Month: January 2024

St Macartan’s Cathedral + Bishop’s Palace Clogher Tyrone

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 29, 2024
2 Comments on St Macartan’s Cathedral + Bishop’s Palace Clogher Tyrone

Whatever It Takes

Clogher may be a “tiny inconsequential place” according to Alastair Rowan (Buildings of Northwest Ulster, 1979) but it still manages to pack in a cathedral; bishop’s palace; Georgian village buildings; and a modernist ecclesiastical masterpiece. All on Main Street.

Alastair introduces St Macartan’s Church of Ireland Cathedral: “The church that stands today was built by Bishop John Stearne in 1744, apparently to the design of the architect builder James Martin. The church looks 18th century: cruciform, with pedimented gables to the transepts and chancel. The broad west front, wider than the nave, also has a pedimental gable but is topped by a solid, square belfry tower with a balustrade and obelisk finials. All the windows are round headed except the east Venetian window: Tuscan outside, Scamozzian Ionic within.”

“The Convent of the Sisters of St Louis is immediately east of the cathedral,” he comments. Quite the ecumenical neighbours at the top of the hill, top of the town, these days. “Formerly Clogher Park and before that the Protestant Bishop’s Palace. A plain ashlar block, built into the hillside, so that the entrance front is three storeys and the garden side four. Seven bay front with three bay pediment and single storey Doric porch. Six bay garden front with a high arcaded terrace across the ground floor flaked by recessed two storey wings with canted bay windows. The house overlooks a miniature park. Mrs Delany describes it in 1748 as ‘pretty with a fine large sloping green walk from the steps to a large basin on water, on which sail most gracefully fair beautiful swans. Beyond the basin of water rises a very steep hill covered with fir in the side of which Mrs Clayton is going to make a grotto. The rest of the garden is irregularly planted.’ The landscape still bears traces of Bishop Clayton’s planting, but the house is a more recent one, begun in the late 18th century by Bishop Lord John Beresford and completed by Bishop Tottenham in 1823. Square entrance hall with drawing room and dining room en suite across the garden front. Mahogany doors in fine late neoclassical architraves. There is a small Doric gatelodge.”

Among the miniature drumlins of the grassy graveyard rest stone tombstones, many of them dating from the 18th century. One tombstone, heavily carved front and back, has the inscription: “Here lyeth the body of John McGirr who departed this life January the 19th 1770 aged 23 years.”

Courthouse Clogher is managed by local couple Len and Joyce Keys. He explains, “This is not a commercial venture – the objectives are not financial. I had a career in banking but felt God very clearly guiding me to leave secular employment and undertake theological training. Through a complex web of circumstances which only God could control, by the time my course was completed, God had provided this courthouse building for Hope 4 U. This is our shared vision so as the renovation work on the building was nearing completion, Joyce left her employement as secretary of a local school. After 200 years as a ’seat of justice’, Courthouse Clogher opened as a place to share God’s peace, mercy and grace. Hope 4 U is focused on serving the whole community of the Clogher Valley.” Various community services are offered at Courthouse Clogher while on Thursdays and Fridays the courtroom is a café. The judge’s bench and the mezzanine over the door have been retained.

A sign in the entrance hall of the former Courthouse sets out: “Court Service of Northern Ireland records indicate that this building was constructed circa 1806. As a public building it had a wide diversity of usage; for example, the Board of Guardians who oversaw the operation of Clogher Union Workhouse met in this building on 27 May 1841. By 1910, Petty Sessions sat on the second Tuesday of each month at 12 noon. The Ulster Towns Directory of that year records Mr James Cull as the Clerk of Petty Sessions, Mr Arthur McCusker as Summons Server and Mr John Trimble as Courtkeeper. It was used as a courthouse throughout the 20th century, and in the latter 1990s it benefitted from a major renovation and refurbishment programme. Despite this investment, on 7 November 20023 Rosie Winterton MP announced that following a strategic review it had been decided that Clogher Courthouse should close at the end of 2002 and court business would transfer to the new Dungannon Courthouse. After the closure, the building lay derelict until it was purchased by Hope 4 U Foundation in March 2013.”

Next door to the Courthouse, Clogher Valley Rural Centre, 47 Main Street, is currently for sale for £139,950. This impressive gable ended five bay two storey over raised basement building looks like it may originally have been a stately village house. A piano nobile tripartite window and Gibbsian doorcase add grandeur to the rendered façade. In the 19th century it was an establishment called the Commercial Hotel with an off licence run by James Sheridan in the raised basement. Converted into offices, the only remaining internal period features are a white marble chimneypiece and a black cast iron chimneypiece in the main former reception rooms.

Opposite No.47 are two more public buildings. The former market house was converted into Clogher Orange and Black Hall in 1957. The two storey rendered with hipped roof T shaped block is a pleasing if severe Georgian design. The one and a half storey Cathedral Hall of 1872 carries on the neoclassical tradition established a century earlier in the village. Its symmetrical façade is an elegant composition with a gabled central projection. Both buildings are rendered with quoined corners. The Orange and Black Hall is vacant; The Cathedral Hall is well maintained.

Breaking away from the neoclassical mould of neighbouring public buildings, St Patrick’s Catholic Church was designed in a radically modernist style by Liam McCormick. The single storey building is set back from the road edge and like most of Main Street has panoramic views across the rolling countryside. Paul Larmour writes in Architects of Ulster 1920s to 1970s (2022), “St Patrick’s Church at Clogher, County Tyrone (1979), which was laid out on a circular plan with battered walls and a shallow conical roof surmounted by a thin spire, giving an almost space age profile.”

A few kilometres outside Clogher heading towards Belfast is the grandest house at any roundabout in Ireland. Ballygawley Roundabout is, as its name suggests, a functional road intersection but is much improved by the vision of architectural beauty that is Lisbeg House. Unusually, Alistair Rowan doesn’t mention it. Despite being set in a 26 hectare estate, the house sits on a gentle rise clearly visible by passing traffic. It has that Clandeboye (County Down) thing going on of having two principal fronts at right angles to one another. The two storey three bay northwest façade is balanced by a three bay southwest garden front. Round headed arched windows and a hipped roof set on deep modillion brackets lends the house a lightly Italianate look. Its most surprising aspect is the long rectangular five bay return which is about as big as the main L shaped block and also roughcast. The only stylistic deference of the return is the absence of the modillion brackets that so define the main block roof. A handsome stone farmyard extends to the rear of the return. The landed gentry family of Vesey Stewart, of part Huguenot descent, built two country houses near Ballygawley: Martray House (circa 1821) and Lisbeg House (1856).

Design Luxury People Restaurants

Ignite Group + Senkai Restaurant Piccadilly London

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 29, 2024

Orient Impress

In the Roaring Twenties, architect Sir Reginald Blomfield completed the part of John Nash’s masterplan for Regent Street adjoining Piccadilly Circus. Known as The Quadrant, the lower floors are punctuated by round arched windows set between rusticated piers. The ground floor rectangular portions of the windows serve shopfronts but the more observant passerby will note that a mezzanine level is lit by the half moon portions above. These lunette windows illuminate another world, far removed from the humdrum of shoppers and workers below. Walk under Sir Reginald’s Doric columned miniature boulevard in the sky, enter an elegant doorway on a side lane, ascend a winding flight of stairs, and beyond lies Senkai.

This is the most recent addition to the Ignite Group, the 1998 brainchild of entrepreneurs Matt Hermer and Paul Deeming. Ignite’s portfolio also includes Boujis private members’ club and Bumpkin bar and restaurant, both in South Kensington. And who did we recently see enjoying Marlborough Lights on the Old Brompton Road terrace of Bumpkin? Why, Prince Harry and his girlfriend Chelsy Davy! Opened in September 2011, Senkai is the latest Japanese themed restaurant to hit London’s West End. A DJ plays on Thursday and Saturday nights to attract a young hip crowd. Low ceilings, as mezzanines tend to have, accentuate the intimate clubby ambience.

Matt says, “Modern Japanese restaurants are a true trend in London. Through my travels, the Orient has been a great inspiration so it made sense as a next step for Ignite. We wanted to reduce the formality of Japanese restaurants with Senkai. We serve food in the lounge where a range of fabulous cocktails are mixed to complement the food.”

The long low dining room (125 covers) is punctuated at one end by a cocktail lounge (30 covers) and at the other by a circular marble raw seafood bar (20 covers). A mix of relaxing seating includes red banquettes, flower shaped stools by Pierre Paulin and Tosai lounge chairs made on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Solid sycamore dining tables are by Benchmark. Bronze de Gournay hand painted wallpaper sets the scene. The ceiling is enlivened by illusory domes with subliminal lighting; Moooi Random LED floor lights throw patterns across the woven flooring. A 1961 floor light from Miguel Milá and a Tripode floor lamp from Santa and Cole add further interest. Interior design was by Christopher Prain, Head of Creative Design at Christopher Chanond, with lighting and furniture mostly supplied by Conran Contracts. Contrast and colour is the dual theme of the decoration and, as will be revealed, out the food. The Executive Chef is Tim Tolley, formerly of Plateau restaurant in Canary Wharf.

