LIAIGRE.COM LONDONSHOWROOMS@LIAIGRE.

COM
Flamenco Fan 117/14043 with Feather Fan F111/8032 – jacquard on sofa
From a breath-taking blend of Mudéjar architecture, unique
crafts and traditions, and fragrant flora and diverse fauna,
emerges Cole & Son’s latest collection SEVILLE. With graphic
architectural prints in sun-drenched antique palettes to
vibrant botanicals and primar y-toned ceramic tile motifs,
SEVILLE captures all the ebullience of southern Spain.

cole-and-son.com
 30
CONTENTS APRIL 2020
ANTENNAE
What’s new in style, decoration
and design, chosen by Nathalie Wilson

41 ANTENNAE ROUNDUP
The best bed linen

46 PEEPERS’ PALACE
Gladys Deacon had her eye on Blenheim Palace
in more ways than one. Text: Matthew Dennison

56 THE DROP OF A HAT

Doff your cap to Maude Smith’s favourite
small-scale wallpapers. They’re peak WoI

69 BOOKS
Reading on art, architecture and design

91 SERIOUS PURSUITS
Auctions, antique fairs and diverting activities

96 DARK STARS
Beautiful outdoor lighting turns an accursed
corridor into a right of passage, says Max Egger

120 REBIRTH OF THE COOL

Funky furniture in a Lombard castle… Jessica
Hayns makes mood music with Milan’s finest

146 NETWORK
Merchandise and events worldwide

150 ADDRESS BOOK

Suppliers in this issue

COVER Strata for ten – Miska Miller-Lovegrove gets full

marks for the way she used this Calacatta marble in her
228 INSPIRATION
How to recreate some of the design
flat on the Bayswater borders. See how the architect did effects in this issue, by Grace McCloud
her level best, on page 186. Photograph: Simon Upton

232 EXHIBITION DIARY

Titian the technician, generation X, uncanny
in the UK, plus Charlotte Edwards’s listings

256 JOURNAL OF A MUSEUM STORE

MOVER Shifting the V&A’s vast stores across
London is no mean feat, says Ruby Hodgson

INTERIORS
SUBSCRIPTIONS AND BACK ISSUES Receive 12 issues deliv-
ered direct to your home address. Call 01858 438815 or fax 01858
461739. Alternatively, you can visit us at www.worldofinteriors.co.uk
160 STOREY BOARD
Zita Unger’s richly layered north London home,
Per iodical s postage paid at Rahway, NJ. Postmaster: Send address dotted with the gold discs and other music
corrections to ‘The World of Interiors’ c/o Mercury Airfreight International
Ltd Inc, 2323 Randolph Avenue, Avenel NJ 07001, ‘The World of Interiors’
memorabilia of her record-exec husband,
(IS SN 026 4 - 0 83X) i s p u b l i s h e d m o n t h l y. Vo l 39 n o 4 , t o t a l 451 has Ruth Guilding nodding with pleasure r
170 FRAMES OF REVERENCE
When an Andalucían nunnery received pious
17th-century pictures from a noble donor,
CONTENTS APRIL 2020
they redecorated the chapel’s choir to house
them. Marie-France Boyer says a little prayer

178 TIMELESS WARP

Märta Måås outraged traditional Swedish
weavers with her designs, but her eponymous
firm is now over a century old. Augusta
Pownall spins a yarn into a shaggy-rug story

186 WAVES IN THE WHITE FLAGS

Sleek Carlo Mollino furniture meets acres of
Calacatta marble in the tactile west London
flat of architect Miska Miller-Lovegrove.
Veins supreme! cries Charlotte Edwards

194 POETIC LICENCE

Nude sunbathing, plant smuggling and kooky
cooking were all pastimes for poet Paul Roche
at his Mallorcan house, rich with Bloomsbury
links. Celia Lyttelton remembers her friend

216 MIXED BLESSING

From sweat-stained corsets to a Samurai
sword hilt, Martha Talbot has found secrets of
her husband’s ancestors in the family pile –
a veritable cache in the attic, as she writes here

ART AND ANTIQUES

108 TASTE ON A PLATE

In the 1790s, a dilettante German baron aimed
to fill his hunting lodge with the world’s
diverse décors – but, as Stephen Patience
reports, only a lip-schmacking book ensued

204 PILOT STUDY

From Icarus’s singed wings to hydrogen
balloons, the history of flight is recorded in
an Italian school in mosaic. The Fascist era
created some turbulence, admits Lee Marshall

FROM THE ARCHIVE

210 ENIGMA VARIATION

To mark a new exhibition featuring Bill Brandt’s IMAGE Brandt manager – photographer Bill limited his
assemblages, Robin Muir revisits the eminent exposure to the outside world, so WoI was honoured to
photographer’s Holland Park flat, shot just be invited into his Holland Park inner sanctum. Sharpen
before he died. First published: February 1984 your focus on page 210. Photograph: Marco de Valdivia
Balloon Bag, 2020 loewe.com
 AD Beatrice Rossetti - Photo Federico Cedrone

www.flexform.it
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H Pavilion & Dots Spotlight by Kettal Studio
Molo Sofa & Chaise longue by Rodolfo Dordoni
Band Chair & Candleholders by Patricia Urquiola
Half Dome Lamp by Naoto Fukasawa
Geometrics Rugs by Doshi Levien
 Masters of Design
With 120 showrooms representing more than 600 of the world’s brightest and best interior brands, Design Centre,
Chelsea Harbour has every reason to be satisfied with its status on the global stage. But not content to rest on its laurels,
the hub continues to attract ever more companies, build new international audiences and invest in its infrastructure

Above: Fabrics: Harlequin, Larsen at Colefax & Fowler, Christian Fischbacher at David Seyfried. Furniture: Andrew Martin, Julian Chichester, Turri,
Ceccotti Collezioni and Alexander Lamont at Miles × Bookshop. Lighting: Arteriors, Paolo Moschino for Nicholas Haslam. Accessory: Alexander
Lamont at Miles × Bookshop. Paint: Zoffany. For full details see London Design Week 2020 – Gallery on dcch.co.uk

design centre L ONDON

DESIGN CENTRE, CHELSEA HARBOUR TEL: 020 7225 9166
WWW.DCCH.CO.UK
I
t is an exciting time to be at Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour. The and the dramatic use of colour, pattern and texture; all celebrate the im-
home of 120 showrooms and 600 international brands, it has an portance of provenance, skill, craftsmanship and a move towards informed
extraordinary vitality that can be credited to its singular offering – a choices. Bespoke products are a forte of many showrooms, creating pieces
strong sense of community, specialist expertise and commitment to that showcase handcrafted, artisanal techniques, respect for materials and
creative excellence. No wonder it’s the first port of call for interior an openness to innovation. The collaborative nature of this sort of work
designers, architects and design lovers from across the globe. This is the allows for an extra level of connection between the industry’s leading lights
place to connect, converse and create with the greatest concentration of and a highly engaged clientele.
world-class talent, all at one address. Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour is recognised as an authoritative voice
The largest of its kind in Europe, its influence stretches far beyond its of interior decoration. Its confident vision represents an ambition to
London base. Nowhere else is guiding interiors with such an assured hand. increase the breadth and scope of what’s on offer, attracting more highly
Every showroom has been carefully selected for its impeccable credentials. influential brands and new international audiences as well as shoring up its
From fabrics to furniture, kitchens to carpets, lighting to wallcoverings, status as an indispensable hub for the industry. More ateliers are opening
and much, much more, it is an astonishing resource for those seeking in- in Design Centre East, as well as Design Centre North, where a curated
spiration for hotel projects, bars, restaurants, superyachts, private jets, offering is adding to the powerful mix. Strategic investment in the mag-
beachside villas, country houses or city apartments. nificent Design Avenue with its imminent opening points to a bright future.
An abundance of designer know-how and expert guidance is available Proof positive that in the remarkable environment of Design Centre,
at every turn. Latest offerings speak of exquisite finishes, couture detailing Chelsea Harbour, masters of design flourish $

Above left: Furniture: David Seyfried and Porta Romana. Lighting: Porta Romana. Fabrics: No 9 Thompson at Jim Thompson, Zeconzeta at Alton-Brooke,
Etro at Turnell & Gigon, Pierre Frey, Clarence House at Turnell & Gigon. Wallcoverings: Anthology at Harlequin. Trimming: Samuel & Sons. Paint: Sanderson
and Zoffany. Above right: Fabrics: Manuel Canovas at Colefax & Fowler, Jason d’Souza, Raoul Textiles at Turnell & Gigon, James Hare at Marvic Textiles.
Leather: Moore & Giles at Altfield. Wallcoverings: Anthology at Harlequin and Sanderson. Trimming: Jim Thompson. Hardware: SA Baxter Design Studio
and Foundry and McKinney & Co. Tile: Via Arkadia. Paint: Sanderson. For full details see London Design Week 2020 – Gallery on dcch.co.uk
Above, from left: Fabrics: Etro at Turnell & Gigon, Sanderson, Etamine at Zimmer & Rohde, Christian Fischbacher at David Seyfried and Manuel
Canovas at Colefax & Fowler. Wallcoverings: Cole & Son and Pierre Frey. Furniture: Julian Chichester and Frato. Lighting: Porta Romana and Gladee
Lighting. Accessory: Andrew Martin. Paint: Zoffany. See London Design Week 2020 – Gallery on dcch.co.uk

ABBOTT & BOYD ALTFIELD ALTON-BROOKE ANDREW MARTIN ART RUGS GALLERY ARTE ARTERIORS ARTISANS OF DEVIZES BAKER BAKER LIFESTYLE
BEAUFORT COLLECTION BELLA FIGURA BRUNSCHWIG & FILS C&C MILANO CECCOTTI COLLEZIONI CHASE ERWIN CHRISTOPHER HYDE LIGHTING
CHRISTOPHER PEACOCK COLE & SON COLEFAX & FOWLER COLLIER WEBB COLONY DAVID HUNT LIGHTING DAVID SEYFRIED DAVIDSON LONDON
DE LE CUONA DECCA DEDAR EDELMAN LEATHER ESPRESSO DESIGN ETHIMO FLEXFORM FOX LINTON FRATO GALLOTTI & RADICE GEORGE SPENCER
DESIGNS GLADEE LIGHTING GP&J BAKER HARLEQUIN HOLLAND & SHERRY HOULES IKSEL – DECORATIVE ARTS INTERDESIGN UK JACARANDA
CARPETS & RUGS JASON D’SOUZA JEAN MONRO JENSEN BEDS JIM THOMPSON JULIAN CHICHESTER KRAVET KVADRAT AT HOME LACAZE LONDON
LEE JOFA LELIEVRE PARIS LEWIS & WOOD LINCRUSTA LIZZO MARVIC TEXTILES MCKINNEY & CO MCKINNON & HARRIS MILES X BOOKSHOP MORRIS
& CO MULBERRY HOME NADA DESIGNS THE NANZ COMPANY NINA CAMPBELL NOBILIS OFICINA INGLESA FURNITURE ORIGINAL BTC PAOLO
MOSCHINO FOR NICHOLAS HASLAM LTD PERRIN & ROWE PHILLIP JEFFRIES PIERRE FREY POLIFORM PORADA PORTA ROMANA POTTERTON
BOOKS RESTED ROMO RUBELLI/DONGHIA SA BAXTER DESIGN STUDIO & FOUNDRY SACCO CARPET SAMUEL & SONS SAMUEL HEATH SANDERSON
SAVOIR BEDS SIBERIAN FLOORS SIMPSONS STARK CARPET STUDIOTEX SUMMIT FURNITURE SUTHERLAND PERENNIALS STUDIO TAI PING TH2
THREADS AT GP&J BAKER TIM PAGE CARPETS TISSUS D’HELENE TOPFLOOR BY ESTI TUFENKIAN ARTISAN CARPETS TURNELL & GIGON TURNSTYLE
DESIGNS TURRI VAUGHAN VENTURA VIA ARKADIA (TILES) VICTORIA AND ALBERT BATHS VILLEROY & BOCH WATTS OF WESTMINSTER WEST ONE
BATHROOMS WHISTLER LEATHER WIRED CUSTOM LIGHTING WOOL CLASSICS YARN COLLECTIVE ZIMMER + ROHDE ZOFFANY

design centre L ONDON

DESIGN CENTRE, CHELSEA HARBOUR TEL: 020 7225 9166
WWW.DCCH.CO.UK
BESPOKE MIRRORED INTERIORS - ARCHITECTURAL CAST GLASS MOULDINGS

www.stephencavallo.com
 antennae
What’s in the air this month, edited by Nathalie Wilson

1 1 Agnès Emery’s new bronze

‘Corolle’ wall light, which is inspir-
ed by a leaf, is certain to grow on
you; available in two sizes and
four finishes, it costs from £145
approx. Ring 00 32 2 513 5892,

PHOTOGRAPHY: SIMON WITHAM (2, 3 BOTTOM OVERLEAF AND 4 OVERLEAF); ALICE CUVELIER (4); ROOS ALDERSHOFF (2 OVERLEAF). PICTURE CREDIT: 4 © SUCCESSION H. MATISSE
or visit emeryetcie.com.

2 Rice fields and rainforests:

Bali’s topography is cited as inspiration for
Samuel & Sons’ eponymous trim-
ming collection made from com-
2 binations of jute, cotton and flax
(from £17 per m). Ring 020 7351
5153, or visit samuelandsons.com.

3 Since its inception in 1983 the Paris gal-

lery En Attendant les Barbares has been forg-
ing links between Diego Giacometti’s ironsmith,
Pierre Basse, and contemporary artists. Many of
the fruits of that matchmaking have been brought
together at its Diego Giacometti Forever exhi-
bition (1 April-13 June), including Mattia
Bonetti’s bronze 45cm-diameter ‘Gu-
éridon Diego’ (shown), which comes
in five finishes and costs £4,875 ap-
prox. Ring 00 33 1 42 22 65 25, or visit
barbares.com.

3
4 From gallery wall to table top: the
4 fourth generation of Henri Matisse’s family
founded Maison Matisse with the intention of
5 working with different designers to create food-
safe ceramic collections inspired by some of the
great man’s paintings. They’ve kicked off with
‘La Musique’ by Marta Bakowski; from £110 ap-
prox for a dessert plate. Ring 00 33 1 70 38 23 36,
or visit maison-matisse.com.

5 The Atelier Vime team (WoI Aug 2018) have

woven their wicker magic again. As well as pan-
elling (£2,910 approx as shown) is this ‘Beau-
caire’ pelmet (from £1,160 approx per 1.5m
length), which takes its cue from those found
on 18th-century canopy beds. Meanwhile, the
45sq cm ‘Vallabrègues’ planter is based on a 19th-
century metal model (£1,950 approx). Ring 00
33 4 66 72 29 11, or visit ateliervime.com.

6 One man’s rubbish is Jake Solomon and Con-

or Taylor’s treasure. The duo take timber offcuts
 6

and waste plaster to create terrazzo-like tongue-

and-groove flooring and 2.4 × 1.2m sheets
that contain 85 per cent recycled material and
manage to capture 78kg of carbon dioxide. The
‘London’ collection costs £324 per sq m, with a
minimum order of one sheet. Ring 020 3302
7387, or visit foresso.co.uk.

7 The renowned French architect and interior

designer Pierre Guariche (1926-1995) did a 7
mean line in lighting. Many of his inventions
have been reissued, with the addi-
tion of modern technologies, by
the French company Sammode
Studio – the most recent include
the ‘G24’ table lamp (left; £650 ap-
prox) and the ‘G1’ (from £2,070
approx for a floor lamp – one of
three different configurations);
both are available in four colours.
Ring 00 33 6 32 09 86 52, or visit
studio.sammode.com.

8 Wielding four coloured pencils,

illustrator and architect Thibaut
8
Rassat has paid homage to Hermès.
His ‘Quatre Cavaliers’ design features the Rue du
Faubourg Saint-Honoré store, its roof terrace
and surrounds, along with chess-piece knights
– a nod to the company’s horsey heritage. It’s
available as wallpaper (shown; £490 per 10m
roll), stylobate or fabric in three colourways.
Ring 020 7499 8856, or visit hermes.com.

9 Dhoti, the cloth traditionally wrapped around

the waist and worn as a garment in India, can 9
dress your sofa too in the form of Caravane’s
eponymous cushion cover (£45; four colours).
Also shown are the company’s plain linen ‘Luni’
covers (£68 each; 15 colours). Ring 020 3819
8660, or visit caravane.co.uk.

10 ‘The most special and unrepeatable’

antiques that pass through dealer Max
Rollitt’s hands become the template for
equally special but repeatable reproduc-
tions. Witness this ‘Crosby’ sofa, which fea-
tures siège-de-duvet feather-and-down uphol-
stery, walnut legs and handmade solid-brass
castors; £14,000 excluding fabric. Ring 01962
791124, or visit maxrollitt.com. r

10
 antennae

1 Mario Luca Giusti’s synthetic-crystal and

melamine tablewares are compulsory accou-
trements for the poshest poolsides and super-
1 yachts. Shown: the ‘Patagonia’ collection, which
starts at £17.50 approx for a bowl. Ring 00 39
055 732 2641, or visit mariolucagiusti.com.

2 Ladies and gentlemen, please raise a glass

to Bollenglass Design, which produced
these fine drinking vessels based
on historical shapes and de-
tails (shown from left: ‘Tulip’,
‘HM 70’ and ‘Simple Margarita’
series). Mouth-blown and hand-
made in Bohemia, they cost from
£58 approx each. Ring 00 31 6 29 360
821, or visit bollenglassdesign.com.
2

3 Stamperia Bertozzi’s (WoI May 2014)

linen ‘Rosa Antica’ table runner (£95) and
napkin (£25) are block-printed by
3 hand – just like the very thing that
inspired them: 18th-century dom-
inoté papers, which were the pre-
cursor of wallpaper by the roll. Ring
00 39 054 756 019, or visit stamperiabertozzi.it.

4 When Roger Oates threw his shuttle 30 years

ago he kickstarted a revival in traditional flat-
weave flooring. The ‘Anniversary’ collection con-
sists of reinterpretations of selected archive
designs, along with brand-new ones such as
this folk-style ‘Ixworth’ fea-
turing a chain-link pattern
(£132 per m). Ring 020 7351
2288, or visit rogeroates.com.

5 With the advent of fire came

warmth, protection and the
means to cook. Which might
explain our primal hanker-
ings for a real one framed by a
beautiful chimney piece. And
few are as beautiful as Jamb’s
‘Mereworth’ in Occhio di Pav-
one marble (£9,840) and ‘Cor-
sham’ (£10,560) in statuary
marble, which are based on
18th- and 19th-century des-
igns respectively. Ring 020 7730 2122, or visit
4 jamb.co.uk $
5
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35
 MINOTTI.COM

L O N D O N
BY EDC
77 MARGARET STREET
LONDON W1W 8SY
T. +44 020 73233233 LAWRENCE SEATING SYSTEM
[email protected] RODOLFO DORDONI DESIGN
 antennae
PHOTOGRAPHY: SIMON WITHAM (PREVIOUS PAGES). THIS PAGE: ESTER & ERIK (TOP LEFT, BOTTOM RIGHT); KENNY BACK (TOP RIGHT)

ERIK MØLLER nearly crashed the car when

his son said he was interested in joining the family firm. Søren,
on a trip back to Denmark from Australia, where he was liv-
ing, had always said he wanted nothing to do with candle-
making. But when he heard that someone had offered to buy
the business, he felt stricken. ‘I just couldn’t imagine [it],’ he
says. ‘I’d seen how much work they put into it.’
His emotional plea worked and, 33 years after it started,
Ester & Erik still operates out of the same factory in central
Denmark, its small staff still colouring the trademark tapered
candles by hand. Until last year Ester, 78, was there every day.
Ester’s long career supports Søren’s theory that candle-
making ‘just sticks to you’. Why does he think this is? ‘Maybe
it’s to do with the ceremony of lighting a candle,’ he says with
sincerity. ‘Being able to create that feeling in people.’ No longer
necessities, candles speak of high days and holidays; one can
see how facilitating a sense of specialness might be moreish.
Candle-making has stuck to his father too, who, at 79, also
still runs errands. In the 1970s Erik worked in one of the finest
candle factories in Europe. It had a sort of kibbutz-y vibe, with
the owner asking his employees to work for free, remunerat-
ing them instead with accommodation and clothes. (Ester,
a seamstress, helped make them.) In the end it was all ‘a bit
too much’ for Søren’s parents. After a bit of a ‘now or never’
moment, in 1987 they branched off on their own.
High standards were always key. ‘They’ve never had that
much,’ says Søren of his parents, ‘but what they buy is very r

Top left: these are what the ‘raw’ products look like before they’re dipped by hand in coloured wax. Left white inside, they burn much better and more
cleanly than those coloured all the way through. Top right: hung over a frame, which will go on to become a sales display, candles are lowered into
orange wax. Above: as well as stick candles, the company makes scented ones. These vats contain perfumes developed by a Frenchman from Grasse
 antennae

good quality.’ The idea was to use the most expensive wax
they could afford and hope people were willing to pay for it.
Luckily, they were. The couple then developed a patented iron
frame from which candles hang, joined by a single wick, to be
hand-dipped in one of 86 coloured waxes. The candles (the
PHOTOGRAPHY: ESTER & ERIK (TOP LEFT); LASSE HYLDAGER (TOP RIGHT); KENNY BACK (BOTTOM RIGHT)

factory can produce up to 16,000 of different shapes and sizes

per day) are either left matt or dipped in impossibly glossy
lacquer – all the better for the bounce of candlelight.
Not only is their frame distinctive in design, it also has a
singular use: Ester & Erik’s suppliers buy them with the can-
dles on them and use them as sales displays, snipping candles
off as they’re sold. ‘People certainly notice them,’ Søren says.
And, crucially, ‘nobody else does that in the world’.
The pride that Søren feels for what his family has created is
palpable. (The firm’s full range includes, among other things,
candles scented with perfumes from Grasse, candle plates and
simple holders, which are based on a design his father came
up with for the couple’s 25th anniversary celebration.) He’s
wistful as he talks about the half-broken candles he has to deal
with at the end of trade shows. He just can’t throw them away.
‘Even the worst, most battered candles are put back in boxes
and I bring them back home. I can’t destroy them. I know my
parents can’t either.’ It’s clear candle-making has stuck to him
too. And what about his own children? Søren laughs. His
daughter wants to be a model, his son a footballer. He’ll have
to wait and see if the flame jumps to the next generation $
Prices start at £4 approx for a 42cm candle. Visit ester-erik.dk

Top left: all 86 colours are made using a blend of different hues, which are stored as solid pieces of wax in tubs. Top right: the patented frame has been
updated over the years. This is a previous iteration. Above: co-founder Ester Møller, 78, dips a batch of tapers in the factory in Silkeborg, Denmark.
Until last year she worked full-time but is now down to four days a week. ‘I told her it’s okay, as long as she makes up for it,’ her son says, laughing
 antennae roundup
Does a new set of bed linen beckon? Rest assured, Max Egger has aired the most inviting options

1 2 3

6 7 8

1 ‘Tableau’, by Bertozzi, from £75 for a pillowcase, Allóra. 2 ‘Authentic Jeans’, from £29 for a pillowcase, Lexington. 3 ‘Delissa’, from £78 for
a double duvet cover set, Anthropologie. 4 ‘Mossruta’ single duvet cover and pillowcase, £22, Ikea. 5 ‘Bea Honeycomb’, from £35 for a single duvet
cover set, Urban Outfitters. 6 ‘Jersey’ double duvet cover set, £45, Habitat. 7 ‘Herringbone’, from £12 for a pillowcase, Heal’s. 8 ‘Rainbow’, by Sonia
Rykiel, from £49 for a pillowcase, Yves Delorme. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
 S E C O N D O N LY T O N AT U R E

O T T I C H A I S E S A N D R O U N D O C C A S I O N A L TA B L E D E S I G N E D B Y V I N C E N T VA N D U Y S E N
S H O W N W I T H D O M A N I L U N A S T O N E S E AT | SUT HERL ANDFURNITURE.COM
 antennae roundup

1 2 3

6 7 8

1 ‘Astor’ double duvet cover, from £130, Designers Guild. 2 ‘Moiré Stripe’, by Kate Erwich, from £175 for a pillowcase, Evitavonni. 3 ‘Waves’, from
£59 for a pillowcase, Peter Reed. 4 Petal ‘Satin Pure’, by Bernadotte & Kylberg, from £60 for a pillowcase, Hästens. 5 ‘Angélie’, by Nina Ricci, from
£60 for a pillowcase, Harrods. 6 Hand-embroidered cotton sateen, £879 for a set, Vis-à-Vis. 7 ‘Camille’, from £20 for a pillowcase, The White
Company. 8 ‘Ornate Medallion Lace’, from $2,400 for a set, Frette. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
antennae roundup

1 3

6 7 8

1 ‘Tulipan’, £70 for a set of two pillowcases, Caravane. 2 Raspberry ‘Bedtime Bundle’, from £392, Piglet. 3 Mustard yellow linen, by Molly Freshwater,
from £16 for a pillowcase, Secret Linen Store. 4 ‘Komala’ duvet cover, from $360, John Robshaw. 5 ‘Belle Point’ comforter, $400, Ralph Lauren
Home. 6 Sage washed-linen set, from £118 approx, Linen Tales. 7 ‘Hem Stitch’, from £58 for a pillowcase, Volga Linen. 8 ‘Santa Fe’ duvet set,
by Christy, £90, Amara. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book $
 MILANO PARIS LONDON NEW YORK ATHENS BARCELONA BEIJING BUDAPEST CHENGDU CHICAGO DUBAI GENEVA HONG KONG ISTANBUL JAKARTA
LOS ANGELES MADRID MANILA MEXICO CITY MIAMI MOSCOW NANJING OSAKA SEOUL SHANGHAI SINGAPORE TEHERAN TOKYO TORONTO

#MolteniGroup

GREGOR SEATING SYSTEM— VINCENT VAN DUYSEN

Left: Colin Gill (on of the scaffolding
the right) creates to give him a scarf
the paintings of she claimed was an
Gladys Deacon’s exact colour match.
blue eyes in 1928. Above and opposite:
She apparently the eyes remain
climbed to the top undimmed today

PEEPERS’
PALACE
Ablaze with the stylised gaze of one of Blenheim’s
most colourful châtelaines – the American beauty
Gladys Deacon – the ceiling of the palace’s north
portico has been a sight to behold since the 1920s.
But how did the newly restored optical artwork
come to be there? With one eye on it, and the
other on the duchess’s candid photo albums,
Matthew Dennison takes a closer examination r
 PEEPERS’
PALACE
Left: overlooked
by Giovanni Boldini’s
portrait of her,
Gladys takes tea with
luminaries including
Lytton Strachey,
pictured, left, with
back to the camera.
Below: Boldini
painted Gladys in
1901, when she was
20. Bottom: she
pasted her snaps in
albums such as this

IN THE LATE SUMMER of 1928, the Tite Street studio

of decorative painter Colin Gill stood empty. Around it, the house was
full of noise, for the artist’s one-legged mistress, Mabel Lethbridge,
her daughter Suzanne and their butler remained in residence. Gill
had left London for Oxfordshire. In a loose-fitting artist’s smock,
belted around the waist, worn over Oxford bags with a shirt and tie,
he devoted long days to an eccentric commission. On a high wooden
platform he was painting six rectangular panels on the lofty ceiling
of the north portico at Blenheim Palace. On completion each would
bear an image of a single eye set in a geometric sunburst: three blue
eyes and three brown eyes, arranged as a pair of large central panels
flanked by two pairs of smaller panels at right angles.
The cerulean eyes in question belonged to Blenheim’s châtelaine,
the Duchess of Marlborough. At 47, the former Gladys Deacon re-
mained strikingly beautiful; she was also narcissistic, egocentric and
unhappy. A woman of iron will, she had conceived a determination
to marry Charles Spencer-Churchill, ninth Duke of Marlborough
– known as Sunny, but taciturn in nature – as a teenager living with
her wealthy mother and three sisters close to the Atlantic shore in
Maine. ‘I suppose you have read about the engagement of the Duke of
Marlborough,’ she wrote to her mother in October 1895, at the age of
14. ‘Oh dear me, if only I was a little older I might “catch” him yet.’
Catch him she did. This resolute American beauty met her duke
five years later in London. They fell in love, though Sunny was married
at the time to another rich American, Consuelo Vanderbilt. For 20
years Gladys was the duke’s mistress. They married in June 1921, after
Sunny’s divorce from Consuelo; at a civil service at the British Consu-
late in Paris, on a day of stifling heat, the bride was dressed in gold bro-
cade. Swiftly Gladys would learn the truth of the old saw about being
careful what one wished for. Hers was a singularly miserable marriage.
Unhappiness notwithstanding, when she summoned Gill to Blen-
heim, the middle-aged duchess retained traces of her power to en-
chant. The enormous bright blue eyes that had charmed so many – from
Proust to the Crown Prince of Prussia – had lost none of their lustre.
Gill chose a luminescent blue to capture their richness, a colour more
typical of illuminated letters in Medieval books of hours, Chinese
enamels or Sèvres porcelain. As Gill painted them, they are almost
too blue – and the brown-eye panels that are their foil, though equally
dramatic, come as a relief. r
PEEPERS’
PALACE

Left: Gladys’s
albums show her at
a sheep sale – viewing
proceedings from
her carriage – and
receiving a ‘lesson
on cinema’. Below:
alongside snaps
of Colin Gill at work
(one mistakenly
captioned ‘Mr Eric
Gill’) are lingering
photographs of
a visitor’s tattoo
PEEPERS’
PALACE
Right: Samuel W.
Ward Willis’s
whimsical lead
sculpture of Gladys
as a sphinx. Below:
here the duchess is
seen sitting for the
sculptor Jacob
Epstein in the palace
undercroft. Bottom:
three more of her
photograph albums,
all of them brightly
bound and numbered

In Gill’s images, which record only the colour and wide-open stare
of Gladys’s gaze, is no hint of the ravages of time or injudicious cos-
metic intervention that observers had begun to note by the 1920s. In
August 1925, Lady Lee described her as ‘not really beautiful’: ‘she has
a heavy chin which looks almost scarred and a coarse crooked mouth.
She has also attempted to acquire a classic Grecian profile, by, it is said,
having paraffin wax injected under the skin of her nose but this ap-
pears to have got somewhat out of place.’ This is how Gladys appears
in a photograph she took of herself in 1928, wearing a kokoshnik-style
tiara, the lower part of her face apparently misshapen.
To the sculptor Jacob Epstein, whom she commissioned to create
a portrait bust of her husband in 1923 (and who sculpted her in turn),
Gladys lamented that she had married a house, not a man. In her long
liaison with Sunny before marriage, Gladys had spent much of her
time abroad, particularly in France, a friend to writers, artists and
bohemian aristocrats. Sunny had joined her there, and the man to
whom she discovered herself married at Blenheim – preoccupied with
estate and county business, irascible, snobbish and unsympathetic –
seemed quite different from her erstwhile cavalier. She tried, as duch-
ess, to perpetuate aspects of her former life. She took up the camera.

