil and his cohort each time we re-enter The Garden Room. Standing to attention of course. You can get the staff these days.

“When the party’s over and the lights go on …” sang Noah. This party’s only getting started so keep those lights dim!

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Architects Architecture Art Design Town Houses

Christ Church Cathedral Dublin + George Edmund Street

Up His Street

It boasts the largest cathedral crypt – 63.4 metres long – in Ireland and Britain, constructed in the 1170s. Above ground, Christ Church Cathedral in the heart of historic Dublin is medieval as reimagined with fervent vigour in Victorian times. The cathedral was declared structurally unsafe in the early 19th century. That was enough for English architect George Edmund Street to revive the building or rather complex of buildings with great gusto from 1871 to 1878. Distiller Henry Roe of Mount Anville stomped up the cash, all £230,000 of it. The cathedral’s founder, Hiberno Norse King Sitric Silkenbeard, would’ve no doubt raised an eyebrow or two.

The north porch? Chop. Quire? Chop. Tower? Rebuild. South nave arcade? Rebuild. Baptistry? Add. Flying buttresses? Add lots. Chapter house? Build. Synod hall? Build. For those tourists who make it up Dame Street away from the discombobulating temptations of Temple Bar, the cathedral and its environs – not least St Werburgh’s Church of Ireland – are a place of repose and reflection.

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Architecture Art Design

Dublin Castle Dublin + Jam Sutton

Pink is the New Black

Just when you thought the back of Dublin Castle couldn’t get any more colourful up pops a hot pink statue matching the tulips. The Irish village tradition of painting buildings in bright colours isn’t often applied to institutional buildings never mind castles. Dublin Castle is the exception: the group of blocks closest to the garden are painted ice cream flavours of blueberry, peach and lemon. The courtyard blocks couldn’t be more different with their stone and red brick fronts.

Dublin Castle has been around for 700 years although the current architecture mostly dates from the 17th to 20th century. Once the seat of British rule, it’s now government offices and an arena of state ceremony. Anyhoo back to that hot pink statue. Apparently it’s a modern take on the David and Goliath classic. David has donned a baseball cap and a pair of shorts, with a Nike trainer clad foot resting on Goliath’s severed head. Designed by English artist Jam Sutton, the method of execution is also a modern take: excitingly it’s a 3D print.

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Architects Architecture Art Country Houses Design Developers Hotels Luxury People Restaurants Town Houses

The Wilder Townhouse Hotel Dublin + Gráinne Weber

Incomplete Madness

Arriving at the west facing hotel on a sunny March evening is simply glorious. Doughnuts on demand in the new light filled conservatory and adjoining terrace. In contrast to the stuccoed pairs of Regency villas on the other side of Harcourt Terrace, The Wilder Townhouse is red brick Victorian. It’s a slightly wonky L shape in plan. Designed by architect James Hargrave Bridgford, the building has a long and complicated history. A Church of Ireland notice summarises its unusual genesis:

“The Asylum for Aged Governesses and Other Unmarried Ladies, first opened AD 1838. The only one in Ireland. Proposed new house, Harcourt Terrace, Dublin. In a former circular we gave an elevation of the proposed house, having four storeys, which was objected to as having rooms at such a distance from the entrance hall, that the ascent of the staircase to the upper rooms would be very trying for old and infirm people. We have, accordingly, modified our plan, which will be much more convenient in every way, and we have secured a plot of ground which gives us ample space for all sanitary and commodious arrangements, but the cost will be considerably more than for the original plan. We obtained four estimates from competent builders, and the lowest was £2,800 for the whole building; having, however only £1,600 in hand, and being determined to avoid debt, we have decided to build only the first block shown in the above drawing, with the portion of the wing included within the lines AB and CD. After this is done, we shall wait on the Lord for the means of completing the structure, which, when finished, will be all that can be desired. Subscriptions are earnestly solicited and will be thankfully received by the Trustees, or any Member of the Committee, whose names and addresses are given. Cheques and post office money orders to be made payable to Miss Eliza Meredyth.”

And a quote from Blackrock, County Dublin, based architect Gráinne Weber explaining its latest reincarnation: “Following on from work on Frankie Whelehan’s sister property, the Montenotte Hotel in Cork City, we were asked to take a look at a former residential institutional building on Harcourt Terrace and Adelaide Road in Dublin. A Victorian Protected Structure, it had planning permission for apartments but our client wished to develop it as a hotel. We achieved planning permission for a 42 bedroom guesthouse from An Bord Pleanála as architects for the project and proceeded to substantially upgrade the building’s shell and core: from there went on to create an interior which was modern yet sensitive to the building’s heritage.”

