Tag: dame rosalind savill

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Castle Stewart Papers + Irish Country Houses + Glebe Houses

Plantation Shudders

The Public Records Office Northern Ireland is an Aladdin’s Cave for those of an architectural heritage bent. It’s in a coolly contemporary commercial building conveniently close to Titanic Hotel in Belfast’s Laganside. Super helpful staff deliver bundles of archive material to designated desks. The Castle Stewart Papers form a significant collection. They comprise about 6,000 documents dating from 1587 to 1960 mainly relating to the County Tyrone estates of the Earls Castle Stuart, their genealogy, their military service, and the building and rebuilding of their houses. The Stewarts were originally a Scottish clan: the surname is derived from the role of steward.

An orthographic issue needs explaining. The family name of the Earls Castle Stewart is Stuart. Their other titles are the Barony of Castle Stewart, the Viscountcy of Castle Stewart and the Viscountcy of Stuart. Confused yet? The petition which the 1st Earl Castle Stewart, then Andrew Thomas Stuart, addressed to the Irish House of Lords in 1768 in substantiation of his claim to the Barony of Castle Stewart sheds light on family history from 1619:

“James I, by his letter of 1619 to the Lord Deputy and Chancellor of Ireland, authorised them to create Andrew Stewart, Lord Stewart, Baron of Castlestewart in the county of Tyrone, to hold the said honour to him and the heirs male of his body. Andrew, the 1st Lord, left issue Andrew, John, and Robert. No Parliament having sat from the year 1615 to the year 1634, Andrew, the 1st Lord, never voted in Parliament, but constantly enjoyed the title. He was succeeded by Sir Andrew, his eldest son and heir, and many entries in the Journals of the Lords in the year 1634 prove his enjoyment of the dignity, in consequence of letters patent issued agreeable to the letter of King James.”

“This Lord died in or about the year 1639, leaving issue Andrew, Robert and Josias, and was succeeded by Andrew, his eldest son and heir. This Lord married one of the daughters of Sir Arthur Blundell, by whom he had issue one child only, a daughter named Mary, who married Henry Howard, afterwards 5th Earl of Suffolk, and this lady carried away almost the whole family estate. Andrew, the 3rd Lord, died without issue male, and Robert his brother being dead without issue, he was succeeded in the honour by Josias, his youngest brother. Josias died in or about the year 1662, without issue, and was succeeded in the honour by John, his uncle.”

“John, the 5th Lord Castlestewart, died without issue in 1685, and after his death, the descendants of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Stewart were the rightful successors to the barony of Castlestewart, [which remained dormant and unclaimed until 1774]. Lieutenant Colonel Robert was the brother of John, the 5th Lord, and consequently a son of the 1st Lord. Robert Stewart of Irry, died 1686, son and heir to Colonel Robert, married Ann Moore, daughter of William Moore of Garvey in the County of Tyrone. To him succeeded Andrew Stewart [1672-1715], his eldest son and heir, then an infant, and to him Robert Stewart [1700-1742], whose son and heir the petitioner is.” Andrew Thomas Stuart was successful in his claim to the Barony of Castle Stewart in 1774.

Amongst the many papers is an exclusive find. Opening the green covered book Photographs of Armagh and Tyrone Scenery by John McGie reveals faded photographs mainly of country houses. It’s undated; the archivists estimate the book to date from between 1868 and 1874. Dame Rosalind Savill, la grande Directrice of The Wallace Collection in London, once commented how she disliked the phrase “hidden gems” but that’s what springs to mind looking at these photographs and, in some cases, lost gems. Stewart seats featured include Ballygawley Park and Stuart Hall. Other country houses photographed also had Plantation of Ulster connections such as Aughentain Castle, Augher Castle, Cecil Lodge, Roxborough Castle and Tynan Abbey.

The Irish Architectural Archive on Merrion Square has another great wealth of material. In contrast to the modern spaces of the Public Records Office Northern Ireland, drawings and documents are laid out in an 18th century double reception room with elaborate plasterwork ceilings. In among various folders are a coloured illustration of Reverend Beresford’s proposed glebe house, a photograph of Moynalty Glebe House and a photograph of Lismullen House, reproduced here for non commercial educational purposes.

Ballygawley Park is a landmark ruin on the Belfast to Omagh A5 road. The formal façade with its Ionic columned breakfront is a romantic distraction to drivers motoring up the hill from Ballygawley roundabout. Remnants of the entrance pillars, railings and gatelodge continue to crumble year on year. The severely elegant neo Grecian mansion was built in the 1820s to the design of John Hargrave. The photograph is of the side elevation which overlooked a sunken garden complete with pond. The Stewarts never returned to the house when it was seemingly accidentally burnt in the 1920s. A not uneventful decade for Irish country houses.

Stuart Hall was the vast country house built on the outskirts of Stewartstown by the abovementioned Andrew Thomas Stuart no doubt to celebrate his social rise from Viscount to Earl. A two storey dropping to three storey Georgian block was attached to a Plantation tower. In Victorian times the building was dressed up with a castellated parapet added to the Georgian block and mullioned windows inserted in the tower. There are two photographs of the house in the book: one of the mainly two storey entrance front and one of the mostly three storey side elevation. Stuart Hall was an architectural victim of The Troubles: it was destroyed by the IRA in 1972.

Usually spelt with an E at the end, the photograph of Aughentain Castle (as it is labelled) shows the house in all its Italianate glory. Why settle for one campanile when you can have two? Haystacks stand between trees on the sloping lawn. This sprawling mansion was demolished in 1955 by then owner Colonel John Hamilton-Stubber who replaced it with a Continental classical style house. The current Aughentaine Castle, while smaller than its predecessor, is still a substantial and stylish building.

Augher Castle on the outskirts of the village of the same name and, like Ballygawley Park, is a showstopper for motorists, visible beyond a lake. Unlike Ballygawley Park, it is in excellent condition. The photograph shows the two storey entrance front range which is attached to a three storey lakeside toy keep. Dating from the 17th century, the castle is now mainly a Victorian rebuild. The people posing next to the exterior are probably fin du siècle dernier owners John and Elizabeth Carmichael-Ferrall and their son.

Many of the Big Houses of Ireland were plain boxy houses. Elizabeth Bowen’s family home in County Cork is a famous example. Cecil Manor, a neighbouring estate to Augher Castle, is another house with strong perpendiculars. Parapet free, hipped roofs rest on a distinctive dentilled cornice. It was designed by the architect William Farrell who had a flourishing country house and church designing practice in the first half of the 19th century. The photograph shows the magnificent backdrop of Knockmany Mountain. It was demolished in the 1930s.

Last but very much not least is the incredibly dotty Roxborough Castle, a Château Chambord by the Bann. The scale is as barmy as the design. Located outside Moy in County Armagh, it was the seat of the Earls of Charlemont. The original 18th century house can be seen in the Georgian glazed recessed portion of the entrance front. Architects William Murray then William Barre transmogrified the house into an enormous hotel like building with chunky four storey towers topped by steeple gradient roofs. The IRA burned Roxborough Castle in 1922, not a good year or indeed decade when it comes to architectural conservation.

Tynan Abbey was situated 18 kilometres south of Roxborough Castle. It was a large Gothic country house belonging to the Stronge family. Church like architecture included a spire rising over one end of the long garden front. The photograph shows a formal terrace dotted with yew trees – which have long been associated with graveyards. In one of the most infamous cases of The Troubles, Sir Norman Stronge and his son James were shot dead in their library by the IRA in 1981 and the house set ablaze. Tynan Abbey stood as a ruin until 1998 when it was demolished in its entirety. The site is now a featureless field devoid of architectural marvels.

The last image in John McGie’s book Photographs of Armagh and Tyrone Scenery is a view of a lake. An archivist has scribbled on the side “Camlough?” In the foreground are two well dressed gentlemen getting ready to row a small boat. In the background, is a high gabled single storey with attic lodge. A porch projects towards the lake. Pure tranquillity. Camlough Lake is a popular tourist attraction, a picturesque narrow strip of water 2.7 kilometres long and only less than half a kilometre at its widest point.