ALL IMAGES: COURTESY BLENHEIM PALACE. PHOTOGRAPHY: RICHARD CAVE PHOTOGRAPHY

In her many photograph albums are pictures of card and tea parties
attended by family members and cultural figures including Edith
Sitwell, Lytton Strachey, Harold Nicolson, Cecil Beaton and Winston
Churchill, scenes currently being restaged in state-room tableaux as
part of a new exhibition about palace life in the 1920s.
And there was Blenheim. Before Sunny embarked on construc-
tion of the palace’s water terraces in 1925, Gladys set about restoring a
rock garden created by the fifth duke. Colin Gill came to her attention
after she saw a mural he had painted in St Stephen’s Hall, Westminster.
And Sunny commissioned from Samuel W. Ward Willis a pair of lead
sphinxes each bearing Gladys’s face, which remain in situ.
Still, the marriage unravelled. At Sunny’s death in 1934, their sepa-
ration was complete. Gladys never returned to Blenheim, ending her
life in a psychiatric hospital. Unblinking, her eyes continue to watch
the palace’s comings and goings $
‘Let’s Misbehave: Blenheim Palace in the 1920s’ runs at Blenheim Palace,
Woodstock, Oxon OX20 1UL (01993 810530; blenheimpalace.com), until 13
April. ‘The Sphinx: The Life of Gladys Deacon – Duchess of Marlborough’,
by Hugo Vickers, is published by Hodder & Stoughton, rrp £25
 ®

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 2

1 Louis Vuitton drawer trunk in monogram canvas, c1908.

Courtesy of 3Details. 2 Georgina Ware, Nesting Wader II, earth-
enware, 2019. Courtesy of Jonathan Cooper. 3 Emerald-cut
aquamarine and diamond ring, c1960. Courtesy of Nigel Milne
Fine Jewellery. 4 Gustave Cariot, Arbres en Bordure de Route,
1924. Courtesy of John Adams Fine Art. 5 Norman Parkinson,
Children Looking in a Car, gelatin silver print, 1957. Courtesy of
Horton London. 6 Frédéric de Luca, Intermezzo I, 2016.
Courtesy of John Adams Fine Art. 7 Pair of Chinese export-
porcelain musician dishes, c1700. Courtesy of Gibson
Antiques. 8 Early Ziegler & Co Persian carpet, c1883. Courtesy
of Farnham Antique Carpets. 9 Danish Art Nouveau mahogany
and mother-of-pearl armchairs, c1900. Courtesy of Wick
Antiques $ The Open Art Fair 2020 runs at Duke of York Square,
London SW3, 18-24 March, with food from the Caravan restaurant
group and drinks from the Gimlet bar to add to the experience. For details
5 and half-price tickets using the code WOI2020, visit theopenartfair.com
 TH E WO RL D OF I NT ER IOR S  PART NER SH IP

Beau Selections
All expertly vetted by the BADA, the treasures of 100 of Europe’s leading antique dealers will be on display (and on sale) this spring at the inaugural year
of The Open Art Fair, the antiques, art and design fair in the heart of Chelsea. The week-long event in March will appeal to the most discerning of devotees

8
1 Delft ‘Seto Mini’, by Brook Perdigon, £109 per m, The Fabric Collective. 2 Marine ‘Diamonds’, by Galbraith & Paul, £129.60 per
m, Tissus d’Hélène. 3 Steel ‘Seedpod’, £102, Paint and Paper Library. 4 ‘Zig Zag 10136’, by Missoni, £121, Osborne & Little. 5 ‘JET-
PN-1’, by Jet & Co, £120, Whiteworks. 6 ‘Pavonazzo PDG1031-08’, £68, Designers Guild. 7 ‘Cannes P2018108-195’, by Lee Jofa,
£158 for two 4.5m rolls, GP&J Baker. 8 ‘French Paper No 25’, by Antoinette Poisson, £52 per 44 × 36.5cm sheet, The Shop Floor
Project. 9 ‘Mosaic 105-3016’, £85, Cole & Son. 10 (and background) Crimson ‘Safari’, £100 per m, Paolo Moschino for Nicholas
Haslam. Book-dust brush (top), by Redecker, £28.95; silver brush, by Redecker, £14.95; both The Oxford Brush Company.
Wallpaper prices are per 10m roll, unless otherwise stated; all prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r

5
 SWATCH

TH E DROP OF A H AT
Do small-scale wallpaper designs float your boater? Well, hang on to your chapeau! Mustering all her millinery
skills, Maude Smith has prepared a parade of beauties brimful with possibilities. Photography: Anders Gramer

7
6

10
 SPLASH
LONDON DESIGN CENTRE CHELSEA HARBOUR
PHILLIPJEFFRIES.COM/SPLASH
 SWATCH

1 ‘Polka Square BP1065’, £105, Farrow & Ball. 2 ‘Fernwood 07926-02’, £34, Colefax & Fowler. 3 (and
background) Beryl ‘Lower George Street’, £75.50, Little Greene. 4 Cameleopard/Prussian blue ‘Love
Leaves’, by William Kilburn, c1800, £140, Common Room. 5 ‘Bouquet Stripe’, from £84, Iksel. 6 Cedar
‘Whitehall’, £87, Little Greene. 7 Camel ‘Crabapple’, £153.60 per 9.5m roll, Knowles & Christou. Prices
are per 10m roll, unless otherwise stated, and include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r

7
 Textile wallcover ing inspired by six foulards

collection KAMI
patter n KIMONO

www.arte-international.com
 SWATCH

1 ‘Blend 29051’, by Hooked on Walls, £75, Arte. 2 ‘Albert’s Cross WP1062’, £1,600 per 9.1m roll, Holland
& Sherry. 3 ‘Tantalum Moonbeam’, by Zinc Textile, £338.50, Romo. 4 Copper ‘Zela’, by Harlequin, £69,
Style Library. 5 ‘Reeds San Z002-03’, £510 per m, Fromental. 6 ‘Sussex P535-11’, £68, Designers Guild.
7 ‘Bloomsbury Dot PRBSQ03’, c1810, £146, Hamilton Weston. 8 ‘Magnus 25001’, £81 per m, Arte. 9 (and
background) ‘Brera GA5-9511’, by Armani Casa, £142, Altfield. Shoe brush (top), by Redecker, £18.95;
book-dust brush, by Redecker, £28.95; both The Oxford Brush Company. Wallpaper prices are per
10m roll, unless otherwise stated; all prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r

5
7

8
9
 SWATCH

1 Red ‘Sunburst’, £107, Robert Kime. 2 Blossom ‘Luxor’, by Walter G., £68 per m, The Fabric Collective. 3 Oyster
‘Petites Fleurs’, £235 per m, Bennison. 4 Light red ‘Corsica’, by Michael S. Smith, £711.60, Jamb. 5 ‘Franklin Stripe’,
$648, Adelphi Paper Hangings. 6 Rose ‘Rizzi Book Paper’, by The Twigs, £270, Simon Playle. 7 (and background)
Bastille ‘Seraphic Star’, £140, Soane Britain. Silver brush, by Redecker, £14.95, The Oxford Brush Company. Wallpaper
prices are per 10m roll, unless otherwise stated; all prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r

7
SWATCH

2 3

1 Indigo ‘Macita’, by Nile & York, £84 per m, The Fabric

Collective. 2 ‘Panier 214064M-01’, by Anne & Veronika,
£195, Hermès. 3 ‘Bauhaus AZDPT044WD’, £60, Mini
Moderns. 4 ‘Le Cor busier Dots 31000’, £142 per 8m
roll, Arte. 5 Sprig ‘Raindots’, by Schumacher, £106.60;
6 Citron ‘Tumbling Blocks’, by Schumacher, £116.40;
both Turnell & Gigon. Background: Mimosa ‘E’, by Anni
Albers, £50 per m, Christopher Farr Cloth. Lint brush, by
Redecker, £21.95, The Oxford Brush Company. Wallpaper
prices are per 10m roll, unless otherwise stated; all prices
include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
SWATCH

1 ‘Elisabet Stripe ELS04’, by Astrid & Rudolf, £100,

Nicholas Herbert. 2 Antique red ‘Bengali’, by Braque-
nié, £240 per 5.4m roll, Pierre Frey. 3 Cluny ‘Voysey
Park’, £70.81, Lewis & Wood. 4 Indigo ‘Ghost of Miss
Willmott’, by Raoul Textiles, £841.40 per 9.1m roll,
Turnell & Gigon. 5 ‘Twiggy W7339-06’, £79, Osborne
& Little. Background: ‘18th-century Flowers’, from
£84 per sq m, Iksel. Silver brush, by Redecker, £14.95,
The Oxford Brush Company. Wallpaper prices are
per 10m roll, unless otherwise stated; all prices in-
clude VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book $

5
Chimneypieces | Lighting | Furniture
020 7730 2122 | jamb.co.uk
 The road unravelled, Italian rad, English trad, Ruskin redux, Modernist melting-pots, Rego’s
sorcery, Far Eastern furniture, snapper’s delight, titfer titbits, Mazzer’s dazzlers, Sindh stitches books

SILK ROADS: PEOPLES, CULTURES, LANDSCAPES (ed. Susan Whitfield; encouraged cultural exchange. Illustrated with historically diverse
Thames & Hudson, rrp £49.95) Trade between China and the West maps, antique and contemporary photography, archaeological
profoundly changed in the early Han Dynasty, about two centu- treasures and ruins, the book shows that the diverse peoples along
ries before the birth of Christ. Likely driven by eager customers for the route interacted, advanced and flourished ‘not in spite of their
Chinese silk throughout the classical world, a network of routes de- differences, but because of them’. Take Filippo Lippi’s Madonna and
veloped linking the Far East with the Mediterranean and taking in Child (1482), where the Virgin’s ultramarine robe is painted using
Arabia, East Africa and southern Europe. Lasting well into the 18th lapis lazuli, mined in the Hindu Kush and an indispensable in-
century, this has become one of history’s most myth- gredient of Italian Renaissance art. Another exquisite illustration
ologised journeys since being given the name Die conveys even more: a 14th-century Ilkhanid tapestry medallion,
Seidenstrasse by Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877. styled on Islamic iconography, depicts the cosmopoli-
Naturally, merchant exchange included much tan court of a ruler flanked by a Mongol prince and an
more than silk: over centuries, the interweaving Arab or Persian minister, using a Chinese weave, with
routes facilitated the migration of ideas, peoples, a west Asian ornamental technique. The aesthetics,
cultures, technologies, diplomacies and intrigues. technology and narratives of this piece were made
Editor Susan Whitfield has devoted much of her ca- possible by centuries of exchange.
reer to the topic, and this handsome book presents a In the 1980s I remember someone bemoan-
comprehensive survey of the geography, archaeology, ing the fact that bus travel between London and
and cultural and physical environment of all parts of Kathmandu was no longer easily possible. The
this historical phenomenon. With over 80 contribu- modern hippie equivalent of the Silk Road tour
tors, the heft of the volume more than matches the sheer had been a staple of young, adventurous travellers
weight of the subject. All the major religions, as well as in the 1970s, but rising Middle Eastern tensions,
minor faiths, echo across the steppes, mountains, de- the Iranian Revolution and the Russian invasion
serts, plains and seas that were all part of the trade and of Afghanistan had made the once popular route
communication network. Between Istanbul and Beijing all but impassable. The value of this sumptuous
were such cosmopolitan centres as Damascus, Baghdad, book lies not in its decorative coffee-table desira-
Isfahan, Samarkand, Kabul, Urumqi, Delhi, Chang’an bility but because it serves to remind us that human
and Shanghai, and associated historical figures read like difference and interaction is vitally necessary for pro-
a Who’s Who of two millennia of history. gress. In an era marked by international wall-building
One essay notes how close trade routes naturally facil- and little compassion towards refugees and migrants,
itated ‘the movement of people from Ural Asia and the we would do well to remember this $ DAVID GLEESON
steppes to south and west Asia’, and how this vast network is a freelance writer r

To order Silk Roads for £42.45 (plus £4.50 UK p&p), ring the World of Interiors Bookshop on 0871 911 1747

69
RICHMOND NEW YORK LONDON LOS ANGELES
mckinnonharris.com
 books

RADICAL: ITALIAN DESIGN 1965-1985: THE DENNIS FREEDMAN COLLECTION (by Cindi Strauss et al;
Yale, rrp £35) To early 21st-century eyes, many of the objects depicted in Radical – includ-
ing Marion Baruch’s ‘Ron Ron’ chair of 1971-2, which resembles a giant pompom, and
Guido Drocco and Franco Mello’s plastic ‘Cactus’ of 1972 – look as if they could have been
bought yesterday from a shop selling cheap kitsch items for the home. And yet they were
the products of an architectural and design movement that set out to make a profound
critique of the sociopolitical status quo.
Rejecting capitalism and consumerism (theoretically, if not in practice), the protago-
nists of radical design emerged first in Florence around 1965-66 in the architectural studios
Archigram and Superstudio, and a few years later migrated to Milan, where the innovative
work of Ettore Sottsass, Andrea Branzi and others rejected the glossy design icons – for
example Vico Magistretti’s shiny ‘Selene’ chair (1968) for Artemide – created by the genera-
tion that immediately preceded them. The radicals sought to replace luxury with banality,
sumptuous materials with simple ones, and form and function with irony and playfulness.
Architects used drawings and models to create ‘non-places’ – that is, built structures,
such as warehouses, that have no social status – acting as critiques of high Modernism,
while designers alluded to the banal artefacts of everyday life. Lapo Binazzi’s 1969 ‘Para-
mount’ table lamp, for example, featured an umbrella, while Fabio de Sanctis and Ugo
Officina Undici’s ‘Cielo, Mare, Terra’ buffet (1964) incorporated two doors from a Fiat
600 car. A few figures from the period – Sottsass, Branzi, Alessandro Mendini and Gaetano
Pesce among them – went on to become globally influential. When Sottsass’s group exhi-
bition, Memphis, opened its doors in Milan in 1981 it was mobbed by 10,000 people, a sign
that its message had hit a nerve. Many other radical designers have vanished without trace.
The legacy of the movement is twofold. On the one hand, as art critic Germano Celant
explains in the book, the effort to direct design away from the commercial marketplace
simply resulted in the production of yet more banal commodities. By the early 21st century,
that phenomenon is still with us, embodied in the trend for nostalgic kitsch, from ducks
on the wall to lava lamps. On the other, the Italian radicals laid the groundwork for the
politically active engagement exhibited by many of today’s young practitioners. Through
their commitment to a design of inclusiveness, of participation, of activism, and of sustain-
ability, and the importance they give to design teams over the individual maestro, today’s
avant-garde is seeking, once again, to sever the link between their profession and consum-
erism. However, that renewed radicalism is expressed more frequently through texts and
activities. Given that climate change is now the world’s greatest problem, and the creation
of yet more ‘things’ is inherently problematic, the possibility of designed artefacts bring-
ing about social and political revolutions is here treated with scepticism.
Radical: Italian Design 1965-1985 is well worth a read. Its illustrations provide an impor-
tant record of a design movement that has much to offer us today. It captures the fun, energy
and enthusiasm that drove a group of committed creative individuals – individuals who
believed their discipline could change the world $ PENNY SPARKE is director of the Modern
Interiors Research Centre, Kingston University r

To order Radical for £31.50 (plus £4.50 UK p&p),

ring the World of Interiors Bookshop on 0871 911 1747
PH BERNARD TOUILLON

R A FA E L BY PAO L A N AV O N E SHOWROOM
LONDON , CHE L SE A HARBOUR DE SIGN CE NTRE /
M I L A N / PA R I S / R O M E / C A N N E S

ETHIMO.COM
 books

ENGLISH HOUSE STYLE: FROM THE ARCHIVES OF COUNTRY LIFE (by John troduced with a double-page spread of deep relief patterns in what
Goodall; Rizzoli, rrp £62.50) I recently attended a fascinating lec- look like Saxon chevron patterns, but which in fact were designed
ture by the author, John Goodall, in which he explained how the by Molly Wells for the mostly Tudor Wardington Manor in 1919.
styles of English domestic architecture transcend historical eras: We pass Penrhyn Castle, a late Georgian mansion plastered with
instead of a clear dividing line that separates, say, the late Tudor bold early Gothic interlaced arches and writhing spandrels, and
from the early classical period, architects went on choosing details then some ancient vaults, to find the wonderfully animated carved
they liked from old buildings and incorporating them into new screen installed only recently to his own design by the artist Louis
ones. Thus the porch ceiling of Clare College, Cambridge, an other- de Wet in his extraordinary Medieval home, Wenlock Abbey.
wise Renaissance building, is decorated with a Gothic vault. This is The fine quality of the carving on this screen, by Andrew Pear-
the lesson that Goodall has used as the theme for his new book: that son, whose other work tellingly includes a relief called Erasmus’s
we have a treasury of design and crafts- First Attempt at the Computer, provides
manship to draw on, and architects to- a link to another theme of the book: the
day, as in every other era, have gone on primacy of craftsmanship in all the fin-
mixing styles under a single roof. est interiors. At the fancy end of the scale
Goodall’s introductory sections are we have French Rococo boiseries, and the
erudite and readable, but this is essen- Byzantine domed hall of Debenham
tially a spectacular picture book of the House with its shimmering mosaics,
highest quality. Country Life’s archives both from the Edwardian era; the lus-
are the source, and except for a few early trous ceiling of William Kent’s stag-
shots from the magazine’s pioneering gering Blue Velvet Room at Chiswick
black-and-white era, they are recent: House; Palladian plasterwork aplenty;
clear, sharp and vivid, they are the work and the indulgent Art Deco bathrooms
of some of Britain’s best interior pho- of sparkling young Londoners from the
tographers. You are unlikely to find a interwar period. But Country Life valued
more comprehensive or imaginative understated excellence in workman-
compilation, for Goodall has added to ship from the start, and so the austerely
the familiar list of styles a few other cat- beautiful 20th-century Tudor home of
egories that transcend period, ‘the col- its first architectural editor, H. Avray
lector’, ‘the cottage’ and ‘grotto and gar- Tipping, also features.
den’ among them. A handful of typos aside, this is a
And thus within each chapter the fabulous book that will disappoint no-
author mixes designs regardless of age, body $ TIMOTHY BRITTAIN-CATLIN’s
sometimes most surprisingly. We start, new book, ‘The Edwardians and their Houses’,
for example, with the Romanesque, in- is published by Lund Humphries r

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73
FUR N IT U RE | FA BR IC S | MI R ROR S | LI GH TS | ACC E SS ORI E S
261 Fulham Road, London SW3 6HY +44 (0)20 7352 5594 www.beaumontandfletcher.com

Calypso dining chairs with Wallis embroidery on Capri silk velvet - Aquamarine
 books

UNTO THIS LAST: TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF JOHN RUSKIN (Tim Barringer et al; Yale, rrp
£40) John Ruskin is not an easy read for attention spans stunted by soundbites and
tweets. Today he is known, bathetically, more for his unconsummated marriage
and an unsettling fascination for his teenage pupil, Rose La Touche. Even in the
19th century, his ‘passionate rhetoric, marrying the authoritative cadence of the
King James Bible with the vivid imagery of the Romantic poets’ irked the novelist
George Meredith as a ‘preposterous, priestly attitude’. Yet it was precisely the quality
of moral certainty that brought Ruskin the vast readership that any modern social
or cultural commentator can only dream of. He was a man whose time had come
in the middle of the Victorian age: he made a love of art not just safe and acceptable
for the Protestant middle classes; he made it a moral imperative.
His writing shaped a renewed appreciation of Turner, energised the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, and in celebrating the natural qualities of building stones and bricks
gave colour to the Gothic Revival in architecture. His condemnation of the over-
zealous restorers of Medieval churches, who scraped away the marks of time and of
the craftsman’s chisel, inspired William Morris to found the Society for the Protec-
tion of Ancient Buildings, making it the norm to conserve and not to restore. Most
prescient of all, he foresaw the decay of society beset by social, economic and eco-
logical division and imbalance.
Last year marked 200 years since Ruskin’s birth, and this book accompanies
an exhibition devised at the Yale Center for British Art and currently at the Watts
Gallery in Compton, Surrey. It is very much more than an exhibition catalogue,
with five essays, including Tim Barringer’s magisterial introduction, that explore
Ruskin’s attitude to observation and drawing, his crafting of the first editions of his
books, his antagonism to iron and its dehumanising production and an initially
surprising epilogue on the contemporary artist Jorge Otero-Pailos, who makes
work from liquid latex casts of parts of buildings, including Ruskin’s beloved St
Mark’s, Venice, the accretion of dust preserved like a fly in amber.
Many of these ideas have been explored before (few corpses have been as com-
prehensively dissected as Ruskin’s), but this beautifully produced book does an
important service in bringing together so many drawings and paintings made or
inspired by Ruskin, early photographs he used, and the books he shepherded so
attentively through the press. It does not aim to be a comprehensive overview of
Ruskin’s life and work, yet in a way it is just that. Ruskin is all about careful, emo-
tionally and intellectually engaged observation of the thing itself, be it a geological
specimen, replete with its millennia of history, a branch of buds or an evanescent
cloud effect. A key notion that runs through his writing is that the essence of the
whole (in nature, architecture or society) is encapsulated in a small detail – of a cath-
edral in a crocket, or a mountain in a pebble. It is through observing the material
traces of Ruskin’s life and work that we are led most surely to an understanding of
the whole man $ AILEEN REID is a historian on the Survey of London at the Bartlett, UCL r

To order Unto This Last, ring Yale University

Press on 020 7079 4900, or visit yalebooks.co.uk
books

CREATIVE GATHERINGS: MEETING PLACES OF MODERNISM (by Mary Ann Caws; Reaktion,
rrp £25) Where did the magic really happen: in the studio, the classroom, the bar or
the bed? This survey sets out with an intriguing objective: to discover the ingredients
making up the places that fostered, fomented and fermented Modernism. Artists
have always done a lot of their bonding and bickering across a communal table or
easel, mostly over a bottle of wine, or at the very least a shared thought. Very often
these early Modernists’ meetings, tertulias, powwows and salons were presided over
by one professorial voice. Think of Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in Virgin-
ia, or Stéphane Mallarmé, hosting his Tuesday-night poetry soirées. Or else they
were led by an undisputed maestro – for they were invariably male – such as an over-
bearing Paul Gauguin playing the piano at the Pension Gloanec in Pont-Aven, a
town veritably littered in squished paint tubes, or by the ‘pope’ of Surrealism, André
Breton, holding court at the Café Cyrano in Paris, while drinking mandarin curaçao,
policing membership and occasionally granting others permission to speak.
Writer Mary Ann Caws teases us with tales of têtes-à-têtes taking place within
the headiest imaginable environments: of the smoky Els Quatre Gats in Barcelona,
or the cosy Charleston farmhouse in Sussex. In some cases, the author empha-
sises personal connections to these locales, revealing a failed attempt to impress
some latter-day Surrealists with her automatic freestyle, while many reminis-
cences were passed down by her grandmother, Margaret Walthour Lippitt, who
frequented a number of famous residencies and academies.
Indeed, most of the chosen destinations are bustling creative colonies, rather
than intimate gatherings (one chapter vaguely centres on that most underrated ar-
tistic hotspot, Venice). The temporary denizens of Barbizon in France, we learn,
were plein-air painters with ‘bison’-like beards, who paid for lodgings with artworks
and ritualistically toked on an enormous pipe so that smoke traces might determine
their Impressionistic leanings. The author trendily argues such painters are proto-
modern rather than ‘post-studio’, which describes the contemporary condition in
which collaborative atmosphere now replaces the reclusive garret of old. But when
the ever-extending timeline of Modernism is stretched so far back, even past the
1880s, why not bring it nearer to the present with, say, the weekly salons at Louise
Bourgeois’s New York home, which ran from the 1970s until her death in 2010?
Sometimes these short accounts can read like a guestbook, listing notable at-
tendees, with little sense of how the collectives coalesced socially or artistically.
The complexities and paucity of direct recollections can be a hindrance, although
generally the lesser-trodden paths lead to the most interesting discoveries, such as
the Florence Griswold House in Old Lyme, Connecticut. This mansion-cum-
boarding house covered in daubs by its visitors was linked to the better-known
Cos Cob art colony by American Impressionists such as Childe Hassam – who
would walk to the post office in his flowery dressing-gown and stovepipe hat –
but where female artists were actively encouraged. As it is, this breezy guide re-
ally bristles only when the roll-calls give way to specific anecdotes and when the
To order Creative Gatherings, ring Reaktion touristic turns atmospheric $ OSSIAN WARD, director of content at Lisson Gallery, is the
Books on 020 7253 4965, or visit reaktionbooks.co.uk author of ‘Look Again: How to Experience the Old Masters’ (Thames & Hudson) r
 books

