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Hôtel du Petit Moulin Paris + Christian Lacroix

We’re Here for The Ride

“Welcome to the Hôtel du Petit Moulin! We would like to thank you for your confidence and for choosing our hotel during your visit in Paris. Le Marais is full of history, wonderful shops, galleries, museums and restaurants. In fact, the building in which the hotel is set was originally the first Parisian bakery. This is where Victor Hugo would come to buy his baguette! Today, the original shop frontage remains, reminding guests of its former past as a ‘boulangerie’, protected under French Heritage. Make yourself at home, relax and enjoy a quiet drink at the honesty bar open from noon to midnight or head to the spa of our sister hotel, the Pavillon de la Reine, situated in Place des Vosges, just a 10 minute walk away from her and available to all our guests. Have a lovely stay with us.” Luc Guillo Lohan, The Manager.

Heaven’s in the detail and the Hôtel du Petit Moulin delivers from bookmarks and business cards to brass door keys and petite boxes â picorer. Highlights of the room service from Restaurant Chez Nenesse on nearby Rue de Saintonge include entrées: salade des queues de langoustines (Dublin Bay prawn salad); plats: fillets de bar aux fines herbes (sea bass fillet, sauce with fine herbs); and desserts: mousse et sorbet chocolat sauce pistache (chocolate mousse and sorbets with pistachio sauce).

Filling a pair of 17th century buildings which couldn’t be more pre Haussmann Parisian if they tried, the ground floor was once a bar and a street corner bakery. Victor Hugo’s house on Place des Vosges is just around the corner. As Monsieur Lohan notes, the former bakery still retains a hand painted glass shopfront. There are just 17 guest rooms. One bedroom on the rez-de-chaussée. Four on the premier étage. Four on the deuxième étage stacked in the same layout as below. Four stacked on the troisième étage. One on the étage intermédiaire. Three on the quatrième étage. The architecture is full of original quirks from fragments of timber structural beams to windows floating between floors. The interior is absolutely fabulous Christian Lacroix sweetie darling.The haut couture designer clearly had a lot of fun dreaming up this Louis XV on an acid trip décor. The colourful chaos of the montaged découpaged toile de jouy in the main rooms contrasts with the calm of the white marble bathrooms. Top floor Room 402 is the largest guest suite and angles into the street corner with the best views, taking in a sweep of chimneys rising above the buildings lining Rue de Poitou and Rue de Saintonge. The mirrored ceiling provides an altogether different view, not least of the shagpile carpet. “Early to bed, and you’ll wish you were dead. Bed before 11, nuts before seven,” shrieked Dorothy Parker in her short story for The Little Hours for The New Yorker, 1933.

Nowhere does acronyms better than cultural Paris. MAD (Musée des Arts Décoratifs) is hard to beat. MAHJ (Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaisme) is exhibiting Erwin Blumenfeld’s photography. The Festival of (captured Light in the City of Light.

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Architecture Hotels Luxury

Dunbrody House Hotel Wexford + Lord Newborough

Searching for a Title

Dunbrody Park Hotel New Ross Wexford © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

By hook or by crook we will dine at Dunbrody House. Oliver Cromwell, ever the joker in the pack, reputedly quipped he would take Ireland “by Hook or by Crook”. That is, start a-raping and a-pillaging in one of the two villages facing each other across the Waterford Channel. Our mission is more refined – in search of the perfect fish ‘n’ chips. Make that beer battered fish and chips with a scoop of tartar sauce and a shot of green pea in a neoclassical reception room overlooking a sun soaked terrace leading onto landscaped gardens in a country estate.

Dunbrody Park Hotel Garden New Ross Wexford © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Dunbrody House was the gaff of an Anglo Irish family right up to 1996. Let us tell you about the very aristocratic. They are different. They have titles. C’m’ere t’us. The last owner was His Grace the 7th Marquess and Earl of Donegall, Earl of Belfast, Viscount Chichester of Ireland, Baron Fisherwick of Fisherwick and Hereditary Lord High Admiral of Lough Neagh. Known to his friends as “Don”. He was once engaged to Sheilah Graham, then a household name, now a footnote in history. Her story was the ultimate top-of-the-bus on the hard shoulder to back-of-the-limo in the fast lane dream come true. From pleb to sleb.

After a lowly start in London’s East End, she became a West End show girl, then a Hollywood celebrity gossip columnist. Before long Sheilah was skating, skiing and skijoring with the likes of Noel Coward, Dorothy Parker (of “don’t put all your eggs in one bastard” notoriety), Jean Harlow and the Mitford brother. At the party to celebrate her engagement to Don, she met Francis Scott Fitzgerald. Sheilah became the writer’s partner for the last four years of his life as recorded in her 1958 autobiography Beloved Infidel. Wha’s the story? They were the toast of Hollywood, before getting burnt. Don went on to marry Lady Josceline Legge, daughter of the 7th Earl of Dartmouth.

Ireland’s most distinguished auctioneer, Fonsie Mealy, with half a century of experience behind him, recalls the late Lord and Lady Donegall complaining about “forever trying to make ends meet”. Fonsie launched a sale of Dunbrody’s contents in May 1985. “It was such a social occasion. The sides of the large marquee were down as the weather was magnificent. The prices were magnificent too! Stair Galleries of New York spent £240,000 on a suite of bookcases.”

Now a hotel run by superchef Kevin Dundon and his wife Catherine, the architecture of this long low lying house hasn’t changed much since it was built 180 years ago. The central tower of the garden front has been removed and dormers added. Otherwise, the Edwardian country house party atmosphere continues betwixt its well preserved walls. Craic’s almighty. “You must drive round to see Hook Head,” exclaims the maître d’hôtel. “Visiting this peninsula without seeing the lighthouse is like going to Paris and missing the Eiffel Tower, so it is!” With less than Cromwellian perseverance, we decline and sail off on the ferry into the sunset.