The Church of Ireland Board of First Fruits funded a glebe house at Fenagh, County Leitrim, in 1829. This two storey over raised basement stone building is of a type that pops up all over Ireland in the ultimate years of the Georgian period. The elevational drawing shows a mid storey landing roundheaded window: the executed arrangement regularises it into a ground floor window and first floor window matching the rest of the rectangular openings on the rear elevation. Fenagh Glebe House is three bays wide; these ecclesiastical dwellings are almost always three or four bays wide. Reverend George de la Poer Beresford, to give him his full name, was a relative of the owner of Curraghmore in County Waterford.

A mid 20th century photograph of Moynalty Glebe House in County Meath shows it to be in a poor state of repair. The entrance door of this well proportioned two storey over raised basement house is set in a chamfered bay window. Similar to Fenagh Glebe House, it has a tall grouped chimneystack, but is an earlier version of the Board of First Fruits clerical house model, dating from 1792. Moynalty Glebe House has been restored in recent years, the render painted a deep grey, and was sold in 2014 for €550,000. It cost £847 to build. The sale included the 275 square metre house, nine hectares of pasture, a gatelodge and a courtyard of stables and outbuildings.

Lismullen House (as it is spelt on the photograph labelling although more commonly Lismullin) in County Meath was the seat of the Dillon family. Presumably it is the Dillons who are playing archery in the faded photograph. The main block had a five bay three storey entrance front. Intriguingly, two storey Ionic pilasters just about visible on this front presumably once formed part of a tetrastyle portico. The IRA burnt Lismullen House along with its furniture and art in 1923. A Sir Joshua Reynolds painting was one of the few belongings the elderly Sir John Dillon and his family were able to rescue, cutting the canvas out of its frame. There is a metaphor lurking there about not seeing the whole picture.

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The Wallace Collection Marylebone London + John O’Connell

Quotes of Armour

Despite being a Sèvres urn’s throw from London’s Oxford Street, The Wallace Collection at Hertford House always radiates an air of calm and civility. Perhaps it’s the sylvan setting of Manchester Square. Maybe it’s the muted acoustics of the Courtyard Restaurant. But most likely it is the dignity – even with some daring moments – of the interiors that secures this aura of being far from the madding crowd. The latest room in the former home of the Victorian collector Sir Richard Wallace to shine once more is the Great Gallery. It’s December 2014 and John O’Connell, Founder and Director of John J O’Connell Architects, is about to give a private tour of The Wallace Collection. The municipal museum is once more a sumptuous townhouse. Over to John:

“Sir Richard Wallace planned the internal spaces around the main staircase which has a balustrade from the Hôtel de Nevers in Paris. In principle, each room is enhanced to stress the domestic or private mansion aspect of the main house. For example interconnecting doors between rooms have been reinstated and indeed in the Study we have introduced an entirely new false door to visually balance the existing doorway on the other side of the fireplace. Our main purpose is to provide an augmented setting for the Collection. It is not about re-creating rooms as they were, no, but rather re-presenting them for today’s visitors and scholars. The colour of the Dining Garden Hall is a quieter silver grey. You can’t have hectic colours all the time! Curtains should cascade and be three dimensional: they should come forwards and backwards.”

“This is the size of a city block, the Great Gallery, so it’s an extraordinary beautiful room and what we’ve done is gone and looked at the archived photograph of the room as it was with this lovely laylight which had to be abolished at a certain moment and now with modern technology we can again have this great laylight. This is where you have studio glazing at the top of the roof and it in turn lets light down onto this magnificent daylight so in other words it has a huge amount of natural light falling into the room.”

“It’s not wallpaper on the walls. It’s the most wonderful possible fabric, silk, and it’s not just damask, it’s a brocatelle, so it’s got even more silk in it! I think that to, as it were, bring the gallery forward into the modern age, you need to get the best possible conditions: lighting, climate control, security, fire safety compliance, decorative effects, so you can bring all of that into this great space. You could only do that if you go right back and lift the roof off because that’s what happened here. You see, the entire roof of the Great Gallery was taken off and what we have here is a whole new room within the gallery space because this has the technology almost of a railway terminal, when you see the supporting structure, and yet inside it is so beautiful.”

“Architectural features must do at least three jobs. The oculi in the latticed cast plasterwork punch through the cove: vertical stop, start, stop, start, all the way round the room. They also let more light into the room and act as the return path for the air conditioning. Reinstating wainscoting has curatorial importance. The paintings come to life against coloured fabric above the dado rail and the light coloured wainscot is appropriate as a backdrop to furniture. The gilt fillet of the wainscot is more pronounced than in the preceding galleries. If it was too small it would look titchy; if it was too over the top it would look bonkers. The wainscot must flow along. The Great Gallery enshrines everything we have learned during our 19 years working at the Collection. Everything bar the floor is new.”

“I think first of all The Wallace Collection is so multifaceted, the armour, then of course furniture, particularly Boulle, as an architect we love Boulle furniture, this is what we really want! The great thing is here the parameters are set. You can move everything but you cannot acquire and you cannot dispose which is marvellous, so it’s like a game of chess all the time. Everything is of equal importance. The placement of objects is just so important.”

Earlier that year Country Life had featured the Great Gallery in its 10 September edition hailing the “triumphant revitalisation”. The hang has long been recognised as one of the world’s best displays of Old Masters. Only two of the principal galleries attached to aristocratic London townhouses survive: Apsley House in Piccadilly and Hertford House. But it was John’s work which really enthralled the magazine. Michael Hall writes in Gallery Tour: The Great Gallery at The Wallace Collection:

“The present restoration – which forms a climax, but not the conclusion, of a comprehensive programme of refurbishment of the galleries begun under The Wallace’s former Director Dame Rosalind Savill in 2000 – has been paid for by a single donation of £5 million by the Monument Trust, in memory of the Honourable Simon Sainsbury, a major donor to The Wallace and a former Trustee. As with the other galleries, the design work has been carried out by John O’Connell Architects.”

“At first glance, it may seem that nothing has changed, but, in fact, almost everything has. Even the gallery’s two doors, at the far ends of the south wall, are not in their original places. They were formerly close to the corners of the room, creating a dead space in the angle; now that they have been moved closer together, there is room to hang large pictures on either side of them. In the 1978 to 1982 restoration, the walls were hung with a coral coloured fabric, which, by 2012, had faded. It has been replaced by a small patterned crimson damask woven by Prelle in Lyon.”

“Inspired by the great Victorian private picture galleries of London – continuing a tradition that goes back to the 17th century – it provides a satisfyingly rich and deep toned backdrop to the paintings. The main seat furniture in the room, an early Louis XVI set of chairs and settees, has been reupholstered to match. One subtle but striking improvement is the addition of a chair rail and dado, which the room had never possessed before. This anchors the furniture to the setting, but, more significantly, provides a strong architectural base for the hang of the paintings, preventing any feeling that they are floating on these huge walls.”

“Most impressive of all is the coved ceiling. An entirely new design by John O’Connell, it reintroduces indirect sunlight by means of oval laylights in the cove and a large laylight in the centre of the room. This has been made possible by advances in air conditioning technology: the new system installed as part of the refurbishment is very much smaller than its 1978 to 1982 predecessor. Daylight brings the room alive, and lends sparkle to the paintings, enhanced by an entirely new lighting scheme – predominantly LEDs – by the engineers, Sutton Vane Associates.” Michael Hall describes the Great Gallery as “one of London’s greatest rooms”.

Ros was Director from 1992 to 2011. Her appointment was approved by Prime Minister John Major because The Wallace is a national museum. She had the dual task of creating the optimal 21st century museum visitor experience and meeting the expanded expectation of the Government. Ros breathed light and life into the museum, excavating the basement and glazing over the courtyard. Two temporary exhibition galleries, a theatre, a learning studio, a library, a meeting room and rows of individual bathrooms were inserted into the basement. The new spaces combine the practical with the scholarly. Most of all, Ros wanted the objects to sparkle and to bring a new domestic intimacy to the staterooms. And so she called upon John and together they embarked upon the golden age of transformation – at pace. Visitor numbers more than doubled.