PAULA REGO: THE ART OF STORY (Deryn Rees-Jones; Thames & Hudson, through it is an unalloyed delight, though a little like having your
rrp £85) If I had to save one Paula Rego picture from a burning brain scorched. In a good way.
building, it might be The Blue Fairy Whispers to Pinocchio (1996). It’s a Rego, you see, widely considered to be one of the finest talents
sublime but unspeakably haunting reimagining of the wooden boy- of her generation, has never shied away from strange or difficult
puppet and his guiding spirit, in which a naked child – we see his subjects. Looking at her work can be a painful, frightening expe-
inert figure only from the back – is wreathed by a sinewy woman in rience and arguably it has puzzled as many critics as it has enrap-
a tiara and wand. Is she admonishing or comforting him? We don’t tured since she came to prominence in 1950s Britain (she studied
know, and that’s part of the painting’s witchery. at the Slade under the exacting William Coldstream, at a time
The Dance (1988), in which assorted configurations of men and when Lucian Freud was one of the visiting tutors).
women waltz and glide on a moonlit beach, would be a close sec- As for images, the book is a treat (less so the maddeningly eru-
ond, if not for the palpably sculptural, exaggerated swish of the dite text surrounding them) – perfect for studying Rego’s visual
women dancers’ skirts, then for their partners’ shiver-eliciting tics up close. Look out, for instance, how in composition and feel
ambivalence, played out in snide grimaces her works often recall the old masters –
and faraway looks. Velázquez and Goya certainly, also Manet
Although – hang on – what about The and Degas – particularly the latter’s por-
Artist in her Studio (1993), in which a force- traits of bathers. Or, how Rego toys with
ful and dazzlingly coloured Rego-like fig- well-known fables and fairy tales in such a
ure (she seems to be more apparition than way that that the original story is bruised
human) appears wide-legged and smoking and undermined. (‘My favourite themes
a pipe amid a nightmare of casts, canvases, are games and hierarchies,’ she has said. ‘I
veiny green cabbages, wolves and dancing always want to turn things on their heads,
mice? Or let’s not forget any of the Jane Eyre to upset the established order.’)
etchings, which, once seen, change your Which brings me to the undertow of
view of the novel utterly. menace or morbidity. In her pictures Rego
Fortunately, all of these works by the brings to the fore things about which we
now 85-year-old Portuguese artist (resi- would not commonly talk openly: abortion,
dent in London) are among the 300 or so sexual predators, a woman behaving like a
paintings, pastels, etchings, drawings and dog – and that’s the least of it. Look at each
collages highlighted in Paula Rego: The Art one for a while and it unfolds into something
of Story, a new minutely researched, silky else. Quash your fears and there’s always a
slipcase-covered and expansive survey of beautiful reward in sight $ LUCY DAVIES is a
her 60-years-and-counting career. Flipping senior arts editor and writer at the ‘Telegraph’ r

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78
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books

CONTEMPORARY CHINESE FURNITURE DESIGN: A NEW WAVE OF CREATIVITY (Charlotte

and Peter Fiell with Zheng Qu; Laurence King, rrp £30) Doyens of the product
design book, the Fiells are well known for their detailed monographs, from 1991’s
Modern Furniture Classics onwards. Here they collaborate with the architect and
founder of the China Design Centre, Zheng Qu, whose raison d’être has been to
counter the negative connotations of the phrase ‘made in China’.
In our interconnected world, it’s strange to think that Westerners are largely ig-
norant of current design trends from the globe’s most populous country. While the
remarkable innovations of the dynasties are rightly lauded, they tend to overshadow
contemporary developments. That’s in part because some historic output is strik-
ingly ‘modern’. A yoke-back armchair that looks as if it could have come straight out
of Kelmscott is actually 16th-century, for example. This modern enterprise, it tran-
spires, is no reinvention of the wheel but more a balance of ancient and new.
The Chinese ‘design reform movement’ in fact began in Britain, the authors
argue, with the work of Samuel Chan in the 1980s. They should know – they’ve
written a book devoted solely to the master of simplicity in wood. By the 1990s,
designers based in China built on Chan’s principles of visual lightness, combining
them with ancient cultural spirit. Shao Fen’s old/new-spliced art furniture of 1995
is perhaps the key example of the new Sinocentrism. Given that there are over a
hundred art-and-technology colleges teaching furniture design, the groundswell of
innovation is almost guaranteed to continue. One could equally argue that this new
wave is just furthering design principles begun in the Song and Ming dynasties that
were ignored for most of the 20th century. And that this renaissance has been fuelled
by economic policies encouraging trade within and outside China.
The preface, foreword and conclusion are somewhat incongruously ‘hard sell’,
coming from industry honchos keen to promote the nation’s exports. Last year’s
China International Import Expo and the 25th China International Furniture
Expo are cited as the spark for the book, tainting it slightly with the whiff of com-
mercialism. Fortunately, the book’s heartwood more than justifies the project.
Over 60 studios and designers have been chosen to demonstrate a ‘broad scope’
of mainstream and experimental work. Nods to the past are frequent, an acknowl-
edgement that as inventors of the tenon joint, among many technical advances,
Chinese craftspeople have design prowess flowing through their veins. Designer
Frank Chou believes the industry is still in the process of finding its own ‘lan-
guage’ – not aping Western styles but also avoiding Orientalism for its own sake.
On display are nods to calligraphy, the Silk Road, Confucianism, the zodiac,
bamboo, Taoism, the tea ceremony, sustainability, lacquering and more. Within
page after page of exceptional pieces, several leap out. Hong Wei’s ‘Xi’ chair repre-
sents the logical conclusion of roots revisiting – yin and yang, shadow and light and
327 pieces of wood slatted together. Pili Wu’s clever upgrading of the humble and
ubiquitous plastic stool raises a smile, as does Shiershiman’s perfect ‘Fisherman’
floor lamp. This is a rich source for anyone interested in the form, function and
fluidity of furniture design $ KATHRYN REILLY is a freelance writer and editor r

To order Contemporary Chinese Furniture Design for £25.50 (plus

£4.50 UK p&p), ring the World of Interiors Bookshop on 0871 911 1747
 CRÉATIONS DES XX e ET XXI e SIÈCLES
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Opening Saturday, Sunday, Monday and upon appointment
 books

FRANCOIS HALARD 2 (by François Halard; Rizzoli, rrp £72.50) After stored French villa, where there is wit, utility and economy. Wonder
you’ve bought this book – and you should – leave ample time to at Pierre Bergé and YSL’s villa in Marrakesh, where there is not.
read it slowly, to enjoy its artsiness and its gorgeousness. This Halard takes particular pleasure in quiet decay, faded hues
won’t feel as much like homework as it might seem because there and the almost-palpable surfaces of crumbling walls. His tender
isn’t any actual text to read, merely chapter headings on the order photographs of Giorgio Morandi’s monkish studio in Bologna are,
of ‘Marc Jacobs – Paris’, a bit of pagination to signify the upcom- perhaps, the perfect example of what he terms – in an excellent
ing subject, for example, 178 – ‘Ugo Rondinone – Harlem’, and a interview near the end – ‘abstract and radical’ photographs made
page of acknowledgements listing lots of names in bold type. The ‘with no concessions’. In practice, this means that if the image in
above, plus artist IDs, and other information are scattered through his mind requires him to cut a table in half – a surgery often dis-
the book in Halard’s inky scrawl. The heartstoppers, of course, couraged by magazines – he cuts it. Thoughtfully, of course, and
are the photographs. with a fastidious eye.
Don’t expect a book full of glossy shelter-mag trophies. The im- His book, Halard says, is ‘a tribute to famous people who are
ages here are a very long way from that. For starters, they’ve been obsessive in their taste – celebrated figures like Eileen Gray,
printed on heavy matt paper in full- and three-quarter page spreads Dominique de Menil, Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé…’ Of
without captions. The author, an eminent Condé Nast photogra- the pictures he’s included of his own house in Arles, he adds that
pher, thinks of this assemblage as a kind of cutting-edge Grand he’s photographed his collections of African masks and his wife’s
Tour: his personal ‘visual diary’ of artist and celebrity digs, where 18th-century Japanese ceramics ‘as if they were beautiful women’.
each homely detail, each elusive hue or slice of shadow is the work of But this personal scrapbook deserves that epithet too, revealing
two aesthetes: the actual creators and our tour guide. See Raphael’s as it does the hearts of the beautiful women, the beautiful men
Villa Farnese, Barragán’s painted walls, a and all the visionary eccentrics who
raffish Lenny Kravitz in Paris. View glided through these buildings and
Rick Owens’ pendant punching bag these timeless rooms.
and Louise Bourgeois’s kitchen, a One last sprinkling of text and
miracle of art and slapdash house- the tour is done, cryptically con-
keeping. Visit Marfa, Texas, where, cluding on endpapers of pasted-up
sprawling across a double-page graphics and charcoal jottings. ‘I
spread, a lone cowboy relaxes in a love my Queen,’ says one. ‘Queen
desert swimming pool while con- Pleasure’ and ‘Marie Antoinette’
templating distant blue moun- and, facing this, ‘King Pleasure’
tains. Immerse yourself in Dries complete with a childlike crown.
van Noten’s riotous and thriv- Impenetrable and a smidge bi-
ing Belgian gardens and Cap zarre. So unlike what’s gone
Moderne, Ei leen Gray’s re- before $ CAROL PRISANT r

To order for £61.63 (plus £8 UK p&p), ring the World of Interiors Bookshop on 0871 911 1747

82
 ®

UNSAME YOUR HOME

Find the paint that reflects you at craigandrose.com
books

HAT: ORIGINS, LANGUAGE, STYLE (by Drake Stutesman; Reaktion,

rrp £18) Near my flat in Farringdon, a large square building
overlooks the new Crossrail station. Now containing a furniture
showroom and smart offices, the site was originally a six-storey
factory built for Collett’s, the largest ladies’ hatters in Europe.
These days, it might seem remarkable that a chunk of expen-
sive real estate was dedicated to fabricating bonce-coverers. But
a new book shows just how important the hat has been, eco-
nomically, culturally and aesthetically, to us since prehistory.
Hat is an engrossing story, full of curiosities. Did you know,
for example, that some of the earliest artworks – take the 30,000-
year-old Venus of Kostenki – represent hats on otherwise naked
figures? Or that the amount of mercury used to make a top hat
means that handling one incorrectly, even today, can be fatal?
As far back as Hermès’s pileus – a plain, working-person’s
hat, enmagicked by its links to the godly messenger – Stutesman
talks us through the hat’s ability to travel, translate and trans-
form. The transfiguring crown, of course, plays a big role in this.
For the Yoruba, donning the heavily fringed Ade Oba crown
activates a connection to a metaphysical line of kingship, ob-
scuring ‘king as man’ and indicating ‘king as king’.
Stutesman places the hat at the centre of a fascinating ac-
count of consumerism and gender struggle. Men dominated
the hatting business, but millinery, which took off in the 18th
century, was typically female-led, catering for women. It was
considered suspect in its frippery, extravagance – its sheer crea-
tivity. Men attacked milliners by linking them with their less
economically enabled, sex-worker sisters; by the 19th century,
a ‘milliner’s shop’ had become coarse slang for the vagina.
Women are the book’s stars. Like Parisian milliner Rose
Bertin, apparently the first retailer to sell ‘a look’, not just a gar-
ment. In the 1770s she prefigured the grands magasins by a cen-
tury, dressing her shopgirls in soigné outfits, to be seen through
large, plate-glass windows. Fashion had arrived in hatting.
It was fashion, though, which did for my local hat factory:
Collett’s folded just 15 years after building its grand new HQ.
The 1960s saw a rapid decline in regular hat-wearing: Stutes-
man highlights reasons as diverse as the invention of hairspray
and the beehive, the generational fracture of the Korean War,
and dinkier automobiles. But hats endure. From the red MAGA
baseball cap of the Trumpiste, through to Beyoncé’s flower-
crowns, the hat remains potent as fashion statement, symbol
or simple head-warmer; and Hat is a skilful and pithy handling
of the subject. Chapeau! $ NICK SHARP is digital director at the
Royal Academy of the Arts, London r

To order Hat for £15.30 (plus £4.50 UK p&p),

ring the World of Interiors Bookshop on 0871 911 1747
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books

BOB MAZZER (by Bob Mazzer; Unicorn, rrp £15) What does it take
to get by in a world of fine margins? In the working-class Wales,
hard-scrabble Hastings and lairy London brought forth by Bob
Mazzer’s camera, it seems to be: keep your identity fluid, shun
the common herd, seek out rapture where you can. As befits
a photographer who studied at Hornsey Art College in the ‘sit-
in’ 60s, and worked for Oz and Time Out, a strong spirit of the
Counterculture courses through the veins of this compact sur-
vey spanning nigh on six decades.
Raised in East London, Mazzer got his first camera, a rudi-
mentary Ilford Sporty, as a Bar Mitzvah gift aged 13 (two well-
framed child’s-eye snaps kick off proceedings). His hobby turned
serious in 1969 while travelling round the States, and his satiri-
cal/romantic images are firmly in the Robert Frank mould. Back
in Britain, he drifted into furry freakdom – cue shots of Afghan-
coat-wearing chicks, reefers pointing skywards and naked festi-
val-goers entwined on a river bank while squares canoe past.
In the 1970s, Mazzer returned to an unlovely London to live
with his widowed father. Drunks brawl in a seedy King’s Cross
street, gaunt girls in bikinis and tats smoke and sunbathe in Soho
Square, and a ‘SID RIP 2/2/79’ graffito scrawled on a Regent’s Park
wall is the closest you or Mr Vicious are going to get to a Blue
Plaque here. But commuting on the Tube late at night – he landed
a job as a projectionist in a porn cinema – Mazzer found his mé-
tier. Here, a middle-aged woman in heart-shaped Lolita glasses
lights a ciggy, a vampiric man prises apart the carriage doors and
a row turns physical. Another photographer, Wolfgang Tillmans,
said of this odd habitat: ‘men and women [are] incredibly close
to each other’ yet ‘we’ve all decided not to think of it as a sen-
sual experience’. Mazzer likewise sees it as a human laboratory,
a haven for the dispossessed and, late at night, a party. Returning
again and again in his career, he never hides behind his Leica, but
uses it like a passport. He’s primed for engagement, and knows
exhibitionists are always on the lookout for a lens.
Now living on the South Coast, the photographer finds plen-
ty of ammunition for the time-honoured themes lighting up his
pictures: a girl working in a Shell garage expresses quiet resist-
ance to authority, her pink hair and piercings a silent rebuke to
the corporate T-shirt she wears. There’s a yearning for tran-
scendence in teenage boys hurling themselves into the sea from
the harbour arm, and the urge to reinvent oneself, from 1066
battle re-enactments to dressing up for the St Leonard’s Festival.
The final image, from 2018, shows a ladder leaning against a
boulder in France. Unlike, and yet like, all that comes before, it’s a
hymn to human story and the free spirit $ DAMIAN THOMPSON r

To order Bob Mazzer for £13.50 (plus £4.50 UK p&p),

ring the World of Interiors Bookshop on 0871 911 1747
 books

THE FLOWERING DESERT: TEXTILES FROM SINDH (by Nasreen Askari

and Hasan Askari; Paul Holberton, rrp £30) This handsome
book focuses on the remarkable collection of textiles from Paki-
stan’s Sindh province collected over some five decades by Nasreen
Askari. Born and brought up in Sindh, and director of the Moh-
atta Palace Museum in Karachi since its inception in 1999, she
has curated several exhibitions on Pakistani textiles and cul-
ture (including Colours of the Indus at the V&A with me), and her
commitment to the preservation and study of Sindh’s textile
culture is palpable. Her husband, Hasan Askari, a former trus-
tee of the British Museum, has added historical background to
ethnographic and technical information about the pieces as
well as the context in which they were made and used.
Most people will buy and enjoy this book as a visual feast,
for it illustrates over 120 textiles, some with excellent close-up
details that are essential to the appreciation of their textures
and stitches. The primary focus is on Sindh’s rich tradition of
embroidery, which is used to stunning effect on women’s gar-
ments such as large rectangular head-covers and blouse-fronts,
men’s shawls and wedding scarves, small bags and hats as well
as on adornments for camels, horses and bullocks. A smaller
number of woven, printed and tie-dyed textiles are also includ-
ed, but it is the embroideries that are the deserved stars. These
range from the elegant geometry of soof needlework, in which
the designs are made up of triangles, including splendidly an-
gular peacocks, to the dense pakkoh style with its exuberant flo-
ral motifs. Stitches only found in the region include a type of
buttonhole done in shiny floss silk and the distinctive hurmitch,
or interlacing stitch. This technique is also found not only in
neighbouring Baluchistan but also in distant Armenia: indeed
its origins are sometimes ascribed to the latter nation, but
Askari (I think rightly) believes it is a Sindhi stitch, presumably
brought to the Caucasus by traders.
The accompanying essays give new insights into such topics
as the often overlooked contribution of Sindh’s Hindu commu-
nities to its textiles and wider culture, and the importance of
Sindhi ports and traders to pan-Asian trade routes – a subject
which has been discussed far less than their Gujarati equiva-
lents. Other essays provide overviews of the different communi-
ties (Jat, Rabari, Meghwar, Baluch and others) who made and
used the embroideries, each with their own distinctive designs.
6 , R U E D E L’O D EO N Excellent close-up details of the different stitches clearly identify
75 0 0 6 PA R I S each of them, helping to make this book a very useful guide for
collectors and curators of these beautiful textiles $ ROSEMARY
T.+3 3 1 5 5 4 2 92 1 0 CRILL is a former senior curator at the V&A
S E R I E R A R E @ S E R I E R A R E .CO M
To order The Flowering Desert for £25.50 (plus £4.50 UK
W W W. S E R I E R A R E .CO M p&p), ring the World of Interiors Bookshop on 0871 911 1747
 e ar t h t on es pa i nt no . 1 5 9

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Contact us: tel +44 (0)20 7893 7400 designersguild.com
Retail Stores: 267-277 Kings Road, London SW3 5EN
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SALONE DEL MOBILE.Milano
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Flagship Store: Via della Moscova, 53 MILANO
 SERIOUS pursuits
Auctions, antique fairs and diverting activities, chosen by Gareth Wyn Davies

1 The Collection of
Sir William Whitfield,
Dreweatts, 10-11 March.
2 Gio Ponti table lamp,
1930, Phillips, 26 March.
3 Gardening course,
Allt-y-Bela, 27 March.
4 Hawking whistle,
16th-century, Dix
Noonan Webb, 17
March. 5 Salvador
1 Dalí, Couple aux Têtes
de Nuages (1937),
Rooting around a junk shop one day, the distinguished archi- Bonhams, 26 March.
tect SIR WILLIAM WHITFIELD happened upon two forlorn 6 Heather Phillipson,
carved-wood bench ends. He knew immediately that they’d The End, Trafalgar
originally come from Thomas Hope’s Robert Adam house Square, 26 March.
near Cavendish Square. A man of deep learning and refined 7 Léon Dromard,
taste, Sir William was an easy match for that great Georgian marble-topped side
aesthete and connoisseur. ‘Our collecting interests were ex- cabinet, 19th-century,
3 Details at the Open
tensive and varied,’ his partner, Andrew Lockwood, says with 2
3 Art Fair, 18-24 March
exquisite understatement. Like latter-day grand tourists,
Messrs Whitfield and Lockwood amassed everything from 18th- and early
19th-century furniture to sculpture and books
(‘so many books!’) for their Palladian house
near Durham. Following Sir William’s
death aged 98 last year, Dreweatts in
4
Newbury is selling the bulk of that col-
lection on 10-11 MARCH – and you can’t
help but feel that he’d rather like the
manner of its disposal. The auction
house has drafted in the interior designer
Daniel Slowik (WoI April 2019) of Sibyl
Colefax & John Fowler to present selected items
in room sets. So if you’ve always ached for a George II mahogany
dressing commode (estimate £40,000-£60,000) now is your
chance… Details: 01635 553553; dreweatts.com.
BRITAIN
28 FEBRUARY CHATSWORTH, BAKEWELL, DERBYSHIRE
JOSEPH PAXTON AT CHATSWORTH. A talk about the
great gardener so entwined with this humble
abode. Details: 01246 565300; chatsworth.org.
28 FEBRUARY TATE BRITAIN, MILLBANK, LONDON SW1
VOGUING WORKSHOP. Strike a pose with voguing
PHOTOGRAPHY: BRITT WILLOUGHBY DYER (3); BONHAMS (5); JAMES O. JENKINS (6)

virtuoso Diva Miyake-Mugler. Prefer move- 5 6

ment of the more aesthetic kind? There’s always
Tate’s Aubrey Beardsley blockbuster (see WoI next month) opening on 4 March
– (yellow) book it now. Details: 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk.
28 FEBRUARY EWBANK’S, LONDON RD, SEND, SURREY THE WE BERRY ORIGINAL
POSTER ARTWORK COLLECTION. A schlock-horror poster for Creature from the
Black Lagoon tops the bill. Details: 01483 223101; ewbankauctions.co.uk.
2 MARCH ROYAL ACADEMY, PICCADILLY, LONDON W1 EILEEN GRAY TALK. An anato-
my of Gray’s great influence. Details: 020 7300 8000; royalacademy.org.uk.
4 MARCH THE FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM, TRUMPINGTON ST, CAMBRIDGE A LOVE STORY
FOR THE MEDICI? Lunchtime talks don’t get more erudite than this, on the
topic of Cupid and Psyche on Florentine Renaissance wedding chests. Your
90 seconds start now… Details: 01223 332900; fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk.
5 MARCH THE BARBER INSTITUTE OF FINE ARTS, EDGBASTON, BIRMINGHAM TERRAZZO
WORKSHOP. Make your own coasters! Details: 0121 414 7333; barber.org.uk.
5 MARCH ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, BEAUMONT ST, OXFORD REMBRANDT TALK. Sir
Simon Schama and ‘Rembrandt revisionist’ Gary Schwartz have a scholarly
confab about the colossus of art. Details: 01865 278000; ashmolean.org. r
7
 SERIOUS pursuits

1 2

1 Rudolf Ernst, The Palace Guard, Sotheby’s, 31 March. 2 Stoup, 1650, Alessandro
Cesati at The European Fine Art Fair, Maastricht, 7-15 March. 3 Annie Morris,
Stack 8, Copper Blue, 2019, Timothy Taylor Gallery at Arco Madrid, until 1 March

10-11 MARCH MONCRIEFF-BRAY GALLERY, WOODRUFFS LANE, EGDEAN, W.

SUSSEX A TIME LINE THROUGH COLOUR. Learn to ‘sculpt with paint’ on
a course led by artist Leonie Gibbs, whose great heroes are Matisse
and Bonnard. Details: 07867 978414; moncrieff-bray.com.
12-15 MARCH EVOLUTION LONDON, BATTERSEA PARK, LONDON SW11 AFFORD-
ABLE ART FAIR. It’s heaven down SW11 if you’re an art lover with
modest funds. Details: 020 8246 4848; affordableartfair.com.
14-15 MARCH OLD TRUMAN BREWERY, BRICK LANE, LONDON E1 THE LONDON
ARTISAN. A makers’ fair for those who prize all things artisan, sus-
tainable and organic. Details: thelondonartisan.com.
15 MARCH DULWICH COLLEGE, LONDON SE21 MIDCENTURY MODERN. Do
you salivate over Giuseppe Scapinelli sofas and Scandi stoneware?
Then head here! More than 85 dealers will be touting their Troika
pottery and such like on the stalls. Details: modernshows.com.
17 MARCH DIX NOONAN WEBB, BOLTON ST, LONDON W1 OBJETS DE VERTU
SALE.Well, blow me if a rare 16th-century hawking whistle isn’t
going under the hammer. Details: 020 7016 1700; dnw.co.uk.
18-24 MARCH DUKE OF YORK SQUARE, LONDON SW3 THE OPEN ART FAIR
About 100 exhibitors assemble for a new antiques, art and design
fair. Expect everything from a Queen Anne burr-walnut bureau
bookcase to a 1950s Picasso textile. Details: theopenartfair.com.
19 MARCH CHRISTIE’S, KING ST, ST JAMES’S, LONDON SW1 PRIVATE COL-
LECTIONS SALE. Said private collections include the part contents of a
David Hicks-designed flat overlooking Hyde Park (WoI
March 2003). Details: 020 7839 9060; christies.com.
19-21 MARCH YORK HOUSE, YORKERSGATE, MALTON, N. YORKS
POP-UP OF THE NORTH. Creatives from across the UK
converge. Details: popupofthenorth.com.
20-22 MARCH CENTRAL SAINT MARTINS, GRANARY SQUARE, LONDON
N1C CERAMIC ART LONDON 2020. Pot luck: 110 makers from
around the world flaunt their feats of clay in the art college.
Details: ceramicartlondon.com.
20-22 MARCH CHELTENHAM TOWN HALL, IMPERIAL SQUARE, CHEL-

EMBOSS rug by Esti Barnes TENHAM, GLOS CRAFT FESTIVAL CHELTENHAM. Workshops and
wares. Details: craftfestival.co.uk.
25 MARCH-5 APRIL WINDMILL HILL, WADDESDON, BUCKS ANISH
KAPOOR: INTO YOURSELF, FALL. Immersive stuff: a sensa-
206 Design Centre Chelsea Harbour tional virtual-reality experience in the grounds of Wad-
London SW10 0XE desdon Manor, courtesy of Kapoor and his collaborators,
Acute Art. Details: 01296 820414; waddesdon.org.uk.
+44 207 795 3333 26 MARCH PHILLIPS, BERKELEY SQUARE, LONDON W1 DESIGN
SALE. Leading light: a rare table lamp by Gio Ponti
(estimate £10,000-£15,000) is all set to shine. Details:
www.topfloorrugs.com 020 7318 4010; phillips.com. r

3
Ph. Kasia Gatkowska
Ad. Graph.x

Agent for UK: SALONE

INTERNAZIONALE
Clemente Cavigioli DEL MOBILE
W10 6BS London MILANO 2020
T. +44 207 7922522 HALL 7
[email protected] STAND D15-E14 WWW.PORRO.COM
SERIOUS pursuits

1 Polidoro da Caravaggio, Joseph Thrown into the Well by His Brothers,

16th-century, Arcturial, Paris, 25 March. 2 Jean Arp,
Composition de Nuages, lithograph, 1959, Christie’s, Paris, 26 March

