Tag: sir john soane museum

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Architects Architecture Art Country Houses Design Developers People Town Houses

Sir John Soane’s Museum Holborn London + Richard Rogers

Architectural Communication

The extraordinary townhouse that is Sir John Soane’s Museum has played host to many exciting exhibitions drawing synergy from the riveting interiors. Highlights of the last nine years include shows featuring Alcantara (microfibre fabric) and Space Popular (multidisciplinary design practice); Emily Allchurch (artist); William Shakespeare (a certain playwright); and Sarah Lucas (artist). The latest is the first UK retrospective since his demise of the work of Richard Rogers, leading exponent of High Tech architecture. And so, at 13 Lincoln’s Inns Fields two architects who had a passion for materials, light and life meet posthumously.

Will Gompertz, Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum, opens the exhibition: “Rogers Pink completely fits with the vibe of the good weather and also aesthetically fits with the vibe of Soane as next door in the South Drawing Room there is this extraordinary colour field of yellow which is called Turner Yellow – not Turner the painter but Turner the designer – which he very specifically chose and then you’ve got the Rogers Pink in this exhibition. I think Soane would approve of this enormously and also he would have loved Richard as a man. They would have had so much in common.”

“The exhibition started three weeks after I began as Director here and Richard’s son Ab got on the phone and said, ‘Can I come round with an idea?’ He came round and five minutes later we had a show! Ab’s idea was for the Soane to show the first retrospective of Richard Rogers in this country since he sadly passed. And the answer was emphatically yes.”

Ab provides a tour of the exhibition Talking Buildings: “It’s a simple show based on eight pivotal projects across his career. It’s really about this escalating idea how the buildings talk to each other. I think Richard really wanted his architecture to talk to the people, to improve the quality of the citizens’ lives, to celebrate the streets, to get people to look up at the sky, to enjoy the public space and to really look at the responsibility of the building to respond to its uses.”

“This ongoing conversation started with the Zip Up House which is a solution to social housing. It is an object made out of prefabricated units, incredibly well insulated, that can continuously grow and expand. He was looking at sustainable issues before there was awareness of them in 1969. The house he designed for his mother and father also in 1969 creates this very open space where there’s no specific programme and you’re free to play with it as you will. You can roll out of the building and into the grass – it’s very free, almost boundaryless.”

“And that plays into the Pompidou Centre in Paris where 50 percent of the site is given to the public; you see all the services taken from the inside to the outside to free up the programme of the interior. And you can argue that this free programme that exists inside the Pompidou also exists inside the Zip Up House. This escalation goes on and then he creates Lloyds Building – this shining armour sitting in the historical setting of the City of London. They’re both very brave and radical buildings. Lloyds was the youngest building to be Listed in the UK.”

“We go on to the Millennium Dome, a building which was quite controversial at its time although it came in on budget and on time. This huge roof held a world beneath it. The Dome was meant to be up for one year but instead 25 years later like the Eiffel Tower it becomes this icon of the capital. And from there we go back to social housing looking at The Treehouse which is a collection of ‘shoeboxes’ fabricated from cross laminated timber, rapidly assembled as a tower and very low cost. The roof of one becomes the garden of the next creating these ‘shoeboxes’ with free programmes.”

“We see this conversation and idea continue when we finally end up in the drawing gallery which takes us back to the Zip Up House’s very muscular cantilevered box. It is designed like a telescope with a straight line of viewing out to the landscape. Talking Buildings is a quick journey really trying to work around this conversation and Richard’s passion for creating civic architecture which is generous to the citizens and generous to the streets, while trying to provoke the role of the developer and the council to be bigger and more integrated.” This show adds yet another layer of brilliance to the immersive multimedia experience that is Sir John Soane’s Museum.

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Architects Architecture Country Houses Developers People

St Mary’s Church + Stratton Park Micheldever Hampshire

Lord of the Dance

There are neither sharp right angles nor precisely shaped polygons in the domestic architecture of Micheldever – from Church Street to Duke Street and from Rock Lane to Sloe Lane. Timber framed thatched medieval cottages with wonky jettied upper floors wend and weave their way through this chocolate box village. The geometry and materiality of the Parish Church of St Mary, set back from Church Street in sylvan grounds, couldn’t be more different from its neighbours.

Behind the late Perpendicular stone tower of the church is an octagonal brick nave. Battlements over the tower; a hipped slate roof over the nave. There are earlier and later additions in between but these two components form one of the most extraordinary juxtapositions in English ecclesiastical architecture. The patron of the nave rebuilding was the banking Baring family who have two country estates nearby: The Grange and Stratton Park. The architect was George Dance the Younger.