In keeping with Ignite Group’s policy on ethical food sourcing, at least three quarters of the fish on the menu is sourced from British day boats or organic farms. The remaining fish is sourced from sustainable worldwide suppliers including yellowtail kingfish from Australia and cobia from Vietnam. Game on the menu is a reminder this is England. edible works of art, polychromatic feasts for the eyes and mouth, arrive on simple white plates and bowls. Highlights from the Autumn Taster Menu include Chef’s Sashimi (yellowtail, salmon, sea bass, sea bream and scallops) and Curried Cabbage Gyoza (dumplings). Crab and Langoustine Ceviche (with mung bean noodles), a Toasted Day Boat (white fish tartare with sesame) and Cobia Umeboshi Samphire are other specialities. Warm dark Chocolate Fondant is served with colourful ice cream (green tea, cherry and vanilla flavoured) perched on a block of ice. Game on the menu (grouse, duck and quail) is a reminder that this Far East haven is in fact in England. The service is seamless and rather aesthetically pleasing. Some fine sommelier steering too.

Like the Roaring Twenties, Senkai revels in the social, artistic and multicultural dynamism of the English capital. Dance music may have replaced jazz and models dine here instead of flappers, but the mood behind Sir Reginald’s sober neoclassical façade is still chilled and decadent. The city has turned full circle. And that was how the review ended 13 years ago.

Alas Senkai didn’t make it to the New Roaring Twenties. Six months after our review, the restaurant went into liquidation. It’s strange as the Ignite Group were successful across a range of ventures, the interior was top notch, the food top quality and the service top drawer. The location, despite being a sushi roll’s throw from Piccadilly Circus is discreet (that side lane and mezzanine) but Hawksmoor steak restaurant has been doing well since November 2012 in the same place and space.

Tags boujis, bumpkin kensington, chef tim tolley, chelsy davy, christopher chanond, christopher prain, gournay, hawksmoor air street piccadilly circus, ignite, matt hermer, miguel mila, moooi, paul deeming, pierre paulin tosai, prince harry, senkai japanese restaurant piccadilly london, sir reginald blomfield john nash

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

Sammy Leslie + Castle Leslie Glaslough Monaghan

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 24, 2024
21 Comments on Sammy Leslie + Castle Leslie Glaslough Monaghan

The Rear View

In 2006 Ulster Architect was Ireland’s leading design magazine – by a country kilometre. Publisher Editor Anne Davey Orr blazed the trail much to the chagrin of Perspective journal which was set up in competition by some local architects to no fanfare: the bitterati. Ulster Architect far outlived Prince Charles’ blink and you’ll have missed it publication Perspectives in Architecture. Success is a dish best served cold. The articles in Ulster Architect – by Sir Charles Brett, Leo McKinstry and too many other literati to mention – have stood the test of time. It’s hard to believe that our interview with the glorious Sammy Leslie for the September edition of Ulster Architect is now nearly two decades old. Happy 18th!

Sir John Betjeman, Sir Winston Churchill, Marianne Faithfull, Sir Paul McCartney and William Butler Yeats have all been. The great and the good, the glitterati in other words. In recent years thanks to Sammy Leslie and her uncle the 4th Baronet, Sir John (forever known as Sir Jack), Castle Leslie has flung open its heavy doors to the hoi polloi (albeit the well heeled variety) too, rebuilding its rep as a byword for sybaritic hospitality. Visitors from Northern Ireland could be forgiven for experiencing déjà vu – it’s the doppelgänger of Belfast Castle. Both were designed in the 1870s by the same architects: William Lynn and Sir Charles Lanyon.

Together these two architects captured the spirit of the age. William Lynn produced a majestic baronial pile with chamfered bay windows perfectly angled for simultaneous views of the garden and lake. Sir Charles Lanyon crammed the house full of Italian Renaissance interiors and designed a matching loggia to boot. Fully signed up members of the MTV Cribs generation will find it hard not to go into unexpected sensory overload at this veritable treasure trove of historic delights. Castle Leslie is all about faded charm; it’s the antithesis of footballer’s pad bling. But still, the place is an explosion of rarity, of dazzling individuality. Sir Jack’s brother Desmond Leslie wrote in 1950, “The trees are enormous, 120 feet being average for conifers; the woods tangled and impenetrable; gigantic Arthur Rackham roots straddle quivering bog, and in the dark lake huge old fish lie or else bask in the amber ponds where branches sweep down to kiss the water.”

We caught up with Sammy in the cookery school in one of the castle’s wings. “Although I’m the fifth of six children, I always wanted to run the estate, even if I didn’t know how. After working abroad, I returned in 1991. The estate was at its lowest point ever. My father Desmond was thinking of selling up to a Japanese consortium. There was no income … crippling insurance to pay … The Troubles were in full swing. People forget how near we are to the border here.”

Nevertheless Sammy took it on. “I sold Dad’s car for five grand and got a five grand grant from the County Enterprise Board to start the ‘leaky tearooms’ in the conservatory. They were great as long as it didn’t rain! And I sold some green oak that went to Windsor Castle for their restoration. Sealing the roof was the first priority. Five years later we started to take people to stay and bit by bit we got the rest of the house done. So we finished the castle in 2006 after – what? – nearly 15 years of slow restoration.” The Castle Leslie and Caledon Regeneration Partnership part funded by the European Union provided finance of €1.2 million. Bravo! The house and estate were saved from the jaws of imminent destruction.

The Leslies are renowned for their sense of fun. An introductory letter sent to guests mentions Sir Jack (an octogenarian) will lead tours on Sunday mornings but only if he recovers in time from clubbing. In the gents (or “Lords” as it’s grandly labelled) off the entrance hall beyond a boot room, individual urinals on either side of a fireplace are labelled “large”, “medium”, “tiny” and “liar”. Take your pick. A plethora of placards between taxidermy proclaim such witticisms as “On this site in 1897 nothing happened” and “Please go slowly round the bend”.

Bathrooms are a bit of a Leslie obsession ever since thrones and thunderboxes were first introduced upstairs. “The sanitaryware in the new bathrooms off the long gallery is by Thomas Crapper. Who else?” she smiles. “We’ve even got a double loo in the ladies so that you can carry on conversations uninterrupted!” Exposed stone walls above tongue and groove panelling elevate these spaces above mere public conveniences. In the 1890s the 1st Sir John Leslie painted murals of his family straight onto the walls of the roof lantern lit long gallery, which runs parallel with the loggia, and framed them to look like hanging portraits.

Always one to carry on a family tradition with a sense of pun, this time visual tricks, Sammy has created a thumping big doll’s house containing an en suite bathroom within a bedroom which was once a nursery, complete with painted façade. It wouldn’t look out of place on the set of Irvine Walsh’s play Babylon Heights.

A sense of history prevails within these walls, from the mildly amusing to the most definitely macabre. The blood drenched shroud which received the head of James, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater, the last English earl to be beheaded for being a Catholic, is mounted on the staircase wall. “It’s a prized possession of Uncle Jack’s,” Sammy confides. Unsurprisingly, the castle is riddled with ghosts.

Our conversation moves on to her latest enterprise: the Castle Leslie Village. “An 1850s map records a village on the site,” she says. “Tenant strips belonging to old mud houses used to stretch down to the lake. Our development is designed as a natural extension to the present village of Glaslough.” In contrast to the ornate articulation of its country houses, Ulster’s vernacular vocabulary is one of restraint. Dublin architect John Cully produced initial drawings; Belfast practice Consarc provided further designs and project managed the scheme. Consarc architect Dawson Stelfox has adhered to classical proportions rather than applied decoration to achieve harmony. Unpretentiousness is the key. At Castle Leslie Village there are no superfluous posts or pillars or piers or peers or pediments or porticos or porte cochères. Self builders of Ulster take note!

That said, enough variety has been introduced into the detail of the terraces to banish monotony. Organic growth is suggested through the use of Georgian 12 pane, Victorian four pane and Edwardian two pane windows. There are more sashes than a 12th of July Orange Day parade. Rectangular, elliptical and semicircular fanlights are over the doorways, some sporting spider’s web glazing bars, others Piscean patterns. “We’ve used proper limestone and salvaged brick,” notes Sammy. “And timber window frames and slate.”

We question Sammy how she would respond to accusations of pastiche. “They’re original designs, not copies,” she retorts. “For example although they’re village houses, the bay window idea comes from the castle. The development is all about integration with the existing village. It’s contextual. These houses are like fine wine. They’ll get better with age.” It’s hard to disagree. “There’s a fine line between copying and adapting but we’ve gone for the latter.”

Later we spoke to Dawson Stelfox. “Pastiche is copying without understanding. We’re keeping alive tradition, not window dressing. For example we paid careful attention to solid-to-void ratios. Good quality traditional architecture is not time linked. We’re simply preserving a way of building. McGurran Construction did a good job. I think Castle Leslie Village is quite similar to our work at Strangford.” The houses are clustered around two highly legible and permeable spaces: a square and a green. Dwelling sizes range from 80 to 230 square metres. “We offered the first two phases to locals at the best price possible and they were all snapped up,” says Sammy. “This has resulted in a readymade sense of community because everyone knows each other already. A few of the houses are available for holiday letting.”

“We’re concentrating on construction first,” she explains. “The Hunting Lodge being restored by Dawson will have 25 bedrooms, a spa and 60 stables. It’ll be great craic! Between the various development sites we must be employing at least 120 builders at the moment. Estate management is next on the agenda. Food production and so on.” Just when we think we’ve heard about all of the building taking place at Castle Leslie, Sammy mentions the old stables. “They date from 1780 and have never been touched. Two sides of the courtyard are missing. We’re going to rebuild them. The old stables will then house 12 holiday cottages.”