26 MARCH BONHAMS, NEW BOND ST, LONDON W1 IMPRESSIONIST AND

MODERN ART SALE. Surreal deal: Salvador Dalí’s masterpiece Couple
aux Têtes de Nuages (1937) is the star lot, with a mind-melting estimate
of £7 million-£10 million. Details: 020 7447 7447; bonhams.com.
26 MARCH TRAFALGAR SQUARE, LONDON WC2 FOURTH PLINTH UNVEILING. One
day my plinth will come: Heather Phillipson’s sculpture The End – a
swirl of replica whipped cream like Douglas Hurd’s quiff – takes its
place among the lions and Lord Nelson. Details: london.gov.uk.
27 MARCH ALLT-Y-BELA, USK, MONM GARDENING THROUGH THE SEASONS. The
first of a four-day course (the other three taking place throughout
the year) at garden designer Arne Maynard’s exquisite 15th-cen-
tury home (WoI May 2015). Details: arnemaynard.com.
27-29 MARCH DARTINGTON HALL, TOTNES, DEVON LOVE WOOD. Learn how to
coax coppiced wood into a freeform tapletop or Shaker-ish seat
with furniture-maker Peter Lanyon. Details: dartington.org.
31 MARCH SOTHEBY’S, NEW BOND ST, LONDON W1 THE NAJD COLLECTION II.
Fancy taking a Jean-Léon Gérôme home? You’ll need very deep
pockets – the first part of this sale of Orientalist paintings realised
£33.5 million in October. Details: 020 7293 5000; sothebys.com.
OUTSIDE BRITAIN
BELGIUM 5-8 MARCH ESPACE VANDERBORGHT, RUE DE L’ECUYER, BRUSSELS
COLLECTIBLE. The fair for 21st-century design, now in its third year,
bringing together renowned galleries. Details: collectible.design.
SPAIN UNTIL 1 MARCH VARIOUS VENUES, MADRID ARCO MADRID. A cornuco-
pia of contemporary art. Details: 00 34 902 221515; ifema.es.
THE NETHERLANDS 7-15 MARCH MECC MAASTRICHT, FORUM 100, MAASTRICHT
THE EUROPEAN FINE ART FAIR. Ancient art to antiques, tribal artefacts
to haute joaillerie. Details: 00 31 20 303 6400; tefaf.com.
FRANCE 25 MARCH ARTCURIAL, ROND-POINT DES CHAMPS-ELYSEES, PARIS
OLD MASTERS AND 19TH CENTURY ART. Hands up anyone who’d like
a sculpture of Liberty by Frédéric
Auguste Bartholdi. Find it here, along
with Joseph Thrown into the Well by His
Brothers, a ravishing drawing by Poli-
doro da Caravaggio, who was one of
Raphael’s pupils. Details: 00 33 1 42
99 20 20; artcurial.com.
FRANCE 26 MARCH CHRISTIE’S, AVENUE
MATIGNON, PARIS HOMMAGE A ARP: THE
GRETA STROEH COLLECTION. About 80
works belonging to a friend of the
artist Jean Arp, from sculpture to
collage, are up for grabs. Details: 00
33 1 40 76 85 85; christies.com $

2
BESPOKE KITCHENS COOKING SUITES SINKS&TAPS APPLIANCES TABLEWARE

FLORENCE MILAN LONDON NEW YORK LOS ANGELES MOSCOW TEL AVIV HONG KONG SHANGHAI LAGOS

LONDON SHOWROOM
12 Francis St, Westminster, London SW1P 1QN

+44 (0) 207 036 1632 | [email protected] | officinegullo.com

DARK STARS
Is your passage, porch or patio a black hole? Well, that’s a bit rubbish.
Perk up the murk with an out-of-this-world sconce, lamp or lantern. Trendy 1
or trad, it’s the way to glow, says Max Egger. Photography: Neil Mersh

4
 SHORTLIST
1 Yellow-tinted glass lantern, £294, Retrouvius. 2 Verdigris ‘Gothic’
bracket lantern, £3,696, Charles Edwards. 3 ‘Georgian’ porch lan-
tern, £586, Vaughan. 4 Rose-tinted bubble lantern, £294, Retrouvius.
5 Outdoor standing ‘Parker’ lamp, £1,200, Paolo Moschino for
Nicholas Haslam. 6 Antiqued-brass ‘Dalston’, £121.90, Jim Lawrence.
All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
2

5
 SHORTLIST

5
3

6 1 Copper up/down spotlight, by Nordlux, £100,

Habitat. 2 Rattan ‘Garota’, by Bover, £601, Amara.
3 Portable ‘Bud’, by Melissa Yip for Innermost, £99,
The Conran Shop. 4 ‘Transloetje’, by Fatboy, £90;
5 ‘Bellhop’, by Flos, £175; both Amara. 6 Portable
‘Tsuki’, £75, The Conran Shop. All prices include
VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
JULIAN CHICHESTER

JULI ANC HICHE STER. C OM

london | new york | atlanta
 SHORTLIST

1 ‘LACO08’, £95, Garden Trading. 2 ‘Crewe’, £240, David Hunt

Lighting. 3 Hanging ‘Michele’, by Manzi & Zanotti Design Studio,
£822, Hector Finch. 4 ‘Bollicosa Nautilus’, from £846, Cassina.
5 Arts and Crafts alabaster-and-copper lanterns, 1915, by Richard
Williamson & Co, £16,000 for the set of four, Rose Uniacke. 6 Bulk-
head light, by Old School Electric, £65, Holloways of Ludlow.
All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
 C U R AT E D AU C T I O N H O U S E I N PA R I S

Auction: March 12th, 2020 - 4PM Auction: March 12th, 2020 - 6PM Auction: March 12th, 2020 - 6PM
EDITIONS HERVÉ WAHLEN,DINANDERIE ITALIAN GLASS
FROM ONE AMERICAN FROM A EUROPEAN PRIVATE
COLLECTION COLLECTION

Auction: March 25th, 2020 - 6PM Auction: March 25th, 2020 - 6PM Auction: March 31st, 2020 - 7PM
ALVAR AALTO DESIGN MODERN AND
BEAUTY IS THE HARMONY OF CONTEMPORARY ART
PURPOSE AND FORM PAPER FOCUS

VIEWINGS & AUCTIONS CONTACT & ENQUIRIES

PIASA DESIGN please contact: [email protected]
118 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré 75008 Paris - France MODERN ART please contact: [email protected]
+33 1 53 34 10 10 | [email protected] PRINTS please contact: [email protected]

INFORMATION, UPCOMING AUCTIONS & RESULTS WWW.PIASA.FR

PIASA SA - agrément n° 2001-020 - Commissaire priseur habilité : Frédéric Chambre

 SHORTLIST

1 ‘Fredensborg’, £170, Nordlux. 2 ‘Southbank’, £55, Rockett

St George. 3 ‘ICF1’, by Michael Anastassiades for Flos,
£990, Aram. 4 ‘Hampton’, £288, John Cullen. All prices
include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
SHORTLIST

1 ‘Hopper’, £1,680, Jamb. 2 ‘Bidart’, £189, The French House. 3 Classic wall lan-
tern, £740, Besselink & Jones. 4 ‘W2’, £2,504, Howe. 5 ‘Cylinder’, £1,530,
Collier Webb. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
SHORTLIST

1 ‘Quad’, by Davey Lighting, £625, Original BTC. 2 ‘Mia’, by

Michel Charlot, from £649, Kettal. 3 Portable ‘Muse’, by Tristan
Auer for Contardi Lighting, £660, Chaplins. 4 ‘Cloche’, by Lexon,
£89, Amara. 5 ‘Ficupala’, from £738, Cassina. Backdrop
throughout: ‘Lambeth’, from £36 per sq m, Murals Wallpaper. All
prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book $
106
Racknitz’s treatise Top row: a hand- the aristocrat was
on historical tastes coloured plate hard-pressed to
also carried the distils the ‘Persian represent ‘Siberian
equivalent of the taste’ seen in the or Russian taste’,
‘get the look’ pages illustration, right, as he captioned the
found in modern- into three key plate, left, and so With its lavish illustrations, Joseph Friedrich zu
day magazines. pieces. Above row: settled for a sledge When the appetite for such things waned, the baron’s
 TA ST E ON A PL AT E
Racknitz’s treatise on global Geschmack, or taste, proved a page-turner among the design-hungry denizens of 1790s Germany.
book was soon forgotten – but now it’s getting a second serving. Stephen Patience savours the many morsels in its pages
LONDON + 44 (0) 20 7730 6400 NEW YORK + 1 646 201 9553 SAN FRANCISCO + 1 415 590 3260 ATLANTA + 1 470 355 4887
[email protected] WWW.SOANE.COM
 TASTE ON
A PLATE

Left: to reflect plate was far from

‘Mexican taste’, as prosaic, however,
he put it, Racknitz and incorporated
simply presented seated figures from
five varieties of the pre-Columbian
wood. Below: this Mayan manuscript
accompanying The Dresden Codex

BARON Joseph Friedrich zu Racknitz is chiefly re- A minor noble in the Electorate of Saxony, he disported himself
membered – in those rarefied circles where he is remembered at with all the dilettante enthusiasm that only a feckless aristocrat can
all – for his involvement with the Mechanical Turk of the 1770s. muster, engaging in, inter alia, military service, landscape garden-
Designed by Wolfgang von Kempelen, this was a turbaned auto- ing, composing music, mineralogy, freemasonry, the construction
maton that sat behind a large desk and was able, purportedly of more automatons, and writing treatises on art. His greatest work,
by a miracle of clockwork, to play all-comers at chess. Racknitz, however, arose out of plans to renovate Schloss Moritzburg, his
however, deduced that this was not really an early example of family’s hunting lodge near Dresden. Racknitz conceived an ad-
artificial intelligence, but an illusion – the Turk was operated by venturous scheme in which four suites of three rooms apiece would
a man concealed within the desk – and he produced a famous be decorated to illustrate various historical ‘tastes’ – or Geschmäcker,
model that showed the hoax-machine’s internal workings. as they are euphoniously called in German – in the form of murals r
 ×
Bill Amberg

savoirbeds.com

London Paris New York Düsseldorf Moscow Shanghai Hong Kong Seoul Taipei Singapore
 TASTE ON
A PLATE

Left: Racknitz had

much to say about
the merits of ‘the
Moorish taste’,
which he chose to
illustrate with this
plate. Below: about
the Alhambra –
depicted in the
background – he
was quite sniffy,
writing, ‘There is
little beauty in
[its] outside aspect’

painted on the considerably more parsimonious medium of canvas. to ‘parallel branches of the history of taste’, namely Persian, Turkish,
The first suite, representing the earliest times, featured the Egyptian, Mexican and, exotically enough, Tahitian – reflecting Captain Cook’s
Chinese and Etruscan tastes. The second, ‘the highest level of taste recent voyages in the South Seas.
and the approach of its decadence’, showed Greek, Roman and Such a scheme would in all likelihood have been somewhat
Moorish. The third, ‘the decadence of art and its revival’, was div- overwhelming, an extravagant chocolate-box assortment of clash-
ided into Gothic, Old German and Old French (by which Racknitz ing styles and manners. But we shall never know, since it was never
meant Baroque). And the fourth, ‘the taste of the present age’, fea- completed. Instead it morphed into a lavishly illustrated book, the
tured the ‘simple English style’ (the Palladian manner), inspired by pithily entitled Presentation and History of the Taste of the Leading Nations,
the discoveries at Pompeii, and the taste of Raphael’s arabesques. In a facsimile of which has now been republished. Within its pages,
addition, Moritzburg’s four round towers would each be dedicated Racknitz expanded his scope to 24 Geschmäcker, adding in such r
TASTE ON
A PLATE

Right: in Polynesia makes its articles of

now, figuratively dress’. Below: this
speaking, Racknitz plate, adapted from
presents ‘a simple an engraving by
card of various John Hall, depicts
Tahitian stuffs from the surrender of the
which this people island of Otaheite

topics as the French Rococo, China and even Kamchatka – just in cued sledge that resembles the titular device from George Pal’s 1960
case any residents of 18th-century Saxony fancied doing up the film of The Time Machine, while its Mexican counterpart shows noth-
schloss in the style of a yurt from the central-Asian steppes. Each is ing more than the grains of various types of wood.)
illustrated with a coloured engraving of a room decorated in the For all its pseudo-academic airs, the Presentation and History is
appropriate manner, with the apparent proviso that it also com- a somewhat autodidactic work. There is a pervading sense that
mand excellent views of a relevant building of historical impor- Racknitz’s examples are drawn from other books rather than direct
tance – Chiswick House, for example, in the case of the English style. experience. The pictures of the pyramids have an isosceles steep-
A secondary plate depicts representative samples of suitable furni- ness that would be unfamiliar to anyone who has visited Egypt,
ture or trimmings. (Within reason. There are times where Racknitz’s but which can nevertheless be seen in numerous European engrav-
desperation is palpable: the Siberian plate offers up an ornate curli- ings of the period. The Pantheon, an exemplar of ‘noble Roman r
 PROMESSE D’AILLEURS

SHOWROOMS PARIS - LONDRES

13, rue du Mail • 75002 Paris • 09 83 05 91 13
Design center Chelsea Harbour • 2nd Floor, Centre Dome • 0207 351 1299
www.misia-paris.com
TASTE ON
A PLATE

Right: ‘the Chinese seen in this plate.

appear to love Below: he helpfully
what is baroque or identified the style’s
strange,’ Racknitz core components,
marvelled, noting including a console
their love of circles table and ‘a vessel
such as the painting containing a coral’

ALL IMAGES: COURTESY GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE, LOS ANGELES

taste’, is depicted with the anachronistic twin bell towers that were bled an old essay by a schoolmaster of 20 years earlier. He also lam-
bolted on in the Baroque period. Meanwhile the ‘Jewish or Hebrew pooned the dilettante aristocrat in Xenien, a collection of satirical
taste’ centres on the Temple of Solomon, although since that site is couplets:‘Formerly we had a single taste. Now we have many tastes./
lost to history its appearance is represented entirely by reference But tell me where the taste for these tastes is to be found.’ Goethe,
to the engravings of Wenceslaus Hollar. in a sense, represented the coming man, embodying the spirit of
Racknitz’s magnum opus was well received, at least among fel- Romanticism that would sweep aside such fussiness and pedantry
low aristocrats, and there was speculation that it might become a with a great Beethoven blast. And along with them went Racknitz,
definitive work to rival Fischer von Erlach’s similar treatise of 1721. his tastes and his tracts outmoded and forgotten – until now $
But praise was not universal. One prominent critic was Goethe, ‘A Rare Treatise on Interior Decoration and Architecture’, edited and trans-
who mocked Racknitz’s text for its ‘bunglings’, adding that it resem- lated by Simon Swynfen Jervis, is published by Getty, rrp £65
_ _ _

The Jazz Age collection

[email protected]
manufacturecogolin.com
THE INTERIORS

INDEX
The Interiors Index, The World of Interiors’
new online directory of shops, galleries
and services is now live.

Visit worldofinteriors.co.uk/interiors-index
to search those specialists whose ethos
of quality and style mirrors that of the
magazine itself.
 TH E WO RL D OF I NT ER IOR S  PART NER SH IP

Left: a living room in the Royal Mon-

ceau suite. Below: a bedroom in one of
the presidential suites. Bottom: an art
book lies alongside a Starck armchair

THE ART OF HOSPITALITY

Culture is firmly on the agenda at Le Royal Monceau – Raffles Paris, a hotel with refined interiors to match

SINCE THE HOTEL OPENED IN 2010, Le Royal Monceau –

Raffles Paris has established an elaborate cultural agenda, offering guests a range
of inspiring options, including an art bookshop, cinema and contemporary gallery
with a private collection of over 300 works. Taking full advantage of its prime posi-
tion in the heart of one of the art capitals of the world, the hotel offers guests an art
concierge service, organising themed excursions and activities throughout the city.
Le Royal Monceau – Raffles Paris has been impressively reimagined by Philippe
Starck, one of the top designers working today. Art, culture, beauty and craftsman-
ship are the hallmarks of its interior: in the choice of furnishings, the style of service
and the very layout of the spaces. The 85 rooms and 54 suites of Le Royal Monceau
– Raffles Paris convey the romantic history of this venerable building – a past that
each traveller is invited to augment.
As might be expected, the focus on good taste extends to the food on offer.
Guests can choose between five dining options, including the unmissable Il Carpac-
cio restaurant, which serves fine Italian, and Matsuhisa, a Nobu spin-off providing
contemporary Japanese.
Everything unfolds as if you were entering the home of a dear friend, a private
and intimate space in which every detail has been considered – one, moreover, with
the beautiful sights of Paris on your doorstep $ To book and for more information, ring
00 33 1 42 99 88 00, visit raffles.com/paris, or email [email protected]
From left: ‘Kay Lounge’ chair, by Jean-Marie Massaud, from £3,025 ap-
prox, Poliform. ‘Suez 120’ coffee table, £3,310 approx, Paolo Castelli. ‘Max’
leather sofa, £11,285 approx, Flexform. ‘BL4’ floor lamp, £950 approx,
Gubi. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
 INTERIORS MODERN

R E B I R T H
OF THE COOL
During the Renaissance, the Botta family put Castello
di Branduzzo on the map, throwing grand parties and,
with Leonardo’s help, diverting the Po river to boost
agriculture. In this storied setting near Pavia, Jessica
Hayns poses the contemporary creations of the 2020
Milan furniture fair in thrilling counterpoint. Produc­
tion assistant: Viola Lanari. Photography: Bill Batten
 INTERIORS MODERN

From left: ‘Flower’ foldable chairs, £92 approx each, Ethimo. Red ‘Sedia’ chairs,
from £10,175 approx each, Archivio Pietro Consagra. ‘Flower’ stackable chairs,
£97 approx each; ‘Flower’ foldable dining table, £460 approx; both Ethimo;
topped with ‘Piani’ table lamp, by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec for Flos, £245;
and ‘Snoopy’ table lamp, by Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni for Flos, £685;
both Atrium. ‘Flare’ candle-holders, £25 each, Hay. (The sofas are the castle’s
property.) All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
Design that lasts a lifetime
 INTERIORS MODERN

From left: ‘Funghetti’ tables, from £425 approx each, Glas Italia.
‘Audrey’ armchair, by Fendi Casa, £4,908 approx, Luxury Living
Group. ‘Baby-Lonia’ soft toy construction, by Studio 65, £11,035,
Gufram. ‘Chubby’ chair, by Dirk Vander Kooij, £475 approx, Rossana
Orlandi. Pink ‘Cocktail’ side table, £295 approx, My Home Collec-
tion. Red ‘Concertina’ table, by Raw Edges, £6,350, Louis Vuitton.
Blue ‘Vinnie’ bedside table, £710 approx, My Home Collection. All
prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
©Photo Anne-Emmanuelle Thion • Set Design : Anne Pericchi-Draeger Bishop Apple Blossom by India Mahdavi

LES MANUFACTURES EMBLEM PARIS :

S H O W - R O O M 122 RUE DE GRENELLE • 75007 PARIS • WWW.EMBLEMPARIS.FR

 INTERIORS MODERN
From left: ‘C W’ chair, by Anna Karlin, £5,265 approx; ‘B W’ chair, by
Anna Karlin, £5,265 approx; ‘Original Chess Piece’ stools, by Anna
Karlin, £4,755 approx each; all Rossana Orlandi. ‘Long Island’ table,
by Giuseppe Bavuso, £7,567, Rimadesio; topped with ‘Vico’ table
lamp, £740, Natuzzi; and ‘Unity Plate’ compound system, by Massi­
miliano Locatelli, £63 approx per set of three, Untitled Homeware.
‘D W’ chair, by Anna Karlin, £5,265 approx, Rossana Orlandi. All
prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
 INTERIORS MODERN

From left: ‘Sacco Alato’ chair, by Roberto Matta, £24,340

approx, Paradiso Terrestre. ‘Diesis’ sofa, by Antonio Cit­
terio and Paolo Nava, £19,702, B&B Italia. ‘Wedge’ coffee
table, £9,456, Minotti. ‘Toio’ floor lamp, by Achille and
Pier Giacomo Castiglioni for Flos, £780, Atrium. All prices
include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
 INTERIORS MODERN
From left: ‘Ischia’ veranda chair, £1,775 approx; ‘Alicudi’ veran-
da stools, £2,130 approx each; both Dimore Milano. ‘Dreamy’
flat loafers, £1,360, Louis Vuitton. ‘Palermo’ low table, £2,485
approx, Dimore Milano. (The bed is the castle’s property.) All
prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
 TRIMMINGS - FABRICS - HARDWARE

THE MICHAEL AIDUSS BRAIDS COLLECTION

PHOTO : GEORGE ROSS

Available from March 6th in the newly renovated Houlès showroom

© - 2020 - HOULÈS

979 Third Avenue - 9th Floor - New York

[email protected]

HOULES.COM
 INTERIORS MODERN

From left: ‘Letizia’ armchairs, £2,200 each, Poltrona Frau.

‘BL4’ floor lamp, £950 approx, Gubi. ‘Flying Landscape’ cof-
fee table, £3,721, De Padova; topped with enamel mugs, from
£11 each, Hay. ‘Blendy Lounge’ sofa, £8,727, De Padova. All
prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
London
+44 (0)208 675 4808
www.indian-ocean.co.uk
 INTERIORS MODERN
From left: ‘Void’ bench, by Guglielmo Poletti, from £1,865 approx; ‘MM8’ table, by
Guglielmo Poletti, from £4,630 approx; both Desalto; topped with ‘Shy Droid’ table
lamp, by Marre Moerel, £460 approx; ‘Equilibrium’ chair, by Guglielmo Poletti,
from £6,365 approx; both Rossana Orlandi. ‘Big Easy’ armchair, by Ron Arad,
£5,875, Moroso. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
INTERIORS MODERN
From left: ‘Epsilon’ table in Murano glass,
£2,300 approx, Reflex Angelo. ‘Mantilla’ sofa,
by Kazuhide Takahama, £7,025 approx; ‘Mar­
garita’ chair, by Roberto Matta, £25,440 ap­
prox; both Paradiso Terrestre. ‘Clive’ bench,
£10,105 approx, Minotti. All prices include
VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
INTERIORS MODERN

From left: ‘Oslo’ leather chairs, £1,885 approx each, Baxter.

‘Pretty’ lacquered side table, £480 approx, My Home
Collection; topped with enamel tumbler, from £11, Hay.
‘Strong’ stool, by Eugeni Quitllet, from £355 approx;
‘Strong’ bistro table, by Eugeni Quitllet, from £945 ap-
prox; both Desalto; topped with ‘Gräshoppa’ table lamp,
by Greta M. Grossman, £390 approx, Gubi. All prices in-
clude VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
INTERIORS MODERN

From left: ‘Letto’ bed, £17,645 approx, Dimore Milano; covered with orig-
inal ‘Indian Parrots’ fabric, £340 per m, Soane Britain; and ‘Pyramid
Nailhead on 2in Linen Border 977-52109-415’, £119 per m, Samuel &
Sons. ‘Original Chess Piece’ stool, by Anna Karlin, £4,730 approx;
topped with ‘B1’ table lamp, by Marre Moerel, £725 approx; both Rossana
Orlandi. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
 BOTANY
THE NEW WALLPAPER COLLECTION - AVAILABLE NOW
Featuring Colours From The New Paint Collection - MONOCHROME
WALLPAPER SAMPLES | FREE COLOUR CARDS | PAINT TO ORDER
Nationwide Stockists | paintandpaperlibrary.com | +44 (0) 161 230 0882 | [email protected]
INTERIORS MODERN

From left: ‘Hati’ chairs, £940 each, Lema. ‘Bob’ side

table, £960, Poltrona Frau. Hand-painted ‘Bear’ deck-
chair, by Tyler Hays, $15,000, BDDW. All prices in-
clude VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r
INTERIORS MODERN
From left: ‘Woody’ chair, by Francesco Meda, £765, Molteni & C.
‘N1’ chairs, £638 each; ‘Ring’ dining table, £2,272; both Gebrüder
Thonet Vienna; topped with ‘Pirouette’ cups and saucers, from £7
per set, Hay; and ‘Ottagonale’ coffee pot, £100; ‘Ottagonale’ milk
jug, £68; both Alessi. ‘Woody’ armchair, by Francesco Meda, £1,676,
Molteni & C. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address
Book. The Cas tello di Branduzzo can be visited by appointment
only. For details, ring 00 39 34 9808 5990, visit fondoambiente.it/
luoghi/castello-di-branduzzo?ldc, or email [email protected] $
F O R A B R O C H U R E A N D N E A R E S T B AT H R O O M S P E C I A L I S T C A L L 01 4 5 4 3 2 8 811 | W W W. M AT K I . C O. U K | M AT K I P L C , B R I S TO L B S 3 7 5 P L
network
Sophia Salaman chooses the
best merchandise and events worldwide

The latest collection of wallpapers from GP&J Baker celebrates the

firm’s extensive archive. Patterns include Oriental peonies, Persian
landscapes and Chinese fire dragons, while the palette features antique
pink, delft blue, Chinese yellow and rich teal. GP&J Baker, Design Centre
Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7351 7760; gpjbaker.com).

Having already joined forces on a paint range, Little Greene and the
Nat ional Trust have now collaborated on a wallpaper collection. This
latest tie-up comprises various patterns in 40 colourways that together
represent over 200 years of design history. Little Greene Paint and Paper,
3 New Cavendish St, London W1 (020 7935 8844; littlegreene.com).
John Pawson has designed a bathroom collection for CP Hart in the
minimalist style for which the British architect is renowned. Carrara
marble features large – in two basins, a bath and the walls of the shower
area – creating a clean and uncluttered space. CP Hart, Newnham
Terrace, Hercules Rd, London SE1 (020 7902 5250; cphart.co.uk).

Vittorio Bonacina set up his eponymous company in 1889 near Milan. Evermore was born in 2014 when founder Sarah Ward set out to make
Today, Bonacina, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of rattan fur- her own natural candles. After much trial and error she discovered the
niture, is run by the founder’s grandson. It has collaborated with some perfect blend to create a vegan wax using rapeseed and soy. The result
of the leading lights in interior design, including Renzo Mongiardino is a candle that is both sustainable and luxuriously scented, with a
and Carlo Colombo. Visit bonacina1889.it. long-lasting burn. Visit evermorelondon.com. r
network
Lee Jofa’s new collection, ‘Manor House’, is inspired by the company’s
past. Comprising prints, weaves, embroideries and wallpaper – many
based on archive documents – it is quintessentially British and encap-
sulates the beauty of the landscape. Lee Jofa, Design Centre Chelsea
Harbour, London SW10 (020 7351 7760; kravet.com).

Volga Linen’s bedding and napery can be found in smart hotels and hostel-
ries around the world, including Oxfordshire’s Wild Rabbit inn and the
Astoria in St Petersburg. The company offers everything from simple yet
elegant hem-stitch detailing to more elaborate hand-drawn thread, as well
as a monogramming service. Ring 01728 635020, or visit volgalinen.co.uk.
Italian company Rimadesio has opened its first flagship store in Britain
in the heart of London’s West End. The space is spread over two storeys
and extends to some 300sq m. Warm walnut tones, bronzed metals and
grey Vicenza stone cover the walls and floor. Rimadesio, 83-85 Wigmore
St, London W1 (020 7486 2193; rimadesio.it).