The Barings used the same architect for Stratton Park which was completed in 1806, two years ahead of the nave. George Dance remodelled an existing house in a forceful Greek Revival style. An imposing unfluted Doric portico anchored the nine bay main front into the ground with a misleading appearance of permanence. The first floor was treated as a piano nobile with taller windows. The ground floor was like a raised basement and the second floor like an attic. A generous void to window proportion added to the sense of massiveness of the stuccoed brick exterior. In 1963 owner John Baring, 7th Baron Ashburton, demolished the house. The portico still stands and a modernist brick and glass house was built behind it.

This rearrangement had at least one admirer. “Country houses are seldom built today in the grand manner,” opined Michael Webb in the 12 January 1967 edition of Country Life, “and when they are the result is usually a dispiriting pastiche of an archaic style … The old Stratton Park was built in 1801. It was never a distinguished building, and by the time Mr and Mrs Baring took it over, it was in bad repair and riddled with dry rot. They decided to demolish it and to commission a new house on the same site from Stephen Gardiner and Christopher Knight.”

He doesn’t dance around his subject: “Of the old house, only the impressive Doric portico was worth preserving, and this became the focus of the new composition: a much smaller house, entirely modern in concept and form, but integrated with a fragment of the old, as the new Coventry Cathedral relates to the bomb scarred ruin.”

Conservation architect John Redmill, who died in Dublin in 2024, stated, “Sir Francis Baring Baronet had employed George Dance to reconstruct his country seat at Stratton. This house, only five miles north of The Grange, was built for the Duke of Bedford in 1731 by John Sanderson, and had been partly demolished some years later. Dance had added the first strictly Greek Doric portico to an English country house – in scale and conception a neoclassical landmark.”

A sectional drawing and floor plan of the nave of St Mary’s Church are in the collection of the Sir John Soane Museum. Aged 15, Sir John’s first job was in the practice of George Dance the Younger. The section – complete with preacher in the pulpit – clearly shows the influence of the Ancient Roman Diocletian Baths. Clerestory Diocletian windows light congregants rather than swimmers. The floor plan introduces the executed corner arched recesses of the octagon.

Why a nave in the shape of a Celebrations box of chocolates? The architect was 63 (he would die aged 84 in 1825) when he designed the nave so it wasn’t an experimental flush of youth. It’s a shape that does improve internal visibility lines and there is precedent. In 1759, the main body of St Martin’s Church in Stoney Middleton, Derbyshire, was rebuilt in an octagonal form to the design of James Paine. That architect also incorporated Diocletian windows into the clerestory. A later example is William Rolfe’s 1821 Picturesque Gothic octagonal nave rising to a lantern at St James the Less, West Teignmouth, Devon. William Rolfe was a pupil of Sir John Soane. Octagonal naves are rare, even if not quite “unique” as each of these places of Christian worship claims on their websites.

Dancing in the morning when the world was young; dancing in the moon and the stars and the sun; dancing; back in London, dancing.

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Art Fashion Luxury Restaurants

Rosewood Hotel London + Retro Art Afternoon Tea

Up On Reflection

Rosewood Hotel Holborn London Courtyard © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

We’re leisurely making our way round the courtyard of Rosewood Hotel in Holborn, a mere canapé’s throw from Sir John Soane Museum. Our first visit was for dinner in Holborn Dining Room. Second visit, Champagne in Scarfes Bar. Our third visit is for afternoon tea in Mirror Room. These are the last photos you’ll ever see of the Retro Art Afternoon Tea. Fortunately, Rosewood London hasn’t gone the way of Bonhams or Typing Room Restaurants – history. Instead, this fifth edition afternoon tea is being superseded by the Van Gogh Afternoon Tea to coincide with an exhibition in Tate Britain.

Rosewood Hotel Holborn London Hallway © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Retro Art Afternoon Tea is just what the doctor ordered after our inaugural Irish Georgian Society London St Patrick’s Party lecture A Very Grand Tour held at The Medical Society of London, off Harley Street. The lecture might have stretched to 100 slides on 16 buildings in 40 minutes but prepping over dinner in Indian Accent, Albemarle Street’s part subterranean wholly Subcontinental haute cuisine restaurant, eased the intellectual burden. Even an eight hour Very Grand Detour lunch the day before in Hix Soho didn’t detract from a performance as polished as our reflections in Rosewood’s Mirror Room.

