Tag: sloane rangers

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Eric Lanlard + Cake Boy Battersea London

Sweet Things Are Made of These  

“I can’t wait to reopen the seating area outside,” says Eric Lanlard, his voice still rich with the timbre of Brittany. We’re in Cake Boy, his café lounge school next to the River Thames in Battersea. The Master Pâtissier and Chef is standing under a halo of lights beside a mouth watering cascade of tartes aux fruit, entremets framboise, pralines and tartes paysannes. “My favourite dessert in the world is tarte tatin – piping hot from the oven with crème fraiche on the side!” he shares. Eric moved from Plomelin in northwestern France to London 32 years ago to work for restaurateurs Albert and Michel Roux, becoming their Head Pastry Chef within a couple of years. He opened Cake Boy in 1995. Ever since, the Garçon de Gâteau has been busy as a global baking ambassador for the likes of Marriott International and Virgin Atlantic in between keeping it sweet by publishing books.

It’s time to take a trip down memory lane, an eight year trip back to a promotion in Knightsbridge… Here goes… Now that London Fashion Week is over, we can all breathe out. Nothing tastes as good as chocolate, so we’re off to experience the Montezuma Afternoon Tea at Jumeirah Carlton Tower Hotel. The hotel building is looking well for 50. Once the gangly new kid on the block, all Sixties bravura, it has matured (with the help of a subtle facelift) into something altogether more refined. The address is not so much golden postcode as golden place: Cadogan. Jumeirah Carlton Tower is off Sloane Street, home of the Rangers, between Candy + Candy’s One Hyde Park and the only road in London to have an architectural style named after it (Pont Street, keep up). Nearby is of course King’s Road, foodie paradise (Duke of York Square market) and shopping heaven (from Partridges to Peter Jones).

Afternoon tea, really an excuse to indulge between official meals, is high up the list of sybaritic Must Dos. Chinoiserie at JCT lives up to its name. Bedecked with hand painted Chinese wallpaper and gold leaf galore, the lounge is thronged with an army of cheongsam clad waitresses at our beck and call. We half expect Fan Bingbing to sweep through the revolving doors. Instead, the flame haired resident harpist provides a sense of serenity for the American, Saudi and English Isabel Marant clad guests. A glass of Champagne accompanies fresh strawberries before the menu goes choc-a-bloc in a celebration of its cocoa theme (Montezuma was the last Aztec king and a bit of a chocolate fiend). We order a Darjeeling and (Lady Grantham wouldn’t approve) a coffee.

One of the many joys of afternoon tea is having your cake and eating it in whatever order you desire. For the purposes of this review, we will stick to the order of the menu. Cocoa dusted (a taste of what’s to come) croissants with chorizo and Elemental provide a comforting intro. The sweet meets savoury theme makes its surprising, sensual, debut with a rich curried crab tart topped by white chocolate. A heart shaped white chocolate and parmesan palmier is hard not to love. Another unlikely yet successful marriage is chocolate macaroon with venison. For pescatarians, there’s the opportunity to order off menu, so cucumber and mayo sandwich is a traditional alternative. Back on menu, the cassis imperial chocolate cupcake is a fine dark mousse with balsamic blackcurrants filling an edible chocolate case. A sprinkling of pearls completes this sultry indulgence.

To cleanse the palate, a conquistador shot is an inspired layered composition of passion fruit, white chocolate with basil seeds and coconut jelly. Mission complete. Caraque spicy chocolate tart with popping candy features a pistachio wafer as delicate and colourful as the Chinese wallpaper. Dark mini chocolate caramel loaf filled with liquid salted butter, sweet food in savoury form, provides a jubilant succulent extravagant finale, for now, to cocoa. After this exotically original South American tour de taste, familiar British comfort returns in the form of (Lady Grantham would approve) scones with clotted cream and fruit preserve. Throughout this autumn, the general public can get tarted up and enjoy Eric Lanlard’s Montezuma Afternoon Tea. It costs £40 per person; £50 includes the Champers; for £55, the strawberries are added. The service is great, friendly staff who are more than adept at catching eye contact; a Coutts (of course) bank machine outside the hotel comes in handy for withdrawing tenners for tips.

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Architecture Art People

Ranger’s House + Park Blackheath London

Sloane

Blackheath Houses © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Pirouettes and marionettes and silhouettes. A silent metronome ticks to the galliards and sarabands of our lives. And so we arrive at a large villa or small mansion. Ranger’s House in, at, on, and opposite Blackheath. It was built around 1700 by Captain Francis Hosier, Vice Admiral of the Blue. Our destination, our desirous subject of the day, is a red brick two storey over raised basement block with later brown brick single storey over raised basement bow fronted wings. The southern wing is bowed at both extremities lending symmetry to the front elevation; the northern wing is missing a bow robbing the garden elevation of symmetry. 

The striking marrying of a house and a collection occurred at the beginning of the 21st century. Ranger’s House was missing artwork and furnishings. The Wernher Collection was homeless. English Heritage acted as matchmaker. The collection of Sir Julius Wernher once graced the interiors of Luton Hoo (his Bedfordshire country house) and Bath House (his London townhouse). The former is now a glitzy hotel; the latter, long demolished. Sir Julius (1850 to 1912) and his business partner Sir Alfred Beit (1853 to 1906) made their fortunes from gold and diamond mining in South Africa. The Beit Collection is housed in Sir Alfred’s former country house, Russborough in County Wicklow, and the National Gallery of Ireland.