Hôtel Les Bains in Paris and Ham Yard Hotel in London provided two sources of inspiration for the interior design. House of Hackney wallpapers, Matthew Williamson fabrics and contemporary paintings reinvigorate the period interiors. The original inhabitants could only dream of today’s rainforest showers in marble bathrooms and Maison Margiela toiletries. Rooms are of course named after governesses who resided here: for example, the Miss Wade Suite was named after Charlotte Wade whose name appears in the 1911 Census. The Lady Jane Room is named in honour of Jane Harrison, Jane Jeffers and Jane Mercer who also all appeared in the 1911 Census. It’s also an acronym of the owner’s wife and daughters’ names: Josephine, Aoife, Niamh and Eimear. Records reveal 19 governesses were evicted down the years for being quarrelsome.

Gráinne’s client Frankie Whelehan expands the story, “What I was trying to achieve was something a bit different: a bespoke guesthouse with limited food and beverage, catering for a niche market that is under represented in Dublin. The name Wilder is a little bit of playacting because we are focusing on the international market coming to Dublin and Oscar Wilde is synonymous with the city. It’s all about experience. A notice in the deeds calls it ‘a home for bewildered women’ so we had that it mind too when naming the hotel.” The reception helpfully supplies a factsheet on governesses:

· They were employed to teach and train children in private middle and upper class households. The majority were Protestant; in the 1861 Census, 74 percent of Irish governesses were Protestant.

· In contrast to nannies, governesses concentrated on teaching children rather than catering for their physical needs.

· From the 1840s to 1860s, governesses accounted for 10 percent of the total teaching force.

· The profession began to decline at the end of the 19th century when schools became more common.

· The Governess Association of Ireland was established in 1869 on 3 Lower Leeson Street. It provided a two year course and an examination in Trinity College. Once completed, a certificate of proficiency helped to push for better wages.

· The average salary was £40 to £60 per annum but certified governesses could earn up to £80 a year.

· Governesses often didn’t have pensions and could end up homeless or in workhouses.

· The Asylum for Aged Governesses and Other Unmarried Ladies served a great need.

Last used as artists’ studios, the planning permission for hotel use granted by Dublin City Council was subject to a third party appeal in 2017 by neighbours on Harcourt Terrace. Inspector Jane Dennehy found in favour of the applicant: “The proposed development would not be seriously injurious to the integrity, character and visual amenities and setting the existing building, a Protected Structure, would not be seriously injurious to the architectural character, visual amenities and residential amenities of the residential Conservation Area and would be acceptable in terms of traffic and public safety and convenience, and would be in accordance with the proper planning and sustainable development of the area.” The Wilder Townhouse finally opened in 2018.

The February 2024 edition of Business Plus magazine reports: “In the 11 month period to November 2023, Dublin achieved the highest hotel occupancy rate, 83 percent, out of 35 European markets. Dublin also ranked seventh highest in terms of Revenue Per Available Room. Dublin has circa 25,860 hotel bedrooms. By comparison, the Stockholm hotel bedroom stock is about 39,000 while Amsterdam has a total stock of around 42,000. Dublin has fewer bedrooms than both comparably sized cities, despite having the fastest growing economy in Europe.” The Wilder Townhouse provides 42 of the very best bedrooms Dublin has to offer.

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Architecture Design Developers Hotels Luxury People Restaurants Town Houses

Wilde Restaurant + The Westbury Hotel Dublin

Come What May

Oscar Wilde: “I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.” A walk down O’Connell Street and beyond is a walk down memory lane. Dublin is full of ghosts of built and once human form. Clery’s department store closed in 2015. Across the River Liffey, and up Grafton Street, there used to be two department stores facing one another. Switzer’s, once owned by Mohammed Al Fayad, disappeared in 1990 while Brown Thomas has kept going. In 2021, the Weston family sold Brown Thomas and Selfridges in London for a few billion euro to a Thai and Austrian consortium.