We ask her if she ever feels daunted by the mammoth scale of the task. “I do have my wobbly days but our family motto is ‘Grip Fast’! I think that when you grow up in a place like this you always have a sense of scale so working on a big scale is normal. I mean it’s 400 hectares, there’s seven kilometres of estate wall, six gatelodges – all different, and 7,300 square metres of historic buildings.” Sammy continues, “The back wall from the cookery school entrance to the end of the billiard room is a quarter of a kilometre.”

“A place like this evolves,” Sammy ruminates. “There’s no point in thinking about the good ol’ days of the past. The castle was cold and damp, y’know, and crumbling. And it’s just – it’s a joy to see it all coming back to life. The whole reason we’re here is to protect and preserve the castle and because the house was built to entertain, that’s what we’re doing. We’re just entertaining on a grand scale. People are coming and having huge amounts of fun here. Castle Leslie hasn’t changed as much as the outside world. Ha!” This year there’s plenty to celebrate including the completion of Castle Leslie Village, the Leslie family’s 1,000th anniversary, Sammy’s 40th birthday, and Sir Jack’s 90th coinciding with the publication of his memoirs.

That was six years ago. This summer we returned to Castle Leslie. Our seventh visit, we first visited the house umpteen years ago. Back then Sammy served us delicious sweetcorn sandwiches and French onion soup in the leaky tearooms, looking over the gardens of knee high grass. The shadows were heightening and lengthening ‘cross the estate. Her late father Desmond showed a nun and us round the fragile rooms lost in a time warp. Ireland’s Calke Abbey without The National Trust saviour. He would later write to us on 11 May 1993, waxing lyrical to transform an acknowledgement letter into a piece of allegorical and existential prose.

On another occasion, Sammy’s younger sister, the vivacious blonde screenwriter Camilla Leslie, came striding up the driveway, returning home from London to get ready for her wedding the following week. “People have been buying me pints all day! Nothing’s ready! I’ve to get the cake organised, my dress, at least we’ve got the church!” she exclaimed to us, pointing to the estate church.

This time round we stay in Wee Joey Farm Hand’s Cottage in Castle Leslie Village and enjoy a lively Friday night dinner in Snaffles restaurant on the first floor of the Hunting Lodge. We’re all “tastefully atwitter over glissades and pirouettes” to take a quote from Armistead Maupin’s More Tales of the City (1984), applying it to a rural setting. The following day, afternoon tea is served, this time in the drawing room. Meanwhile, Sir Jack is taking a disco nap in the new spa to prepare for his regular Saturday night clubbing in nearby Carrickmacross.

That was four years ago. Visit number eight and counting. More to celebrate as Sammy, still living in the West Wing, turns 50. Sir Jack would have turned 100 on 6 December 2016 but sadly died just weeks before our visit. This time, we’re here for afternoon tea in the rebuilt conservatory or ‘sunny tearooms’ as they turn out to be today. The assault of a rare Irish heatwave, 26 degrees centigrade for days on end, won’t interrupt tradition. A turf fire is still lit in the drawing room. “Apologies for the mismatching crockery as so many of our plates have been smashed during lively dinner debates” warned a sign on our first visit. The crockery all matches now but the food is of the same high standard: cucumber and cream cheese brioches; oak cured Irish smoked salmon pitta; fruit scones with Castle Leslie preserves and clotted cream; crumpets and custard pies; rounded off with Earl Grey macaroons, Victoria sponge cake and lemon meringues.

Miraculously, Castle Leslie still has no modern extensions. It hasn’t been ‘Carton’d’ (in conservation-speak that means more extensions than an Essex girl in a hairdressers). Instead, the hotel has grown organically, stretching further and further into Lynn and Lanyon’s building. An upstairs corridor lined with servants’ bells – Sir J Leslie’s Dressing Room, Lady Leslie’s Dressing Room, Dining Room, Office – leads to a cinema carved out of old attics. Castle Leslie has had its ups and downs but Sammy Leslie is determined to ‘Grip Fast’! And in response to Ms Leslie’s late father’s letter to us, we will come again when there is nothing better to do on a nice weekend.

That nice weekend has come or at least a nice Friday evening. We’re here for a celebration dinner. January 2024 is especially cold – minus two degrees centigrade but the turf fires at Castle Leslie are, as ever, roaring. Dinner is in Conor’s Bar on the ground floor of the Hunting Lodge below Snaffles.

It’s 3pm in New York, 5am in Tokyo and 8pm in Glaslough according to clocks high up on the stone wall of the courtyard entrance hall. A poem by the comedian Billy Connolly, The Welly Boot Boy, hangs in the boot room. A cartoon series on The Gentle Art of Making Guinness hangs in the gents. And so to dinner: garlic tiger prawns (toasted sourdough, Estate Walled Garden chimichurri sauce) followed by sweet potato and mozzarella gnocchi (asparagus, peas, spinach and crushed basil) keep up the very high standard of gourmet cooking with local produce.

We’re dressed to the nines, accessorised by Mary Martin London, for our ninth visit to the castle. Sammy, looking as fresh as she did 18 years ago, also dining in Conor’s, greets us like a long lost friend. We congratulate her on saving one of Ireland’s most important historic houses and estates. “There’s still more to do!” she beams. “We need to restore the seven kilometre Famine Wall next and several gatelodges too. There’s always work to be done!”

Sammy explains that overnight guests staying in the castle bedrooms have breakfast in the dining room but later meals in the day are down in the Hunting Lodge as that’s where the main kitchen is now. The paradox of continuity and progress at Castle Leslie. Time stands still for no woman. The leaky tearooms may no longer leak but the ghosts are still all around, some new ones in their midst, silent misty figures just out of clear vision, partying in the shadows. To take another quote by Armistead Maupin, “Too much of a good thing is wonderful.”

Tags anne davey orr ulster architect, architect dawson stelfox, architect john cully produced initial drawings; consarc, armistead maupin more tales city, belfast castle, billy connolly, calke abbey, camilla leslie, carton hotel kildare, castle leslie village, conors bar, desmond leslie, hunting lodge, irvine walsh babylon heights, james 3rd earl of derwentwater, leo mckinstry, marianne faithfull, mary martin london, mcgurran construction, prince charles, sammy leslie castle leslie glaslough monaghan, sir charles brett, sir charles lanyon, sir john betjeman, sir john leslie, sir paul mccartney, sir winston churchill, thomas crapper bathrooms, wee joey farm hands cottage, william butler yeats 4th baronet, william lynn, windsor castle

Architecture Country Houses Design Developers People Restaurants Town Houses

Glaslough + Castle Leslie Village Monaghan

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 22, 2024

The Blurring of the Lines

Little wonder we feel so comfortable in Castle Leslie, so at home, so welcomed. The Blakleys were landlords in nearby Clones (listed in the 1876 Landowners of Ireland, County Monaghan) before heading up to the bright lights of Belfast at the turn of the 20th century. Glaslough means “calm or green lake”. The historic village is cute without being twee. The Coach House and Olde Bar is owned by the Wright family who are also the local undertakers – you don’t get more Irish than that.

Earlier this century Sammy Leslie of Castle Leslie – Glaslough is something of an estate village – did the seemingly impossible and extended the village in a complementary fashion. Organic, tasteful, contextual, understated, mildly playful. Importantly, where other places fail, it doesn’t try too hard stylistically. The only porticos you’ll find are up at the castle itself. We remember the new village layout being held up as an exemplar for contemporary residential development by Dublin planners. Desmond FitzGerald, the last Knight of Glin, was so impressed by Castle Leslie Village that he appointed the Development Planning Partnership, a planning practice based in Dublin, to carry out feasibility studies (although never executed) for a similar development on his estate of Glin Castle in County Limerick.

Tags castle leslie glaslough monaghan, coach house olde bar, desmond fitzgerald knight glin, glin castle, lavenders blue, sammy leslie, stuart blakley

Architects Architecture Design Developers People Town Houses

Lady Mico’s Almshouses + York Square + Half Moon Theatre Limehouse London

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 21, 2024
6 Comments on Lady Mico’s Almshouses + York Square + Half Moon Theatre Limehouse London

The Whole of It

Limehouse is known these days for its contemporary high rise Thameside developments but venture inland and you’ll soon discover this part of east London is steeped in history. The grounds of St Dunstan and All Saints Church cover almost three hectares – as an outer suburb of historic London with space to spare they were used for mass burials during the Great Plague of 1665. More recently, the original Chinatown was in Limehouse so up until the 1970s that’s where you headed to for some mapo tofu.

Opposite the church are Lady Mico’s Almshouses. She was the widow of Sir Michael Mico, a mercer who traded across the Mediterranean in the early to mid 17th century. Known for her charitable works, Lady Mico left a bequest in her 1670 will for the building of the almshouses which were completed 21 years later. The terrace was rebuilt in 1856 to the design of George Smith for the Mercers’ Company. Greyish white brick (darkened with age) distinguishes it from the surrounding mainly red brick houses. The end houses are entered from the side elevations and the eight houses in between have paired porches, so giving the illusion of being four double fronted cottages. Three of the houses were carefully rebuilt in 1951 after being destroyed in World War II.

In 1823 a surveyor George Smith drew up plans to redevelop the area to the south of the almshouses. The land was also owned by the Mercers’ Company, the guild for dealers in textiles. Just five years later, the development was completed. York Square with its leafy green forms the focal point of a grid of streets. The red brick terraced houses are mainly two bay two storey (apart from mansards on York Square) with front doors opening off the pavement and decent sized gardens to the rear. Butterfly roofs are hidden from the streetscape by parapets, a common townhouse style for London (Roupell Street in Waterloo is unusual for having no front parapets). Rear elevations are surprisingly uniform.