Back in London, we catch up with another aristocrat – tenuous link, yes – Lord Newborough, for a topping time at Magazine, the restaurant with a gallery attached (The Serpentine) while enjoying the world’s smallest onion rings. Robert is owner of Rhug Estate (pronounced “Reeg”), one of the largest organic farms and certainly the most ethical in the UK, d’y’ know’d we mean?

“Rhug is our brand,” explains Robert Newborough. “All we are really are farmers from North Wales. My family can be traced back to the 9th century – not me personally. We were good at pilfering, stealing farmland. Slate fortunes fell into the estates followed by mismanagement, divorce, inheritance tax. Our estates rapidly diminished. Then my family acquired Rhug by marriage. Don’t underestimate the importance of a good dowry! Across three estates, we farm 7,000 acres organically and pride ourselves on animal welfare. Rhug Estate supplies to over 20 Michelin star restaurants here and abroad, and over 20 five star hotels.”

Lord Newborough of Rhug Estate © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

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Architecture Country Houses People

Lady Colin Campbell + Castle Goring West Sussex

You Might As Well Live

“Yawnsville, dahling, yawnsville!” Known – among many things – for her catchphrases, Lady Colin Campbell is never ever dull. And she doesn’t tolerate dullness in others. Certainly not in her castle in Sussex, at any rate. “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity,” Dorothy Parker once said. Lady C would give Mrs P a run for her money in the quips department. “Oh do put that on the internet!” winks Her Ladyship. Not an early riser, at least not today, she appears makeup free, her high cheekbones unadorned. Traces of confetti on the driveway suggest it’s been a busy weekend.

“I’m me whatever – I’m not playing for the gallery. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and, as you can see, I’m not dead yet!” Lady C gleefully describes her various fundraising activities as “whoring for Goring”. A stint on one celebrity TV programme famously helped pay for the castle’s dome preservation. “My friend Carla, not being English, thinks outside the box and suggested covering the dome with a layer of cling film and carpet protector.” Very Parkeresque: “Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.” Although when confronted with a 10 metre python in one episode she did exclaim, “I’m not prepared to jeopardise my life for the entertainment industry!”

“Goring Castle was built by the Shelley family for the poet Shelley,” she explains. “It was sold by his wife Mary who, you know, wrote Frankenstein. I saw the potential immediately and I thought it would be possible if I got my Jamaican workers – which I did. I knew what they were capable of – I am Jamaican!” Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in Italy aged 29. The building is a less compact English version of Northern Ireland’s Castle Ward. Dracu Gothic to the north; Greco Palladian to the south. Either the architect John Biagio-Rebecca or the client had adventurously diverse taste. Or maybe bipolar. “It self evidently hedges its bets with no attempt at unity!” remarks Lady C. As Dotty observed, “Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.”

“Let’s whizz round the outside,” enthuses the châtelaine. “The gothic front looks more like the original Arundel Castle than Arundel Castle itself. The horseshoe staircase on the classical front was bought by the former owners, the Somersets, on a trip to Italy. It cost £30,000. That’s £8 million today. Beyond belief! They could’ve just done it up much cheaper! Above the stairs is the beautiful Shelley coat of arms made of Coade stone.”

Alas, Dorothy Parker’s aphorism resonated with the found state of the castle: “The only dependable law of life – everything is always worse than you thought it was going to be.” Nothing that a few million quid wouldn’t fix, though. “I bought the castle three and a half years ago and after the first year moved in. Mid restoration! The east wing collapsed into the wall. I took down the outside bread oven. Hideous beyond belief! There have been times when I wished I could stop,” Lady C recalls, “and there have been times when there has been too much for me to do. It has been frenzied at times – there are neverending demands, neverending things to do, and lots of problems. But I have always enjoyed it.” She benefits from Dotty’s “keen eye and magnetic memory”.

“It’s worth the trouble.

It’s a magnificent building.

It’s absolutely beautiful.

It’s laden with history.”

The castle with its obligatory west wing is a sprawling 1,450 square metres. That’s the size of 16 three bedroom houses. An elegant sitting room framed by Doric columns opens onto the terrace under the external staircase. Above, three interconnecting staterooms span the length of the piano mobile. “Its architect understood light and the light here is just fantastic,” Lady C observes. On cue, late morning sunlight gilds the curve of the oval staircase hall. A family staircase leads up to top floor private apartments for Lady C and her two sons. Hopefully there’s plenty of storage for Her Ladyship’s five tiaras and couture wardrobe. She affirms, “Just because I happen to have come from a privileged background doesn’t mean I’m not human, even though many people may think I’m not!”

Two springer spaniels, Totty and Nicky, follow their owner around the place. “It’s very different when you’ve inherited furniture. Interior designers want to cover everything with the same fabric. So American. I went to school in New York but I’m not a New Yorker! We have a licence for people to get married here. Very pretty, but of course, the weather…” Her mobile rings. Instead of Dorothy Parker’s “What fresh hell is this?” she answers, “Hi honee. Hi, where are you? We’ll get there, my son!” Dima is busy on a computer on the top floor. That’s several storeys and hallways and lobbies and corridors away.

Lady C reflects: “Well I would say that there are times in life when you realise that if you put in the graft you get the reward. Effort requires effort.” It’s the end of Lady Colin Campbell’s bold and brilliant, wild and whacky, fast and furious tour. “Appreciation, my dear,” her eyebrows arching, “is a wonderful thing.” What would Dotty do? “Tomorrow’s gone – we’ll have tonight!” And there’s more from the original New Yorker, “Oh, life is a glorious cycle | A medley of extemporanea.” We step out of the recessed gothic porch into the rest of our lives.