Tucked behind Grafton Street, Powerscourt Townhouse Centre is comfortingly still intact as the city’s most original shop and restaurant destination. Once the urban seat of the Wingfield family, it’s full of the exuberant 18th century plasterwork made popular by the Italian Francini brother stuccodores. Walking over the uneven Georgian floorboards along the galleries has the unsteadying feel of being on a slightly rocky ship. Round the corner the only evidence that Odessa bar and restaurant ever existed, never mind being the coolest hangout in town circa 2001, is the sign, and even that’s about to disappear. Also tucked behind Grafton Street is another institution that is very much alive and kicking: The Westbury Hotel, part of The Doyle Collection.

Opened in 1984, this 205 bedroom five star hotel is still highly recognisable even after several multimillion euro renovations. The first floor restaurant Wilde overlooks Balfe Street below. A conservatory was added to the restaurant during one of the renovations. The 90s apricot colour scheme, linen tablecloths and synchronised cloche lifting have all long gone. In their place is a chintz free interior and informal vibe. Cane chairs, fern patterned cushions, botanical prints and tiled floor are all reminders this is definitely conservatory dining. Or rather lunching.

Dublin’s most wonderful waitress is an El Salvadorian lawyer. “Over six million people are squeezed into 21,000 square kilometres. It’s the smallest country in Central America,” she relates. “But there are great places to stay on the Pacific coastline. El Tunco beach and La Tibertand port are two of my favourite places. Our nostalgic produce is horchata: it’s a drink made from a blend of spices and seeds such as morro, sesame and peanut. My family own businesses and there used to be a lot of extortion. That’s all gone: the new President and his strict regime clamping down on gangs has been a gamechanger. El Salvador is the first country to have made Bitcoin a legal tender.” It’s time to book flights with United Airlines.

The Berkeley Court Hotel in Ballsbridge, a couple of kilometres south of The Westbury, has not survived. An RTÉ news report broadcast in 1978, “Providing first class comfort for guests is the aim of Dublin’s newest hotel The Berkeley Court. It is the newest hotel owned by Pascal Vincent Doyle. At £25 a night for a single bed, the majority of us will never be able to afford its delights. The 200 bedroom hotel is situated on the corner of Shelbourne Road and Lansdowne Road. Inside, it provides the standard demanded by wealthy American and Continental guests. With an emphasis on first class comfort, the luxury hotel is indicative of the upward trend of tourism in Ireland. The hotel was formally opened by Minister for Tourism and Transport, Padraig Faulkner.” This fellow epitome of late 20th century glamour was demolished in 2016 and replaced by apartments – Ballsbridge is the best residential address in Dublin.

Wilde deserves a Michelin star, or rather Oscar! It’s the best thing since sliced sourdough (of which there is plenty). So how much is lunch per person? Well, the same price as checking in for six nights to The Berkeley Court. Circa 1978. After Wilde, we’ll walk past the Oscar Wilde statue on Merrion Square and then we’ll head to The Wilder Townhouse to get dolled up for a wild (no E) night out in town. But not before Taizé Prayer in Newman University Church on St Stephen’s Green. Oscar Wilde: “Memory … is the diary that we all carry about with us.”

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Architects Architecture Art Design Hotels People Town Houses

IDA Global Headquarters + Iveagh Gardens Dublin

The Green Stuff

Everyone knows St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. But not so many people are aware that its southside buildings back onto Iveagh Gardens, a lower profile yet equally fine park. The brick rear elevations of Newman University Church (a windowless apse), Museum of Literature Ireland (a bow window and a chamfered bay with Gothick windows) and Stauntons on the Green Hotel (a pair of shallow chamfered bays) all rise above the archery grounds.

Iveagh Gardens are entered from the opposite side, off Upper Hatch Street. A new addition to the encircling cityscape, this time facing the park, is the IDA Ireland global headquarters, completed in 2019. Designed by Dublin practice MOLA, the transparent façade is a glacial foil to the verdancy of the gardens. IDA Chief Executive Martin Shanahan says, “The new location at Three Park Place provides IDA Ireland with an excellent location from which to market to global investors.” The IDA was previously located for 35 years at Wilton Place opposite the canal. Wilton Place is being redeveloped to the design of architects Henry John Lyons.