These houses are what the woman on the street or the man on the No.37 to Clapham refers to as “Georgian”. The well proportioned brick facades; the regular street rhythm; the familiar 12 pane sash windows. Except they’re not technically Georgian but really late Regency or very early Victorian. Whatever their categorisation, they’re a lesson in the lost art of townhouse building. Sustainable, efficient and very easy on the eye.

Six of these houses were demolished in 1862 to make way for the Limehouse District Board of Works Offices. The building was designed by the Board’s surveyor Charles Dunch and built at a cost of £5,172 over the following two years. Occupied by the Half Moon Theatre since 1994, this building couldn’t contrast more if it tried to with the surrounding George Smith’s architecture. It’s bombastic in scale (almost double height storeys), style (decorative Italianate) and material (bright stucco).

Tags georgian limehouse london, half moon theatre, lady mico almhouses, lavenders blue, limehouse district board works offices, mercers company, roupell street waterloo, st dunstan all saints church, stuart blakley, surveyor charles durch, surveyor george smith, york square

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SABBATH PLUS ONE Louis Pasteur Street + The Jaffa Hotel Jaffa Tel Aviv

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 20, 2024

Love in a Hot Climate

“Now let my lord send his servants the wheat and barley and the olive oil and wine he promised, and we will cut all the logs from Lebanon that you need and will float them as rafts by sea down to Joppa. You can then take them up to Jerusalem.” II Chronicles 2:15 to 16

The sun stands still. Gazing across the Mediterranean shoreline (273 kilometres stretching north to Lebanon and tipping Egypt to the southwest), astonished by our own brilliance, mingling with the coastal elite, we are delighted how well the afternoon has turned out. “You will die! The Jaffa is gorgeous,” coos Parisienne Maud Rabanne, une dame cultivée. “Coucou! Have coffee on the roof terrace. It’s got the best view! The Jaffa is one of my favourite places. It’s fabuloso! C’est la vie! That’s what we say in Paris. We always mean it in a positive way. Montagne de baisirs. Remplie de joie d’amour et de bonheur. Tchin-tchin!” Cinq à sept. Coûte que coûte. Le paradis, c’est les autres.

Moshe Sakal describes a similar view in his novel The Diamond Setter (2018), “Tel Aviv sprawls out on the right, the rocks of Jaffa on the left, and straight ahead lies Andromeda’s Rock, a plain looking rock that juts out of the water with an Israeli flag billowing on its peak.” International architect John O’Connell hints, “Should you arrive at the hotel, go further up and down the hill, as the Roman Catholic church will be on your left, and nearly opposite it is a very fine and abandoned Ottoman building. A robust ensemble. Try to see the internal court, where I have failed to do so! Such supreme life and joy!” Ah, that will be the Old Saraya House taken over by clubbers, bats and thespians. Abandonment begone!

We’re enjoying a Mitfordesque moment (Love in a Cold Climate heated up from 1949) on that terrace: “So here we all are, my darling, having our lovely cake and eating it too, one’s great aim in life.” We’re feeling “very grand as well as very rich”. The pleasures of passing hours. It helps that this heroic hotel is emphatically designed by everybody’s favourite minimalist maestro, master of the monastic John Pawson, along with Israeli architect and conservationist Ramy Gill. Oracle of our own orbit, balancing on a notional pedestal, we don’t need a doctorate in aesthetics to appreciate John Pawson’s masterwork. John O’Connell is on a roll: “Mr P’s oeuvre is so restrained. Everything’s resolved.” It’s a breath of fresh air, or at least an intake of the coolest sea breeze imaginable. Soon we will be expounding riddles with the grand piano and dwelling on Gertrude Stein (Tender Buttons, 1914), “Cold climate. A season in yellow sold extra strings makes lying places.”

The 1870s Saint Louis V Hospital, built by French businessman François Guinet to the design of architectural practice Grebez and Ribellet and managed by the Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Apparition, has been sharply reimagined under John Pawson’s crisply contained direction. Delamination of extant solid form – from the remnants of a 13th century Crusaders’ bastion in the lobby to the peeling paint of the dusky pink loggias – leads to a richly layered intertextual discursively informative spirited patina of the raw and the worked throughout the revelatory restoration and clever conversion and audacious augmentation and sensual solution. Faded lettering over the arched doorways lining the loggias reads: ‘Communaute’, ‘Tribune’, ‘Salle Ste Elizabeth 2me Don Blesses, ‘Salle Ste Clotilde 2me Don Fievreux’, ‘Salle Ste Marie Pensionnaires’, ‘Orphelinat’. As Hans Ulrich Obrist (Ways of Curating, 2014) would interject, “… conversations … are happening between various narratives”.

Beyond the lobby with its Ligne Roset corduroy sofas and Damien Hirst spin paintings and lacquered backgammon tables lies a courtyard garden of sacred and human geometry (an unflowered greenscape) linking the ancient with the old with the new with the futuristic. John Pawson venerates yet challenges the original architecture, creating an unfolding sequence of voids and vistas and virtuosic visions. There’s an endless tightly choreographed play between past and present, architecture and art: a nuanced paradox of togetherness and oneness. As Elizabeth Bowen contends in The Heat of the Day (1948), “To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.” There lies the definite ascetism – to be freed from oneself. Not even an Israeli Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden, 1911) could summon up such discreet walled splendour. Corrugations of percolated sunshine ripple across the stone floor, climbing over chairs, falling over tables. Beyond the courtyard lies the Chapel Bar. The beyondness of many things. This world is our oyster and ours alone. It’s all it’s cracked up to be. Postcard home material. We’re checked in; we’ve checked out. Being here; doing it.

A private paradise. A secret world. A hidden kingdom. Cloistered espaliered sequestered formal glory. The very essence of unexampled exclusivity. If luxury could be bottled … heaven’s scent. A multiple epiphanic realisation of complete beauty. It was as if Elizabeth Bowen was in The Jaffa and not The House in Paris (1935), “Heaven – call it heaven; on the plane of potential not merely likely behaviour. Or call it art, with truth and imagination informing every word.” Marilynne Robinson (When I Was a Child I Read Books, 2012) insists, “Call it history, call it culture. We came from somewhere and we are tending somewhere, and the spectacle is glorious and portentous.”

Ah – the Chapel Bar – from litany and liturgy to luxury and libation, à la carte over elegy, mixology supplanting doxology, heterodoxy replacing orthodoxy, every hour is happy in this soaring sanctuary for sybarites. The only blues are the saturated cerulean hues of the ribbed vaulted ceiling. Beautiful in its loftiness, this bar is an explosion of sizzling rarity, of dazzlingly dilettantish individuality. There are no equals. There were no prequels. There’ll be no sequels. The perfect pitstop to slake your thirst, it’s like being at a house party if all your friends are knowingly sophisticated distractingly gorgeous models or similar ilk rocking new threads inspired by Inès de la Fressange’s (Parisian Chic Encore: A Style Guide, 2019) “haute couture and street style” – Doron Ashkenaz shirts and skin fade haircuts – dancing in eternal graceful circles. In Tel Aviv, kitchen and club are often confused so dancing on tables is de rigueur. A real era catcher: the New Roaring Twenties. Here they come The Beautiful Ones, The Fabulists, The Found Generation, Our Milieu. As befits our subject matter, we’re looking just a little bit sparkly ourselves: all dressed up in Elie Saab attire with somewhere to go; we shall go to the ball. What Roland Barthes (The Fashion System, 1963) calls “the euphoria of Fashion”. All of life has been a dress rehearsal for tonight. For a hot minute we’re running with the fastest set in town. To reference Nancy Mitford’s Don’t Tell Alfred (1963), it’s “high-falutin’, midnight stuff”.

The hotel is all “courtesy clouds” and “honeyed luxury” in a “rococo harmony” straight from The Diamond as Big as the Ritz (Frances Scott Fitzgerald, 1922). Average doesn’t exist in The Jaffa: it’s Lake Wobegon for real and we’ve got a majestic waterside view. Such is the alchemic segue! And who should know better than us? We’re qualified connoisseurs of fabulousness with diplomas in decadence, bachelors in brio and masters in magnificence. Very Bright Young Things. We’re taking the advice of Frédéric Dassas, Senior Curator of the Musée du Louvre Paris. During the Remembering Napoléon III Dinner at Camden Place in Kent he guided us: “Be part of the room; don’t just go through it.” The Chapel Bar is full of “people one should know” to channel Dorinda, Lady Dunleath. She would say, “It’s wild!” The glitter of this mirage. “Every generation has to keep the party going,” Her Ladyship always remarked in her Belgravia meets Ballywalter accent.

