Lights! Models! Guest list! There’s a clash of fabulous invites but we’ll always have Home House. Bathroom showrooms are the new members’ clubs when it comes to fun times. We’re off to the opening of a door. Albeit a rather fine bathroom cabinet door. This is, after all, C P Hart. And we’re all for doing our bit for the environment. The party is Adventures in the Urban Jungle: The Bathroom Transformed. Very green. Disruptor alert.
The C P Hart showroom is enough to make Flanagan and Allen burst into song: “Underneath the arches | We dream our dreams away | Underneath the arches | On cobblestones we lay.” This cavernous store fills a run rabbit run warren of railway arches south of Waterloo. Oh no, time for another Flanagan and Allen rendition: “Anytime you’re Lambeth way | Any evening, any day | You’ll find us all doin’ the Lambeth walk.”
The brick vaults and hanging lightbulbs are as deconstructed as Kuskus Foods’ root vegetables served in Thurlby Baston baskets. Who needs to dine at The Ritz or The Carlton when you can balance on a bath or sit on a cistern eating Joy of Taste’s crabsticks and caviar? New room set: House of Hackney’s leafy Palmeral wallpaper is the perfect backdrop to designer Christian Sieger’s characterful Dornbracht brassware. The Urban Jungle is all about celebrating light, air and greenery in urban living. Colourful tribalism in; white minimalism out. “Maybe it’s because we’re Londoners…”
Another year, another masterpiece. Another year, another Masterpiece. Only in its seventh year, whatever did we do before this gaping lacuna in the social calendar was filled? Mind you, the Victorians managed just one Great Exhibition. It’s time to mingle with the well addressed sort of people who live in a house with no number (we’ll allow Number One London or at a push One Kensington Gardens as exceptions). Hey big spenders: there are no pockets in shrouds. Superprimers at play. From the Occident to the Orient, Venice to Little Venice, Dalston Cumbria to Dalston Dalston, the Gael to the Pale, Sally Gap to Sally Park or Sallynoggin, Masterpiece is like living between inverted commas. Among this year’s prestigious sponsors are Sir John Soane’s Museum and The Wallace Collection. That familiar conundrum: Scott’s or Le Caprice? Best doing both. Home of tofu foam Sinabro would approve. It’s not like we’ve hit the skids ourselves, as they say. The choice of champagne is even less of a dilemma: it’s Claridge’s favourite Perrier-Jouët on (gold) tap.
Symmetry and the art of the perpendicular abound in the Masterpiece salons (displays being much too modest a term). Lady Rosemary “I hate furniture on the slant” Spencer-Churchill would approve. Tinged with temporality, touched by ephemerality, the rooms are nonetheless paragons of authenticity. Exhibitors’ choice of wall covering is all defining. At Wallace Chan, velvety black is not so much a negation as a celebration of the totality of all colours. The kaleidoscopic crystallinity of a heist’s worth of gems is a welcome foil to the solidity of the backdrop. Jewellery designer and artist Wallace tells us, “I am always very curious. I like to study the sky and the earth. I seek to capture the emotions of the universe in my works.” Pre-Raphaelite stained glass windows by Henry Holiday cast an atmospheric rainbow over Sinai and Sons. Such a whirl of interiors – Min Hogg would approve. Purveyors of Exquisite Mind Bombs, Quiet Storm, add to the glamour. An exchange of fabulosity with Linda Oliver occurs. Moving on…
The late great Zaha Hadid, a regular visitor up to last year at Masterpiece, is now the subject of a commemorative salon. Interior designer Francis Sultana has curated an exhibition revealing Zaha wasn’t just the world’s greatest female architect – she was a dab hand at painting, jewellery and crockery design. Undisputed queen of Suprematism, curvature is her signature whatever the scale. Francis remarks, “Zaha never really believed in straight lines as such.” Across the boulevard, a moving arrangement by the Factum Foundation centred round a life-size crucifix is a reminder amidst this earthly wealth and glamour of the importance of faith and preservation. “Art is intention, not materials,” believes Adam Lowe of the Factum Foundation.