The Anglo Irish Guinness family have done so much for Ireland including Desmond and Mariga Guinness establishing the Irish Georgian Society in 1958. “Without a doubt,” writes Carola Peck in Mariga and Her Friends (1997), “both Desmond and Mariga worked unremittingly and unstintingly to save Dublin’s architectural heritage.” A century earlier, Benjamin Guinness leased Iveagh Gardens to the Dublin Exhibition Palace. The gardens were designed by landscape architect Ninian Niven, merging French Formal and English Landscape styles. His descendent Rupert Guinness 2nd Earl of Iveagh donated the gardens to the nation in 1939. The public – and IDA employees on their lunch break – can still enjoy the one metre high maze, sunken gardens with fountains, archery grounds, rustic grotto and cascade.

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Art Design Fashion Luxury People Town Houses

Mary Martin London + Zelda Blakley

Haute Cature

Put simply, Gertrude Stein is Zelda Blakley’s favourite author and Tender Buttons of 1914 her favourite book. Transparent intellectual accessibility is not Zelda’s chief concern. Take: “The instance of there being more is an instance of more. The shadow is not shining in the way there is a black line.” She just doesn’t wear her erudition lightly; Zelda also likes to don Mary Martin London and we’re not talking the prêt-à-porter range.

Britain’s leading fashion artist is in her prime, now working at concert pitch: already this month she’s received gongs at The Extraordinary Achievers Charity Awards and Power of A Woman Awards. As always with her one-off pieces, there’s more to Zelda’s cape than meets the eye. “The checked tweed is very British and the handsewn felt shamrocks represent Ireland, reflecting Zelda’s Anglo Irish heritage,” Mary explains. “The duffle coat buckle shows off her street cred too. The costume jewellery is just literally that – fit for royalty!”

The fashion artist was inspired by the oil painting of Queen Charlotte in Zelda’s London residence. Mary shares, “Baron Christian Friedrich von Stockmar, a contemporary of the Queen Consort of King George III, said she had a ‘positive mulatto face’. Her ethnicity as a woman of colour is often denied or ignored by mainstream history.” Queen Charlotte had a celebrated diamond filled collection of jewellery. To segue back to Gertrude Stein, “Giving it away, not giving it away, is there any difference. Giving it away, not giving it away.”

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Uncategorized

Church Hill House Model Farm + Drummond Hotel + Presbyterian Church + Bridge House + Let’s Really Talk About The Unsung Hero of Early 19th Century Irish Palladianism Richard Suter Who Transformed Blink and You’ll Miss It Ballykelly Londonderry

Northern Lights

Breaking the fourth wall to borrow theatre speak, not architectural parlance, we’re all up for a challenge but there’s only so much paparazzo lenses and post shoot editing can achieve. A sea of car parking around County Londonderry’s finest Palladian villa may be an unfortunate modern necessity for its new use as a private hospital but it doesn’t make for the most photogenic foreground. And so we made use of a series of strategically placed shrubs and trees to camouflage the vehicles. Our intelligent readership (more fourth wall breakage) will ably piece together the jigsaw of photographs to get the full picture of that tremendous quinquepartite façade.

English novelist William Thackeray, passing through the village on his 1842 tour of Ireland, was a fan despite not being a nonconformist enthusiast: “In Ballykelly, besides numerous simple, stout, brick built dwellings for the peasantry, with their shining windows and trim garden plots, is a Presbyterian Meeting House, so well built, substantial, and handsome, so different from the lean, pretentious, sham Gothic ecclesiastical edifices which have been erected in late years in Ireland, that it can’t fail to strike the tourist who has made architecture his study or his pleasure. The gentleman’s seats in the district are numerous and handsome; and the whole movement along the road betokened cheerfulness and prosperous activity.”

Ballykelly has been the subject of academic research by Donald Girvan in Buildings of North Derry, 1974, and The History, Architecture and Planning of the Estates of The Fishmongers’ Company in Ulster by James Curl, 1981. Both are Ulster Architectural Heritage Society publications. The land where the village stands was granted by James I in 1613 to the Fishmonger’s Company, one of the ancient Livery Companies of the City of London. The Company’s English architect Richard Suter and Irish builder James Turnbull combined their design and delivery acumen to transform Ballykelly into a village of architectural note. Buff pink sandstone has never looked so good.

James relates, “One of Suter’s first and most happy compositions came off his drawing board and the designs were realised in 1824. This was Church Hill, the Model Farm for the Estate. The cost £900 and was built of Dungiven sandstone by James Turnbull. It consists of a two storey house, three windows wide, with a low hipped roof and wide eaves. High rubble walls link this central building to the single storey rectangular pavilions that again have hipped roofs. These pavilions have semicircular headed windows set in blind arched recesses. The Ordinance Survey Memoirs thought the farm was too ambitious and expensive to be relevant to the circumstances of most farms in the parish. However, the Model Farm remains one of the most distinguished buildings on the estate.”