Rosewood Hotel Holborn London Bathroom © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Rosewood Hotel Holborn London Flower Arrangement © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Rosewood Hotel Holborn London Sandwiches © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Rosewood Hotel Holborn London Retro Sweets © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

An enigmatic vitrine, shortly to become an evolving diorama of dainty delights, is placed on our table. Pescatarian savouries upfront include salmon vol au vents with cream cheese and keta caviar, egg and watercress sandwiches, and the cucumber and cheese variety. In true Duchess of Bedford tradition, plain and raisin scones follow, accompanied by Corniche Cornish cream, lemon curd, and strawberry and elderflower jam. Queen Victoria Darjeeling blend is a 19th century interrupter. That’s before the afternoon tea leaps another century forwards, starting with retro sweets of Ferrero Rocher | Jaffa Cake | lemon flying saucer | rhubarb and custard. Finally, the vitrine is filled with a very 20th century interruption, a diorama of edible vintage sculptures.

Rosewood Hotel Holborn London Malika Favre Pastry © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

  • Malika Favre inspired pastry: lime and pineapple mousse, raspberry crémeux and sponge, raspberry glaze and chocolate. Malika is a French illustrator and graphic artist based in London. Her bold minimalist style bridges the gap between Pop Art and Op Art.
  • Andy Warhol inspired pastry: Morello cherry jelly, chocolate mousse, vanilla brûlée, flourless chocolate sponge, cherry ganache. Campbell’s Soup is one of Andy Warhol’s most celebrated works of art. Produced in 1962, it’s composed of 32 canvases each representing a can of Campbell’s Soup.
  • Retro Wall Art inspired pastry: vanilla tart case, almond crunchy praline, salted caramel mousse, chocolate crémeux, caramel glaze, chocolate popping candy. Wall Art took on a new meaning in Seventies and Eighties, embracing geometrics and flowers in bright colours.

Rosewood Hotel Holborn London Andy Warhol Pastry © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

“As a Pastry Chef, I’m always curious and draw inspiration from things that surround me. London is a vibrant city with an incredibly energetic art scene. Rosewood London’s quirky interiors reflect the British capital’s history, culture and sensibilities,” explains Executive Pastry Chef Mark Perkins. “The interiors feature works of some of the world’s most renowned artists, with contemporary pieces complemented by more traditional art. My latest creations are inspired by retro art from the Sixties to the Eighties.” Next time, we’ll complete our Rosewood London courtyard journey with a leisurely visit to Sense Spa.

Rosewood Hotel Holborn London Retro Wall Inspired Pastry © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

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Art Design Luxury

The House of Lavender’s Blue + Attitude

The Final Show

Our magnus opus. Crescendo. An operatic high. We’ve got attitude and Attitude have got us. In a world exclusive, Lavender’s Blue the interiors (and a flash of beyond – how’s the garden?) are revealed in all their splendour in Europe’s whirl of interiors magazine, Attitude Interior Design. The Porto based publication was the perfect platform for launching our mission accomplished, a rocketing decade of shopping decorating. Closer to home, a national newspaper was keen to capture the images: The Irish Times. And the most read homes magazine on that sage and shamrock island, Ireland’s Homes Interiors + Living, celebrated Lavender’s Blue in style with a lavish spread. Phew. It’s a (very well rounded) wrap. Our writing may veer towards minimalism, occasionally. Our interiors do not. They feature some rather demanding garniture. Grab your monocle as we live up to our wallpaper. So what do the great, the good and the truly marvellous have to say?

lavender's blue courtyard zelda © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Alfred Cochrane, Artist + Architect: “Amazingly atmospheric as always. You have stood your ground and there is now a vogue again for retro country house nostalgia with a dash of Tolstoy or Turgenev where Daddy Vladimir would gladly go topless. Keep looking towards the East.”

lavender's blue courtyard © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Annabel P, Muse + Amanuensis, “Darlings, so many parties, so little time. What interiors?”

lavender's blue courtyard plaque © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Anne Davey Orr, Artist + Publisher: “I have been witness to a number of interiors which you have designed in the past.  However, none of them expressed this eclectic taste, this creative marrying of objects or these transformational powers so successfully as Lavender’s Blue itself does. In a kind of way it is a pied á terre of curiosities in which the curiosities, including you, spin off and enhance one another.”

lavender's blue courtyard sculpture © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Annabella Forbes, Actor, Art Director, Copywriter, Designer, Film Director, Ideator, Naming Consultant, Presenter, Product Innovator, Script Writer + Strategist: “It’s AMAZING! It’s fab, fab, fab!”

lavender's blue courtyard morning coffee © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Caroline Clifton Mogg, Writer: “London is a city of secret gardens, a place where plain faced streets give little away of what lies there, and where few individual facades give any clues as to the streets behind their all-embracing walls. Protected and hidden by their house the best gardens are a fusion of inside and outside… Whatever secret a garden may reveal, it will always surprise and delight those who discover it for the first time.”