At her Memorial Service in St Marylebone Anglican Church in May 2025, the Reverend Canon Dr Stephen Evans said, “Rosalind is not only renowned for her services to the study of ceramics, but also someone once described as ‘the most distinguished woman museum director of the western world’. Not only the keeper who transformed The Wallace Collection. A trusted advisor. A wise, exciting and imaginative teacher. An engaging meticulous writer whose public service was enlivened by ebullience, verve and passion.”

It’s August 2025: asparagus and feta mousse followed by orange and poppyseed cake are being served in the Courtyard Restaurant. A time for reflection in and on and about a monumental cultural legacy. The late great Dame Rosalind Savill was an inspirational scholar of European decorative arts, a visionary museum director, and a human being of such intelligence, empathy and grace. She called John “my genius architect”. His practice would later be responsible for redesigning major country house estates such as Montalto in County Down. What Ros and John achieved together at The Wallace Collection remains a touchstone of excellence for museums everywhere. Dancing to the music of time.

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St Pancras Renaissance Hotel + Victor Garvey at The Midland Grand Dining Room St Pancras London

No Rotten Tomatoes

So long ago. Back in 2011, we interviewed Harry Handelsman, the visionary replacing ossification with revivification at the majestic St Pancras Renaissance Hotel. Rewinding 14 years: a Polly Morgan taxidermy of a fox snuggled in a glass dome in the reception is a sign this is no ordinary office block. The Edison Building on Old Marylebone Road is named after the world’s most prolific inventor Thomas Edison. Its 1930s Art Deco exterior has been reinvented by architect David Adjaye who’s cloaked it in his trademark charcoal grey rendering. The client was Harry Handelsman of Manhattan Loft Corporation, the property developer who brought loft living to London before reinventing the Capital’s best Victorian railway hotel.

“This could have been a cool apartment building but I wanted to do something more exciting,” starts Harry. He’s clad in a charcoal grey suit, no tie, sitting in his charcoal grey top floor corner office. So far, so suave. Sliding doors open onto a huge decked terrace. “I called on my friend David. He designed an amazing transformation.” Adjaye Associates now occupy the ground floor of the Edison Building which has filled up with design companies. Munich born Harry worked as a financier in New York before arriving in London in 1984. He soon realised the potential for American style loft living in Britain. “Lofts are the concept behind giving buildings a new lease of life – they’re exciting and wonderful places,” Harry enthuses. He set up Manhattan Loft Corporation in 1992. To date around 1,000 apartments have been completed in the UK and Germany.

“We’ve no concerns about building something new though,” he adds. “Even our first scheme in London – Bankside Lofts next to what is now Tate Modern – was part newbuild. So much other new development seems too simplistic. It needs to be more energetic, more dramatic. We want to give our developments a bit of punch!” There’s nothing unenergetic or undramatic about St Pancras Renaissance Hotel. And it literally has punch – as we will discover later.

Two decades after he brought loft living to London, he’s also the best man to know what’s next in the residential development world of 2011. “High rise apartments. That’s the way things are going,” states Harry. “London is the most exciting city in the world. Development can make such a positive contribution. It’s not all about commerce. Each of our projects is different. An exciting thing is that we can make a positive difference to the cityscape. We are incredibly privileged. My team is second to none, combining creativity and commitment. I wish the planning regime would be simplified but any issues aren’t insurmountable. There’s enough appreciation of design quality. If it was all smooth sailing I wouldn’t have any grey hairs!”

Also in 2011, a busy year, we reviewed the hotel opening for Luxury Travel Magazine. Paris in two hours. Amsterdam in four hours. Lobby in 2.4 minutes. Those are the travel times from the First Class platform of the Eurostar train in London to St Pancras Renaissance Hotel … and so we continued, the excitement lifting off the screen. The motif of the hotel is the peacock which represents rejuvenation – and not just vanity (although with such architectural beauty that would be justifiable). When a peacock loses a feather it grows back perfectly. St Pancras is more like plume replacement. In 1865 Sir George Gilbert Scott won a competition held by Midland Railway to design a hotel for St Pancras Station. The client’s vision was for an understated building. The architect had other ideas.

A Gothic Revival extravaganza, his gargantuan fairytale confection of towers, turrets and terracotta tiles overwhelmed visitors when it opened in 1873, did once again in 2011, and still does in 2025. The verticality of a 72 metre high clocktower is balanced by the horizontality of a sweep of 150 metre wide frontage and the third of a kilometre depth including engineer William Barlow’s railway terminus behind the hotel. If the hotel is all about design and detailing, the terminus with its 800 cast iron columns and 2,000 wrought iron girders is a pure expression of structure and function – the sort of thundering modernity captured on canvas down the line in Joseph Turner’s 1844 Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway.

Sir George’s design incorporated all the latest fittings too: the first lift in a British hotel; the first revolving door in Britain; 40 centimetre thick fireproof walls. The latter was to contribute to its downfall. Time stands still for no architect or builder or hotelier. Not long after it opened, en suite bathrooms became all the rage for grand hotels. Thick internal walls did not adapt well to the insertion of bathrooms. The hotel eventually closed after just 62 years of operation and was downgraded to British Rail offices. It was even threatened with demolition in the 1960s before Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman successfully campaigned for its retention.

This Grade I Listed Building was finally saved by Harry Handelsman. A labour of love, albeit an expensive affair. His company Manhattan Loft Corporation spent £100 million converting the three upper floors to 67 apartments and a further £150 million rejuvenating the remainder of the building back to a hotel. It’s a physical embodiment of joie de vivre. The peacock’s feathers have truly regrown. Such rare and colourful plumage! The original entrance hall is now a bar with a polychromatic corniced ceiling, encaustic filed floors and walls dripping in gold leaf. Upstairs, the Renaissance inspired ceiling of the Ladies’ Smoking Room cost nearly £1 million to restore. It was the first place in Europe where females could acceptably smoke in public. This room now aptly leads onto a smoking terrace (or at least did until the boring ban was introduced).

The St Pancras Railway Terminus designed by engineer William Henry Barlow was – wait for it, another record breaker – the single largest railway structure of its time. The former taxi rank between the railway shed and original hotel (originally the pedestrian entrance to the railway platforms) has been converted into a cavernous glass roofed lobby lounge. The adjacent Booking Office is now a brasserie and bar serving traditional English delights such as quail’s eggs with anchovies. Victorian drinks like Garrick Club Punch and Moonlight White Tea are served on neverending bar. The grand staircase is the interior pièce de resistance. It’s a cathedral of colour with hand painted fleur de lys walls framed by Midland Stone arches and vaults. Exposed structural ironwork under the flights of stair fuses romance and technology. Harry’s workforce even aged the carpet on the dizzying array of fanciful flights of stairs. In 2011, we observed that the limestone pillared Gilbert Scott Restaurant looked positively restrained in comparison. Celebrity Chef Marcus Wareing’s team offered its own take on nostalgic classics such as Queen Anne’s Artichoke Tart and Mrs Beeton’s Snow Egg. The Gilbert Scott Restaurant was the setting of our first lunch with Dame Rosalind Savill, then Director of The Wallace Collection, London’s best museum.

Harry carved 38 bedrooms out of the old building and inserted 207 into a new sympathetically designed extension. Once more, the hotel caters for the demands of five star guests. A subterranean spa occupies the former steam kitchen. Our Luxury Travel Magazine 2011 article ended with Stairway to Seven (Facts). A double storey apartment is housed in the clocktower. English Heritage only allowed a 20 colour palette which includes Barlow Blue and Midland Red. The latter hue has a tomato tinge to it, an augury of our 2025 dinner. On Thursday nights in 2011, DJ Eloise rocked the Booking Office and on Friday nights it was the turn of DJ Zulu. The diamond shape is another motif of the hotel and 725 can be found in the Booking Office.

In 2018, Harry reminisced, “I always knew that St Pancras would be a challenge. The complexity of the structure and the Grade I Listing by English Heritage allowing only minimum intervention in the creation of a 21st century hotel was always going to be difficult. Many of my business compatriots thought that I was mad for undertaking such an ambitious project. At times I thought they were right. It was the sheer excitement and privilege of being given the opportunity and responsibility for this most fascinating building that kept me from desperation.”

