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‘Nymphs and Shepherds, Come Away’– Nicky Haslam’s Hunting Lodge.
This week Nicky Haslam’s Folly de Grandeur was published. It’s the story of the house in which he has lived for over thirty years, told in a prose which is never purple but ever so slightly lilac. He...
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In the North Kent Downs: the West Street Tickham’s last meet & Twentieth...
Hunt supporters don’t carry umbrellas. On March 16th under lead-grey skies and needle-sharp rain the West Street Tickham hunt met for the last time on the gravel in front of Doddington Place in Kent....
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A.N. Wilson’s Wedgwood.
A.N.Wilson writes: I grew up in North Staffordshire, where my forebears had been potters since the end of the eighteenth century. My brother Stephen and I sometimes look at our hands and think – we...
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Something for the weekend – Barbara Jones.
The King Penguin Guide to the Isle of Wight – a place that I once commuted to each week – was the first book by Barbara Jones that I bought. One of her illustrations shows the Horn Room at Osborne...
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The hounds of spring.
’When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces…’ Atalanta in Calydon, by Algernon Charles Swinburne. Photography by Liz Neville, www.lizneville.com/ model, Flora Neville, grateful thanks to both....
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Ghastly Good Taste? The Best of John Betjeman.
John Betjeman hated experts, antiquarianism, art historians and research fellowships. As his daughter Candida Lycett Green has pointed out, he never set out to champion conservation in the academic...
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Joe Hemming, artist, stone carver, part-time shed-dweller.
Joe Hemming carves incised and relief images and lettering in stone, slate and wood, and plays the violin in a string swing band. Home, recycled architectural elements He was brought up in...
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Philippa Kunisch, Jeweller.
Philippa Kunisch lives in north London, with her whippet, Moth. Philippa is part Scottish, Moth is from Yorkshire. She bought this lamp from a flea market in America. She bought a lot of the hand blown...
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Mr. Dodd at home, 2 : Country.
Local children nicknamed this seventeenth century folly ‘Mustard-pot Hall.’ It stands on the edge of a field in south-eastern England. ALAN DODD has lived here since the 1980s. I was a guest here one...
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London Calling.
My friends Bridie Hall and Ben Pentreath are a decorative artist and an architect, both designers and interior designers who also keep an excellent shop, Pentreath and Hall. This week we are doing...
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The Englishman’s Room, Gavin Stamp and Anti-Ugly.
The architectural historian and writer Gavin Stamp is one of the ‘new Georgians,’ pioneers of gentrification who brought up their families in the unloved and unlovely bits of London, where boarded up...
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Romilly Saumarez Smith, a maker and her house in East London.
From a temporary gallery arranged in the downstairs rooms of her house in Stepney, Romilly Saumarez Smith has just sold her latest jewellery collection. ‘That collection is done now, we’ll make up the...
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John Martin Robinson, Maltravers Herald Extraordinary and architectural...
This is the London dwelling of John Martin Robinson, aesthete, architectural historian and controversialist. He holds the offices of Maltravers Herald Extraordinary, Librarian to the Duke of Norfolk...
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Reminiscences of my visit to Smedmore.
I stayed at lovely Smedmore House in Dorset, settled in its green declivity between ridge-backed Purbeck hills, in May. The first day was grey, with scudding wind and rain, but then the sun came out....
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Big Old House, Fen-land.
Richard and Patricia Hewlings live in the Fens, the district known as the Holy land of England. Their house is a flat-fronted, red brick farmhouse with a pretty Georgian doorcase, and an older wing...
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Ian Archie Beck, Elton John and les Frères Perverts.
A family of aesthetes live here, in Thames-side Isleworth to the west of London. These are some clues to their identity. The hanging mugs feature monochrome woodblock vignettes of the Dorset...
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The Way We Live, Now.
‘Nothing much has happened to our house for about 20 years in terms of its look,’ says Christina Moore. ‘It’s not designed although I guess when we first put it together it was. We moved in here in...
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New year, new build, Bavent House in East Anglia.
Lucy, Clea and Richard Turvill have been here now, in the house they built, for about 5 years. While they lived in London their countrified alter-egos had been well disguised. I thought they were truly...
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The real thing, Tanya Harrod, essays on making.
Tanya Harrod published ‘The Real Thing, essays on making in the modern world,’ this week. Its essays are about art, craft and design, and the shifts and spaces in between them.These are subjects she...
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Trematon Castle : “Escape culture all day & night at Bannermans.”
The postcard advertises Bannerman’s Bar in Cowgate, Edinburgh Old Town, Julian Bannerman’s legendary first venture in 1979, the place where he met his wife Isabel Eustace (it is still there). This...
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