lavender's blue courtyard tailor's dummy © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Dr Charlotte Blease, Cognitive Scientist + Philosopher of Medicine: “It is uncanny. You are the inheritor of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s style. I’m calling it EE – Eccentric Eclecticism.” Louise Hall Tharp, Isabella Stewart Gardner Biographer: “Mrs Gardner bought her Rembrandt with the intent of developing a real museum collection… The rooms are notable for their calculated intimacy and informality – their almost bric-a-brac juxtapositions of paintings, sculptures, drawings, pastels, letters, manuscripts, ceramics, decorative objects, and artefacts. She imitates nobody; everything she does is novel and original.”

lavender's blue courtyard ivy © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Inês Graça, Attitude Interior Design Interiors Editor: “What does one see upon entering this inner world? Broad temporal and spatial references and the thoughtful organisation of a passionate collection. Those of culture are present because of the elegance and knowledge that makes itself apparent. Singularity and extravagance define Lavender’s Blue: a hidden refuge inspired by Irish country houses named after 18th century lavender fields. A little piece of secret London that invites guests to be part of an immersive and unique experience. Fue maravilloso.”

lavender's blue courtyard statue © lavender's blue stuart blakley

John Curran, UK’s First Shigeru Ban Client: “I knew it would be interesting, but had no idea that it would be among the most engaging private interiors I have seen photographed. We pride ourselves as collectors of things we love, but you put us to shame. Having discussed John Soane at our coffee, I will somewhat shyly draw the comparison with the museum, knowing that I am not the first to do so. I have great appreciation for objects that attract the owner and that give a window into the person. Your home very much does that.”

lavender's blue outer hall © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Karla W, Heiress, “Lavender’s Blue is my absolute favourite; you have recreated a 1920s Parisian salon in present day London. The photographs are ravishing but you can only truly appreciate it in the flesh, especially by night. All the rooms are terribly, terribly smart in every sense. Every time I’m at yours I become obsessed with some fascinating detail I never noticed before. Lavender’s Blue is a rare evolutionary wonder. You’re like the sun, always coming up shining. How’s Zelda?”

lavender's blue outer hall view © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Mary Martin, Fashion Designer: “LOVE it! You’re a genius! You should do interior design! It’s exactly the taste I have! Your rooms remind me of the inside of Cardiff Castle which I used to visit as a child.”

lavender's blue drawing room view © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Mary Weaver, Houses Editor Living Etc, “Your home is so charming and original.”

lavender's blue drawing room © lavender's blue stuart blakley

lavender's blue drawing room piano © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Maud Rabin, Parisian Translator, “Your home is so stylish! Très très chic!”

lavender's blue drawing room window © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Michael S Howard, Managing Director Rasa Hospitality, “Your home is AMAZING! How fabulous is that?”

lavender's blue drawing room table © lavender's blue stuart blakley

PJ Gibbons, Editor Social + Personal, “Your house looks beautiful.”

lavender's blue drawing room urn © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Régis Camus, World’s Top Chef de Cave, “C’est magnifique!”

lavender's blue drawing room clerestory © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Dame Rosalind Savill OBE, Former Director The Wallace Collection + Sèvres World Expert, “I just LOVE it! It’s so smart. It’s so exquisite.”

lavender's blue drawing room watch © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Sandra Jonas, Former Model + Landscape Designer Georgia: “You are gorgeous!!! Zelda is so beautiful.”

lavender's blue inner hall © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Samantha Laurie, Editor Wandsworth Magazine, “What a beautiful home you have created! Are you an interior designer?”

lavender's blue inner hall cabinet © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Sheila Molloy, Châtelaine Gaultier Lodge + Castle ffrench, “Your place looks fantastic, full of the things I love. Is the cat alive or dead? My kitchen in Gaultier when it was upstairs was painted a very similar colour blue called Lobaelia pre Farrow and Balls days, Dulux I think. I saw it in the kitchen at Emo Court when Cholmeley Harrison had it about 1978!!!”

lavender's blue bathroom © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Sara Larkham, Editor Ireland’s Homes Interiors + Living: “Your home is spectacular! It’s stunningly unique and transports guests back in time… a truly unique home in London filled with character and charm.”

lavender's blue kitchen © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Simon O’Hara, Châtelain Coopershill House, “Very interesting interiors.”

lavender's blue kitchen china © lavender's blue stuart blakley

Tamar Madmoni Reich, New York Philanthropist + Holistic Health Coach, “Your home is beautiful!”

lavender's blue kitchen sink © lavender's blue stuart blakley

William Thuiller, Art Dealer + Collector: “It’s quite lovely. I love the layered textures, colours, patterns and atmosphere… sort of Leighton House meets Soane Museum, if that’s not patronising! It’s completely alien to my usual taste, in that I would never have bought any individual item, but it works superbly as an ensemble against that rich blue on the walls.”

lavender's blue master bedroom © lavender's blue stuart blakley