Hermès pays homage to jungle flora and fauna with its new tableware This spring sees the launch of the long-awaited first wallpaper collection
collection, ‘Passifolia’. Drawn from nature by Nathalie Rolland-Huckel, from the Santa Barbara company Raoul Textiles. Options include ‘Amore’,
it features hand-painted foliage in various shades of green, from sage to ‘Michel’,‘The Ghost of Miss Willmott’ and ‘Sylla’, which are all printed on
celadon, as well as bursts of tropical fuchsia and coral. Hermès, 155 New pulp, enhancing the design. Like everything else – from sketching to
Bond St, London W1 (020 7499 8856; hermes.com). screen-making – this is done by hand. Visit raoultextiles.com $
Feels perfectly at home, outside or in. [email protected]
@gazeburvill

CLEVER LEVITY
www.gazeburvill.com
 ADDRESS book

Hat: blue/green ‘Devonshire’, by Michael S. Smith, £577.20, Jamb; trimmed with ‘Franklin Stripe’ $648;
Background: ‘Griffin House Sprig’, $576; both Adelphi Paper Hangings. Prices are per 10m roll and include VAT

Adelphi Paper Hangings. Ring 001 518 284 9066, or visit adelphipaperhangings. Cloth, 32-33 Chelsea Wharf, 15 Lots Rd, London SW10 (020 7349 0888;
com. Alessi. Ring 00 39 02 9475 3451, or visit alessi.com. Allóra. Ring 020 3701 christopherfarrcloth.com). Cole & Son. Ring 020 8442 8844, or visit cole-
4076, or visit allorashop.com. Altfield, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, and-son.com. Colefax & Fowler, 110 Fulham Rd, London SW3 (020 7224
London SW10 (020 7351 5893; altfield.com). Amara. Ring 0800 587 7645, or 7427; colefax.com). Collier Webb, 68 Pimlico Rd, London SW1 (020 7373
visit amara.com. Anthropologie, 158 Regent St, London W1 (020 7529 9800; 8888; collierwebb.com). Common Room. Ring 07900 006309, or visit
anthropologie.com). Aram, 110 Drury Lane, London WC2 (020 7557 7557; commonroom.co. The Conran Shop, Michelin House, 81 Fulham Rd, London
aram.co.uk). Archivio Pietro Consagra. Ring 00 39 02 8646 0319, or visit SW3 (0844 848 4000; conranshop.co.uk). David Hunt Lighting, Design
pietroconsagra.it. Arte, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7349 8111; davidhuntlighting.
(0800 500 3335; arte-international.com). Atrium, 28 Leonard St, London EC2 co.uk). De Padova, 161 Draycott Ave, London SW3 (020 7581 7928;
(020 7681 9933; atrium.ltd.uk). B&B Italia, 250 Brompton Rd, London SW3 depadova.com). Desalto. Ring 00 39 031 7832 211, or visit desalto.it. Designers
(020 7591 8111; bebitalia.com). Baxter. Ring 00 39 03 135999, or visit baxter.it. Guild, 265-277 King’s Rd, London SW3 (020 7351 5775; designersguild.
PHOTOGRAPHY: ANDERS GRAMER

BDDW, 5 Crosby St, New York, NY 10013 (001 212 625 1230; bddw.com). com). Dimore Milano. Ring 00 39 023 653 7088, or visit dimoremilano.
Bennison, 16 Holbein Place, London SW1 (020 7730 8076; bennisonfabrics. com. Ethimo. Ring 00 39 076 130 0400, or visit ethimo.com. Evitavonni.
com). Besselink & Jones, 99 Walton St, London SW3 (020 7584 0343; Ring 0800 130 3180, or visit evitavonni.com. The Fabric Collective, 9
besselink.com). Caravane, 52-54 Coal Drops Yard, London N1C (020 3819 Langton St, London SW10 (020 7384 2975; thefabriccollective.com).
8660; caravane.co.uk). Cassina, 238-242 Brompton Rd, London SW3 (020 Farrow & Ball. Ring 01202 876141, or visit farrow-ball.com. Flexform, Design
7584 0000; cassina.com). Chaplins, 477-507 Uxbridge Rd, Hatch End, Pinner Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7376 5272; f lexform.it).
HA5 4JS (020 8421 1779; chaplins.co.uk). Charles Edwards, 582 King’s Rd, The French House. Ring 020 7859 4939, or visit thefrenchhouse.net.
London SW6 (020 7736 8490; charlesedwards.com). Christopher Farr Frette, 43 South Audley St, London W1 (020 7493 1333; frette.com). r
DAVID SEYFRIED LTD
CLASSIC UPHOLSTERED FURNITURE MADE IN ENGLAND

[email protected] WWW. DAVIDSEYFRIED.COM

105 DESIGN CENTRE CHELSEA HARBOUR
LONDON SW10 0XE 020 7823 3848
 PERSONAL
SHOPPING ADDRESS book
S E RV I C E
AT THE WORLD’S

DESIGN DESTINATION

<PM8MZ[WVIT;PWXXQVO;MZ^QKMWᙘMZ[NZQMVLTaO]QLIVKM
XZIK\QKITIL^QKMIVLIKWUXTQUMV\IZa[W]ZKQVO[MZ^QKM
UISQVOaW]ZM`XMZQMVKMI\,M[QOV+MV\ZM+PMT[MI0IZJW]Z
MI[aMᙘWZ\TM[[IVLMVRWaIJTM

Where eagles stare: a painted bird keeps a beady eye on WoI’s shoot at the Botta
family’s eyrie, the Castello di Branduzzo (see Interiors Modern, pages 120-144)

Fromental, 2 Kimberley Rd, London NW6 (020 3410 2000; fromental.

co.uk). Garden Trading, Carterton South Industrial Estate, Oxon OX18 3EZ
(01994 845559; gardentrading.co.uk). Gebrüder Thonet Vienna, 23h Via
Foggia, 10152 Turin (00 39 011 013 3330; gebruederthonetvienna.com).
Glas Italia, 29 Via Cavour, 20816 Macherio (MB), Italy (00 39 039 232
3202; glasitalia.com). GP&J Baker, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour,
London SW10 (020 7351 7760; gpjbaker.com). Gubi, 19 Møntergade, 1140
Copenhagen (00 45 53 616 368; gubi.com). Gufram. Ring 00 39 017 356102,
or visit gufram.it. Habitat. Ring 0344 499 4686, or visit habitat.co.uk.
To discuss your individual design needs Hamilton Weston. Ring 020 8940 4850, or visit hamiltonweston.com.
with Gabrielle Grubanovich contact: Harrods, 87-135 Brompton Rd, London SW1 (020 7730 1234; harrods.com).
020 7225 9180 Hästens, 66-68 Margaret St, London W1 (020 7436 0646; hastens.com).
[email protected] Hay, 36-37 Milsom St, Bath BA1 1DN (01225 461409; hay.dk). Heal’s, 196
PHOTOGRAPHY: JESSICA HAYNS

Tottenham Court Rd, London W1 (0333 212 1915; heals.com). Hector Finch,
92 Wandsworth Bridge Rd, London SW6 (020 7731 8886; hectorfinch.com).
8TMI[MY]W\M8;,++0_PMVJWWSQVOaW]ZÅZ[\ Hermès, 155 New Bond St, London W1 (020 7499 8856; hermes.com).
appointment and receive a free branded Holland & Sherry, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7352
Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour notebook 7768; interiors.hollandandsherry.com). Holloways of Ludlow. Ring 020
Whilst stocks last 7602 5757, or visit hollowaysofludlow.com. Howe, 93 Pimlico Rd, London
SW1 (020 7730 7987; howelondon.com). Ikea. Visit ikea.com. Iksel, Design
design centre LONDON
Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7351 4414; iksel.com). r

www.dcch.co.uk
 BE A PART OF A MEMBERS’ CLUB IN THE
ADDRESS book
THRIVING HEART OF THE DESIGN COMMUNITY
AT DESIGN CENTRE, CHELSEA HARBOUR

Frosty reception: photographer Bill Batten braves the cold on an early-morning

walk before setting up his camera for the day (see Interiors Modern, pages 120-144)

Jamb, 95-97 Pimlico Rd, London SW1 (020 7730 2122; jamb.co.uk). Jim
Lawrence, The Ironworks, Lady Lane, Hadleigh, Suffolk IP7 6BQ (01473
826685; jim-lawrence.co.uk). John Cullen, 561-563 King’s Rd, London
SW6 (020 7371 9000; johncullenlighting.com). John Robshaw. Ring 00 212
594 6006, or visit johnrobshaw.com. Kettal, 567 King’s Rd, London SW6
(020 7371 5170; kettal.com). Knowles & Christou, 116 Lots Rd, London
SW10 (020 7352 7000; knowles-christou.com). Lema, 183 King’s Rd,
London SW3 (020 3761 3299; lemamobili.com). Lewis & Wood, Design
Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (01453 878517; lewisandwood.
co.uk). Lexington. Visit lexingtoncompany.com. Linen Tales. Ring 00 37
065 947 138, or visit linentales.com. Little Greene, 3 New Cavendish St,
London W1 (020 7935 8844; littlegreene.com). Louis Vuitton, 17-20 New
Bond St, London W1 (020 7998 6286; uk.louisvuitton.com). Luxury Living
PHOTOGRAPHY: JESSICA HAYNS

Group. Ring 020 7225 2534, or visit luxurylivinggroup.com. Mini Moderns.

Ring 020 7737 6767, or visit minimoderns.com. Minotti, 77 Margaret St,
London W1 (020 7323 3233; minotti.com). Molteni & C, 245-249 Brompton
Third Floor ANNUAL AND DAILY
Rd, London SW3 (020 7631 2345; molteni.it). Moroso, 7-15 Rosebery Ave,
South Dome MEMBERSHIP AVAILABLE
London EC1 (020 3328 3560; moroso.it). My Home Collection. Ring 00 39
Design Centre For more information:
055 807 0202, or visit myhomecollection.it). Natuzzi, 80-81 Tottenham
Chelsea Harbour 020 7351 5842
Court Rd, London W1 (01322 771442; natuzzi.co.uk). Nicholas Herbert,
London SW10 0XE www.dcch.co.uk
118 Lots Rd, London SW10 (020 7376 5596; nicholasherbert.com). r

design centre
LONDON
 PICKETT.CO.UK

10-12 BURLINGTON GARDENS, LONDON W1S 3EY

149 SLOANE STREET, LONDON SW1X 9BZ
+44 (0) 20 7493 8939
 ADDRESS book

Nicholas Herbert Ltd.

Fabrics & Wallpapers
Beaky blinder: the Botta family feathered their Renaissance nest near Pavia
with a series of extraordinary murals (see Interiors Modern, pages 120-144)

Nordlux. Ring 01200 422777, or visit nordlux.com. Original BTC. Ring 020
7351 2130, or visit originalbtc.com. Osborne & Little, 304 King’s Rd, London
SW3 (020 8812 3123; osborneandlittle.com). The Oxford Brush Company,
54 High St, Burford, Oxon OX18 4QF (01993 824148; oxfordbrushcompany.
com). Paint and Paper Library, 3 Elystan St, London SW3 (020 7823 7755;
paintandpaperlibrary.com). Paolo Castelli, 12 Via San Carpoforo, 20121
Milan (00 39 02 427095; paolocastelli.com). Paolo Moschino for Nicholas
Haslam, 8-14 Holbein Place, London SW1 (020 7730 8623; nicholashaslam.
com). Paradiso Terrestre, 4 Via de’ Musei, 40124 Bologna (00 39 051 506
1212; paradisoterrestre.it). Peter Reed. Ring 01282 616069, or visit
peterreed.com. Pierre Frey, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London
SW10 (020 7376 5599; pierrefrey.com). Piglet. Visit pigletinbed.com.
Poliform, 278 King’s Rd, London SW3 (020 7368 7600; poliform.it). Poltrona
PHOTOGRAPHY: JESSICA HAYNS

Frau, 147-153 Fulham Rd, London SW3 (020 7589 3846; poltronafrau.
com). Ralph Lauren Home. Visit ralphlauren.com. Reflex Angelo. Ring 00
39 04 228444, or visit ref lexangelo.com. Retrouvius, 1016 Harrow Rd,
London NW10 (020 8960 6060; retrouvius.com). Rimadesio, 83-85
Wigmore St, London W1 (020 7486 2193; rimadesio.it). Robert Kime, 190-
192 Ebury St, London SW1 (020 7831 6066; robertkime.com). Rockett St
George. Ring 01444 253391, or visit rockettstgeorge.co.uk. Romo, Design
Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (01623 750005; romo.com). r

118 Lots Road London SW10 0RJ [ 020 7376 5596

[email protected] [ www.nicholasherbert.com
G R E AT HOM E S M A DE G R E AT E R
Award-winning residential construction and project management

Architects and Project Managers – Hackett Holland Architects Ltd

Main Contractor – Markstone Construction UK Ltd

markstone.co.uk

The World of Interiors magazine would like to thank Markstone Construction

for their collaboration on all exhibition and fair projects in 2019
 ADDRESS book

bespoke
CLAUDE CABINET

fionamcdonald.com | +44 (0) 20 7731 3234

Vaulting achievement: production assistant Viola Lanari oversees the arrival of

van-loads of furniture ahead of WoI’s Interiors Modern shoot (see pages 120-144)

Rose Uniacke, 76-84 Pimlico Rd, London SW1 (020 7730 7050;
roseuniacke.com). Rossana Orlandi, 14-16 Via Matteo Bandello, 20123
Milan (00 39 02 467 4471; rossanaorlandi.com). Samuel & Sons,
Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7351 5153;
samuelandsons.com). Secret Linen Store. Ring 01243 822599, or visit
secretlinenstore.com. The Shop Floor Project. Ring 01229 584537, or
visit theshopfloorproject.com. Simon Playle, The Plaza, 535 King’s Rd,
London SW10 (020 7371 0131; simonplayle.com). Soane Britain, 50-52
Pimlico Rd, London SW1 (020 7730 6400; soane.co.uk). Style Library.
Ring 020 3457 5862, or visit stylelibrary.com. Tissus d’Hélène, Design
Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7352 9977; tissusdhelene.
co.uk). Turnell & Gigon, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London
SW10 (020 7259 7280; turnellandgigon.com). Untitled Homeware.
PHOTOGRAPHY: JESSICA HAYNS

Visit untitledhomeware.com. Urban Outfitters. Visit urbanoutfitters.

com. Vaughan, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020
7349 4600; vaughandesigns.com). Vis-à-Vis, 8 Motcomb St, London
SW1 (020 7838 9592; visavisparis.com). Volga Linen. Ring 01728
635020, or visit volgalinen.co.uk. The White Company. Ring 020 3758
9222, or visit thewhitecompany.com. Whiteworks, 20a Pimlico Rd,
London SW1 (07833 693142; whiteworksgroup.co.uk). Yves Delorme.
Ring 0808 234 4609, visit yvesdelorme.com $
Walls
S TO R E Y
BOARD
Over a six-year period, Zita Unger meticulously planned the
renovation of her north London home, shifting the family
from floor to floor as work progressed. While her approach
was full of rigour – thinking ahead to when her small children
would become teenagers and doubling back to rectify ear-
lier mistakes – the finished effect feels quirky, relaxed and
full of life. Text: Ruth Guilding. Photography: Simon Upton

Left: in the ground-floor front room, a pair of unmatched dressers

from Brandt Antiques have their backs against a wall hung with
paper-backed ‘Hollyhock’ fabric by Jean Monro. Hanging from a
brass rod is a vintage mirror found by decorator Nick Plant – it
faces a pendant light from Soane. Top: both the vintage sabre-
legged dining chairs and the whale-themed one are from Talisman
This page, clockwise from top left: in the hall, Mark Brazier-Jones sconces flank a picture by Piers Jackson; its round form echoes the
framed gold discs racked up by Ferdy as an A&R man (he’s now president of Columbia Records UK). The floor was painted by Rosie Men-
nem; the giant doll’s house in the basement hides a TV and hi-fi; behind the sofa, made by Nick Plant in 2007, hangs Bennison fabric, while
the tall lamp and elephant rattan table both came from Les Couilles du Chien. That Golborne Road curiosity shop also supplied the
pendant light of lemons and pomegranates in the kitchen (opposite), with its Emery & Cie tiles, La Cornue cooker and Plain English units
Left: Zita designed the swagged curtain treatment in the first-
floor living room, where an early 1990s sofa from Succession, re-
covered in Claremont cloth, faces a Jamb fireplace and a hexagonal
lampshade from Robert Kime. Top: in between the yellow picture
and circular looking-glass – both discovered on Lillie Road – hangs a
(rectangular) art print by New Wave musician Ian Dury. Above: in
the adjoining room, dressers contain a record/CD library and bar
Left: after the main bedroom was finished, Zita had the idea of
hanging the walls and ceiling with De Gournay silk. She also found
the rug on the sale rail at Larusi. Top: in the basement bathroom,
the banana-leaf ‘Martinique’ paper was designed for the Beverly
Hills Hotel by CW Stockwell. The sink is from Lefroy Brooks. Above:
the poster in the nearby loo commemorates Portishead’s first album
(Dummy, 1994) and Ferdy’s signing of the Bristol trip-hop pioneers
 own experience by bringing in professionals Nick and Joanna
Plant, whom Zita had known since she was 18. ‘Grown-up dec-
orating has problems,’ she says. ‘They helped me and ordered
everything. Jo introduced me to lots of things, and she could
also get everything made. Nick got me the two most beautiful
carpets. They sold me the Howard [& Sons] sofa.
‘[After] each round [of decorating] I insisted we double back
to rectify earlier mistakes. I made choices without many com-
promises. If I couldn’t figure something out or I couldn’t afford
something, I stopped.’ To illustrate the point, the scaffolding
balcony that she installed outside the kitchen door has been on
trial there for two years; garden plans have lain dormant for al-
most a decade. Her Bennison phase was ‘strong’ when they over-
hauled the basement, but her plans were laid with the long term
in mind. To that end, the nursery there has a built-in kitchen,
ready for its transformation into an assisted living space for
when her small children become teenagers. She designed the
first floor for Ferdy ‘as a thanks for the freedom. He wanted a
bar and a music library and I wanted him to have one.’
Life had to continue while this was going on around them,
so they moved up and down the house, changing floors as works
progressed. Downstairs became a flat in which they lived while
the ground-floor kitchen was under way. Then they shifted up-
stairs as Zita devised the plan for the basement. This she achieved
with huge amounts of storage and joinery and cupboards de-

‘WE REALLY came together over the house,’ says

Zita. Her partner, Ferdy Unger-Hamilton, was already living
signed by Plain English. ‘I’d done my own flat and I’d worked
out that matching wasn’t going to work. I’d done a dark purple,
more ethnic thing, but I was definitely regurgitating the house
around the corner from this bosky north London square, but Zita that we’d lived in when I was a child. I had this Mulberry hand-
didn’t want to move into his bachelor pad and he wouldn’t join her bag and I said to the painter, “If you could do it like this, kind of
in Shoreditch. He chose the house, although when they’d walked shiny and purple?” My sister, Nyasa, was working at Sterling
past on their way to the pub, he’d initially said he’d never want Studios so I knew I couldn’t go low; she was working on such
to live there because these houses had such small gardens. They high-spec projects.’
bought the house from a family who had lived there for a long This house is dark and friendly and peaceful, with rooms that
time. Damp and painted white throughout, it had been deeply welcome you in and deep chairs that invite you to sit. Zita likes
loved but had run out of steam. Changing it was a slow, considered to feel private, with curtains closed against the street. It feels ex-
process. ‘It takes so long to bed in,’ she says. ‘You’ve got to sit in traordinary and unlike anywhere else, but it also feels like home.
rooms for long periods with all the furniture around you.’ A lurcher bitch called Edie has made the Bennison-upholstered
But then Zita grew up in decorating. ‘There were lots of influ- sofa nearest the front door her own; the nursery floorscape is
ences,’ she says. In the 1990s, her father, Christopher Nevile, was spread with toys, drawings and ambitious, half-executed card-
decorating out of The Study London, a shop selling Mark Brazier- board constructions. Gold discs – trophies of Ferdy’s stellar ca-
Jones’s furniture, sculptural pieces by Oriel Harwood, plus shells, reer in the music industry – march around the staircase. Nothing
lamps and door handles. ‘We had a fireplace by her [Harwood], is fixed and everything is mutable. ‘I’m always styling,’ she says.
made for a client who changed their mind. My father loved mu- ‘Friends come and say: “You’ve always changed something.”’ She
rals and we had this bird room in Lincolnshire that Sterling Stu- agrees, acknowledging that for a time she poured her mind into
dios [of northwest London] had done, painted on to canvas. We this house. ‘I gave it everything I had for a while while looking
took it out into the garden and all the children were told to jump after my small children. I furiously held on to decorating. I longed
on it as a way of ageing it.’ for a concrete, permanent, external reality. I constantly reshuf-
Her childhood bedroom was furnished from Ikea; she chose fled the layouts, the lights, the furniture.’ The soundproof boards
a side corner cupboard designed for a kitchen. Her father made a under all the carpeted floors were a priority, because they im-
yellow lacquer top for it, while there was a dressing-room corner proved the way sounds travel through the house. After that, it felt
with blue-white-and-yellow geometric curtains. Her mother, more solid and private.
who made hats in the 1980s and 1990s, chose to decorate her ‘My favourite rooms are my children’s: their bedrooms and
houses with ‘lots of curtains dividing up the rooms’. Following their nursery. I feel there is less of a show in them. They’re where
school, Zita worked briefly for Vivien Greenock, a former direc- my energies have gone and those rooms also remind me of the
tor of Colefax & Fowler. speedy passage of time. It really was very specific,’ she con-
In their new house, Zita and Ferdy decorated a floor almost cludes. ‘It’s perfectionism. It’s gotta feel right. And that’s why
every year for six years. She had the forethought to add to her it takes a long time’ $

Top: in one child’s bedroom, Zita swapped a doll’s house cupboard for a dealer’s painted armoire. The textile hanging is Indian. Opposite:
in another, Lucy Hammond Giles did the curtains, while Pat Giddens of the Hackney Draper made the headboard from Pierre Frey fabric
F R A M E S OF
R E V E R E NCE
In 1715, the Duke of Arcos donated his mother’s devotional objects to the local nunnery – the Convent of the Immaculate
Conception in Andalucía – that his family had helped to found. Enclosed by gold or housed in glass in the chapel’s choir,
the collection includes holy relics and old-master engravings of bible scenes. Moreover, as Marie-France Boyer reports,
it offers rare insights into the material culture of a pious 17th-century Spanish noblewoman. Photography: Eric Morin
 The convent lies find their echo in the
in the heart of Baroque interior
Andalucía, where of the chapel. The
constant saints’ exterior – campanile
days, festivals and aside – is by contrast
Catholic processions soberly Neoclassical
A painting of the a faux-marble
Mexican Virgin of harmonium,
Guadelupe hangs right, was redone
above a grille in the early 18th
separating the choir, century to highlight
where nuns assist the the older pious
officiants, from the objects and artworks
altar beyond. The given by the convent’s
interior, including noble benefactor
This page, clockwise
from top left: framed
devotional works
donated in 1715 have
been incorporated
into the graphic
bands that cross the
coro’s vaulted ceiling;
above the entrance,
saints’ relics in glass
cases (see below)
flank depictions of
the instruments
of Christ’s passion –
a sponge, ladder,
pliers, vinegar bottle,
lance and nails; pious
images appear singly
within frames or,
as here, scrapbook-
style. This montage
features a 17th-
century engraving
of Dürer’s Adam and
Eve; the bones of
saints (regarded as
protectors of places
and miracle makers)
are decorated with
gold and coloured
papers; prayer books
rest on seats reserved
for the order’s senior
nuns. Opposite: Our
Lady of Consolation,
in a niche on the
public side of the
chapel, is enthroned
on a float during Holy
Week processions.
The faithful bring
votive candles and
flowers as offerings
THE WHITEWASHED walls of the Poor Clares’
convent – the Convent of the Immaculate Conception – a little way off the road
from Seville to Córdoba, blend into the harmonious cluster of similarly white
cubes that comprise Marchena. This attractive village dominates the vast, empty
plain of the Guadalquivir, broken up here and there by tiny farm buildings.
The Poor Clares are a branch of the Franciscan order, and this convent was
founded in the 17th century at the request of Sister María de la Antigua by the
Duke of Arcos, Rodrigo Ponce de León; his family, ennobled by the Catholic kings,
owned all the surrounding land. Some 50 years later – in 1670 – on the death of his
beloved mother, Doña Guadalupe, the new Duke of Arcos, Joaquín, decided to
donate all his mother’s devotional objects to the convent, believing that nowhere
else in the world would they be better preserved. This was very important to him.
In a letter to the Mother Superior, whom he no doubt knew well, he explained that
all the objects, engravings and handwritten letters he was donating were very
delicate, some of the documents being fragments of old prayer books, and that he
intended to frame them himself before bringing them to her. ‘The nuns are sure to
like these things,’ he wrote, ‘because they are beautiful and golden.’ However, they
had to wait until 1715 for 20 frames to arrive in Marchena, each with its contents laid
out differently, sometimes resembling scrapbooks. They provide a unique account
of the religious knowledge of a 17th-century Spanish aristocrat, her codes of behav-
iour, devotional practices and artistic interests.
And so it was that almost all the frames were installed in the coro (choir), the
sectioned-off part of the chapel. Some are also hung in the chapel itself and the
infirmary. The décor was entirely reworked to accommodate them. Surrounded
by mouldings and Rococo frescos alternately depicting flowers and allegorical
phrases from the Song of Songs, the 20 frames cover the walls and ceilings, and
overhang the niche that harbours a statue of Our Lady of Consolation, donated
when the convent was founded. Illuminated by the light from two high windows
and often protected by an inner shutter, this part of the chapel is blissfully cool in
a part of Spain where temperatures often reach 50°C. Here it is that the nuns hear
mass, rehearse their Sunday songs gathered around a faux-marble harmonium,
pray together or meditate alone in silence.
The content of the frames varies, from handwritten letters to engravings by
Dürer, Jacques Callot, Simon Vouet, Cornelius Galle or Carlo Maratta depicting
saints or scenes from the Bible, such as Eve and the apple or the flight to Egypt. There
are even relics, which may surprise viewers in our less godly age: beribboned tracery
of saints’ bones bearing calligraphic inscriptions, mysterious small gold packets
containing (invisible) fragments of hair, bone or clothes that belonged to people
venerated by the duchess. Her Christian name – Guadalupe – is echoed by a figure
of the Virgin of Guadalupe (who appeared in Mexico) over the entrance railings.
This fascinating monument, which could also be read as a son’s shrine to his
mother (or a cabinet of curiosities to 21st-century eyes), is still very much a work-
ing convent. Eleven nuns gather four times a day between six in the morning and Opposite: the
nine at night. The congenial Mother Superior reminds us that her order is gov- public side of the
erned by the principles of poverty, fraternity – and joy. Accordingly, all the statues chapel is far more
are decorated with sweet-smelling carnations, roses and jasmine, and when they ornately Baroque
are not praying, the sisters busy themselves making realistic fruit out of almond in décor than the
paste with little green leaves to sell, as well as quince cheese and honey or coconut restrained choir,
biscuits. They package them up in old-style cardboard boxes, on which one could with its vegetal and
imagine the word ‘sins’ being written. Nowadays, few girls take their vows and so, scallop-shell motifs
many nuns come from the other side of the world. As if to demonstrate this fact, in muted colours.
Here a strange,
we are treated to a romantic glimpse of a young Ugandan nun with a large gath-
disembodied muscly
ered apron and blue-and-white checked oversleeves, on her way to decorate the
arm, surrounded
main altar, a large bunch of arum lilies in her arms. by other religious
The sisters also offer B&B in an attractive building, the Hospedería Santa María, images, resembles
surrounding a cobbled cloister. It is all very pleasant, if unsurprisingly spartan, those reliquaries
with a large inviting breakfast room. At reception one can buy marzipan, biscuits, (typically silver)
quince cheese, honey pestinos and coconut cocodos $ shaped in the
Convento de la Purísima Concepción, 16 Calle Palacio Ducal, 41620 Marchena, Seville. For form of the body
more information about Hospedería Santa María, ring 00 34 954 843 983, or visit clarisas.es parts they contain
This page: Märta Måås-Fjetterström’s basement store contains some yarns that are 70 years old – the company keeps original samples
for every design. Knots on the ball of wool indicate which was used as a main colour and which as an accent. Opposite: ‘Tånga’ is a
Barbro Nilsson design from 1955. Weavers only see the rugs properly for the first time once they’ve cut them down from the loom
T I M E L E S S
W A R P
The rug company founded by Märta Måås-Fjetterström has been weaving its magic in the Swedish resort of Båstad
for just over 100 years, with refreshingly little sign of change underfoot. For while she herself has long since departed,
her classic designs remain as fresh and modern as they did in her day – and take equally long to produce. The un-
compromising owner tells Augusta Pownall why she believes in a tuft love approach. Photography: Antony Crolla
Top: these two rugs – ‘Ljusa Mattan’, left, and ‘Röda Slingan’, right – are both 1928 designs by Märta Måås-Fjetterström and show her fondness
for repeat patterns. ‘Repetition is, according to my taste, a practically infallible criterion of the value of a pattern design; just as a song must
withstand being sung through numerous verses,’ she wrote to the decorator Carl Malmsten, who was a friend and collaborator, in 1940.
Above left: this device helps the weavers wind the wool. Above right: examples of the studio’s work hang between the large windows
Top: ‘Hästhagen’, on the floor, was first exhibited at the Gothenburg Tercentennial Jubilee Exposition in 1923. Princess Märtha of Sweden was
presented with a smaller version of it on her marriage to the future King Olav V of Norway six years later. Above left: ‘Skvattram’, which was
designed in 1938 for the Swedish Institute in Rome, is an example of a knotted relief pile. A graph-paper pattern is pegged to the loom for
weavers to follow. Above right: all these rugs are Barbro Nilsson designs, except for the brown one in the background by Marianne Richter
Top: Märta Måås-Fjetterström is photographed painting a new design in her studio in Båstad in 1919, the year it opened.The other shot shows
her outside enjoying nature, which would be an enduring influence. Above left: small samples of rugs guide the weavers in their work, along-
side the instructions on graph paper. Above right: hanks of wool in different colours pop up everywhere. Opposite: Märta developed a special
technique for hanging panels on a linen ground, such as this ‘Daggkåpan’ from 1929, which allowed light to filter through from the other side
 hotel he had set up in a bid to turn the sleepy fishing village of
Båstad into the popular tennis resort it remains today. The com-
mission persuaded her to establish a studio there, where she can-
nily clocked she would be surrounded by a pool of affluent poten-
tial clients, fresh off the courts. Business was soon booming.
Märta brought four weavers with her from Vittsjö, and set about
training more. They built the looms, created a showroom and
office and established a thriving enterprise, all of which left little
time for the creative work of sketching new designs. ‘She was a
professional woman and an artist,’ Tina point outs. ‘It’s more
complicated than just an old spinster sitting here weaving. No,
she didn’t just sit here in Båstad – she was out travelling with her
artistic work, meeting clients. She was a very professional person.’
Travel she did, to arrange exhibitions in Paris, Copenhagen,
London and eventually New York. As well as an opportunity to
flaunt her wares, her trips were a rich source of inspiration. The
Moorish-ish border of her ‘Il Greco’ knotted-pile rug draws on
her travels across the Mediterranean; likewise the ‘Perugia’ wall
hanging; and a delicate weave called ‘Ladbroke Square’ echoes
the windows and climbing vines of the place in west London where
one of Märta’s old art-school friends, a dealer in the city, lived.
But other designs depict the dog roses that grow on the shore in
Båstad, crocuses, heather found on the hills, elm trees, corn-
flowers, lilies. Some of the company’s most popular and endur-
ing rugs are those in which Märta has harnessed the natural world