Morning figs and evening chocolates bookend a day’s room service. “Upstairs is crazy with dreams or love,” purrs Elizabeth Bowen (The House in Paris again). Guest suites breathe and stretch and sprawl across six uncrowded unhurried unparalleled bedroom floors, arabesque honeycomb filigreed screens flung open to the birds tweeting roosters crowing leaves rustling church bells peeling Saint Michael’s Greek Orthodox School pupils singing car horns honking cacophony. Deliciously diffused light seeps through the open window conjuring up a crimson carpet of crushed rubies. Devoid of demanding garniture or frivolous flotsam and jetsam, passing on the passementerie, the sole artwork in our bedroom is an orange tree captured by Israeli photographer Tal Shochat. Scholar Rebecca Walker educated us at the Remembering Napoléon III Dinner: “Eugénie, Empress of the French, had a fondness for knickknacks.” The unfussy décor of our bedroom would raise her imperial chagrin. A slanted mirror doubles as a reflection of perfection and a television. The perfumed aroma of jasmine and honeysuckle intensifies in the dying heat of a balmy summer day. And so to bed. Looking back, much later, like Frances Scott Fitzgerald’s character John we “remembered that first night as a daze of many colours, of quick sensory impressions, of music soft as a voice in love, and of the beauty of things, lights and shadows, and motions and faces”. Elizabeth Bowen’s line in To The North (1932) haunts us still: “this evening had an airy superurbanity”.

“… and he has filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills – to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood and to engage in all kinds of artistic crafts.” Exodus 35:31 to 33

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

Tags andromedas rock, architect john o’connell, chapel bar, damien hirst, dorinda lady dunleath, doron ashkenaz, elie saab, elizabeth bowen heat day, frances hodgson burnett secret garden, frances scott fitzgerald diamond big ritz, francois guinet, frederic dassas louvre, gertrude stein tender buttons, grebez ribellet, ines de la fressange parison chic encore, jaffa hotel, john pawson, lavenders blue, lignet roset, louis pasteur street, love cold climate, marilynne robinson child read books, moshe sakal diamond setter, nancy mitford, nancy mitford dont tell alfred, old saraya house, ramy gill, rebecca walker, remembering napoleon iii dinner, roland barthes fashion system, sabbath plus one jerusalem and tel aviv, saint louis v hospital, sisters saint joseph apparition, stuart blakley, tal shochat

Architects Architecture Art Country Houses People

Hilton Park Scotshouse Monaghan + William Hague

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 20, 2024

Powers Hilton

Elsewhere erroneously attributed to the better known architect Francis Johnson, the core of the current house was most likely designed by James Jones of Dundalk. The rebuilding followed a fire of 1803 which destroyed much of an earlier house. A letter from James to Colonel Madden dated 24 July 1838 refers to various works to be undertaken at Hilton Park. The stables and dovecote, the latter a romantic folly, are probably by the same architect. He was also the likely designer of the ‘ride’ which adjoins the rear of the house. The ride is a distinctive cast iron colonnade erected at the rear of the house to allow the family to observe horses being broken in away from the inclement County Monaghan weather.

In 1874 County Cavan born architect William Hague was paid 100 guineas by the Maddens to redesign the house. It was a surprising commission from an Orangeman to a Catholic ecclesiastical architect. One of his many churches is St Aidan’s in nearby Butlersbridge. Drawings by William Hague line the walls of the vaulted breakfast room. “He provided my ancestor with a ‘pick and mix’,” says current owner Johnny Madden, “including ceiling designs for the main rooms.”

While the campanile, bay window and dome weren’t executed, the Ionic porte cochère, parapet decorations and lower level rustication were added. Triangular pediments (without aedicules) float over the piano nobile. The most dramatic change was the excavation of the basement to form a three storey house. Montalto (County Down) and Tullylagan Manor (County Tyrone) are two Northern Irish houses which have been similarly treated, most likely for aesthetic purposes. Johnny Madden believes many of the alterations at Hilton Park were for security reasons:

“You can’t ram the reception rooms when they’re on the first floor. The porte cochère also acts as a barrier. The central rooms on the front elevation all have metal shutters. And the front door is lined with metal. Hague went on to design the west wing of Crom Castle.” Life is more relaxed these days. A sliding sash and handily placed steps provide an exit from the kitchen into the garden. William Hague was clearly versatile. His executed design for Crom Castle (County Fermanagh) is neo Elizabethan. Hilton Park is Italianate. Many of his churches were French gothic. “The house isn’t particularly Irish looking,” reckons Johnny.

Hilton Park as it now stands is a a large three storey stone block commanding views over 240 hectares of land. The entrance front is divided into four sections: a five bay breakfront framing the three bay porte cochère; three bays on either side of the breakfront; and a single bay wing to the right. “The house isn’t as large as it first seems,” says Johnny’s wife Lucy. “It’s long and narrow.” This is apparent on the approach from the driveway which reveals the building is just three bays deep in some parts. Hilton Park looks much larger when viewed from the five bay garden front which is elongated by an ancillary wing.

The entrance door opens into a relatively small gothick hall enlivened by polychromatic encaustic floor tiles, coral walls and ribbed vaults. Most of the ground floor rooms have vaulted ceilings, a reminder they were once in the basement. The estate office and morning room are accessed off the hall. Arched double doors lead into the staircase hall which is panelled on the ground floor. The gothick theme continues in the first floor barrel vaulted dining room on the garden front. An enfilade of Italianate reception rooms is positioned across the entrance front. Stained glass windows add drama to the staircase hall; plate glass windows add light to the reception rooms.

The upper section of the staircase is lit by a tall arched Georgian window. Two blind windows in the corner guest bedroom provide balance to the entrance front. All the guest bedrooms are grouped around an upper landing and corridor to the rear of the house. The corridor ceiling slopes under the slant of the pitched roof. The section of the house closest to the driveway is used as the family wing. This article was first published in November 2012 when Hilton Park accepted paying guests for dinner, bed and breakfast. The new generation of Maddens have relaunched the house and estate as a weddings and events venue.

Tags crom castle, francis johnson, hilton park scotshouse monaghan, james jones dundalk, johnny madden, lavenders blue, lucy madden, montalto, stuart blakley, tullylagan manor, william hague

Design Luxury People

Pininfarina Tribute Rally Launch + Hurtwood Park Polo Club Cranleigh Surrey

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 20, 2024

Polo Mints and Panama Hats

What a wonderful world. Lavender’s Blue were delighted to be invited to cover the exclusive launch of the Pininfarina Tribute Rally 2013 at the glorious Hurtwood Park Polo Club in Surrey. It got off to a flying start on a gorgeous sunny June weekend. The forthcoming September rally is in honour of the late great creative genius Sergio Pininfarina. It was an outing of the bold and beautiful, and that was just starting with the cars. Sergio’s dashing son Paolo, who has taken over as Chairman of the company that carries his family’s name, unveiled for the first time in the UK the concept car made in honour of his father. A helicopter ride over the woodland, a quick spin across the grassland, and Paol pulled up beside us. The view from the VIP marquee (is there any other type?) never looked so good.

“I’m sure my father is happy today,” he proudly announced. “This car expresses his spirit. It also represents the past, the present and the future of Pininfarina. History continues forth in the present tradition of excellence in designing, manufacturing and engineering. For the future, it shows the potential for securing new business for Pininfarina. So it is fitting that my father who created so many motoring masterpieces is honoured by this concept car named in his memory. I know he would like it.”

In polo, as we all know, players are rated on a handicap scale of minus two to 10, the higher the better. Talent shines through horsemanship, range of strokes and speed of play. A goal is a goal, whether by pony or rider. The Sergio is an equine athlete in crimson metal and grey leather. Ferrari’s pioneering wind tunnels were exploited to the max during the design process. The low front spoiler, the leading edge of the roll bar behind the cockpit and the passenger compartment are all shaped to enhance air flow. Instead of a windshield, driver and passenger wear helmets. The headrests appear to float as they are attached to the roll bar, not the seats. Holes atop the rear engine recall Pininfarina’s Ferrari 512S Modulo.

Event sponsors Brokersclub – “high speed online trading” according to founder Markus Böckmann – held the four matches of the Brokersclub Tribute Gold Cup Polo Tournament over the course of the launch weekend. A VIP marquee in front of the clubhouse allowed the glamorous crowd, handbags and glad rags and hot legs, to take in all things horse power, two and four legged, while Rod Stewart laid on the foreground music. Hurtwood is owned by Kenney Jones, legendary drummer with The Who. Kenney also serenaded the crowd with his own band The Jones Gang.

Ooh la la! The triumphant triumvirate of trophies, trips and tribunes kept going with a world record breaking gathering of over 200 Pininfarina designed cars. A lucky 100 owners were there to gear up for taking part in the rally. Among the cars on display were dozens of Ferraris from the past such as the 275 GTB Spider, the 250 GT SWB and the 365 Daytona. More recent Ferrari models included the 360 Modena and the 458 Spider.

Other newer brands represented at Hurtwood included the Alfa Romeo Duetto, the Lancia Aurelia B20 and the Lancia Monte Carlo. Also on display were rare models such as the Lancia Aurelia B24 Spider, first seen at the Brussels Motor Show of 1955. Eric Clapton popped over from his neighbouring estate in his one of a kind SP12 EC Ferrari, designed by Pininfarina in collaboration with the Ferrari Design Centre. Some guys have all the luck. The glamour has only got started and is about to rev into top gear.

Day 1: the Pininf arina cavalcade departs from the Hilton on Park Lane crossing the English Channel at Dover and onwards to Dunkirk. Spend first night in Germany.
Day 2: the Swiss mountains await; stopover close to the Italian border.
Day 3: navigate God’s Highway aka the Stelvio Pass which has more hairpins than a Sixties beehive bouffant. After a rendezvous at the Pininfarina Design Building, onwards to Maranello, the home of Ferrari.
Day 4: drive across Monaco where a party on aboard mega yacht provides a travel respite.
Day 5: the party continues at Jimmy’z. This is Monte Carlo after all. Raise your champagne flutes to Sergio Pininfarina!