That was then and this is now: 2025 to be precise. We’re staying in a modern bedroom of St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, dining in the restaurant and late night drinking in the hotel opposite. Bedroom furniture was graduated by wood when our hotel first opened. The best rooms on the first floor contained pieces made of oak or walnut. Second floor rooms had oak or teak furniture; third floor, mahogany; poor old fourth floor, ash. Decoration is more democratic this time round. Our fourth floor room is elegant simplicity: pattern free, clutter free, bad artwork free. The view is of the British Library, another vast red brick building (designed by Colin St John Wilson in the 1990s) although not quite so beloved as its neighbour. Our two paned rectangular window is set in a Gothic arch on the exterior: contemporary inside, traditional outside. Richard Griffiths’ architecture hits all the right notes. RHWL was the overseeing design practice of the development. Encaustic tiles on the floors of the long bedroom corridors draws the original hotel into the extension which fits neatly between the rear of the hotel and the side of the station.

The Gilbert Scott Restaurant closed in 2021. Two years later, The Midland Grand Dining Room by Patrick Powell (an Irish chef) opened before closing last year. And that brings us to The Midland Grand Dining Room by Victor Garvey (a mostly American chef). His CV includes working at two of the world’s most famous restaurants: El Bulli in Barcelona and Noma Copenhagen. Victor’s maternal grandmother was a personal chef for Charles de Gaulle so it makes sense the rebooted restaurant offers French haute cuisine even before you hop across the Channel on the Eurostar.

“There are only a few times in a chef’s life when they get handed a dining room,” says Victor, “and I’m extremely honoured and privileged and excited to be able to embark on this journey in something like this. The idea behind the menu here stems from respecting tradition but innovating and making it lighter and making it more streamlined and making it more concise and finding a way to tell the story of that incredibly deep French culinary heritage and respecting it but updating it. Old world, new ideas.” The sausage shaped Dining Room has a robust neoclassicism of the mid Victorian muscularity ilk befitting its original use as the Smoking Room. The Midland Grand isn’t the only French newcomer in town: a week later we will venture to the wildly popular Joséphine Bouchon in Fulham for cabillaud au beurre blanc à l’é chalote. Chef Claud Bossi of Bibendum South Kensington fame is once again putting the Lyon into lyonnaise in the English Capital.

Tick tock. It’s Pimm’s O’Clock on the Champagne Terrace (we’ve worked up a thirst strolling through the wetland habitat of Camley Street Park). One of London’s hidden gems, the Champagne Terrace is perched below the back of the hotel entrance tower and looked down on from the modern bedroom wing. Oysters are only to be consumed in months with an R and Pimm’s are only to be downed in months without an R. James Pimm’s recipe of liqueurs and herbs remains a warm weather winner 185 years after it was trademarked. In The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982), Peter York and Ann Barr order, “May: at the first sign of summer, Pimm’s.” But no accompanying oysters.

We’re all on for tenuously excused partying and it doesn’t come much better than the 5.05pm Punch Ritual in the Booking Office for guests to celebrate the 152nd anniversary of the original hotel opening. It’s a few days off the actual date (5 May) but we don’t fuss about detail. Historic fountain penned letters from the hotel’s archives are shared while the sommelier stirs his cauldron of elixir. We’ve barely ordered more drinks in the main hotel bar when we’re ushered to our window table in The Midland Grand Dining Room. Oh the anticipation! The à la carte caters for the carnivorous so our waitress suggests vegetarian alternatives. In between pretty amuse bouches and freshly baked bread we’re served a sliced tomato starter and a diced tomato main. We’re all on for retaining our Parisian waistlines. Minimalist plates in maximalist architecture. Pudding is l’Opéra which turns out to be a delightfully deconstructed coffee cake.

A quick dash across the road and we’re soon zooming up 11 storeys in the external lift of The Standard Hotel to Sweeties bar for Power Play cocktails (Belvedere Vodka, Dry Vermouth, Sweeties Savoury Brine). We skip the Bloody Marys: enough tomato for one day. Sure enough, against a darkening pink sky, St Pancras Renaissance Hotel looms in all its pinnacled silhouetted glory. But it’s not over till the fat lady sings or the slim girl walks: before stepping onto the First Class Eurostar to post paschal pastures anew in Paris we’re off to Lightroom (a Louboutin’s throw from the hotel and Central St Martin’s Art College) for a Vogue installation. A tomato red Mercedes roars up and the fashion artist Dame Mary Martin emerges to join us – from the hemline to the frontline of fashion. So now.

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WOW!house 2025 + Design Centre Chelsea Harbour London

Always

It’s the perfect single storey neoclassical villa. And there’s just one month to experience it. “The façade draws on early Georgian architecture amplified in a Chelsea London context,” explains Darren Price, a Design Director at Adam Architecture. “Its refinement embraces contemporary minimalism and reinterprets the language of classicism in a way that feels both timeless and relevant to modern sensibilities. The neoclassical design relies on lines and arches rather than columns and pilasters.”

WOW!house is back in the Design Centre Chelsea Harbour for another year to inspire, educate and thrill. One of several new elements is a Town Garden designed by Alexander Hoyle and delivered by Artorius Faber. Stone materially links Adam Architecture’s façade and the garden: a Portland limestone plinth; reclaimed sandstone cobbles and walling; and reclaimed flagstones for the portico and arcades flooring. Walking through Darren’s portico, under the oculus in the Soaneian pendentive dome, over the corresponding tiled circle, leads into a procession of eight rooms, a Courtyard, 10 further rooms and onwards and outwards to a Grand Terrace. It’s like wandering through a stationary Venice Simplon-Orient Express with side carriages. International collaborations of interior designers, architects, design brands and suppliers stimulate the senses. Even smell: each room has its own dedicated Jo Malone London fragrance from Pomegranate Noir to Red Roses.

Victoria Davar of Maison Artefact perfectly captures a sense of arrival in the Entrance Hall sponsored by Cox London. A five metre ceiling height adds an extravagance of volume allowing for a floating staircase to spiral up towards an imaginary upper room. Victoria reckons, “We have designed a modern day cabinet of curiosities including a cast bronze and iron chandelier from Cox London.” A Robert Adam plaster frieze from Stevensons of Norwich draws on the neoclassicism of the façade. In contrast, Chad Dorsey’s members’ clubby Drawing Room, sponsored by Fromental, is Arts and Crafts. Fromental’s Kiku wallcovering wraps the room (and ceiling) in panels of stylised chrysanthemums and sunflowers. Chad continues the nature theme with Kyle Bunting’s chequerboard leather rug featuring birch and wheat emblems.

“The Phillip Jeffries Study is designed to be visually compelling but also should enhance the way someone lives and interacts with their environment,” suggests Staffan Tollgård. The Creative Director of Tollgård selected a striking abstract artwork formed of slices of oak and paulownia wood as a wallcovering by Phillip Jeffries. Another cosy space is the Nucleus Media Room designed by Alex Dauley. This Myrrh and Spice Jo Malone London aroma filled cocoon is swathed in Zinc Textile’s suede wallcovering and incorporates Nucleus’ seamless home automation.

“A space to intrigue, inspire and spark conversation,” is how Spinocchia Freund describes The Curator’s Room. The designer has a commitment to working exclusively with women. She collaborated with Ashley Stark, Creative Director of the room’s sponsor Stark, on a bespoke rug. Spinocchia explains, “This rug is a celebration of 87 powerful creative women such as Élisabeth Garouste, Zaha Hadid, Charlotte Perriand, Faye Toogood and Vanessa Raw. Their names are woven into it. My biggest issue was deciding who to include as there were so many suitable names!”

Tommaso Franchi of Tomèf Design collaborated with three of Italy’s leading heritage brands for the Primary Bedroom. Fabric house Fortuny, rattan furniture company Bonacina, and Venetian glass masters Barovier and Toso have all contributed pieces to a room embracing Italian craft. A Primary Bedroom that could be in Venice or Verona is not complete without some Murano: a Tomèf designed coffee table contains a collection of objets d’art made from offcuts of Barovier and Toso’s Murano glassware. Alisa Connery of 1508 London based the House of Rohle Primary Bathroom on reflection, ritual and reverie. The fluid shape of the freestanding bath and standalone shower by the room’s sponsor embodies the energy and movement of water.