‘WE HAVE decided to be a Greta Garbo-style

company. We hide here in Båstad and people have to come to us,’
and distilled it into dynamic woven form.
She worked right up until her death on Easter Sunday, 1941.
The weavers finished the rugs on the looms, then went home. The
Tina Swedrup, the co-owner of artisan rug company Märta Måås- studio remained closed until the following year, when Märta’s
Fjetterström, tells me on a visit to the studio in the Swedish sea- right-hand woman, Barbro Nilsson, revitalised the operation
side town in question. ‘We have very exclusive products, not only with her bold love of colour. They moved into the current prem-
when it comes to price but also the designs and the quality.’ ises designed by the father-and-son architects Ivar and Anders
‘And time,’ chips in the deputy managing director, Martin Tengbom in 1947 and have been there ever since.
Chard Uścilo, who started out at the company during his school Tina and her husband, Ulrik, bought the company 19 years
summer holidays. ‘Of course, our vintage pieces can be shipped ago having collected vintage MMF rugs since the 1980s. There
and be in New York by tomorrow, but if you want to order some- have been lean years in the time since, but they’ve never bent to
thing, you actually need to wait for it. You might have to wait a year, clients’ whims for a bespoke piece in this unconventional size
and people are not used to that, especially interior designers!’ or that lurid shade. ‘We still have said no,’ says Tina. ‘Even when
In an age when everything is available at the touch of a but- the order book was poor, because we always have to stay at that
ton, these flat-weave and pile rugs are well worth waiting for. level, so we don’t make those kind of compromises.’ If the de-
Handmade by skilled artisans, the pieces that come out of the signer of a particular rug is no longer alive and so can’t be con-
unassuming red-brick house with its deeply pitched roof sing sulted, they stick to their instructions. ‘If we start changing the
with the colours of the Swedish countryside. They are the result design we dilute the essence,’ says Martin.
of thousands of hours of labour-intensive work. A relatively Downstairs, the eye-popping basement yarn store is stacked
small 2 × 3m rug in London’s Aquavit restaurant designed by high with wool in every colour of the rainbow that is dyed on
contemporary Danish/Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, for ex- site. This is where you’ll find the priceless original watercolour
ample, took 3,000 hours to produce. They can be found at the sketches. The local fire-brigade has been told to aim their hoses
Swedish royal residences, and Buckingham Palace (the Queen here first, were there ever to be a blaze. The sketches become in-
was given a fabulous cream knotted relief-pile rug in 1956 by the structions on graph paper; a code waiting to be interpreted.
Swedish king), as well as banks and law courts, and the homes of Then it’s over to the weavers, the oldest of whom turns 69 this
passionate collectors all over the world. If customers don’t come year and started at the studio in 1968. After five years, they can
back for another rug after their first purchase, Tina and Martin weave a rug for themselves, paying just for the necessary materi-
start to worry that there was something wrong with the original. als. They often work on commissions in pairs or threes, handing
It all began when Märta Måås, as she is known, set up her stu- down a lifetime’s worth of knowledge in their fingers, sometimes
dio in 1919, the same year that Swedish women got the right to chatting and stopping for coffee and cake in the garden that rolls
vote. Born into a strict family of clergy in 1873, she had made a down to the sea, sometimes silent for eight hours straight as they
name for herself shaking up Malmö County Handicraft Associa- perfect the stem of a flower. ‘To have the patience to sit all these
tion. She was dismissed in 1911 for trying to update traditional hours, you have to love it,’ says Tina. ‘It must be a lot of thinking,
weaving with new ideas – her innovative ‘Staffan Stalledräng’ tap- because when you work with your hands you think a lot, so per-
estry with prancing horses and twinkling stars was not consid- haps they are kind of philosophers’ $
ered sufficiently ‘of the region’ – before being offered the chance ‘Märta Måås at the Royal Palace’ runs at the Royal Palace, 1 Slottsbacken,
to head up a school of weavers in Vittsjö. Around this time, Ludvig 111 30 Stockholm (00 46 8 402 6100; royalpalaces.se), until 19 April. To
Nobel, Alfred’s nephew, commissioned her to make rugs for a contact Märta Måås-Fjetterström, ring 00 46 431 70183, or visit mmf.se
Opposite: thousands of rolled-up instructions
are hidden in seemingly every nook and cranny
of the studio. This page: leftover yarns for spe-
cific designs are stored in the bags, ready for
use the next time a customer places an order
WAV ES I N T H E
WHITE FL AGS
Calacatta marble, swirling eddies on a snowy ground, creates a thrilling wall-to-wall floor show in this
flat on the Bayswater borders. The spectacular heart of stone was dreamed up by its owner, architect
Miska Miller-Lovegrove, who boosted its reflective qualities by turning a warren of low-ceilinged rooms
into one fluid space. She’s hit a rich vein of form, says Charlotte Edwards. Photography: Simon Upton
The curving forms of recumbent bodies in a
Henry Moore lithograph in the dining area
are echoed by Ross Lovegrove’s Bio-Dychro
Sculptures, three biomorphic columns gener­
ated by parametric modelling. An African terra­
cotta cone and a Konstantin Grcic side table
punctuate the eddying Calacatta marble floor
Top: the textured, resin-coated fibreglass columns disguise structural steel
posts in a frame. Above: the kitchen ‘monolith’, as Miska refers to it, was
custom-made in Corian. Right: Nicholas Alvis Vega’s triptych L’Amour (A
Metaphor), 2019, offers a sinuous counterpoint to Cassina’s boxy ‘LC2/
LC3’ furniture. The glass-topped oak dining table is by Carlo Mollino
 Top: in her bedroom, Miska works at De Padova’s ‘Scrittarello’ desk by
Achille Castiglioni. Above: Ross Lovegrove’s fin-like ‘Biophilia’ chair for
Vondom was inspired by Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia basilica. Right: an
inflated-steel ‘Rondo’ mirror by Miska’s fellow Pole Oskar Zieta looks out
towards Zanotta’s ‘Gilda’ armchair, another design by Carlo Mollino
000
HAVE WE forgotten that there’s more
to minimalism than meets the eye? Writing in the
rectly into a soaring open-plan space divided only by
three undulating biomorphic columns. Conceived
New York Times last month, Kyle Chayka claims that by Miska’s husband, Ross Lovegrove, their textured
we’ve lost sight of the origins of the movement, first fibreglass shells, designed using parametric model-
described by art theorist Richard Wollheim in a 1965 ling, conceal structural steel pillars that replaced the
essay on Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and other artists load-bearing wall. But even in the face of these ‘verti-
whose work ostensibly had ‘minimal art content’. As cal sculptures’, as Lovegrove has described them, your
Wollheim saw it, minimalism wasn’t a question of eye is drawn to the marble. With its butterf ly-wing
there being nothing to look at. Instead, it was about swoops, swirling eddies and delicate tracery seamless-
creating a complex encounter with a single object, ly flowing from slab to slab, it generates an extraordi-
often an everyday thing, such as a brick or a fluores- nary sense of movement, directing your steps around
cent light tube, that was otherwise easily overlooked. the apartment. And, as almost everything else in here
In his article and recently published book about the is white, you really pay attention to the kaleidoscopic
history and com modification of minimalism, The colours in the stone, its skeins of dark to pearly grey,
Longing for Less, Chayka attempts to reclaim those amber, honey and gold. ‘The marble was the canvas,’
ideas. ‘Minimalism… is more about attention than Miska confirms. ‘I didn’t need anything else. Any ad-
anything else,’ he wrote. ‘It advocates seeing the world ditions had to be completely white, or concealed. For
not as a series of products to consume, but sensory example, the kitchen is not really a kitchen any more’
experiences to have on your own terms.’ – she indicates the glacier-like sculpted counter, whose
By this measure, Miska Miller-Lovegrove is a text- function is not immediately clear at first glance – ‘and
book minimalist: an architect and designer whose the bathrooms are equally invisible.’
past projects – with the London-based Lovegrove Despite the absence of clutter, Miska confesses
Studio, of which she was a founding partner, and that most of her possessions are still ‘in transit’; and
more recently for her own practice, MM-L – often already there are plenty of books, flowers, a televi-
focus attention on a single feature or material, or en- sion, and even, in a guest bedroom rounded by a shell-
hance what is already there. In her interiors and, es- like curved partition, a shelf of (eminently tasteful)
pecially, her designs for exhibitions and art fairs, she knick-knacks. ‘If you’re talking about art galleries,
simply removes obstacles to potential encounters: you can create a neutral background,’ Miska says,
opening up rooms and stairwells, channelling light ‘but with interiors, it’s different, because you have to
inwards, and either removing walls or remaking them live in them. There have to be elements you are com-
using glass and see-through or perforated textiles. She fortable with.’ Her friend Nicholas Alvis Vega (WoI
talks about her endless fascination with the way the July 2017), whose fleshy-coloured, portal-like paint-
sun hits a curved surface, the qualities of the shapes ings and horned ceramic sculptures also ornament
it makes, and she builds that patient way of looking the flat, thinks that she’s struck the right balance; he’s
into her spaces – to maximum effect. even proposing holding regular art viewings here. ‘It
The floor is the dramatic focal point of the light, is very gallery-like, but it’s still domestic; and some-
bright apartment that the Warsaw-born architect has where you can sit and really contemplate,’ he says. ‘My
designed for herself in an outwardly unpromising paintings have a sensual, procreative energy. They are
Victorian mansion block on the Notting Hill/Bays- quite unsettling in a way. People go very quiet when
water border. She wants visitors to see the wall-to- they look at them… I have to give Miska a huge amount
wall marble as she did when she first came across it in of credit for putting them up!’ She laughs. ‘But it’s the
a stone warehouse that she likes to visit on trips home same with everything that is organic,’ she says. ‘Look
to Poland. Someone had ordered – and paid for – a at the marble, it has the same kind of eroticism – in
vast amount of book-matched Calacatta Unica from its colours, and how everything is both beautifully
Carrara, but rejected it because the slabs were cut to complete and completely accidental.’
be laid with a small step join, in the traditional Italian ‘Too often,’ Kyle Chayka complains in his New York
style, rather than at right angles. Miska, however, had Times piece, ‘trendy minimalism is a way of numbing
no such reservations. ‘For me, that’s how it should be ourselves to reality and maintaining a comfortable,
done,’ she insists. ‘You don’t have the crosses, you lose solid barrier through which nothing unpleasant in-
the divisions, and instead you see the natural pattern trudes.’ But at Miska’s windows, semi-transparent
of the marble.’ She shipped the whole lot back to Lon- linen blinds filter rather than conceal the red-brick
don. To her astonishment, the marble almost exactly façade of the terrace opposite, and the typically wonky
covered the area of her new f lat, where she had just London skyline at the rear. ‘It was very important for
demolished a 1980s warren of cramped, low-ceilinged me to see what was outside,’ this generous-minded
rooms. ‘It was 180 square metres of marble for a 170 minimalist explains, to a soundtrack of a juddering
square-metre apartment,’ she says, in awe at the co- road drill and a piano concerto on her stereo. ‘It’s won-
incidence. ‘So I used it everywhere.’ derful to feel that you are in this dense urban context.
There’s no hall or corridor to prepare you; from a This way, you’re just muting the picture’ $
dingy communal staircase, all squashy leather sofas To contact Miska Miller-Lovegrove, ring 020 3214 3128, or
and fleur-de-lis carpeting, the front door opens di- visit mmlstudio.com
The marble floor continues uninterrupted into both
bathrooms – ‘completely seamless was the idea,’
says Miska – in which fittings from Antonio Lupi
are combined with curvaceous custom-made ele-
ments. ‘Straight lines can be interesting,’ the ar-
chitect avers, ‘but curves are very good at giving
directions, and take the light in a different way’
POETIC LICENCE
Paul Roche was never one for bourgeois rules or conventions, but moving to Mallorca late in life really brought
out a bohemian flourish in the poet, former priest and protégé of Duncan Grant. An ode to the Omega Workshops
and Bloomsbury, his house in Sóller became the scene of naked sunbathing and positively quirky cooking, as
his friend Celia Lyttelton recalls. Poached aubergine spread with Bovril, anyone? Photography: Tim Beddow
Opposite: the garden is crammed with native plants, as well as species Paul Roche smuggled back from his travels. Top: in the sitting
room, a copy of A Visit to India – which he wrote after backpacking there aged 79 – sits on a table decorated by his former wife, Clarissa
This page, clockwise from top: from the balcony Paul
could hear the tintinnabulation of sheep bells at dusk;
Tobit Roche decorated the dining table, while the cane
chairs and lamp stand were skip finds; the chandelier in
the hall was fashioned out of rejects acquired from a
nearby glass-blowing factory. Opposite: one of Tobit’s
works hangs above a fireplace painted à la Charleston
 This page, clockwise from top: a pair of antique
wardrobes filled with Paul’s correspondence stand like
sentry boxes either side of a door in the studio; visiting
artists were billeted to this attic bedroom; Duncan Grant’s
old paintbox sits on the bottom shelf. Opposite: the work
of Francesca Spille, who lived at the house for two years,
the fresco features citrus trees and Paul’s moggy, Vapour
 This page, clockwise from top: a copy of a Duncan
Grant nude by Tobit and a portrait by Rudolf Lehmann
hang in the sitting room. Old damask curtains cover the
chairs; the library doubles as a bedroom; Paul’s French
great-grandmother, Emily Moscheles, stares sternly
from the walls. Opposite: Paul’s daughter Mitey painted
the Omega Workshops-style wardrobe in Tobit’s room
THERE’S NO taint of the genteel in this
house; it is robustly bohemian. Its sparse, lofty rooms, nostal-
Rigg both read his poems at Wigmore Hall; Stephen Spender
and John Lehmann were friends. Events were moving quickly.
gic and redolent of summer, were inhabited by Paul Roche, the He published a novel, O Pale Galilean, in 1954 and started a trans-
‘Bloomsbury poet’. A classical scholar and translator of the Greek lation of Antigone – and a family. He had Tobit by Mary Blundell
tragedians, he was also a novelist, and muse/model for Duncan and, shortly after, married Clarissa Tanner, with whom he had
Grant. As friends, they were devoted to one another. Paul lived in four children. By the late 1950s, he was teaching at Smith College,
Sóller, Mallorca, for 22 happy years until his death in 2007, aged Massachusetts, where he met Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.
91. He first viewed the house ‘in the hot haze of a muslin after- In 1961, a grief-stricken Duncan Grant begged Paul to re-
noon’ after his eldest son, Tobit, and partner, Nancy, had spent a turn to England after the death of Vanessa Bell, the mother of
summer in the town and encouraged him to house-hunt there. Grant’s daughter. Paul responded to the call and settled his
The property reveals the vestigial traces of Bloomsbury. Its new family in a converted stable in Berkshire. Fellowships and teach-
owner is keen to keep the furniture, decorated by Paul’s children ing assignments took him away to American universities, but
in the style of the Omega Workshops. he was Grant’s helpmeet during his last
Two decades ago, Paul and Tobit, a years, taking him on a raki-fuelled trip
painter (WoI June 2002), came to stay around Turkey in 1973 that resulted in a
in my off-grid cottage in the Pennines. travel memoir. Grant died in the Roche
Paul warmed to the real fires and candle- household in 1978, aged 93.
light as I warmed to his eccentricities Seven years later, Paul moved into
and inventive drinks. He always mixed the large Mallorcan house that became
lethal concoctions: boiling up water and home for more than two decades. The
Marmite then lacing it with vodka and changes he made were minimal. An un-
gin. To the bemusement of Yorkshire ashamed magpie, he retrieved wood-
publicans and their patrons, he would wormy furniture from skips and charity
intone to all those present, ‘Shall I have shops; his children painted the furni-
half a pint or a pint of Landlord’s?’ or, ture and murals with friends. The walls
‘Shall I stay here by the fire or go for a were originally crowded with Grant’s
walk in the rain?’ And so on. paintings (Paul inherited half the es-
Paul wrote and published poetry, tate), though they have now been dis-
while his Greek and Latin translations tributed among the family. As those who
from the 1950s and 1960s – Euripides, came to stay reputedly left healthier than
Sophocles, Aeschylus, the comedies of when they arrived, he gave the house
Plautus and Sappho’s poems – sold in a Greek name that translates as House
their hundreds of thousands, admired of Healing. Of those visitors there was
by classical scholars and popular with a constant stream, including Frankie
students. They remain standard texts, Goes to Hollywood’s Holly Johnson,
praised for the natural sense of rhythm whose partner, Wolfgang Kuhle, is an
that Paul shows. He wore his scholar- avid collector of Grant’s work. There
ship lightly and donated 10 per cent of his income to charities. were a few house rules: each guest took turns to shop for, and pre-
Born a child of the Raj in Mussoorie, India, Paul was brought pare, dinner; conversation had to revolve around the table and
up in a palatial house in Poona. His father was an engineer who not remain with one’s immediate neighbours.
designed railway bridges. When his mother, an Armenian aris- In his dotage at Sóller, Paul cycled everywhere, treating shop
tocrat, died, the family moved to Britain. Not yet a teenager, he was proprietors to his farrago of Spanish, Latin, French and Italian.
sent to a Catholic seminary, Ushaw College in County Durham, The contents of his basket were used in bizarre dishes such as
where it was so cold the inkwells were said to freeze and a few boys poached aubergine spread with Bovril. When the devoted wor-
died of pneumonia. Later, feeling the call of the priesthood, he shipper of Helios wasn’t sunbathing naked, he was engaged in
studied in Rome at the English College until the onset of World another outdoor pursuit: gardening. He smuggled exotic plants
War II. On his return to Britain, he attended Stonyhurst College, from abroad to plant and propagate; flowers were the only thing
training ground for Jesuits. He was ordained a priest in 1943, but he spent money on. Frugal to the last, it was always a case of make
ultimately shed his vestments and returned to a secular exist- do and mend. He even glued broken glasses back together.
ence. One balmy Piccadilly evening in 1946, he met Duncan In his study, which commands views of Serra de Tramuntana,
Grant. It was the start of a tender love that endured for more than Paul kept writing, from A Visit to India to Cooking with a Poet. From
30 years. Grant moved Paul into the Fitzrovia f lat owned by his book of verse, The Calle de Ampurias Cantos, come these lines:
Marjorie Strachey, sister of Lytton. He was to be there for eight ‘Who shall go into this skeleton of a house, enter the discarded
years. Whenever he visited Charleston, the Bloomsbury group’s rooms, or ascend to the attic? Go into the Garden. There are still
house in East Sussex, Roche had to camp out of sight on the flowers there and the green of the trees.’ One of his daughters,
Downs if Vanessa Bell, Duncan’s partner, was also there. Mitey, recalls: ‘My father had told his angels that he was looking
Handsome and sartorially savvy, Paul cut a considerable for a house half in town and half in the countryside. They an-
dash in literary and thespian circles. Sybil Thorndike and Diana swered his prayers’ $

Above: Puig Major, Mallorca’s highest peak, can be seen from the garden looming in the distance. Opposite: Paul’s younger
son, Potie, slept in this slightly monastic bedroom, where a copy of Bathing, a 1911 painting by Duncan Grant, hangs in one corner
Above: the panel in the foreground ‘celebrates’ the Italo-Turkish
War of 1911-12 and, specifically, the world’s first-ever night flight.
Opposite: this mosaic depicts the pressurised suit that was worn
by Mario Pezzi, a record-breaking commander in Italy’s air force

Where most school corridors are proudly plastered with pupils’ artwork, these in the Italian city of Forlì feature
Dating back to the building’s days as a college for airmen in the late 1930s, they’re an object lesson in the
 P I L O T S T U D Y
something entirely different – the least prosaic of mosaics marking milestones in the country’s aviation history.
achievements of flight, Futurism and, more darkly, Fascism. Text: Lee Marshall. Photography: Bill Batten
This page, clockwise from top left: polymath Fausto Veranzio merits a mention in mosaic even though Leonardo beat him to the
idea of a parachute by 130 years; here Icarus is shown about to don his wings before singeing them; the green mice – sorci verdi
– are a reference to a proverb meaning ‘give someone what for’, which Italy’s 205th bomber squadron adopted as a motto; Arturo
Ferrarin was famous for flying from Rome to Tokyo in a biplane – landing at one point on a Baghdad football pitch mid-match
Vincenzo Lunardi was secretary to the Italian ambassador in
London when, in 1784, he carried out the first ascent in a hydro-
gen balloon. The ‘fratelli’ here remains something of a mystery,
as none of this he did with his brother – if indeed he even had one
 HERE’S ICARUS tumbling from the sky, look-
ing for all the world like Le Corbusier’s Modulor man after
‘Mussolini Dux’ any more horrifying, the prevailing argu-
ment went, than the ancient Roman arena of death known
a few too many drinks. Nearby is a scene dedicated to strange as the Colosseum? But there was also another incentive.
Renaissance flying machines, never knowingly flown. Next The public art commissioned by the Italian Fascists was,
up, flight pioneers such as Blériot and the Wright brothers for the most part, simply more interesting than the dreary
(the H is missing, but never mind), alongside the first great Volk and Heimat clichés favoured in Nazi Germany.
Italian aviators. There’s dashing World War I fighter ace The mosaics that line the walls of the central courtyard
Count Francesco Baracca, who chalked up 34 victories be- of what is today a middle school in the Italian town of Forlì
fore succumbing to Austrian ground fire in June 1918, and are a case in point. Designed some time between 1938 and
look – it’s newsreel hero Arturo Ferrarin, who, in 1920, fa- 1941 by artist Angelo Canevari for what was a training col-
mously flew from Rome to Tokyo in a biplane, landing at lege for air-force pilots, and translated into mosaic tesserae
one point along the way on a football pitch in Baghdad dur- by Roman firm Luigi Rimassa, these black-and-white pan-
ing a match. What larks! els fuse the charm and clarity of ancient Roman chiaroscuro
Thereafter, things get darker. Regime slogans (‘Vincere!’) mosaics, like those from the port town of Ostia Antica, with
and quotations from Mussolini appear, and the maps that the dynamism and speed thrills of Futurism. The result is
chart the exploits of those magnificent men in their flying a kind of graphic novel of aviation history, one in which
machines become exercises in expansionist propaganda: bird’s-eye and ground-level views alternate, in which classi-
‘On fronts in three continents, and over the oceans, the cally influenced line drawings reminiscent of Matisse stand
Fascist wing is always present,’ recites a caption in a scene alongside Miró-like blobs, where black planes on a white
that displays Italian planes over Europe, Africa and Asia. background and white ones on black swap places with the
The latest panel in this pictorial chronology of flight is the confident ease of a pilot flicking a switch.
grimmest: celebrating the disastrous 1940-41 Italian cam- There’s something playfully ‘Boy’s Own’ about the ex-
paign in Greece, it no longer indulges in poetic triumphal- ercise, a whiff of Tintin or Dan Dare. This wasn’t exclusive
ism, but limits itself to an ugly, bullying list: ‘4,829 tons of to Canevari, though few of his colleagues expressed the
bombs dropped, 700,000 shots fired, 261 planes downed…’ spirit with the same narrative verve. From its inception, the
Then a bell rings, and all of a sudden the corridors that Futurist movement to which the Viterbo-born painter ad-
house this Fascist-era exaltation of manned flight are full of hered had been fascinated by motorised flight, which ticked
schoolchildren and teachers scurrying to their next lesson. all the boxes so bombastically set out by Marinetti in the
After the regime was toppled, Italy took a relaxed atti- Futurist Manifesto of 1909: a worship of speed, audacity,
tude to the decorative, sculptural and architectural legacy machines, the future rather than the past, war (‘the world’s
of its 20-year dictatorship. Is an obelisk bearing the words only hygiene’) over peace. The second wave of Futurism, in