Uncategorized

Lavender’s Blue + Loughmacrory Lough Tyrone

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 19, 2024

Half a Century of Phantasmagorical Fabulosity

“Plant yourself within His word,” preached Bobbie Houston, Pastor of Hillsong Church, in 2023, “and let the Holy Spirit still your heart. Allow the experience of those who went before to infuse courage.” The poet John Milton wrote 379 years earlier in Areopagitica, “Well knows he to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrive by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion.”

Tags bobbie houston hillsong, john milton areopagitica, lavenders blue, loughmacrory lough tyrone, stuart blakley

Architecture Design Developers People Town Houses

SABBATH PLUS ONE Jerusalem +

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 16, 2024

Under the Eucalyptus Tree

“Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you by the gazelles and by the does of the field: Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires.” Song of Songs 2:7

We’re on a mission so of course it makes sense crossing the Holy Rubicon to reach the place of Christ’s salvific crucifixion, resurrection and ascension. “We are the people of the resurrection!” beams Reverend Andy Rider, Area Dean of Tower Hamlets London. “We are Easter people!” During the post Paschal season, one can almost hear the soaring descant of Regina Coeli from Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Benjamin Disraeli (Disraeli: A Biography, 1993) believed, “The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more; it is the history of heaven and earth.” Simon Sebag Montefiore (Jerusalem: The Biography, 2012) concurs, “The history of Jerusalem is the history of the world, but it is also the chronicle of an often penurious provincial town amid the Judean Hills. Jerusalem was once regarded as the centre of the world and today that is more true than ever.” Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, 2019) named it the “Eternal Capital”. Teddy Kollek (Mayor and the Citadel: Teddy Kollek and Jerusalem, 1987), Mayor of Jerusalem in the late 20th century, leads with, “Jerusalem has always projected a metaphysical image.” The ancient Babylonian Talmud (circa 500) gets it: “He who has not seen Jerusalem in her splendour has never seen a desirable city in his life.” In Natural History (77) Pliny the Elder exalts Jerusalem to be “… by far the most famous city of the East and not of Judea only”.

Katharina Galor and Hanswulf Bloedhorn open The Archaeology of Jerusalem: From the Origins to the Ottomans (2014) with, “Jerusalem first appears in the written sources as a Canaanite city at the beginning of the second millennium BC.” Moshe Safdie observes in Jerusalem: The Future of the Past (1989), “Jerusalem the Golden is the Jerusalem of yellow-gold limestone.” Henry Van Dyke (Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land, 1908) calls it “a metropolis of infinite human hopes and longings and devotions”. We’re reminded of the words of Paula Fredriksen (When Christians Were Jews: The First Generation, 2018), “It [Jerusalem] was probably the most beautiful city that any of them [Jesus and His followers] had ever seen.” They resonate with Stewart Perone (Jerusalem and Bethlehem, 1965), “Its beauty is bewildering, the accumulated treasure of more than three millennia.” Celestial and terrestrial, natural and supernatural, sacred and secular, universal and personal, Jerusalem is truly the interface of heaven and earth. Jerusalem, the intersection between the then, the now and the not yet. Jerusalem in all your treasured totemic totality, lift up your gates and sing! Rivers clap your hands! Daphne du Maurier writes in her short story The Way of the Cross (1973), “The lights were burning bright in the city of Jerusalem.” They continue to burn bright. Our pilgrimage gathers pace. To repeat the title of singer songwriter Amy Grant’s modern day song of ascents, it’s Better than a Hallelujah.

“And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved; for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be deliverance, as the Lord has said, even among the survivors whom the Lord calls.” Joel 2:32

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

Tags amy grant, babylonian talmud, benjamin disraeli, daphne maurier, hanswulf bloedhorn, henry van dyke, jerusalem mayor teddy kollek, katharina galor, lavenders blue, moshe safdie, paula fredriksen, pietro mascagni cavalleria rusticana, pliny elder, prime minister david ben gurion, reverend andy rider, sabbath plus one jerusalem and tel aviv, simon sebag montefiore, stewart perone, stuart blakley

Architects Architecture Design Developers

SABBATH PLUS ONE Santiago Calatrava + Chords Bridge Jerusalem

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 15, 2024

Nathan the Prophet and Zadok and Abiathar the Priests

“Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet: praise Him with the psaltery and harp.” Psalm 150:3

Spanish-Swiss architect Santiago Calatrava has designed over 40 bridges – Dublin has two (James Joyce and Samuel Beckett) – but The Chords Bridge was the first to carry both trains and pedestrians. Completed in 2008, it arches over a traffic junction next to Barchana Architects’ Yitzhak Navon Railway Station in northwest Jerusalem. A 188 metre high cantilevered pylon provides mathematically rigorous support for 66 steel cables which hold the bridge’s 30 metre long deck. Santiago relates, “The Jerusalem light rail train bridge project started with the idea that we had to create a very light and very transparent bridge which would span a major new plaza at the entry to Jerusalem.” His work is a stimulating addition to the cityscape, capturing the spirit of the age montaged onto an indigo sky. The Chords Bridge is clad in Jerusalem stone which accords with the architect’s penchant for pale. “Calatrava’s geminal iconoclastic experiments with structure and movement spring out of a long historical tradition,” shares Alexander Tzonis in Santiago Calatrava: The Poetics of Movement (1999). Make that implied, potential and physical movement.

“The architect compares the final result with the form of a musical instrument such as a harp with its cables as strings,” explains Philip Jodidio in Calatrava Complete Works 1979 to Today (2018), “an apt metaphor in the City of David. According to Moshe Safdie in Jerusalem The Future of the Past (1984), “What Bach did with the fugue, we must learn to do in architecture. I feel architecture can, however rarely, move us as deeply as music can.” Sometimes architecture really is frozen music, accompanied by a light cordial on the rocks. At the Cathedral of St George the Martyr, the Mother Church of the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem, The Very Reverend Canon Richard Sewell hoped, “We might hear the chord that calls us up to dance!” Or the voice of harpers harping with their harps. Sourires d’été en musique.

“You strum away on your harps like David and improvise on musical instruments.” Amos 6:5

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

Tags alexander tzonis, barchana architects, chords bridge jerusalem, james joyce bridge dublin, lavenders blue, moshe safdie, philip jodidio, sabbath plus one jersualem and tel aviv, samuel beckett bridge dublin, santiago calatrava, st george cathedral jerusalem, stuart blakley, very reverend canon richard sewell, yitzhak navon railway station

Architects Architecture Art Country Houses Design People

Glenveagh Castle + Derryveagh Mountains + Lough Beagh Donegal

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 11, 2024
9 Comments on Glenveagh Castle + Derryveagh Mountains + Lough Beagh Donegal

Wild Geese

“To me how veritably a palace of enchantment” cries Edward Poe’s character William Wilson in The Fall of the House of Usher. Parts of Glenveagh Castle’s history are as dark as this horror (owner ‘Black Jack’ Adair’s land agent was murdered in 1861; a later owner Arthur Potter would disappear without a trace) but it enjoyed an Indian summer in the mid 20th century as a palace of enchantment. It is a castle in name only. Scots Irish landowner John ‘Black Jack’ Adair built it as a hunting lodge. Architect John Townsend Trench (Black Jack’s cousin) was instructed to use the Royals’ Balmoral Castle in Aberdeenshire as inspiration. The castellated house is much less chunky that its Scottish forerunner: the architect handles its massing well, no doubt in part due to the incremental building programme. The central house, started in 1867, was gradually extended with a variety of towers, completing in 1901.

Cast iron hoppers, corbelled bartizans, crenellated parapets, crow stepped gables, granite machicolations – the architect plundered the Scottish Baronial textbook to great effect. Perhaps he also read Oscar Wilde’s 1882 essay The House Beautiful, “The use of the natural hues of stone is one of the real signs of proper architecture.” The 16,000 hectare estate passed out of Adair ownership in 1929 when it was bought by the ill fated Harvard Professor Arthur Potter and his wife Lucy who together restored and redecorated the castle. Perhaps they read Oscar’s essay too for the décor follows his rule, “A designer must imagine in colour, must think in colour, must see in colour.”

Glenveagh Castle is too compact to fall under Annabel Davis-Goff’s category “impossible large houses” in her 1989 book about gentry in Ireland, Walled Gardens. But it does fit in with her description, “Even in the grander houses in Ireland there was rarely a bedroom with its own bathroom.” The house really came into its own when Henry McIlhenny bought it in 1937. The Bachelor Corridor is lined with appropriately single bedrooms while being light on en suites. The world (and only occasionally their partner) came to stay. Samuel Barber, best known for composing Adagio for Strings, was a frequent guest.

The American composer and pianist was also a gifted diarist, recording in 1952, “There are two towers in the castle, six drawing rooms, with fires always burning; so I confiscated one at once and messed it up PDQ with orchestration, paper, and pencils, et al, announcing that I would see no one until lunchtime; and I worked very well every day and almost finished two numbers of the ballet; lots of fun working at it. There was really no one to see for almost a week.” He continues, “Joy of joys, peat fires are burning in every room … they call it turf … and burning it has an ineffable perfume, at least for me.” He notes, “We left Glenveagh after a week of candlight and peat and Gaelic twilight.”