Sir Julius’ will was the largest ever recorded at the time by the Inland Revenue. Sir Alfred was reckoned to be the richest man in the world of his time. The tycoons’ busts flank the entrance to the Geology Department of the Imperial College of Science and Technology in Kensington, founded in 1907 with a donation from Werner Beit + Co. There is another Irish connection. The late 5th Duchess of Abercorn, “Sasha” Alexandra Phillips, was the great granddaughter of Sir Julius Werner. Her sister Natalia is the Dowager Duchess of Westminster. Luton Hoo was sold in 1997 following the death of their brother Nicholas. Their mother Georgina Lady Kennard (née Wernher) was a close friend of the Queen.

Our tour of Ranger’s House with John O’Connell, who designed the interiors of the Wallace Collection, begins. “A portico can be expressed or suppressed, nothing else. The ultimate expression is a porte cochère. Here, it is suppressed as a temple front. We love the expressed aprons and rubbed brickwork!” Moving indoors, “The timber staircase would probably have been painted to resemble stone. Three balusters per thread is very noble. The panelled stairs below denote a basement of consequence.”

There are 700 items spread over two floors. “It is one of the best English Heritage collections with some knockout pieces,” John explains. “The Pink Drawing Room has most emphatic Inigo Jones Whitehall Palace style ceiling plasterwork. The interconnecting door to the Entrance Hall is missing its enrichments on top. The Sir Joshua Reynolds portrait, disposed to one side of a wall composition, should be moved and placed centrally. There would have been pier mirrors and tables between the three windows.”

The Grade I Conservation Practice Architect points to a desk: “This is a Jean-François Oeben wow piece! Mr Oeben was a great craftsman. He would have made the woodwork but the guild system wouldn’t have allowed him to make the metalwork. That would have been executed by another craftsman.” Pointing to an earlier more modest piece of furniture: “This work table illustrates the development of specific pieces of furniture for rooms, the search for comfort.”

“The Adriaen van Ostade is a typically allegorical 17th century Dutch painting. The gentleman playing cards suggests profligacy. The lady gazing out the window is showing disloyalty. And the 1617 Gabriël Metsu is wonderful, an absolute beauty, a very important painting. The broom is symbolic of spiritual cleansing. The lapdog represents loyalty.” Our tour continues through the reception rooms. “Such ravishing marble matching mantlepieces and hearthstones. That’s what you get at a certain moment,” admires John. Completing the tour upstairs: “The corridors remind us of Castle Howard.”

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Architecture Country Houses Design Luxury People

Cadogan Hall + Inchbald Private View London

Hip to be Square

Hermione Russell Inchbald © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley

Is it just us or does the world really revolve around Sloane Square? Is it seriously the epicentre of gravity and gravitas? Everybody knows everybody in Café (Colbert) Society. There are no Sloane strangers. First it was the Chelsea Flower Show. Then Masterpiece. Now Inchbald. We’re off to Cadogan Hall to discover the next Sister Parish and Gertrude Jekyll at the end of year show. Well past its half century, the Inchbald School of Design has been instrumental in raising the profile of design in this country. Its founder Jacqueline Duncan – Mrs Duncan OBE to you – is reining principal. Not content with founding the first interior design school in Europe, she soon expanded the syllabus to incorporate garden design courses. Past lecturers have included David Hicks and alumni frequently reach single name status: Henrietta, Nina, Zaha.

Cothay Manor, a star of Country House Rescue, is revisited by Postgraduate Diploma in Architectural Interior Design student Hermione Russell. Ever since her History of Art BA, Hermione has focused on country house architecture. “I’ve reimagined Cothay Manor, which dates from the 1400s, as a bed and breakfast in the countryside. I wanted to instil a sense of belonging into the interiors,” she explains. “I’ve sandblasted the beams of the low ceilings to make spaces appear more airy.” Her drawings reveal a contemporary reinterpretation of Edwardian notions of sweetness and light. Think Lutyens at Knebworth or later Aileen Plunket at Luttrellstown Castle. “The bedrooms are named after wild flowers,” says Hermione, carrying on a country house tradition. Take Dundarave, Northern Ireland’s finest estate on the market. It sticks to colours for the names of the seven principal bedrooms. The Blue Room, Pink Room, Green Room, Yellow Room, Red Room, Brown Room, Bird Room (which begs the question what hue is the plumage?). The 12 secondary bedrooms remain anonymous.

From the great indoors to the great outdoors. Postgraduate Diploma in Garden Design student Anastasia Voloshko’s exhibition is entitled Seam Maze Limassol Promenade. “Limassol is Cyprus’s most international city,” says Anastasia who has also studied interior design. “It’s a crossroads of different cultures and languages. My concept was to use the spectacular background of the sea and translate its deep mystery onto the land.” An organic flow of contours and materials emerges, connecting the rocky shore to the modern city. Again, a reinterpretation of traditional forms – a rock garden, pool, box hedging – creates a refreshed language, a new geometry for our times. “I am inspired by many things,” she ponders. “A nice mood, the sky, a song, a painting… sometimes my best ideas come out of nowhere!”

Seam Maze Limassol Promenade by Anastasia Voloshko Lavender's Blue

Two very different projects. Two very different voices. Yet both Hermione and Anastasia tell us, “Going to Inchbald was the best professional decision of my life!” Inchbald School of Design continues to equip new generations of graduates with the skills to create houses for gardens and gardens for houses and places for people.

Anastasia Voloshko Inchbald © Lavender's Blue Stuart Blakley