Hurrah, Treasure House Fair has come early this year! Or at a least a foretaste has popped up. The Season fixture is Daniel Slowik’s Morning Room sponsor. The interior designer and antique dealer sourced furniture, paintings and objets d’art from contributors to the Treasure House Fair. Daniel’s imaginary client Richard Wallace. The 19th century art collector’s London home, Hertford House in Marylebone, is now The Wallace Collection. This museum and art gallery was reinvented by the brilliant symbiotic force of the late Director Dame Rosalind Savill and the neoclassical architect John O’Connell. A Bardiglio marble chimneypiece by Jamb provides a focal point for the Treasure House Morning Room. Set pieces include a George III pedimented bookcase from Ronald Philipps and a portrait by the 18th century artist Maria Verelst from Philip Mould.

The second of three (or is it four?) open spaces at WOW!house, the Perennials and Sutherland Courtyard designed by Goddard Littlefair combines the best of Andalusian gardens and Moorish architecture. Jo Littlefair compliments Perennials and Sutherland’s technological advancement, “Their outdoor Crescent furniture uses powder coated aluminium as a finish. It’s perfect in hotter climates because the coating has good thermal stability.” The Sims Hilditch Courtyard Room is firmly back on British soil. Country house specialist Emma Sims Hilditch has created a very smart behind the green baize door space. A coffered ceiling and antique furniture elevate this space from back of house to front of courtyard. A dog room and a boot room are set behind glazed internal partition walls in two corners of the Courtyard Room.

The perfect neoclassical villa must contain at least one fourposter bed and American Alessandra Branca comes up trumps with the Casa Branca Bedroom. Drawing on eclectic sources from David Hicks to Lee Radziwill, the sponsor and designer’s own brand of textiles, wallpapers and furniture fill the room. A border stripe framing curly motifs wallpaper is echoed in the striped bed curtains. Murano vases provide hints of Alessandra’s Italian heritage.

“It all began with a pair of taps,” reveals Samuel Heath, the exclusive bathware designer and manufacturer sponsoring the Bathroom by Laura Hammett. The stepped profile, chamfered corners and bronze finish of the new taps could belong to only one style of full bathroom design: Art Deco. “This year is the centenary of l’Exposition des Arts Décoratifs à Paris which launched Art Deco,” Laura relates. “We are really reimagining the 1920s style with gusto and have included a San Marino marble rolltop bath and matching double vanity unit.”

No world class display of interiors is complete without the Pre Raphaelite tour de force that is Kelly Hoppen CBE. Her moody Living Room, sponsored by Visual Comfort and Company, is all that is to be expected from the design powerhouse. She confirms, “Visual Comfort’s collection gave us the freedom to create atmosphere and rhythm through lighting.” Kelly has selected an earthy palette of rich brown, terracotta and muted neutrals. Vintage furniture sits cheek by jowl with bespoke pieces. She notes, “The Living Room blends asymmetry, history and personal storytelling.”

Curvature is a theme of the interiors and reaches a geometric climax in the Dedar Library by Pirajean Lees which is encircled by bookcases. Designers Clémence Pirajean and James Michael Lees discovered something they have in common with the cutting edge (no pun) fabric house of Dedar: a love of music. A440 Hz, the tuning standard of musical instruments before a concert, provides an unlikely source of inspiration for patterns in the painted dome ceiling and the rug made by Jennifer Manners. A pitch perfect room. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges imagined Paris as a library. And as the American journalist Maureen Callaghan warns, “If you ever go back with someone after a night out and they’ve no books in their home, run! Run!”

Drummonds backed Nicola Harding’s jewel box inspired Powder Room. The Art Deco style collection includes a marble top vanity and storage units reflected in antiqued mirrors in a glazed ceramic tiled setting. “For the Powder Room you have to be more dramatic,” Nicola opines. “It’s a space where you’re likely to be alone so it can be an escape. We wanted to create an intoxicating atmosphere rich with colour and texture.” The colourway includes ruby, turquoise and jade. In contrast, Toni Black of Blacksheep uses a palette of soft blush, terracotta and taupe for her Home Bar. The scheme is centred on Shepel’s handmade joinery and furniture. A curvaceous bar follows the rounded rectangle room shape.

“The application and finish of the paint is paramount to the finished look and feel of any room, so we’re thrilled to work with Benjamin Moore, the best paint brand out there,” exclaims Peter Mikic, the designer of the Dining Room. A vast abstract artwork by Billy Metcalfe and trompe l’oeil panels by Ian Harper – using Benjamin Moore paint of course – provide sweeps of colour across the walls. Vintage Lucite leopard skin fabric metal framed dining chairs contrast with a circular dining table bejewelled with semi precious stones made by Kaizen.

Atmospheric lighting is another theme of this villa so who better than Hector Finch to sponsor the Thurstan Snug? “We were inspired by Hector’s enthusiasm for designing and crafting his lighting,” says the room’s designer James Thurston Waterworth, Founder of interiors practice Thurstan. “So we imagined a practical creative space where he could draft sketches, test samples and immerse himself in books.” Blue lime plaster walls painted with marble dust bound by varnish and a d’Ardeche parquet floor bring rich patinas to the Snug.

Ben Pentreath Studio is one of King Charles’ favourite architectural design companies. The Studio’s Rupert Cunningham, Leo Kary and Alice Montgomery have come up with the Kitchen built by Lopen Joinery which would definitely persuade Queen Camilla to don her cooking apron. Grecogothik is a novel portmanteau the team jokingly use to describe the genre of this unfitted room. Octagonal shaped cabinet legs reflect the shape of the octagonal rooflight. Art should be in every room in the house and paintings in the Kitchen include Tallisker Isle of Sky bye by John Nash (Paul Nash’s younger brother, not the architect).

His Majesty would certainly enjoy the Garden Terrace designed by Randle Siddeley which leads off the Kitchen. This exotic garden under the glass sky of the Design Centre Chelsea Harbour is filled with lush planting and framed by formal trellis in the style of an orangery. Randle believes, “The Garden Terrace is an immersive escape where one can pause, entertain and connect with nature.” Bespoke aluminium outdoor furniture by the space sponsor McKinnon and Harris includes scalloped dining chairs and an Italianate table. Mental note: every space deserves a crystal chandelier. Things get really wild … in the same collaborators’ Secret Garden filled with Oxenwood outdoor furniture.

This year, WOW!House truly is La Nouvelle Exposition des Arts Décoratifs de Londres. WOW!House 2025 deserves its own chapter in the sequel to Peter Thornton’s 1984 authoritative tome Authentic Décor The Domestic Interior 1620 to 1920.

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Le Littré Hotel + Left Bank Paris

Rêve Parisien

Nos jours. The late great chanteuse Marianne Faithfull latterly lived in a lateral apartment on Boulevard du Montparnasse. She once shared, “I have some lovely paintings and photographs and furniture. All things that have been passed down by my family. But actual decorations are absurd!” Hôtel Le Littré is on a quiet side street off the southern end of Boulevard du Montparnasse, under the shadow of the famous Montparnasse Tower.

Rue Littré fortunately isn’t named after rubbish but rather the multihyphenate Émile Littré. This politician, philosopher and linguist Left Banker fulfilled his aptronym by writing an etymological dictionary, published in 1841. A few copies of the Littré Dictionary are in the Winter Garden of the hotel which opens onto that most Parisian of spaces – the courtyard. There has been a hotel behind the Haussmann façade of 9 Rue Littré since 1967. Full French breakfast is served in the lower level dining room.

Keeping to the literary theme, the hotel stocks Le Littré News (April 2025 edition) and La Gazette de Littré (timeless edition). One of the recommendations in Le Littré News is for a restaurant across the road from the hotel called Le Petit Littré. Jean-Baptiste Bellecourt opened the restaurant in 2012. On a rainy Saturday evening, it’s at full capacity. The convivial owner explains that the waiter cut his hand earlier and had to go home. So Jean-Baptiste is acting as receptionist, maître d’, waiter, sommelier … a one man machine (presumably there’s a chef hidden away somewhere). Dinner of risotto and Tarte Tatin is an essay on perfect French cuisine.