Another guest was the highly amusing Rafaelle Duchess of Leinster. Writing in her 1973 entertaining autobiography So Brief a Dream, “I fell head over heels with this enchanting castle. Glenveagh is a divine place to stay. You couldn’t have a more charming host. His sense of things beautiful and comfortable make you want to stay forever. There was only one snag, the undercurrent that so often flows when the guests are more fashionable than friendly, and the host is elsewhere. Every night after dinner when we gathered in the lovely red room warmed by the sweet scented peat fire, you would be wise to see to it that you were the last to leave when it came to say goodnight.” Typically, there is something of a sting in the tail of her tale. Although that pales in comparison to the description of her disastrous wedding in Knightsbridge, London, “He and I walked up the aisle of Holy Trinity Brompton on a December morning in 1932 to the altar of doom ‘for better for worse’ … mainly for worse!”

Henry McIlhenny added more than just colour to the castle: he invested in Victorian paintings by Edwin Landseer, inserted marble chimneypieces salvaged from nearby Ards House in Creeslough, and created a series of extraordinary gardens (enlisting the expertise of leading landscapers Philippe Julian, Lanning Roper and Jim Russell) climbing up the purple headed Derryveagh Mountains and falling down to the eastern shore of Lough Beagh. Mock fortifications enclose a pool raised above the lapping water’s edge. The American tycoon donated the castle and estate to the Irish Government in 1983. Three years later he died just as Glenveagh National Park was opening to the public. Visiting this remote house set in a wilderness on a scorching hot summer day, it’s impossible not to be “married to amazement” to borrow Mary Oliver’s phrase from her 2004 poem Wild Geese.

Architects Architecture Art Country Houses Design Hotels Luxury People Restaurants

Von Essen Hotels + Cliveden House Hotel Berkshire

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 11, 2024

The Conservative Party

At one time they owned some of the best hotels in Britain. The portfolio of the two Andrews – Messrs Davis and Onraet embraced 30 odd mostly historic hotels included Ston Easton Park in Bath, Sharrow Bay in Cumbria, and most famously of all Cliveden in Berkshire. They knew how to throw a good party – we didn’t need an excuse to jive away an evening at their stuccoed Belgravia mansion. The Sunday Times restaurant critic Michael Winner was a close friend; Raine Countess Spencer was too. You never knew who you’d share a bottle of Moët with by the indoor basement swimming pool.

So when they suggested we visit Cliveden, there was only one response: when can we go? It was the heady summer of 2010 when we went south to Berkshire’s best. Our review for Luxury Travel Magazine at the time contained the prescient line, “Notoriety and Cliveden go hand in hand.” Sadly, little did we know that two years after our visit Von Essen would go out of business. A certain Meghan Markle and her mother would later spend the night before her wedding to Prince Harry at Cliveden. The National Trust continues to own the grounds while the hotel has changed hands several times since.

Another forte of the two Andrews was PR. Von Essen sponsored The Sunday Times’ Rich List and regularly appeared in the glossies. An article predating their tenure was written by Jo Newson and Dorothy Bosomworth in Traditional Interior Decoration, February / March 1988. They state, “Country house hotels are a relatively recent phenomenon. They have sprung up with a demand for something more than comfort: a wider appreciation of style without streamlining, and a recognition of the value of old buildings in our brave new world. Cliveden is one of the most recent – and important – examples.”

Here goes. At a bend in the Thames a house has twice risen from the ashes: welcome to Cliveden. Have you ever stayed at an historic hotel and yearned to learn more about its past? Von Essen Hotels have the answer. Throughout 2010 they are rolling out Heritage Concierges at all their properties. Guests can discover the history of the hotel they are staying at through a dedicated member of staff. Tours are free but must be booked upon arrival. First to offer this innovative concept is Cliveden (drop your E’s to pronounce “Cliv’d’n”) in Berkshire.

And what a task. Cliveden has been the scene of riotous living by the rich and infamous for almost three and a half centuries. Spies, call girls, billionaires, dukes and queens have all partied hard here. The name is so synonymous with presidential league entertaining that even the Sugar King Julio Lobo referred to his bolthole for holding court in Havana as the “Cliveden of Cuba”. But Michael Chaloner, Cliveden’s Heritage Concierge, is well up to the job. He jokes that he’s been at the hotel forever. Michael explains, “Surprisingly the house has never been the principal seat of any of its owners. It’s always been a holiday home if somewhat on a grand scale. When it was converted to a hotel in 1985 barely any changes needed to be made.” Some things really haven’t changed. Sue Crawley, Hotel Manager – actually the staff never refer to “hotel” but rather “house” – comments, “All the food still comes up on trays from the cellar kitchen. This involves navigating four twists of the narrow staircase!”

The present house is an impossibly palatial affair erected in 1852 to the design of Sir Charles Barry for the 2nd Duke of Sutherland. This starchitect practised his penchant for all things Italianate a decade earlier at the Reform Club on Pall Mall, London, before being let loose at Cliveden. It’s hard not to feel important, sitting on plumped up cushions in the Great Hall under the disdainful eye of Lady Astor in a Sargent portrait, while on the other side of the tall sash windows a gaggle of National Trust tourists gawk and traipse past (Von Essen lease the building from The National Trust).

Each of the 39 bedrooms is individually decorated and named after someone connected to the house, from the Tudorbethan panelling of the Mountbatten Room to the sloping ceilings of the Prince Albert Room. In the Asquith Room you can lie back in the bath and watch the limos pulling up in the forecourt three storeys below. Thankfully there’s not a modern extension in sight. Fancy a fourposter bed? No problem, try the Chinese Room. A coronet bed? That will be the Sutherland Suite. A polonaise bed? Not sure, but there’s probably one somewhere. Cliveden doesn’t do second class. No wonder Queen Victoria stayed here for six weeks.

Henry Ford, Franklin Roosevelt and George Bernard Shaw have also enjoyed stints at Cliveden. In 1893 the hideously wealthy American tycoon William Astor, who’d bought the house 13 years earlier for a staggering $1.25 million, presented it to his son as a wedding gift. Halcyon days beckoned as Astor junior and his glamorous wife Nancy hosted society. The government of the day was broke (sounds familiar?) and so ministers were only too glad to meet visiting dignitaries at Cliveden. But it is the fall of a later government that keeps Michael’s tour especially lively. Almost half a century ago, on a balmy Saturday evening in midsummer the Secretary of State for War Jack Profumo clapped eyes on Christine Keeler, a 19 year old demimondaine, larking round the outdoor swimming pool. The rest is history as immortalised in the 1989 film Scandal starring John Hurt, Ian McKellen and Joanne Whalley.

“Lord Astor had persistent backache,” says Michael, “so he allowed his osteopath Stephen Ward use of Spring Cottage on the estate as payment in kind. That fateful evening the party staying at Spring Cottage included Ward’s acquaintance Christine Keeler and Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet assistant attaché who was also a spy. Meanwhile Profumo and his wife, the beautiful Northern Irish actress Valerie Hobson, were guests of the Astors. After dinner they strolled out of the house to the pool area. Profumo in a dinner jacket; Keeler emerging from the pool in a dripping towel. Their clandestine affair began the following day. When Keeler sold her story to a tabloid it was revealed she’d been sleeping with both Profumo and Ivanov at the same time.” A case of Reds in the beds.

Jack Profumo baldly denied any impropriety in his relationship with Christine Keeler in a statement to the House of Commons. “Well he would, wouldn’t he?” tartly snapped Mandy Rice-Davies, Christine’s best buddy and co accused of prostitution, later at the subsequent court case. He finally confessed although not before suing Paris Match and Italian magazine Il Tempo for libel. Stephen Ward was tried on trumped up charges relating to immoral earnings and committed suicide before the case concluded. Jack’s career lay in tatters and the furore brought down the then Conservative government in 1964. The swimming pool is now Grade I Listed in its own right.

Notoriety and Cliveden go hand in hand. Its first owner, the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, was imprisoned several times in the Tower of London. It was said of the Duke that “a young lady could not resist his charms … all his trouble in wooing was, he came, saw and conquered”. He challenged his mistress’s husband to a duel in 1696. And lost. A cross sword emblem set into the East Lawn commemorates his gory death. Even the luscious interiors, manicured to within a square centimetre of their lives, aren’t quite all they seem. Look closely and you’ll find the unexpected, from blood spattered soldiers lurking in the Great Hall tapestries to rabbits mercilessly trapped behind balusters in the gruesome plasterwork of the French Dining Room.

Once a full day’s coach ride from London, Cliveden is now just an hour by train from Paddington. A chauffeur can pick you up from the station at nearby Burnham. Natch. Culinary delights to satisfy the most demanding of gourmands await. The Terrace Dining Room greedily devours six windows of the nine bay garden front. Menu highlights include John Dory slowly cooked to perfection and Heston Blumenthalesque chocolate fondant (The Fat Duck restaurant is a mere 6.5 kilometres downstream).

Business Development Manager Amanda Irby confirms that these days you are more likely to find television chef Jamie Oliver celebrating his 10th anniversary at an informal dinner on the terrace than any political mischief unfolding. “Or you may well pass Sir Paul McCartney engaged in conversation with his daughter Stella next to the Great Hall fireplace,” she remarks. Indeed the President of Afghanistan held meetings in the Macmillan Room lately. History is rumbling along. The Heritage Concierge at Cliveden will never be short of tales to update his tours.