Things take a sinister turn on this wall, which covers the years 1925-1935 and celebrates Fascist-era air power across the globe
– hence the maps. Among the exploits marked is Mario Stoppani’s 1934 straight-line distance record: 4,131km in just over 26 hours
 the 1920s, even spawned a whole new genre: aeropittura, or it. These included Rome’s grandiose Foro Italico sports com-
‘aero-painting’, with its dizzy cockpit perspectives. There plex, where Severini worked alongside Canevari and two
were aero-cuisine events, and a flying countess from Forlì, other artists in the mid- to late 1930s, creating preparatory
Aloisa Guarini Matteucci degli Angeli, even organised an drawings that were then transformed into mosaics by arti-
aeromoda fashion show. sans from the renowned Spilimbergo Mosaic School using
The Collegio Aeronautico was named after Il Duce’s son, the rivoltatura technique (Canevari’s jaunty designs of divers
Bruno Mussolini, a young air-force pilot who died during a and gods on the walls of the sports centre’s covered Olympic
test flight in August 1941. In October of the same year, his swimming pool featured as a backdrop in a Milan furniture
father inaugurated the academy, though it appears from fair round-up; WoI Nov 2005).
Fascist newsreels that it had already been teaching would-be We will probably never know just how closely Canevari
pilots for at least a year (one, from May 1941, shows a parade to worked with the artisans whose task was to translate his
mark the end of the academic year in which goose-stepping sketches into mosaics. But a close look belies Severini’s dim
cadets form a giant M in the courtyard). view of the reverse method. There’s a flow and rhythm in
Though the history of the building is hardly ancient, the blocked-out shapes and one-tile ‘line drawings’ of this
nobody knows exactly when the mosaics were created and four-wall cycle that chimes well with its subject. Only at one
installed, not even my guide, Emanuela Bagattoni, an art point do the confident, riverine swirls and eddies of the
historian who is the leading expert on Canevari’s Forlì mo- mosaic tesserae descend into something like confusion:
saic cycle. All the documents regarding the commission in the centre of a stylised eagle’s wing that links the birth of
were lost or destroyed during the war, so the only dates we Fascism with the foundation of the Italian air force in March
can rely on are those on display in the mosaics themselves 1923. Some time after the war, two of the bundled stick sym-
– which give us an end point of late summer 1941. The in- bols that gave Fascism its name were removed from their
stallation itself could have been relatively quick, as the mo- place on the wing; the holes were then hastily patched up
saics were not laid by hand, tessera by tessera; instead, the by a less than expert restorer. It’s an odd correction to have
rivoltatura, or reverse, method was used. This involves tem- made, given the regime-glorifying tenor of the whole cycle,
porarily gluing the pieces back to front on to sheets of paper and the fact that other fasci were left in place.
or cardboard; these are then pressed into position on the wet As for the 11- to 14-year-olds who fill the corridors of the
plaster of the wall, and removed once the plaster has set. Collegio Aeronautico today, they’re unlikely to be swayed in
Though fellow artist and mosaicist Gino Severini railed their political views by Canevari’s fluid, oddly romantic, clas-
against this ‘quasi-mechanical system which prevents any sically infused paean to the joy of taking to the air. But they
emotion from being felt’, economies of time and budget might just find fuel for dreams here as they trudge from dou-
meant that many large-scale public commissions favoured ble Latin to double maths on a wet Wednesday morning $

Pegasus joins other flight ‘pioneers’ on this wall, including Leonardo da Vinci – or at least a quote from Codex Atlanticus and
flying machines proposed by him. These include an aerial screw, a wing to be strapped to the body and, far right, a parachute
 This page: Brandt as he appeared in WoI
in 1984. The portrait on the wall shows his
father as a young boy. Opposite: one of
his flotsam assemblages, Fifteen, from 1971
COLLAGE: BILL BRANDT ARCHIVE LTD, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH: JON STOKES

ENIGM A VA RIATION
An obsessively private soul who studiously blurred details about his background, the late photographer Bill Brandt made
a rare concession to self-promotion when this magazine featured his London flat in February 1984. Given that reserve,
he would perhaps squirm to now find himself the focus, with his friend Henry Moore, of a new book and touring exhibition.
But for the rest of us, writes Robin Muir, it’s a chance to marvel at the sheer breadth of his output – from those
famous nudes to lesser-known flotsam collages – and his brilliance. Original interiors photography: Marco de Valdivia
SOME TIME in late 1983 The World of Interiors visited
Bill Brandt and his wife, Noya, in their bow-windowed, second-
Lilliput, remain his earliest achievement, collected together in The
English at Home (1936). For this influential book, he crossed the
f loor apartment in a brick-built block in Holland Park. For social spectrum, observing steps scrubbed at dawn in Stepney
many years their home – Brandt had first moved there in late slums and evening backgammon games in Mayfair mansions,
1948 or early 1949 – the flat looked out towards other similar to present in his own words a document of a ‘fresh and strange’
blocks past a tennis court in a small park, but for most of the world. The book was a critical success but a commercial failure.
year tall trees in leaf screened the view, as might the heavy red However, with its successor, A Night in London (1938), it strength-
velvet curtains around the window. Which is just, one suspect- ened Brandt’s position – and his identity – as ‘our leading British
ed, how this intensely private man liked it. He took many of his photographer of people’, as Vogue put it. This was intriguing be-
celebrated nudes there in the small, dark, enclosed rooms. cause he was scrutinising his fresh and strange world and its dis-
For most of the last century, as a photographer working in tinctive hierarchies with an outsider’s eye. His father, LW Brandt,
Britain, Brandt stood alone for the uncluttered purity of his vi- head of an import/export firm, had British nationality, being
sion, the master, it seems, of everything he turned his lens upon. born in London, which makes his son on paper a British photo-
So distinct are his achievements in different areas that, to view grapher; but Hermann Wilhelm Brandt himself was born in 1904
them in isolation, they appear the oeuvres of separate artists: in Hamburg and his youth, punctuated by bouts of ill-health, was
acute social realism; timeless pictures of the English landscape; spent in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. He decided to live in
compassionate home-front war photography; a body of spatially London in 1931 and was there permanently by 1934. Thereafter
distorted nudes without precedent; sharply observed portraits he would deflect close enquiry into his German roots. He was
of the literary and artistic scene. more forthcoming about his relatives from pre-Revolutionary
Then approaching 80, this giant of European photography Russia – a painting in the naive style of his great-great-grand-
had all but retired, though writer Ian Fraser could confidently mother’s house near St Petersburg hung above his bed. COLLAGE: BILL BRANDT ARCHIVE LTD, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH: JON STOKES
report he was still a long way ‘from turning off the darkroom By the time Fraser and photographer Marco de Valdivia had
light’, his half-century career now the subject of grand retro- taken the rickety lift up two floors, the exhibition Photographs by
spective exhibitions. These demanded prints, and Brandt was Bill Brandt had just come down in New York; Bill Brandt’s Literary
still the master of his own image-making. The darkroom in the Britain would open in spring 1984 at the Victoria & Albert
flat was not on view to WoI; ‘a sacred place’, Fraser conjectured. Museum, while Bill Brandt: Behind the Camera was in its early
Just after the war, Brandt had given up the photojournalism in planning stages for 1985 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
which he had first made his name when he – and it – had reached About this attention, Brandt was ambivalent. He shunned
a peak because ‘everyone seemed to be getting in on the act’; he self-promotion, kept a low profile and public appearances were
might have added that this was before the term photojournalism rare; as a lifelong diabetic, his health was poor too. Further, as
had even been coined. His studies of social conditions in England Fraser discovered, Brandt was ‘easily embarrassed by praise of
in the 1930s, made on assignment chief ly for Picture Post and his own work’. In fact, there was only one Brandt photograph on

Top left: the only photograph by Brandt on display in the flat (from his 1961 book Perspective of Nudes) is seen to the left of the bookcase.
The Victorian doll belonged to his second wife, Marjorie, who died of cancer at the age of 62. Top right: Fifty, 1974, collage in Plexiglas box.
Opposite: the same work hung in the Holland Park sitting room, where a collection of glass paperweights sat on the chest under the mirror
 THIS PAGE: YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART, FRIENDS OF BRITISH ART, © 2014-2019 PAUL RAYMOND PUBLICATIONS. OPPOSITE: BILL BRANDT ARCHIVE LTD, LONDON. ALL PHOTOGRAPHY: RICHARD CASPOLE AND ROBERT HIXON
display in the flat, even then almost overshadowed by a ceiling- Surrealism made by objects placed directly on to photosensi-
height bureau and bookcase. This was Untitled Nude (1953), from tive paper. This deftly linked Brandt with his past. The Surrealist
the collection of experimental studies published as Perspective of movement shaped Brandt’s work, he having been for a time, per-
Nudes (1961), which Brandt made with a 19th-century mahogany- haps only a matter of weeks, Man Ray’s assistant in Paris. ‘Tell me,
and-brass police camera he had found in a second-hand shop did you actually learn anything when you worked for me?’ asked
near Covent Garden, its aperture a pinhole, its ultra-wide-angle Ray shortly before his death in 1976. ‘You went away so often I
lens focused on infinity. It produced, he said later, ‘anatomical never learned anything directly,’ replied his former assistant, ‘but
images and shapes that my eye never saw’. He proudly told Fraser what I did was go through all the drawers and files I would never
that the book was nearly banned in the USA, but now, he sighed, have dared had you been there. So, yes, I learned a great deal.’ Man
‘they just cannot get enough of nudes’. More than one commen- Ray was reportedly delighted.
tator has written of the sculptural form these abstract shapes There is a poignant coda to this story. On 11 December, be-
take: ‘bleached and broken fresh from the earth’, said one. The tween the magazine’s visit and publication of the feature, Bill
comparison with sculpture was pertinent. Brandt suffered a heart attack. Nine days later he died. The lead-
Henry Moore and Bill Brandt first established a rapport dur- in time for the February 1984 issue, in which these photographs
ing the Blitz, finding each other in the deepest stations of the would appear, meant that by December the presses were already
London Underground, Brandt making photographs of sleeping rolling and there was no possibility of changes or announce-
figures in their makeshift shelters, Moore drawing them. Their ments. The darkroom light had flickered for the last time and
friendship endured. Brandt photographed Moore more than momentarily for WoI, before extinguishing itself forever. As
any other single artist, recognising, one might guess, the paral- Brandt’s era begins to fade from memory, a prewar world of
lels in their two- and three-dimensional worlds. This affinity is lamp-lighters and West End drawing rooms, Brandt’s reputa-
celebrated in a new book and exhibition, Bill Brandt/Henry Moore, tion endures as the most British of photographers – and surely
currently on view at the Hepworth Wakefield. by 1983 he could, at last, count as British $
Back in Holland Park, on the other side of the bureau/book- ‘Bill Brandt/Henry Moore’, edited by Martina Droth and Paul Messier, is
case were several collages of flotsam washed up on the English published by Yale Center for British Art, £50. The exhibition of the same
coastline; the only evidence, observed Fraser, that Brandt had name runs at the Hepworth Wakefield, Gallery Walk, Wakefield, W.
done anything other than take photographs. These unexpected Yorks WF1 5AW (01924 247360; hepworthwakefield.org), until 31 May,
assemblages set upon painted backdrops resemble nothing less, touring to Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (25 June-13 Sept) and
in form if not method, than Man Ray’s ‘Rayographs’, homespun Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (22 Nov-28 Feb 2021)
Opposite: Brandt and Henry Moore forged their friendship during the Blitz, when the former would take photographs of Londoners
sleeping in Tube stations and the latter would draw them. That alliance is seen here in a December 1942 spread from Lilliput
magazine, which reproduced Brandt’s Tube S elter and Moore’s Four Grey Sleepers side by side. Above: Nude, Baie des Anges, 1959
MIXED BLESSING
A confection of architectural styles, from graceful Georgian
to dour Victorian, this country pile has been in the same family
for 220 years. When the current occupants moved in they
were in two minds about the responsibility bestowed on them
and their progeny, its future custodians. Now, acres of
‘swirly pub carpets’ banished and all vestiges of magnolia paint
being obliterated, the house finally feels like home, writes
châtelaine Martha Talbot. Photography: Huntley Hedworth
The library was remodelled in 1851 by the
fourth-generation owner. Old relatives,
painted by unknown artists, look out over
a Steinway boudoir piano and an 18th-
century Dutch mahogany marquetry
bureau to an Ushak carpet of like vintage
I USED TO TAKE the dual carriageway
in the autumn just so that I could catch a glimpse of this house, if
torianisation of the place. Thankfully he ran out of money part
way through, though not soon enough for the seven-bayed Geor-
only briefly, through the bare trees. Manderley, or at least as I had gian northern façade, which is blighted with an 1870s carbuncle
imagined it to be. A long dour Victorian frontage, the marly sand- in the form of a soaring porch tower, which my father-in-law rou-
stone blackened by years of rain. Little tinely suggests we reverse into.
did I know that one day the place would My husband always says that the lives
become my home, and I its châtelaine, a of the men of his family have been scaf-
job that entails an intimate understand- folded by the strong women they have
ing of drain maps, and of weaknesses married, who often found themselves
in the wainscoting, rather than having widowed young, left alone at the helm.
any grand role to play. When we arrived, I found myself look-
For 200 years the home to one family, ing for those who have come before me
passing from one eldest son to another. in this rather antiquated role, misaligned
Ten generations of letters, diaries and with the 21st century. Unlike their hus-
secrets now in our care. A consistently bands, the wives went unrecorded – at
modest, thrifty family defined by hard least in the form of paint on canvas – un-
work and diligence, as it very much re- less they were particularly decorative. I
mains to this day. A house that was the could find them only in the silent selec-
host to temperance meetings, rather tion of wallpapers, perspiration stains on
than grand parties. Although there are corsets, which had left a forgotten blend
coming-out dresses in the wardrobe, it of a family’s fragrance, and the piles of
would seem that this was only a passing unfinished needlework. Their genetic
gesture to convention, as the inhabitants likeness passed unnoticed into the por-
lived out their lives quietly, noticeably traits of subsequent male generations.
not engaging with the county set. The My daughter’s smile might be theirs. Un-
only exception to generations of meas- burdened by an emotional connection,
ured restraint was one particular son, and when I should have probably been
who started with great zeal on the Vic- unpacking our own boxes, I rehung the

Top: behind the painting, on the exterior wall, is what the Talbots thought to be a blind window until a fidgety child pulled a brass knob she
found. The central arch panel loosened to reveal a perfectly framed vista of yews planted at the same time as the remodelling of the library.
The celestial globe is late Georgian. Its terrestrial counterpart was lent to a local school and never found its way back. Above: the view northwards
 Paintings of unknown provenance but
probably depicting Syrian traders are
guarded by a pair of late 19th-century
soapstone pagodas. They are outflanked
by two Imari jars, c1700, on the floor
portraits and trawled through the photographs, found discarded who in turn will do the same. Room by room I have negotiated
frames and placed them in the library, filling the gaps in the story. the removal of acres of beige and swirly pub carpet. My husband,
In doing so, by securing their existence, I was in turn making my more accustomed to the harsh winters, sees their comfy merit over
own place within it. The rehang also meant I could contain my my love of old boards. Where the children and dogs have chipped
curious children on the hunt for treas- away at the paintwork, we have redeco-
ure: by siting the portrait of the very aus- rated – mostly – in the original colours,
tere Anne, a joyless-looking Wesleyan, revealed by wear and tear. Much of the
by the door to the attics, the top floor has original paintwork on the wood, pre-
to date been left unexplored and un- dominantly a burnt ochre, was lost to Mr
touched by little fingers. Soot’s brush under a sea of white gloss
We decided to live with the contents in the 1950s. In turn, I am slowly chas-
rather than in parallel: not exiling our- ing out the magnolia.
selves to the small, dark-linoed rooms The library hadn’t been used since
at the back, as the last generation had Lady Bea was at the helm in the 1950s.
done. A cousin reminded me that the A perfect mid-19th-century Victorian
losses incurred when they used to play library, a collection that encapsulates
cricket in the hall had been forgotten, all the aspirations of the self-made man
and so our carelessness would be too who bought it: turgid Victorian novel-
with the passage of time. Whenever I las sitting alongside Royal Society pa-
prefix an item with the word ‘historic’, pers. In the 1950s and 60s it was the store
my children, without even thinking, in- for vast quantities of spermicide and
stinctively do a full body swerve. dutch caps, which Lady Bea – a Fabian
Our changes have been more about with a strong social conscience – was
putting stuff away and pulling out the accustomed to taking on the bus for
gentler, time-worn things that were re- weekly distribution in the nearest city.
jected by previous generations. I often In the 1970s, the room was immacu-
think about the subsequent ‘blow-ins’ lately recreated as it had been depicted
my children might spend their lives with, in an 1850s watercolour. Though it held

Top: in the music room (now commandeered as a playroom by today’s youngest generation living here), the painting above the fire is a firm
family favourite. Darkened by soot, it has been attributed to many artists, including Wilson, but it’s now believed to be by Robert Freebairn.
The five-fold leather screen is 17th-century north European. Above: the chairs in the anteroom are part of a painted and parcel-gilt suite, c1775
 The rare Cowtan & Sons wallpaper
contains arsenic, meaning that the room
has been effectively mothballed.
The room is kept warm to keep the paper
stable. Without this, the damp would
mobilise the element into a toxic gas
Top: sited on the hall landing is Richard the Rake, whose sobriquet reflects the way in which the family regarded him for seeking commercial gain
rather than doing good works. He ended his life by blowing his brains out in front of a mirror. Above left: an early 18th-century Dutch bow-fronted
corner cupboard hangs by the hall’s gent’s loo. Above right: the ship’s sink in the Slip Room bathroom probably came from Brunel’s ss Great Britain
Top: at the top of the main staircase, the settees are part of the same set of Georgian furniture found in the anteroom. Above left: the view through
to the Talbots’ living quarters, where the rooms are more domestic in scale and modest in décor. Above the lamp hangs a portrait of Lady
Bea’s sister, a bluestocking whose picture had found itself turned to the wall in the attic. Above right: the Octagon Room ‘feels truly our own’
 The Green Room is only slept in now by
children on their birthdays or when the
Talbots are short of beds. The family
commissioned the crewelwork hangings,
embroidered with motifs that refer to
its heritage, in the early 17th century. In
the window bay sit a pair of George II
walnut side chairs and a rosewood table
an eternal moment in time, the gilded settees upholstered in white misidentified, I riffled through the attic until I found an identical
silk rendered the room unusable, and so it remained in dark- roll of paper labelled ‘acrylic-coated’ by Sanderson. It was my
ness until four years ago when we arrived here. Citing the settees father-in-law’s only aesthetic decision in the house, so it felt right
as the barrier to our ever using the room, I found two old Victor- it should stay, acrylic-coated as may be.
ian sofas, and piece by piece I slowly Would I want this for my first-born,
assembled scraps of William Morris’s my daughter Flora, as opposed to my
‘Wandle’ design from Ebay until I had younger son? Would I want to accept
enough to cover them. In its original the continuation of male-only primo-
indigo-printed form it had been used geniture? Not on my watch. Stories from
before in the house, but only survived returning wartime evacuees, with their
in pieces in the scrap box. It would also tales of owls flying down corridors and
mask the jam stains and dog hair inevi- housemaid indiscretions, or the discov-
table in a family home. ery of a Samurai sword hilt when look-
Having moved eastward within the ing for Sellotape, are a privilege and a
house, away from the previous occu- pleasure. Perhaps my peripatetic child-
pants’ footprint – something that has hood left me with a yearning for rooted-
always happened at the moment of tran- ness, giving me a reason to want my
sition between the generations – we own children to be hefted to one place,
needed to find historic precedent for and one place only, so they could truly
our choice of site for the kitchen. My know what it is to belong.
father-in-law’s study had in living mem- Or perhaps not. It’s more than pos-
ory housed a range, and an 1820s plan sible that a life dominated by a demand-
confirmed that the room had once been ing and overbearing family member –
the kitchen. A planning officer suggest- albeit one built of bricks and mortar – is
ed the paper might be Cole & Son, so we too great a burden to pass to yet another
set about installing glass splashbacks generation. The house does for their ten-
to protect it. The paper wasn’t matt, as ure own the people who live here, rather
might be expected; certain it had been than them owning it $

Top: in the morning room, which serves as the family’s kitchen, the wallpaper is by Sanderson and was hung in the mid-1970s. The long, low
kitchen table was built specifically for World War II evacuees billeted at the house. Martha is reminded of them daily as she bumps her
knees squeezing them under the table. Above: a lead trough sits between hedges beneath a Tudorbethan mullioned window on the northerly front
 Formerly part of the network of rooms
that made up the demolished Victorian
kitchen wing, the back hall is now where
the Talbots make chutney and preserves,
and hold farm meetings. On the window
seat rests a much pierced archery target
 inspiration
Some of the design effects in this issue, recreated by Grace McCloud

1 Do you admire the ring-shaped mirror

casting kooky reflections above Miska Miller-
Lovegrove’s double bed (page 191)? Don’t
be a doughnut – get one for yourself. Prices
for Zieta’s ‘Rondo’ start at £925 approx. Ring
00 48 785 911 861, or visit shop.zieta.pl.

1 2 WoI may have recognised the jointly con-

ceived Le Corbusier, Jeanneret and Perriand
sofas (from £4,815) in the Polish architect’s
home (page 189), but only the most dedicated
design devotees will have known that the fa-
mous ‘LC3’ frame comes in eight colours, in-
cluding Miller-Lovegrove’s choice of blue. Ring
Cassina on 020 7584 0000, or visit cassina.com.

3
3 Echoing the sinuous shapes of the columns,
Flos’s white ‘Fantasma’ floor lamp sits, almost
camouflaged, in the minimalist living room
2
(page 189) in the flat on the Bayswater bor-
4 ders. If you covet those curves, Tobia
Scarpa’s 1961 design is available for
£2,990. Visit flos.com.

4 If you yearn for yarn in bold

rust or rich indigo, like that used
by the weavers working at Märta
Måås-Fjetterström (page 178), let
us point you in the right direc-
tion: Zoë Ritchie’s hanks of wool,
dyed from locally foraged plants,
come in boxes of six, which cost
£57.60. Ring 01546 870317, or
visit zoeritchieweaving.co.uk.

5 5 Where some might opt for filing cabinets,

the Swedish rug company uses coloured laundry
sacks to keep its stored goods separate (page PHOTOGRAPHY: LIAM STEVENS (4, 5, 8 BOTTOM, 11)

185). For a similarly jolly solution with bags of

style, try Linen Rain. Its handmade offerings are
available in 17 colours and three sizes, and start
from £13 approx each. Visit etsy.com.

6 The Bloomsbury aesthetic has made its

mark in Paul Roche’s Spanish home, where fur-
niture painted by his children brightens its sim-
ple rooms (page 201). As charmed as we are?
The alpha and Omega of such repro workshop
craftsmanship is surely TDS, which creates be-
spoke pieces, including this one-door book-
case (from £1,525). Visit charlieroe.com.

6
 7

7 Zita Unger feathered her nest with, among

other things of beauty, Soane Britain’s antique-
brass ‘Owl’ lantern (page 160), whose ‘feathers’
are individually handmade by Sheffield silver-
smiths. We positively hooted with glee
when we discovered that the fitting is
8
also available as a flush ceiling light –
yours from £10,600. Ring 020 7730 9
6400, or visit soane.com.

8 The straggling tendrils of Marthe

Armitage’s ‘Old Man’s Beard’ wall-
paper adds to the mismatch melée
in a child’s bedroom in the north
London town house (page 169).
While that incarnation is yellow,
the hand-block-printed design
is custom coloured to order.
It costs £360 approx per 10m
roll from Hamilton Weston.
Ring 020 8940 4850, or visit
hamiltonweston.com.
10
9 The only thing better than a fireside chair is 11
a couple of them, as Zita Unger knows full well
(page 164). Follow her example with George
Sherlock’s ‘Baby’, which costs £1,055. Small in
stature and with a similarly rounded back, it
makes a splendid stand-in. Ring 01842 864190,
or visit georgesherlock.com.

10 Zita Unger paired a silver cooker from La

Cornue with her aubergine kitchen cabinets
(page 163). If your scheme has a different fla-
vour, fear not: the French company’s ‘Cornufé
110’, from £6,000, comes in more than 40 col-
ours. Visit lacornue.com.

11 Moss-green fabric lines Bill Brandt’s walls,

forming a sober and supremely stylish backdrop
to his considered collages (page 210). Like the
look? Dedar’s mousse ‘Aplomb 018’ wool satin,
£168.50 per m, is just the thing. Ring 020 7351
9939, or visit dedar.com.

12 Bill Brandt’s brown polished floor has the

look of leather to us – a refined touch from a
man with a sophisticated eye (page 213). Seeking
hide? Bill Amberg Studio can do you a leather
floor from £650 per sq m. Ring 020 8960 2000, or
visit billamberg.com. r

12
 inspiration
1

1 Generations of Talbots tinkling the ivories

at their stylistic patchwork of a pile presumably
read their sheet music by the light of the plafon-
2
nier above (page 222). Get the glow with Urban
Archaeology’s ‘Bronxville’, cost-
ing $5,910. Now to practise the
piano… Ring 001 212 371 4646,
or visit urbanarchaeology.com.

2 You’ve toured the restored pile,

but did you remember to look up?
The plaster ceilings chez Talbot are
remarkable (pages 217 and 220) –
and recreatable: George Jackson
does bespoke decorative ones from
£15,000. Ring 020 8687 9740, or visit
georgejackson.com.

3
3 A grand library needs a grand
fireplace – and what better way to
add warmth than with red marble?
Peer inside the Talbots’ country house for proof
(page 219), then head to Origines, which has a
rolling stock of such surrounds. This Louis XV-
style one from c1880 is £4,200 approx. Ring 00
33 130 887 515, or visit origines.com.

4 Hankering after some bed-hangings sewn

with flora, fauna and hummocky hills? Why
not commission your own crewelwork, as those
17th-century Talbots did (page 224); or take the
4
5
more straightforward route, opting for Schu-
macher’s ‘Gerry Embroidery 72450’; it costs
£1,389 per m. Ring Turnell & Gigon on 020 7259
7280, or visit turnellandgigon.com.

5 Coveting the cabriole chairs in the Tal-

bots’ Green Room (page 225), we looked
for a springy-legged doppelgänger: English
Georgian’s ‘George I’ (£1,753), carved by
hand in mahogany, is perfectly period and
just as elegant. Ring 020 7351 4433, or visit
englishgeorgian.com.