“Madame de Pompadour ate four meals a day: breakfast, dinner, a late afternoon snack (goûter) and supper,” the much missed Dame Rosalind Savill records in her 2022 double volume literary masterpiece Everyday Rococo: Madame De Pompadour and Sèvres Porcelain. Madame de Pompadour would have adored the French fries and shrimp parcels lunch in a casual café on Boulevard du Montparnasse.

A short stroll past the glasshouses of Jardin Botanique de l’Universitie Cité leads to Jardin du Luxembourg. The world and its beautiful partner are playing boules, sunbathing, promenading. All 25 hectares are brimming with life. The ghost of Louis XIII’s mother, the Regent Marie de’ Medici, must be looking down in wonder at the bourgeois from her top floor bedroom in the 17th century Palais du Luxembourg. The balustrades and pedestals and statues and urns are all still very recognisable from John Singer Sargent’s 1879 painting In the Luxembourg Garden.

Getting ever closer to the River Seine, past the scent of Goutal perfumery (a modern day maker of myrrh), is the city’s third largest church: St Sulpice. Construction of Daniel Gittard’s neoclassical design began in 1646 and its 21 chapels were decorated over the following decades as the architecture evolved. Most splendid of all is the Virgin Chapel started by Giovanni Nicoli Servandoni in 1777 and completed 48 years later by Charles de Wally. “She was perfectly in tune with the rococo period in which she lived, and enabled it to evolve and flourish,” Ros comments. Madame de Pompadour would feel very at peace under the rococo golden dome of the Virgin Chapel.

A visit to San Francisco Books literally continues the literary theme.

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Lavender’s Blue + 1,000 Articles

Upward We Fly

The Tuamgraney born London based novelist Edna O’Brien once remarked, “There’s a very interesting thing about memory and exile. It is only when you leave someone or something that the full power if you like, the performance of it is in you, it’s inside you. So separation brings the emotions and ultimately a book. I think a book is the accumulation of emotions written in a particular, hopefully musical, way. It’s a beautiful feeling actually; it’s like the whole influx of something that is stronger than memory. Of course, it’s memory but you’re back in it, not writing it secondhand. Again, that counts for a certain derangement.”

It all started with Cliveden. In September 2012, we received an invitation to stay in the Berkshire hotel but as hard copy publications back then were disappearing faster than Veuve Cliquot at one of our soirées, we came up with the idea of publishing an article online. And so Lavender’s Blue was born. The name has triple derivation after our home (“Your house is so cinematic!” declares film director Stephan Pierre Mitchell), our location and the song by Marillion. Before long, every PR in London and further afield learned we always turn up, give good party, and even better copy. Although five parties in one day starting with an 11am Champagne reception for New York thinker John Mack in the Rosewood Hotel was pushing it even by our standards. Actually, it all really began in April 1995 with a column House of the Month in Ulster Architect magazine, edited and published by the bold and brave and brilliant Anne Davey Orr. But that’s a whole other story.

While most events are one-offs, from a vanishing crystal coach at Ascot to a vanishing guest on the Orient Express, others would become annual events. If the preview of Masterpiece (in Royal Hospital Chelsea grounds) was an early summer hit each year, the Boutique Hotel Awards (in Merchant Taylor’s Hall) would quickly become a midwinter highlight. Fortunately Masterpiece has been replaced by The Treasure House Fair and WOW!house and we’ve landed ourselves on their preview lists. We’re also proving a hit at the annual International Media Marketplace.

Behind the curtain. That’s our forte. And we don’t just mean peeping round the iron variety (think Gdańsk). We’re not only through the gates: we’re over the threshold. We gain access where others dare not tread. If it’s an Irish country house, we’ll stay with the owners and explore the cellars and attics – preferably when they’re tucked up in their fourposter (Temple House). We’ll pop into the kitchen to see what’s really going on whether in Le Bristol or Comme Chez Soi. We’ll talk to the lady of the manor and a millworker (Sion Mills). Sometimes it takes a village to raise an article: in Castletownshend the fun began over breakfast at The Castle continuing through public houses and private houses up Main Street before ending back in The Castle by dawn.

If “design” is the mauve thread that sews Lavender’s Blue together, “celebration of life” is our way of banishing anything mentally blue. Illuminated by art and architecture, fashion and the Divine, we’re mad for life, channelling that literary derangement. But if it ain’t good, it don’t appear. Simple. At the opposite end of the spectrum, some events are far too private to be published such as an impresario salon recital in one of London’s grandest houses surrounded by more Zoffanys than The National Gallery owns while sampling the owners’ South African wine cellar. Or a party in Corke Lodge, County Wicklow, with more diplomats per square metre than Kensington Palace Gardens being serenaded by the Whiffenpoofs on the folly gladed lawn.

Lavender’s Blue is all about places and people so we rarely do personal. You won’t read how we were catastrophically frogmarched out of The Lanesborough (too much catwalking) or categorically told to pipe down in Launceston Place (too much caterwauling). Or the full story of hijinks with the model Parees which one friend described as sounding like an escapade from an Armistead Maupin short story. Original writing and original photography – and occasionally original drawing (from a two minute sketch of Mountainstown House to a 10 hour floor plan of Derrymore House) – are our creative cornerstones. We never plagiarise except from ourselves: to quote from one of our most read articles, Beaulieu House, “Lavender’s Blue is the brilliant coated edition of universal facts, riveting mankind, bringing nice and pretty events.” We’ll coin the odd phrase too from “Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder” to “You can’t be this fabulous and not make a few enemies!”

What’s our literary style? Well we’re not paid up members of Plain English for starters. Lord Wolfe would blanche at such opening gambits as, “There’s nothing standard in The Standard” or “Mary Martin London fashion is more than an antinomic macédoine: it is a semiotic embrace of science and conviction made manifest in materiality, tactility and sartorial disruption”. There are a quarter of a million English words to choose from (compared to a mere 100,000 in French and a meagre 85,000 in Chinese) so why reach for simplicity when you can stretch the lexicon? We don’t like to namedrop but as Daphne Guinness shared with us about her lyrics at a party in Notting Hill, “There are some words I just really like the sound of!” A picture tells 1,000 words and sometimes we’ll deliver 1,000 words and 1,000 pictures. But how can you keep the shutter open when you’re cherishing Chatsworth or roaming round Rochester? We’re not just about obvious glitz and glamour. So we frequent Hôtel Meurice in Paris and Hôtel Meurice in Calais. We’ve explored Georgian Bath and Georgian Dover. Doubling down on clichés is avoided except in derision while downing Chapel Down south of the Kent Downs.

How long does an article take to prepare? Some flow with automatic writing on a commute or in bed or in the bath in almost unconscious reverie. Others take decades. Mourne Park House started with a memorable visit in 1992 (the boathouse collapsed and gracefully slid into the lake mid morning coffee) and continued with return visits up to 2021 (by then the house was badly burnt). Crevenagh House was photographed over two decades in every season from heavy snow to scorching sunshine. We visited Gunnersbury Park four times over a London heatwave to capture it morning, noon, evening, and after supper. We also vacationed at Murlough four times, Irish Sea hopping in search of elusive sunlight. Montevetro and Marlfield both first appeared in Ulster Architect before being resurrected on Lavender’s Blue. Marlfield is the work of genius architect Alfred Cochrane with later lodges by the talented Albert Noonan. And on that note, John O’Connell’s work (Montalto) and tours (Ranger’s House) have added an abundance of sparkle to Lavender’s Blue.

We’re always up for top drawer collaborations: polo in Buenos Aires; the Government in Montenegro; Audi in Istanbul; Boutique Hotels Club in Bruges; Guggenheim in Bilbao; Rare Champagne in Paris. Did we mention Paris? The friendliest city in the world! As long as you’re in the right set, of course. We know our French, spring, red and rings. Oh, and we’re easily dragooned to fashion shows stretching the bailiwick especially when it comes to fashion artist Mary Martin London. Vintage models (Goodwood, Carmen dell’Orefice and Pattie Boyd), modern models (Esther Blakley, Janice Blakley and Katie Ice – all beautiful, all gazelles), royalty (Queen Ronke and Catherine Princess of Wales) and pop star royalty (Heather Small) have all enjoyed Lavender’s Blue exposure. There are even occasional segues into filming (Newzroom Afrika and English Heritage) and the dreaded bashing of ivories (Rabbit).