Architects Architecture Art Design Developers Luxury Restaurants

Knotel + Sessions Arts Club Clerkenwell London

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 10, 2024

Working Girls and Boys

The Grade II* Listed former courthouse on Clerkenwell Green works hard for its upkeep. Every cubic metre is used up. Sessions Arts Club restaurant occupies part of the building. Designer outlets fill the lower ground floor. And 2,050 square metres across several upper floors are taken up by Knotel work club which is more about laptops (working) than lap dancing (clubbing). But there’s always space for a session in the 20 metre high domed bar. Chintz free kitsch free, the interior is all about rough luxe smooth plaster.

Tags knotel, knotel old sessions house, lavenders blue, sessions arts club clerkenwell green london, stuart blakley

Architects Architecture Art Country Houses Design People

Saltburn + Drayton House Lowick Northamptonshire

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 7, 2024
42 Comments on Saltburn + Drayton House Lowick Northamptonshire

The Go Betweeners

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

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

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

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

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

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

Architecture Design Developers

1890s + Radnor Park Folkestone Kent

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 6, 2024

Eclecticity

It was the mother of all building booms. So much housing stock in London and the southeast of England dates from the 1890s. The busy decade or rather decades stretched up to 1914. After World War I the State became involved in the building of homes and in 1947 the planning system was introduced after which all housebuilding was subject to the consent of the local authority.

The 1890s and subsequent decade and a bit were therefore the last time Britain had a free market of housebuilding without restriction or competition of any significance from councils. Builders could more or less pitch up wherever they fancied, buy some land and get putting up homes. One would imagine this free for all would have spewed out architectural horrors but quite the opposite occurred: some of the best domestic architecture was delivered in the very late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Not that it was universally welcomed at the time. In 1907 the Property Owners’ Journal moaned “the builders go on building, notwithstanding the 90,000 empty houses and tenements in London”.

The housing around Radnor Park in Folkestone, Kent, is a prime example. Radnor Park was donated by the Earl of Radnor as a recreation ground to the seaside town in 1886. Soon houses sprung up around the park boosted by the catalyst of the nearby railway station that would become Folkestone Central. Combining red brick, wall tiles and half timbered Tudor gables with transomed and mullioned windows and rendered quoins sounds like cluttered chaos but the confident handling of materials and details has produced houses. Idiosyncratic features further enhance some of the houses: a buttressed stone porch here, an octagonal turret there.

Tags 1890s, earl radnor, lavenders blue, radnor park folkestone kent, stuart blakley

Architecture Art Design

SABBATH PLUS ONE HaYarkon Park + Environs Tel Aviv

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 4, 2024

It Could’ve Gone Either Way

“They will come and shout for joy on the heights of Zion; they will rejoice in the bounty of the Lord – the grain, the new wine and the olive oil, the young of the flocks and herds. They will be like a well watered garden, and they will sorrow no more.” Jeremiah 31:12

We are pretty and good and pretty good photographers and pretty good models and pretty good socialites and we have to do them all at once and we find it difficult being pretty good gardeners. Enter now the little owl, and the great owl, and the swan, and the gier eagle. Nature abounds at HaYarkon Park, the green lung breathing life into northern Tel Aviv. This wild and previous landscape, treescape and dreamscape hugs the pioned and twill brimmed banks of the River Yarkon – that molten mirror of gently rippling silver amalgam. Six gardens amidst the rolling riparian parkland include the four hectare Rock Garden filled with over 3,500 plant species as well as raucous birdsong. Hoopoe, Hooded Crow, Laughing Dove, White Throated Kingfisher and Black Crowned Night Heron all join in the dawn to dusk chorus. There’s more.

Come closer, draw nearer. An enigmatic sculpture in the middle of HaYarkon Park stretches our visual vocabulary. White concrete cylindrical and wave forms tip three metres at their tallest point. Berlin born Slade School of Fine Art London trained Yitzhak Danziger became a leading 20th century Israeli sculptor. His Serpentine sculpture was erected in 1973, just four years before he died aged 61. Expand your view, broaden your horizon.

There are certain certainties. There are certain things we are certain about. There are certain uncertainties. That is to say, there are things that we are certain we are uncertain about. But there are also uncertain uncertainties. We are certainly certain that we’ll never be pretty good gardeners but that doesn’t stop us loving HaYarkon Park. As Queen Diambi Kabatusuila Tshiyoyo Muata of the Bakwa Indu People of the Luba Empire Kasaï Democratic Republic of Congo once reminded us, “It’s a beautiful day to be alive!” And butterfly jewellery artist Wallace Chan whispered to us at the British Museum London, “Embrace every fleeting moment.” This is our summer of content and we mean content.

“… and I will bring my people Israel back from exile. They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them. They will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will make gardens and eat their fruit.” Amos 9:14

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

Tags hayarkon park tel aviv, lavenders blue, queen diambi kabatusuila tshiyoyo muata bakwa indu people luba empire kasai democratic republic congo, sabbath plus one jersualem and tel aviv, stuart blakley, wallace chan, yarkon river, yitzhak danziger

Architecture Art Design People

SABBATH PLUS ONE Hayim Nahman Bialik + Trumpeldor Cemetery Tel Aviv

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 3, 2024

Scion of Sion

“Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will rest secure, because You will not abandon me to the grave, nor will You let your Holy One see decay. You have made known to me the path of life; You will find me with joy in Your presence, with eternal pleasures at Your right hand.” Psalm 16:9 to 11

Every ridiculously smart place has one. Paris possesses Père Lachaise. Buenos Aires revels in Recoleta. Savannah boasts Bonaventure. Newtownstewart, Pubble. Tel Aviv trumps them all with Trumpeldor. A stylish resting place steeped in sublime presence and subliminal absence. A three dimensional requiem. An architectural danse macabre. A spectral spectacle. A necropolis in the metropolis. Amazing mausolea. A sepulchral sculpture garden imbued with meaning and nostalgia.

Trumpeldor Cemetery was established by Jewish settlers on empty land in 1902. Jerusalem stone on stone on stone. Today, it is surrounded by downtown Tel Aviv. The cemetery is named after Joseph Trumpeldor, a Zionist originally from Pyatigorsk in Russia who died in 1920. Noa Tishby lionises him in Israel: The Most Misunderstood Country on Earth (2021) as “a decorated Russian military war hero and former POW in Japan … a Jewish Russian idealist.” Joseph Trumpeldor’s biographer Pesah Lipovetzky eulogises in his biography (1953), “He fought for the establishment in the Holy Land of a free society of Jewish workers, and in defending the frontiers of his country met his untimely death.” The cemetery is the burial place of Hayim Nahman Bialik. His 1996 poem After My Death contains the lines: “There was a man – and look he is no more. He died before his time. The music of his life suddenly stopped. A pity! There was another song in him. Not now it is lost forever.”

In Decay and Death: Urban Topoi in Literary Depictions of Tel Aviv, an essay in Tel Aviv The First Century: Visions, Designs, Actualities edited by Maoz Azaryahu (2012), Rachel Harris compares the city that never sleeps with the eternal rest: “The narrative of Tel Aviv as the White City with new, modern buildings contrasts with the decay of the city – through the image of death. Death takes two forms: that of the city and that of individuals. Death is represented in the city by its cemeteries. Shabtai’s novel and Amos Gitai’s adaptation Devarim open with a surreal hunt through the city’s graveyards to find Goldman’s father’s funeral.” Historian Barbara Mann writing in A Place in History (2006) views any cemetery as “a mnemonic space through which the visitor moves and activates images linked to a collective memory.”

“Madame de Valhubert died suddenly the very day she was to have left Bellandargues for Paris,” writes Nancy Mitford in The Blessing (1951), adding with a sparkle of graveyard humour, “She made the journey all the same, and was buried in the family grave at the Père Lachaise.”

“Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them.” Ezekiel 37:13

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

Tags barbara mann, bonaventure cemetery savannah, hayim nahman bialik, joseph trumpeldor, lavenders blue, maoz azaryahu, nancy mitford blessing, noa tishby, pere lachaise paris, pesah lipovetzky, rachel harris, recoleta cemetery buenos aires argentina, sabbath plus one jersualem and tel aviv, stuart blakley, trumpeldor cemetery tel aviv

Architects Architecture Design Developers People

Piers Gough + CZWG + Dundee Wharf Limehouse London

Post author By Lavender's Blue
Post date January 1, 2024

Very Light Industry

Since the 1990s, the architectural practice CZWG has been enhancing the banks of the Thames, the river that snakes through London, with architectural brilliance. Contextualism and historical references are key to their riverside schemes’ success. Piers Gough CBE, the G in CZWG, states, “We have a history of reinterpreting industrial riverside structures for residential use. Dundee Wharf was a riff on cranes and mills, Cascades on grain elevators, Millennium Harbour on cantilevering control rooms and Seacon Tower was channelling exoskeleton support structures. At Rivermark for Taylor Wimpey London, the towers are like well oiled ribbed cooling cylinders of some imaginary industrial process.”

Dundee Wharf was built in 1997 by Irish developer Ballymore. Rectangular brick blocks of varying heights are positioned in a horseshoe shape. The seven storey principal elevation facing the Thames is a grid of alternating stacks of Juliet balconied windows and French doors opening onto balconies. The projecting balconies are framed by steel skeletons resembling inverted pylons. Attached to the corner closest to the river is an 11 storey tower and projecting from this is a steel skeleton tower of terraces taking the inverted pylon concept to its logical conclusion. A residents’ lounge sits on top of the skeleton tower like a bird’s nest surrounded by metal branches.