Church Hill is Palladian in style and function. Palladio’s villas of Veneto were farmhouses. The lefthand pavilion of Church Hill was stables; the righthand one, stores. Behind the connecting high walls lay a walled farmyard. The pavilions were increased in height by 75 centimetres to allow another floor to be inserted into them: the change of material to brick makes this apparent. The overall impact still gives a powerful punch: a noble design separated from the road by a meadow. The central block is almost square in footprint with a double piled roof. In 1988 planning permission was granted to convert the Model Farm into the North West Independent Hospital. A two storey extension for 18 additional bedrooms and services was approved in 2002 for Kingsbridge Private Hospital. The façade remains uninterrupted, a mini Russborough.

Don’t blink when driving through Ballykelly for high up on the opposite side of the road are two more of Richard Suter’s accomplished set pieces: Drummond House (now Drummond Hotel) and Ballykelly Presbyterian Church. The bare pilasters and clean mouldings of Drummond House are late neoclassicism at its most reticent. Donald records, “Turnbull created Drummond House to designs by Suter as a ‘commodious house built by the Fishmongers’ Company for the residence of their agent’. The designs dated from 1822 show Drummond House was a handsome structure, double fronted, three windows wide, and two storeys high. It had the stripped down neoclassical manner to be found at the schools anad the two churches, and had dressed sandstone corner pilasters. Windows had segmental heads and elegant sashes. The porch was added by Turnbull.”

Richard Suter replaces Palladio with Inigo Jones as his chief inspiration for the Presbyterian Church. The boldness of the 30 degree high pediment and deep overhang with moulded soffits are straight from St Paul’s Church Covent Garden, London. Over to Donald: “Ballykelly Presbyterian Church was begun in 1826 and completed in 1827. There is a two storey arrangement of windows as would be expected in galleried churches. The upper windows have segmental, and the lower have straight heads, arranged in six bays along the length of the church, and flanking the central blind arch in which the pedimented entrance doorcase is set. Over the blind arch is a massive keystone. Once more, the building is constructed of coarsed rubble with Dungiven sandstone dressings, and once again the masonry is of superlative quality. Glazing bars are of cast iron.”

Having driven past Church Hill on one side and Drummond Hotel and the Presbyterian Church on the other, still don’t blink. There’s one more architectural treat in store courtesy of our favourite architect and builder duo. Donald Girvan tells all: “Bridge House, 1829. Builder James Turnbull. Cost £2,000. A fine two storey, five bay Dungiven sandstone house, with attic. It was originally the house of the dispensary surgeon and the mark where the dispensary door was can still be seen between the first two bays on the left. Above hung the Dispensaries’ Arms, which the Ordnance Survey Memoirs felt ‘were too thick and clumsy, like the house itself’. The house is three bays deep with extensive offices behind. It is attractively set at an angle on the road.” In 2002 planning permission was granted to restore and convert Bridge House to three apartments and develop its surroundings for 17 townhouses.

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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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Art Design Developers Hotels Luxury People Restaurants Town Houses

The Metropolitan Hotel + Nobu Restaurant Park Lane London

Still Cool Britannia

“Park Lane is synonymous with worldly riches and fashionable life. Down its entire extent, from where it joins Oxford Street to the point at which it reaches Hamilton Place, great houses jostle each other in bewildering profusion on its eastern side, while on the west lies the Park with its mass of verdure, and, during the season, its kaleidoscopic ever shifting glow of brilliant colour.” Edwin Beresford Chancellor, The Private Palaces of London Past and Present, 1908

The Metropolitan Hotel and The Met Bar opened on Old Park Lane, which is parallel with Hamilton Place, just as Tony and Cherie Blair were entering No.10 Downing Street. Both Mets were an instant hit with celebrities. The bar closed in 2018; the hotel is still going strong. So is Nobu’s first European outpost on the first floor via its own discreet street entrance. The parent London Nobu has been joined by offspring restaurants and hotels in Portman Square and Shoreditch. There are 55 restaurants and 36 hotels in the group internationally now from Dallas to Dubai, San Diego to San Sebastián.