The current culmination of Lavender’s Blue is an exquisitely printed hardback coffee table book of substance on the Holy Land. The first edition of SABBATH PLUS ONE was an instant sellout at Daunt Books Marylebone. It’s now on the coffee tables of all the best homes – including a certain Clarence House. Oh yes, King Charles III is really enjoying his copy. “Your most thoughtful gesture is greatly appreciated …” So it’s time for the second edition. Same high quality print with a reddish burgundy rather than navy blue hard back hand stitched fabric cover. We’re still gonna vaunt about Daunt. Only the finest. In all the best libraries now, not least earning its stripes at Abbey Leix House and Pitchford Hall. And lobbies: The American Colony Hotel and The Jaffa.

We do love our triple Michelin starred places (L’Ambroisie, Lasarte, Core). Champagne! Foam! Truffle! While most of the restaurants we have visited are still thriving, unknowingly at the time, Lavender’s Blue would become an archive for quite a few. Aquavit, Bank Westminster and Zander Bar, Duddell’s, Farmacy, Galvin at Windows in The Hilton Park Lane, The Gas Station (one of our regular rendezvous with fellow gourmand Becks), Hello Darling, Marcus Wareing’s Tredwell’s, 8 Mount Street, Nuala, Plateau, Rex Whistler at Tate Britain, San Lorenzo, Senkai, Tom Kemble at Bonham’s, and Typing Room all in London have disappeared. So have Scheltema in Brussels, Le Détroit in Calais, The Black Douglas in Deal, The Table in Broadstairs, l’Écrivain in Dublin, Cristal Room Baccarat in Paris, and Forage and Folk in Omagh.

Still, nothing tastes as good as skinny fries. It’s survival of the fattest! Impressive as it was, Embassy Gardens Marketing Suite was never built to last. Erarta Art Gallery, Fu Manchu nightclub (the real Annabel’s!) and The Green and Found gift shop are lost in the mists of time. We’d barely photographed Quinlan Terry’s 35 year old junior common room bungalow at Downing College before the wrecker’s ball entered the site. We’re already missing our perfumer neighbour Sniff.

Even sadder, we have become the repository for final curtain interviews. Min Hogg, Founding Editor of The World of Interiors magazine and Anna Wintour’s first boss, the 9th Marquess of Waterford and the musician Diana Rogers entertained us – and hopefully you – with their end of life witticisms. David George, a reader of our Diana in Savannah article wrote, “I was married to her for 10 years and we were together for more than two decades. When you look in the sky she is the brightest star that you will ever see! I love you sweet middle class princess! Rest in peace, all my love, David.” We featured artist Trevor Newton’s final solo show and fashion designer Thierry Mugler taking his au revoir bow at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs Paris. Now historic photographs of model Misty Bailey appeared on Lavender’s Blue. Lindy Guinness, the last Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, shared thoughts at one of her last townhouse parties full of people one should know like the international tastemaker Charles Plante. Beresford Neill reminisced on early 20th century Tyrella. And of course, two memorial pieces to the much missed Dorinda, Lady Dunleath. The last book launch of Dame Rosalind Savill, the inspirational scholar of European decorative arts and visionary museum director of the Wallace Collection, is another moving memory now frozen in time.

Readers’ comments are always of interest. Standout messages include a painting request to Ballyfin; advice on the best photographic viewing point at Dungiven Castle; revealing a shared love of Mary Delany or the Mitfords; a discussion of the meaning of Rue Monsieur; Samarès Manor relatives trying to contact each other during a Jersey storm; and an unreported baby drowning in a mansion swimming pool in Sandwich Bay. Mount Congreve attracted interesting comments including from James Sweeney who wrote, “I worked in Mount Congreve Estate for many years as a Private Chef to the Congreves. It was a joy and a pleasure and has given me cherished memories. Mr Congreve was an amazing man and I owe him a great deal for his wisdom that he kindly let me benefit from.”

Ewelina from Beauty on the Cliff poetically scribed, “Waterford is my home since 17 years and Mount Congreve was always my soft point. The moment when you enter the place is simply magical. I’ve been inside the house recently, just before yesterday. I was inside of the Blue Wedgwood Room … well … only the pale blue walls and the beautiful but sadly empty china cabinets reminded me about past grandeur of this place. It’s really really heartbreaking to see the empty rooms, stripped from everything … even the curtains … the books all over the floor in the library … totally without the respect for Mr Congreve. I hope that Waterford City Council didn’t forget that was someone else’s home. As Mr Yeats said, ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’ Thank you so much for your review. Kindest regards from Waterford.” Sara Stainsby messaged, “Really interesting essay on Stapleford Park. My great grandparents worked there, my grandmother was born there and was married in the church. In the 70s I visited my great grandparents when they lived in a flat above the stables …” Birthday wishes (Portrait) and restoration concerns (Barden Towers) are always welcome. Even more welcome was a Champers accompanied poem hand delivered to the state dining room (Hartwell House).

There are direct messages too: “I came across your Lavender’s Blue series starting from Auchinleck then Crevenagh House and Tullan Strand. I can see from your McClelland connection that you have an interest in Northern Ireland including Donegal … I found that your articles on architecture address the most erudite, meticulous and expansive aspects of the subject so perhaps the work of James Taylor in late Georgian times will fall beneath the range of your interest in the style and proportions of symmetrical Palladian buildings.” We jumped straight in a car to Islington. Likewise when tipped off about Stockwell Park. A reader enjoyed our “wonderful commentary on various aspects of Ballyshannon … tis wonderful to share your thoughts about my hometown”. We’ll accept high praise from Ireland’s greatest host: “I just love your articles striking notes of deepest erudizione to soprano and coloratura gossip! I’m so glad you were the catalyst to my party and I can’t believe it went so well.”

Amazing Grace Point inspired a declaration of faith: “Lough Swilly and Fort Dunree is one of the most wonderful places in Ireland to visit, and especially to look out across the waters where so many great ships have sailed. But most of all – to ponder the words of Amazing Grace written there by John Newton. His miraculous conversion credited to his mother’s prayers. She never gave up, like my mother, who never gave up but prayed me into the Kingdom.” Messages come from above and down under: “I hope you don’t mind me emailing you but I happened to walk into a beautiful graveyard today in Picton, Australia, and happened to come across this one particular headstone. I was instantly intrigued as my grandparents were from Donegal in Ireland and I wanted to see if this was close? Anyway I just read about Mountjoy Square and when the area become established. I’m not sure but working out the dates I think this couple might have been some of the original inhabitants? I saw an article that you wrote and just wanted to share this with you – you may or may not appreciate it but I wanted to bring this couple home!” They’ve come home.

Artist and art restorer Denise Cook crosses the rare divide from comment provider to content provider sharing her expanse of knowledge from Pink Magnolias to the Rector of Stiffkey. So does Dr Roderick O’Donnell, world authority on all matters Pugin. Another reader turned writer, the ever erudite historian and patron of the arts Nicholas Sheaff, brought Gosford Castle completely (back) to life. “There is really too much to say,” to parrot Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady, 1881. Haud muto factum.

As Reverend Prebendary Andy Rider once quipped, “You do get around.” Amsterdam to Zürich, Brussels to Verona, Channel Island hopping, nowhere is safe from the Lavender’s Blue sagacity filled patrician treatment. As for our favourite place, that’s simple: Bunbeg Beach, especially at 10.30pm on a sun drenched midsummer night. Chronicling our times, we produce the material – and sometimes we are the material. But only when shot by the likes of top cinematographer Mina Hanbury-Tennyson-Choi and shoot the shoot supremo Simon Dutson. Striking a striking pose. Fading grandeur (the interior not the model).