6 If you’ve been praying for interior in-

spiration, may we suggest a vicarious trip
to the Spanish convent (page 170) before
adding Graham & Green’s ‘Maria’ figure,
£49.95, and glass dome, £69, to your cath-
olic collections? Ring 01225 418200, or
visit grahamandgreen.co.uk $
6
 K I TCH EN AN D
BATH RO OM G UI D E
MAY 2020
S P

Find all the inspiration you’ll ever need for

your kitchen and bathroom projects in The
World of Interiors’ definitive Guide to Kitchens
and Bathrooms, a beautifully edited 100-page
sourcebook and lookbook of those specialist
designers and suppliers you need to know

Find it in the May issue

on sale from 2 April 2020

Be part of the story

#theworldofinteriorsmayissue
 EXHIBITION diary
If looks could kill, say it loud, deep-diving
dreamers, plus Charlotte Edwards’s listings

Titian: Love, Desire, Death

NATIONAL GALLERY Trafalgar Square, London WC2

The seven poesie – painted poems – created by Titian for the king of
Spain are one of the high points of European narrative painting.
Both sensuous and moving, these large squarish canvases with
mythological subjects set in vibrant landscapes changed the idea
of what an oil painting can be. They are brilliantly orchestrated and
technically outrageous, painted and repainted with visible brush-
strokes that coalesce only at a distance. Their impossible freshness
and rawness still speak to artists and art lovers today – so best book
now for one of this exhibition’s four venues.
When in 1551 Philip, then crown prince of Spain, bade Titian
paint him a series of works derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he
was following his father, Charles V, who knighted the Venetian painter
in 1533. But whereas his father mostly commissioned dynastic por-
traits, his son gave Titian a free rein in terms of subject matter, so
long as he included plenty of naked ladies. The first pictures, Danae
(being penetrated by Jupiter in a shower of gold) and Venus and
Adonis, were a matching pair. Titian wrote to Philip in London,
where he had just married Mary Tudor, explaining that they pro-
vided contrasting views of female nudes. The latter painting does
more than that, however: Venus’s back and arms are almost dislo-
cated as she tries to prevent Adonis going to certain death during a
hunt. Hunting was another of Philip’s favourite pastimes.
The high point of the series is the tragic pair Diana and Actaeon
and Diana and Callisto (1556-59). Technically they are unprece-
dented: a contemporary said that the elderly Titian would sketch
in the painting, turn the canvas to the wall for a few months, then
scrutinise it as if it were ‘a mortal enemy’, before attacking it with
a few bold strokes. In the first picture, Diana, goddess of chastity,
is bathing in a shimmering forest pool with her nymphs, when the
hunter Actaeon accidentally chances on them. Diana’s body, pro-
tectively bracketed by a black servant girl, tenses up like a bolt of
lightning: the punishment for seeing her naked is always death.
The range of poses, gestures and expressions – steeped in refer-
ences to antique sculpture and Michelangelo – is incredible: a
girl peeking out tremulously from behind a column seems as
anxious for Actaeon as for herself. He recoils in shock, helplessly
feeling the air with his fingers, with a sort of mimed eroticism.
Actaeon stands in for all viewers of the painting, because we too
advance, staring at it up close, then recoil to see from a distance.
The Death of Actaeon (1559-75) was only executed much later
and never delivered. We see the hunter hunted. Actaeon, having
fled the scene, is metamorphosed into a stag. His dogs turn on
him, almost raping him, and one of Diana’s nymphs, armed with
a longbow, delivers the coup de grâce. All of nature is set aquiver;
and the ripples created by these paintings have never ceased flow-
ing through art. TITIAN: LOVE, DESIRE, DEATH runs 16 March-14 June,
Mon-Thurs, Sat, Sun 10-6, Fri 10-9, touring to Edinburgh, Madrid
and Boston $ JAMES HALL is research professor at Winchester School of
Art, University of Southampton. His most recent book is ‘The Self-Portrait:
A Cultural History’, published by Thames & Hudson

Diana and Actaeon, 1556-59, oil on canvas, 1.85 × 2.02m

 ARTS & ANTIQUES
GUIDE 2020
A celebration of creativity and collecting
across countries, cultures and time
IMAGE COURTESY OF BILL BATTEN

JUNE ISSUE ON SALE 7 MAY 2020

 EXHIBITION diary

We Will Walk TURNER CONTEMPORARY Rendezvous, Margate

We live in an age of protest, with groups of all allegiances taking to the streets to
demand change. Many such efforts draw inspiration from the American civil-
rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, which brought about the end of laws ena-
bling racial discrimination. Yet the daily experience of people of colour in the US
is still blighted by systemic racism, which makes Turner Contemporary’s new exhi-
bition an exhilarating proposition. We Will Walk brings together work by African-
American artists from the Deep South and surrounding states to celebrate the
ongoing role of creativity in the struggle for justice and individual freedom.
Among the earliest works in the show are paintings by Bill Traylor, who was born
PREVIOUS PAGES: © THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON/THE NATIONAL GALLERIES OF SCOTLAND. THIS PAGE, FROM TOP: PHOTO: HANNAH COLLINS; SPELMAN
COLLEGE MUSEUM OF FINE ART, ATLANTA, GA, GIFT OF RUTH SHACK, 2014.1; PHOTO: STEPHEN PITKIN/PITKIN STUDIO; THE MUSEUM OF EVERYTHING, LONDON

into slavery around 1853 and laboured for six decades before he began to draw his
memories of life on the plantation. Traylor is now lauded as one of America’s most
important artists, but his creative vision emerged out of what curators Hannah
Collins and Paul Goodwin call the ‘racial terror’ of slavery and segregation. Many of
the featured artists worked within a domestic setting, creating assemblages of found
objects in their yards and bridging the private space of the home and the outdoor
landscape. Emmer Sewell’s Scarecrow (undated) is one such work, but its theme is
anything but homely, as it was inspired by ‘the Black Panthers out there in Holly-
wood’. The paintings of Floridian Purvis Young set the African-American experi-
ence against a wider horizon; in Black People Migrating West (late 1970s), crowds sit
atop railway boxcars, heeding the promise of a better life on the West Coast.
Several artists pay tribute to figureheads of the movement: following Malcolm X’s
dictum, Lonnie Holley says he makes work ‘by any means necessary’. His Changing
my Walk (Honoring Andrew Young), in which a pair of mismatched shoes sits on a chair,
is dedicated to another civil-rights leader. In Jack Whitten’s King’s Wish (Martin Luther’s
Dream) of 1968, the year King was assassinated, swirls of many-coloured paint har-
bour the faces of protesters; according to Whitten, his painting showed how ‘the
spirit operates through matter’. Nkisi traditions brought by slaves from Kongo, in
modern-day Angola, also hold that objects can embody spirits. Their influence can
be felt in votive-like heads sculpted by blues musician and gravedigger James ‘Son
Ford’ Thomas, which often include human teeth; in Freeman Vines’s guitars carved
with wood from a ‘hanging tree’ used for lynchings; and Beverly Buchanan’s sculp-
tures of modest shacks, which evoke a poignant sense of home and loss.
There is a delicate balance to be struck in an exhibition such as We Will Walk, to
avoid glossing over history or romanticising an art so fully enmeshed in suffering.
The inclusion of photographs and videos from the civil-rights era along with more
recent works promises to situate the works within a contemporary context. Water-
colours painted in 2015 by Kara Walker parse visual motifs of the Deep South – the
From top: the yard and porch of artist Emmer Sewell; Beverly
field hand, the mule – while Sheila Pree Bright’s photographic series ‘#1960Now’
Buchanan, The Williams House, 1998, acrylic paint and
(2015) documents Black Lives Matter protesters, emphasising how vital the fight foam core, 45.7 × 20 × 30.5cm; Annie Mae Young, Bars,
against racism still is for many Americans. WE WILL WALK: ART AND RESISTANCE IN THE c1965, corduroy, denim, polyester knit, assorted synthetics
AMERI CAN SOUTH runs until 3 May, Tues-Sun, bank hols 10-5 $ ELLEN MARA DE (britches legs), 2.06 × 2m; Bill Traylor, Untitled, 1939-
WACHTER is the author of ‘Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration’, published by Phaidon 42, poster paint and pencil on cardboard, 38.3 × 37.4cm
 12 PRINT ISSUES +
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 EXHIBITION diary
TOP LEFT: © TATE. TOP RIGHT: PRIVATE COLLECTION. © THE LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES. INSET: THE MURRAY FAMILY COLLECTION (UK & USA). © THE ESTATE OF EDITH RIMMINGTON

British Surrealism DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY Gallery Rd, London SE21

On 11 June 1936, the International Surrealist Exhibition burst on ing precursors in the supernatural paintings of Henry Fuseli and
to the London art scene. This spectacular event, 400 works from Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. The art critic Herbert Read, writ-
14 countries, included 27 British artists, all of whom claimed an ing in the catalogue of the 1936 exhibition, emphasised the move-
interest – albeit sometimes tenuous – in the then decade-old move- ment’s native origins when he wrote: ‘a nation which has produced
ment from continental Europe. During the opening reception two such superrealists as William Blake and Lewis Carroll is to
Salvador Dalí delivered a lecture in a deep-sea diving suit, which the manner born’.
nearly led to his suffocation. Drawing over 23,000 visitors during For most visitors, the greatest surprise of the exhibition will be
its three-week run, the show caused a sensation – largely owing to the too-often ignored contribution made by the many remarkable
the publicity it received, most of it bad. The Daily Mail, for example, Surrealist women: from Eileen Agar and Leonora Carrington to
considered the exhibition ‘thoroughly deca- new discoveries such as Marion Adnams and
dent and unhealthy’. Emmy Bridgwater. Overturning the intensely
Dulwich Picture Gallery’s show offers an patriarchal ideologies of the movement, and
ambitious survey of the fully fledged Brit- largely in reaction to them, these artists ex-
ish movement, whose flowering was largely plored their own private dream states to cre-
inspired by the 1936 exhibition. Bringing ate trailblazing pictures, often centred on the
together the work of 40 artists, including female condition. As Agar remarked, they
Edward Burra, Lucian Freud and Paul Nash, felt themselves to be a minority within a mi-
the exhibition will also spotlight less familiar nority, taking ‘deviance as a principle of cre-
talents, such as Conroy Maddox, John Bigge ativity’. Meanwhile, Fantastic Women: Surreal
and Sam Haile. It explores both artists di- Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Frida Kahlo,
rectly involved with Surrealism, as well as which opened just before the Dulwich show
those influenced by it; all were united by a at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, also
common interest in the realm of visions and includes striking works by these British
dreams, of the subconscious and the gro- women. It seems that their stars are finally
tesque, of the irrational and the uncanny. rising after too many decades of neglect.
Attempting to explain why Surrealism, BRITISH SURREALISM runs until 17 May, Tues-
though late to flourish, took root so natu- Sun, bank hols 10-5 $ SACHA LLEWELLYN is
rally in Britain, the show also presents works a writer and curator, with a particular interest in
and books by some of its ‘ancestors’, find- women artists of the interwar period

Top left: Edward Burra, Dancing Skeletons, 1934, gouache and ink on paper, 78.7 × 55.9cm. Top right: Lucian Freud,
Landscape with Birds, 1940, oil on panel, 39.5 × 32.3cm. Above: Edith Rimmington, Family Tree, 1938, collage, 35 × 25cm
 EXHIBITION diary
1

LONDON HAYWARD GALLERY BELVEDERE RD, SE1 4 March-17

AGA KHAN CENTRE GALLERY HANDYSIDE ST, N1C 27 May. Mon, Wed, Fri-Sun 11-7, Thurs 11-9. Odes to
1 Ghosts in the
Feb-3 May. Mon-Sun 10-6. Iranian textile artist trees by international artists, including Robert
machine – Andy
Bita Ghezelayagh’s geometric compositions, Adams, Tacita Dean and Peter Doig, who are
Warhol, Marilyn
cloaks, tunics and breastplates incorporating drawn to their branching form, grand scale
Diptych, 1962, at
fragments of threadbare carpet, traditional and deep-rooted symbolism.
Tate Modern.
embroidery, felt, velvet, silk and mirror. NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY ST MARTIN’S PLACE,
2 Strong suit – Paul
ALISON JACQUES GALLERY BERNERS ST, W1 27 March- WC2 12 March-7 June. Mon-Wed, Sat, Sun 10-6, Thurs,
Tanqueray, Cecil
25 April. Tues-Sat 11-6. ‘I saw the camera could Fri 10-9. Curtain up for a show of Cecil Beaton’s
Beaton, 1937, at
be a weapon against poverty, against racism, deliriously theatrical portraits.
the National Portrait
against all sorts of social wrongs,’ said self- QUEEN’S HOUSE ROMNEY RD, SE10 Until 31 Aug.
Gallery. 3 Vanes
taught US photographer Gordon Parks. Here’s Mon-Sun 10-5. The three versions of Elizabeth
glorious – Camille
evidence of its power both to change minds I’s Armada portrait are hung together for the
Corot, The Windmill,
and capture the life of the individual, in his first time. Until 17 Jan 21, art from the Duke and
c1835-40, at
images of 1950s Alabama, the black Muslim Duchess of Bedford’s collection, on loan dur-
the Royal Academy.
2 movement, and Muhammad Ali. ing a Woburn Abbey refurb.
BLUE MOUNTAIN SCHOOL CHANCE ST, E2 Until 18 REBECCA HOSSACK CONWAY ST, W1 10 March-10
April. Tues-Sat 10.30-6.30 (closed 1-1.45). Planet April. Mon-Sat 10-6. Using traditional Chinese
earth: terracotta vessels and sculpture from brushes, paper and techniques, but inspired by
antiquity to the present, a collaboration be- Western artists such as Rothko, Ye Xue makes
tween Blue Projects and dealer Ben Hunter. paintings steeped in the landscape, and light
DAVID HILL GALLERY LADBROKE GROVE, W10 28 Feb- of his home on the Yellow River.
24 April. Thurs-Sat 11-5. Curator Carrie Scott as- ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS PICCADILLY, W1 Until 13
sembles a real array of sunshine: Coney Islan- April. Mon-Thurs, Sat, Sun 10-6, Fri 10-10. Picasso’s
der Harold Feinstein’s carefree photographs cutting-edge work with paper (WoI March
of crowded beaches and the summertime city, 2020). Until 25 May, too often eclipsed by his
as joyful as monochrome can be. fellow Ostender James Ensor, insomniac Léon
DAVID ZWIRNER GRAFTON ST, W1 6 March-18 April. Spilliaert’s nocturnal landscapes and melan-
Tues-Sat 10-6. The luminous late work of Paul cholic self-portraits emerge from the shadows.
3 Klee, undiminished by bouts of illness, his 29 March-14 June, Impressionist masterpieces
departure from Nazi Germany for his native from Denmark’s Ordrupgaard Collection.
Bern, and the general turmoil of the 1930s. SERPENTINE GALLERY KENSINGTON GARDENS, W2 4
FASHION & TEXTILE MUSEUM BERMONDSEY ST, SE1 March-17 May. Tues-Sun, bank hols 10-6. Starting
Until 14 June. Tues, Wed, Fri, Sat 11-6, Thurs 11-8, Sun with her film Whose Utopia? (2006), in which
11-5. Peacock-bright 50-year retrospective of light-bulb factory workers acted out their
Designers Guild, which started life in a corner fantasy lives as dancers or pop stars, Cao Fei
of a King’s Road shop in 1970. has made work navigating real and virtual
GARDEN MUSEUM LAMBETH PALACE RD, SE1 Until spaces, the rapid advance of technology and
5 April. Mon-Sun 10.30-5. The artist-gardeners the changing landscape of the city and the
of the interwar period, dedicated as much to self in the digital age. Her first big UK show
plants as to painting, who swapped cuttings features a new VR artwork and an installa-
with each other in the post. Plus, Fleur Olby’s tion based on elements of her Beijing studio.
velvety, seductive flower photographs. TATE MODERN BANKSIDE, SE1 Until 5 April. Mon-
GOLDSMITHS CCA ST JAMES’S, NEW CROSS, SE14 Thurs, Sun 10-6, Fri, Sat 10-10. Fount of wisdom:
Until 3 May. Wed, Fri-Sun 11-6, Thurs 11-9. ‘Man- Kara Walker’s interrogative take on imperial
made objects, or natural ones, inert in them- monuments. Until 11 May, though by no means
4 5 selves but much used by careless life […] are encyclopaedic, this Steve McQueen survey
particularly difficult to keep in surface focus’, contains whole worlds in single films such
Vladimir Nabokov wrote in Transparent Things. as Caribs’ Leap or Western Deep (2002). 2 March-
4 Throwing shapes This group show invites 14 artists to respond 6 Sept, research into Andy Warhol’s sexuality,
– Paul Klee, Masks at to that novella’s opening chapter with works his Carpatho-Rusyn heritage and his moth-
Twilight, 1938, at based on familiar, everyday things that find er’s devout Catholicism supplies new read-
David Zwirner. 5 Tree ways to grab our attention. ings of his work – and accounts for his interest
worshipper – Ugo HAUSER & WIRTH SAVILE ROW, W1 Until 2 May. Tues- in every thing from folk embroidery and or-
Rondinone, Wind Sat 10-6. Body-cast foam, resin or plaster sculp- nate handwriting to minority or underground
Moon, 2011, at the tures, some lit up as lamps, by Polish cultures, commodities and the fear of death.
Hayward. 6 Arch look artist Alina Szapocznikow, who WHITE CUBE BERMONDSEY ST, SE1 Until 19 April.
– Charles Mahoney, spent her teens in concentration Tues-Sat 10-6, Sun 12-6. Making reference
The Garden, 1950, at camps before developing her to fountains, screens and bicycle
the Garden Museum. Surrealist-influenced practice. wheels, Cerith Wyn Evans’s
7 Object lesson – Plus, cabin fever: Isa Genzken’s neon and cracked-glass
Becky Beasley, installation of plane seats installations tackle the
Astray (DAM), 2018, and windows. history of conceptual art.
at Goldsmiths CCA
6

7
 EXHIBITION diary
1

OUTSIDE LONDON NORWICH SAINSBURY CENTRE Until 14 June. Tues-Fri

1 Have a Deco – Tom
BEXHILL-ON-SEA DE LA WARR PAVILION Until 4 May. 10-6, Sat, Sun 10-5. Some front: Art Deco’s im- Purvis poster, 1937,
Mon-Sun 10-5. Zadie Xa conjures up an under- pact on British seaside architecture. 29 March- in Norwich. 2 Identity
water world occupied by Korean folk god- 13 Sept, natural selection: how Art Nouveau crisis – Federico
desses, shimmering outfits and squashy orca designers deployed organic forms. Zuccaro, Head and
sculptures. Until 10 May, shipping news: Marc POOLE POOLE MUSEUM Until 19 April. Mon-Sat shoulders of a
Bauer’s large- and small-scale pencil drawings 10-4, Sun 12-4. Using painting, gilding and rub- bearded man wearing
based on historical images of boat travellers, ber stamps, Ann-Marie James has made en- a cap, possibly a self-
from Greek pots and 15th-century ex votos to tirely white or gold works inspired by Wes- portrait, 16th-17th
recent footage of Mediterranean migrants. sex Museums’ collections. Look out for a rug century, in Sheffield.
BIRMINGHAM BARBER INSTITUTE Until 17 May. Mon- shaved with patterns from a Roman mosaic. 3 In the chair – David
Fri 10-5, Sat, Sun 11-5. Art produced in and around SALISBURY SALISBURY MUSEUM Until 18 April. Mon-
Hockney, Portrait
St Ives from the 1930s to 60s. 27 March-11 April Sat 10-5. Delightful watercolour landscapes of Sir David Webster,
21, love me tender: marking 50 years of the by Albert Goodwin (1845-1932). 1971, in Woking.
Barber’s world-class coin collection. SHEFFIELD MILLENNIUM GALLERY Until 13 April. 2
BRISTOL SPIKE ISLAND Until 5 April. Tues-Sun 12-5. Mon-Wed, Fri, Sat 10-5, Thurs 10-8, Sun, bank hols
Filipino-American Pacita Abad’s ‘trapunto’ 11-4. Artist Richard Bartle’s homage to the
paintings: padded canvases layered with patch- late 14th- and early 15th-century drawings
work, shells, buttons and sequins. of Siyah Kalem, or ‘Black Pen’. Until 25 May,
CANTERBURY THE BEANEY 7 March-26 April. Tues- master drawings from Chatsworth.
Sat 10-5, Sun 11-4. Master strokes: a study of line WOKING THE LIGHTBOX Until 19 April. Tues-Sat 10.30-
in prints from the Arts Council Collection, 5, Sun 11-4. Inside information: a never-before-
including Sickert, Chillida and Caulfield. shown 14-page letter in which David Hockney
CASTLE CARY DAVID SIMON CONTEMPORARY 7 March- describes his working processes is part of an
28 April. Mon, Tues, Thurs-Sat 10-5.30. George Dan- exhibition about his studio life.
natt’s (WoI July 2015) investigations into geo- AUSTRIA VIENNA ALBERTINA MODERN 13 March-2
metry, form and space in five decades of ab- Aug. Mon-Sun 10-6. The Albertina’s new modern-
stract and landscape paintings. art branch opens, in the renovated and ex-
CHICHESTER PALLANT HOUSE GALLERY 14 March-14 panded 1860s Künstlerhaus, with a survey of
June. Tues, Wed, Fri, Sat 10-5, Thurs 10-8, Sun, bank the Austrian avant-garde of 1945-1980.
hols 11-5. Barnett fair: East-Ender Freedman’s MAK Until 13 April. Tues 10-9, Wed-Sun 10-6. How
work in design, illustration and typography. Thonet’s bentwood ‘Chair No.14’ (1859) 3
An accompanying display focuses on his peer changed the shape of furniture design. Until
group at the Royal College of Art, including 17 May, the career of prolific Viennese designer
Ravilious, Bawden, Burra and Enid Marx; a and architect Otto Prutscher (1880-1949).
generation famously described by their tea- BELGIUM GHENT MSK Until 30 April. Mon, Fri, Sat
cher Paul Nash as an ‘outbreak of talent’. 9.30-11, Tues, Thurs 10.30-7, Wed 9.30-6, Sun 9.30-7.
EXETER ROYAL ALBERT MEMORIAL MUSEUM Until 3 Book for a jam-packed Van Eyck blockbuster
May. Tues-Sun 10-5. Vibrant multi-part abstract that includes the eight outer panels of the
paintings and prints by West Country artist Ghent altarpiece, on display outside St Bavo’s
Brian Rice, a contemporary of Peter Blake and cathedral for the first and last time.
David Hockney. Until 31 May, doily mixture: FRANCE PARIS GRAND PALAIS 25 March-8 June. Mon,
historic lace by Devon makers. Thurs-Sun 10-8, Wed 10-10. Projections, sound-
HARROGATE MERCER ART GALLERY Until 19 April. scapes and reconstructions allow you to stroll
Mon-Sat 10-4, Sun 12-4. The last stop of a touring through the streets of Pompeii.
show retracing Turner’s eight-week sketch- NETHERLANDS AMSTERDAM FOAM Until 5 April.
ing trip through northern England in 1797, Mon-Wed, Sat, Sun 10-6, Thurs, Fri 10-9. Author 4
5
featuring two of the sketchbooks he carried Wright Morris’s unpopulated still-life, inte-
and 13 of the resulting colour studies. rior and landscape photographs supply an
LEICESTER NEW WALK MUSEUM Until 19 April. Mon- alternative history of the Great Depression. 4 Fringe benefits –
Fri 11-4.30, Sat, Sun 11-5. Monica Petzal’s litho- USA NEW YORK BROOKLYN MUSEUM Until 10 May. Numunuu (Comanche)
graphs reflect on her Jewish-refugee heritage Wed, Fri-Sun 11-6, Thurs 11-10. Horse play: a 2005 women’s moccasins,
and this gallery’s German Express- equestrian portrait by Kehinde Wiley hangs in New York. 5 Just
ionist collection. alongside the painting that his type – Barnett
NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE GREAT inspired it: David’s magis- Freedman, Baynard
NORTH MUSEUM 7 March-2 Aug. terial Bonaparte Crossing ‘Claudia’ book, 1935,
Mon-Fri 10-5, Sat 10-4, Sun the Alps (1800-1). Until in Chichester. 6 Cap
11-4. The British Muse- 10 Jan 21, Jeffrey Gibson, gains – Jan Van Eyck,
um illuminates the lat- an artist of Choctaw and Portrait of a Man
est field research from Cherokee descent, pla- in a Blue Chaperon,
digs in Iraq with rele- ces his own beaded art- c1428-30, in Ghent.
vant ancient artefacts works among historical 7 Leaves to remain –
from its collections. Native American objects $ headdress, Ur, 2600-
2300 BC, in Newcastle
6
7
JOURNAL OF A MUSEUM STORE MOVER

BEWARE: FEATHERED HAT AHEAD

WITH EVERYTHING FROM ARSENIC TO ASBESTOS LURKING IN SEEMINGLY HARMLESS ARTEFACTS, MOVING THE V&A’S VAST STORES TO A NEW
SITE POSES PLENTY OF POTENTIAL HAZARDS – AS WELL AS PLANNING HEADACHES. BUT IT’S ALL IN A DAY’S WORK FOR RUBY HODGSON

The V&A is home to one of the greatest collections relating to art, Hats only need a little mounted tray to mitigate the risk of handling,
design, theatre and performance in the world, and we are currently while the slightest concerns about asbestos prompt a call to the ex-
undertaking our biggest move since World War II. By March 2023, perts to investigate and contain it. Even innocuous-looking objects
as part of our V&A East project, we will have shifted more than such as wallpapers can pose a risk (arsenic again!), so the team al-
260,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archive collections from ways wears nitrile gloves, and hands are washed straight away.
our stores at Blythe House (WoI Dec 2013) in west London to a While this is very much a long-term project, some of the most
new site across town in Queen Elizabeth Park, Stratford. These satisfying outcomes are also the most immediate. Colour photo-
objects span 5,000 years of human creativity and range from tiny graphs are being taken of those objects that don’t already have
16th-century dress pins and dolls’ shoes no bigger than a finger- one on file – at the start of the project only 54 per cent of items at
nail to ceiling panels from the 1849 London Coal Exchange. our Blythe House stores did. It would be impossible for the studio
It’s my job to ensure all of these things are ready for the move. photography team to take publication-standard shots of each
Every part of each item needs checking against our database to and every one of the 110,000-plus pieces. But armed with a few
confirm it is precisely how and where it should be; once it’s in place, lessons and some entry-level digital SLR cameras, the collections
we assign it a barcode to speed up location updates in the future. move team has set up makeshift studios throughout the building
We also take a photograph, check for hazards and assess the state of and now takes an average of 4,000 photos every month. These are
the object. Fortunately, I have eight incredible collections move of- uploaded to our internal database almost as soon as they’ve been
ficers working with me, and together we liaise with conservators, taken and are made available on the V&A website overnight. So
curators and technicians to stabilise delicate surfaces, resolve num- far more than 90,000 images of 68,000 objects have gone online.
bering queries and rehouse fragile fragments. A lot of time is spent (I maintained that we only had time to take one image per object,
responding to emails, ordering supplies and reviewing targets. but that particular observation has so far gone unheeded.)
When a call comes through from a member of my team, it might The higher-standard photographs have appeared on the V&A’s
concern anything from the printer running out of paper to a bomb- Instagram feed, helped curators select objects for exhibitions and
shell being found (in the theatre and performance collection, natu- inspired research projects. The important thing is that these im-
rally – it fell on the Prince’s Theatre in London in 1944). ages are out there, meaning more of the collection is now acces-
Detonated explosives are not the only, ahem, minefield. When sible to a wider audience than ever before. There’s a sense of pride
you deal with historic objects, you tend to come across all sorts of in knowing that we’ve contributed to something larger and given
ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NICOL

hazardous materials that wouldn’t be used today – radios and lamps what might be a forgotten object its moment in the spotlight.
with asbestos in their wiring, hats felted with mercury and adorned In 40,000 photographs’ time we’ll be on to the next phase –
with arsenic-preserved feathers, lead paints on theatre costumes, to packing the objects into boxes, and then on to crates and lorries,
name just a few. We simply don’t have the time to analyse every ob- to make their journey across London, where we’ll settle them into
ject, so we err on the side of caution and take no chances: anything their new forever home. It’s just like moving house really, except
with the potential to be hazardous is treated as though it really were. with four lorries per day for 13 months. I can’t wait $
LOS ANGELES CHICAGO BOSTON NEW YORK MIAMI SAN FRANCISCO LONDON