In 1987 Chef Nobu Matsuhisa opened his first restaurant in Beverly Hills. His Japanese Peruvian fusion food reflects his place of birth and place of training. Actor Robert de Niro soon joined him as business partner and together they embarked on world domination. The phrase “signature dish” might as well have been invented for Nobu as every other course is famous.

“I’ve got the best table in the house for you,” beckons the front of house at Nobu Park Lane. Always. The corner window table, the dining equivalent of the C suite. A personalised card with the traditional greeting “Irasshaimase” stands next to the crisply folded linen napkins. The direct view of Hyde Park is framed by the Four Seasons on the left and The Hilton on the right, that comforting proximity of five star luxury all around. The interior is a reminder that nobody ever did minimalism better than the Japanese. Park Lane is still synonymous with worldly riches and fashionable life.

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Architecture Art Design Developers Town Houses

SABBATH PLUS ONE Cats + Neve Tzedek Tel Aviv

Angels Unaware

“Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land.” Song of Songs 2:12

The boundary lines have fallen in very pleasant places. Really, it’s the ultimate urban oasis full of fluttering sparrows and darting swallows between distant oaks. Resident tycoons occupy swathes of this prized real estate. Between the many mansions flow bougainvillea festooned rose and vine laneways, riots of colour and love amidst herbage and verdure. Acacia and camphire and poinciana and weeping fig trees camouflage gaily painted architecture. “Pink and saffron mallows, and the yellow and white daisies, and the violet and snow of the drooping cyclamen, and the gold of the genista” visualises Henry Van Dyke in Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land (1908). Colette captures horticultural wonder in Chéri, (1920), “Walking along in the shade of the acacia trees, between trellised roses and huge clumps of rhododendrons in full blaze.” And again in Gigi (1944): “Such a beautiful garden … such a beautiful garden.” She romanticises in The Cat (1944), “Above the withered stump draped with climbing plants, a flight of bees over the ivy flowers gave out a solemn cymbal note, the idenitical note of so many summers.” In Save Me the Waltz (1932), Zelda Fitzgerald’s protagonist Alabama cries, “I love little trees, arborvitae and juniper.”

Neve Tzedek was established in 1887, predating the official founding of Tel Aviv by over two decades. “Tz is pronounced as one letter sounding a bit like an ‘S’,” clarifies our driver Yaron Reuveny. “Neve Tzedek is beside the famous Carmel Market which is really trendy with fast food bars. It’s really good to hang out there in the evenings. There’s a good vibe!” Neve Tzedek was the first Jewish quarter to be built outside Jaffa. Fragrant with the perfumed aroma of myrrh and aloes and cassia, coloured by the turquoise of jacaranda and tamarisk and wisteria, Neve Tzedek is for the rich and fabulous and their feline friends (coffee loving techno music mad Israelis set the world record for cats-to-humans ratio). This enclave simply oozes unforced charm: streets named desire. Marco Koskas’ character Juliette in Goodbye Paris, Shalom Tel Aviv (2020) immediately adopts a cat called Jean-Pierre upon settling in Tel Aviv. Henri Cole opines in Orphic Paris (2016), “Cats are cats, briefly put, and their world is the world of cats through and through.” Truman Capote (1948) noticed in Other Voices, Other Rooms that they have “tawny astonished eyes”. No doubt Gertrude Stein would add, “Cats are cats are cats.” Quite so. Cats: the exquisite link in the Great Chain of Being. Colette’s The Cat once more, “The zone of shadow … the zone of shadow.”

“‘In that day each of you will invite your neighbour to sit under your vine and fig tree,’ declares the Lord Almighty.” Zechariah 3:10

(Extract with alternative imagery from the bestseller SABBATH PLUS ONE Jerusalem and Tel Aviv).

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Architects Architecture Country Houses People

Kings of Leinster + Borris House Carlow

The Lines of Beauty

Roger White writes in Country Life, 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 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 Boroughs, 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, outside something magical is happening. 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 the tour include: Borris House is a mostly 1830s Richard and William Vitruvius Morrison confection. Neoclassical innards under 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 in the south. Glenarm Castle in 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 reined 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 estate 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 but this proved costly and bereft the house of its kitchen. The cupolas, the crowning glory of the four square turrets at each corner of the main block were removed at this time. Fortunately 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 with the cuploas removed. Turning the circle comes at a price: it costs the Kavanaghs about €250,000 a year to maintain and run Borris House and its estate.

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