“The whole earth is filled with awe at Your wonders; where morning dawns, where evening fades, You call forth songs of joy,” Psalm 65. Lavender’s Blue is between the bookends of everything that was and is to come. It’s about dealing with things as they are, not as they should be. We’re all about orchestrating a fresh approach, synthesising Baroque stridency with Palladian refinement. Our oeuvre is a sumptuous sequence of artistic compositions. On the frontline, turning to face the light. Mary Oliver always gets it right: Instructions for Living a Life, 2010, “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Thank you to all our readers. Thank you Council Bluffs. In the short now, to pluralise the words of the French Resistance fighter Simone Segouin, “We’d do it all again.”

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Musée Nissim de Camondo Paris + Winter

L’Assez Grand Trianon
It’s time to get MAD (Musée des Arts Décoratifs) and go Camondo. The 4th Edition of the Michelin Guide to Paris (1960) states, “The building and its contents were left to the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs by the Comte de Camondo in 1936, in memory of his son Nissim, killed during the 1st World War. The visit will fascinate amateurs of 18th century furniture and works of art. The museum is arranged as an elegant 18th century home, and is furnished with remarkably sure taste and objects of great beauty.” An explosive profusion of riches.

It’s international art dealer and collector Charles Plante’s favourite house museum. Amsterdam boasts Museum van Loon. Barcelona has Casa Amattler. Lisbon, Medeiros e Almeida House. London, the Wallace Collection. Musée Nissim de Camondo was designed by architect Réne Sergent taking inspiration from Le Petit Trianon in Versailles; it backs onto Parc Monceau in the 8th Arrondisement. In Letters to Comondo, 2021, artist Edmund de Waal describes Parc Monceau as being “… in the English manner with a little lake and bridge and smart flowerbeds full of annual flowers that need to be tended and renewed and weeded so that there are always gardeners head down and meandering paths…”

This three story house built in 1911 to 1914 by divorced financier Moïse de Camondo is separated from the street by a typical Parisian courtyard. The stern steel coloured paint of the casement window frames contrasts with the welcoming honeyed hue of the stone façade. A relatively flat front – a three bay central set back flanked by single bay chamfered links leading to single bay projections – conceals an intricate layout: a butterfly plan spreads out to the rear towards Parc Monceau. This arrangement creates a jigsaw to be filled with geometrically varied rooms within the confines of the external walls.

All three floors are on show from the functional (bathrooms with porcelain sanitaryware by Kula) to the decorative (the Porcelain Room with more Sèvres than a Rosalind Savill book launch) and a collection of salons in between all linked by a fantastical marble staircase hall. The Buste de Négress by sculptor Pierre-Philippe Thomire in the dining room is just one of a myriad pieces of period art. Being here. Doing it. Incessant winter rain emboldens the colour of the stonework, softens the light, intensifies the ambience, creating ghosts in the shadows.

Such beauty from such tragedy. In 1944, Nissim’s only sibling, Béatrice, the last surviving Camondo, and her family were killed by the Nazis for being Jews in 1944. The Camondo family tree was ripped asunder, a dynasty destroyed. The house museum resonates with happier times though. A menu card for déjeuner on the dining room table is dated 2 June 1933: “Melon glacé; Filets de soles Murat; Pouleta pochés à l’estragon; Ris créole; Pièce de boeuf à la gelée; Salade de romaine; Petits pois à la Française; Paillettes au parmesan; Fromage; Granit à la cerise.” Lunch, 11 years earlier…

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Art Design Luxury People

Dame Rosalind Savill + Madame de Pompadour + Sèvres Porcelain + 500 Years of European Ceramics Bonhams London

Reinette  

“Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, 1721 to 1764, became official mistress to Louis XV in 1745. Their patronage of the Vincennes  Sèvres porcelain manufactory, both jointly and individually, ensured its success. Its production is characterised by brilliant colours, daring design and an insatiable pursuit of novelty,” explains Nette Megens, Head of Department of European Ceramics at Bonhams. “Her purchases, which she made regularly, from 1747 until her death, and the factory’s products are the subject of a definitive new book by Dame Rosalind Savill: Everyday Rococo: Madame de Pompadour and Sèvres Porcelain.”

The Bond Street auction house gallery is aglow as Pol Roger Champagne and mince pies are served at an exhibition 500 Years of European Ceramics covering Italian, Meissen, Vienna and Sèvres porcelain to celebrate the book launch on the tercentenary of Madame de Pompadour’s birth. “This exhibition and book launch is organised by Bonhams and The French Porcelain Society,” introduces Nette. “If you’re not a member of the Society, shame on you! Ros wrote a seminal book 41 years ago on The Wallace Collection Sèvres and to her credit it has remained up there with the best of books on the subject. It’s sold out. This new book is of the same canon … ‘Ros’, as she is known to all, is exceptional, generous, charming, persevering and kind.” Addressing the author directly, “You are a demigod of competence darling angel, simply the best; we are all the keenest members of your fan club tonight!”

John Whitehead, authority on 18th century decorative arts and Committee Member of The French Porcelain Society, remarks, “Ros is the greatest scholar blessed with an extraordinary talent for communicating. Her events at the Society are always a sell out and her enthusiasm is infectious.” Back to Nette: “The tone of this book is all about hearing her talk. It feels so personal and lovely … Now it’s time for the Dame!” Dazzling in a Sèvres pink coloured dress, Dame Rosalind Savill discusses her book. She was of course Director of the Wallace Collection London, 1992 to 2011, and is a specialist in French decorative arts, especially Sèvres.

“We are here to celebrate the 300th birthday of Madame de Pompadour. She kept youth on her side, right to her death,” notes Rosalind. Nancy Mitford rhapsodises in her 1968 biography, “Madame de Pompadour excelled at an art which the majority of humans being thoroughly despise because it is unprofitable and ephemeral is the art of living.” Rosalind again, “This book covers her daily routine and what she bought each year in court. The pieces vary from simplicity to embracing the wildest extravagance – a gamut of some of the best ever produced. You can’t help but be drawn into these beautiful but useful pieces. It is their quality, their specialness, that makes them exquisite. The colours are so unbelievable and unlike textiles they haven’t faded. This is the 18th century staring you in the face!” She points out the beauty of one piece decorated with peacock feathers resembling the Christmas street decorations outside on New Bond Street. And the functionality of another: a cup with a deep wide saucer for drinking hot milk in bed. “Madame de Pompadour was worn to a frazzle trying to keep the whole show on the road. Louis XV couldn’t bear not to have her by his side.”

Pierre Arrizoli-Clémentel, Directeur Générale du Châteaux de Versailles, summarises in his Forward to the book, “In these beautiful volumes Rosalind Savill has had the inspired idea of recording the annual calendar of Sèvres manufacture for the marquise’s incessant orders which reveals her true love of French porcelain.” Rosalind entices the reader with her opening line, “Imagine being 23 years old and suddenly isolated in the competitive, combative world of the royal palace of Versailles.” Such an imagination is brought vividly to life in two volumes totalling 1,232 pages weighing 7.5 kilograms. She elaborates, “It is possible to trace her annual purchases from the factory, month by month, revealing how these were often intimately connected to events in her life.” Intriguing chapter subtitles range from Dairies and Milk Mania and Washing, Hygiene and Health to Pets: Dogs, Birds and Other Animals and Letter Writing: Embroidery and Knotting.

The work is polished and academic yet entertaining and full of fascinating anecdotes from “Madame de Pompadour helped make bathing popular” to “She remarked on the King’s tenderness towards his children, though she was critical of their looks”. Rosalind writes movingly of the impact of her female subject’s death: “Louis XV outlived Madame de Pompadour by 10 years, but nothing could replace his 19 year relationship with her. Voltaire wrote of how surprising it was that ‘a beautiful woman should die … in the midst of the most dazzling career in the world.” In the words of Nancy Mitford, “After this a great sadness fell upon the Château of Versailles.” The last paragraph of ‘Everyday Rococo’ sets the scene for the title of these volumes, “She was perfectly in tune with the rococo period in which she lived, and enabled it to evolve and flourish. But mostly she was buying exceptional objects to enhance her everyday life.” Dame Rosalind Savill dedicates her brilliant publication to “my darling daughter Isabella Dove Savill“.