Lignificadas

JANUARY 2018

WAREHOUSE WONDERLAND Art director conjures a creative sanctum in Milan

NATURE FROM NURTURE Wildlife watching from a luxury shepherd’s hut in Kent

CONTENTS JANUARY 2018

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BOOKS

Reading on art, architecture and design

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SERIOUS PURSUITS

Auctions, antique fairs and diverting activities

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A TWIST IN THE YARN

These embroidered fabrics face the future, says Max Egger: hello, crewel world

36 COVER Shear colour – dyed sheepskin rugs lie underfoot in the bedroom of interior designer/ art director Roberto Gerosa. Where does he have his hide out? A former frozen-fish warehouse in Milan. Turn to page 58. Photograph: Simon Upton

ADDRESS BOOK

Suppliers in this issue

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What’s new in style, decoration and design, chosen by Nathalie Wilson

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ANTENNAE ROUNDUP

Our selection of the best chests of drawers

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HOT TIP!

Finding the ideal vessel for your chosen cuppa is no mug’s game, as Miranda Sinclair proves

Periodicals postage paid at Rahway, NJ. Postmaster: Send address corrections to ‘The World of Interiors’ c/o Mercury Airfreight International Ltd Inc, 2323 Randolph Avenue, Avenel NJ 07001, ‘The World of Interiors’ (ISSN 0264-083X) is published monthly. Vol 38 no 1, total 424

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TWITCH SWITCH

A shlep to the Isle of Sheppey now has an added draw – staying in a luxury shepherd’s hut in the midst of a nature reserve. Kate Jacobs separates the geese from the godwits

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COUNTER CULTURE

Cavalier’s crowning glories, Pole’s portals, plus Charlotte Edwards’s listings

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ART & ANTIQUES

EXHIBITION DIARY

JOURNAL OF AN ENGINEER

Peter James, a specialist in historic structures, has rewritten how the pyramids were built

INTERIORS

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FOLLY À DEUX

The Stoelties love doing up a quirky building – and this turreted Flemish gatehouse of 1824 was just too tempting. Now, writes Barbara Stoeltie, they have a ‘dacha’ with dash SUBSCRIPTIONS AND BACK ISSUES Receive 12 issues delivered direct to your home address. Call 01858 438815 or fax 01858 461739. Alternatively, you can visit us at www.worldofinteriors.co.uk

SPLIT DECISION

At Isy Ettedgui’s flat in Mayfair, perched above her upmarket leather shop, the sharp urban look is offset by the earthy textures of her African childhood, as Tim Beddow reports

German artist Regine Bartsch has breathed new life into a relic of old Ireland, an ironmonger’s shop/house in Kerry. Sophie Barling finds she’s just the latest in a line of female custodians

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INSPIRATION

How to recreate some of the design effects in this issue, by Augusta Pownall

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CREATION STOREYS

NETWORK

Merchandise and events worldwide

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From a rustic pergola to an Art Nouveau partition, surprises abound in the live-in studio of this Milanese art director. Lee Marshall follows the flow of a ‘creative volcano’

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EASEL ACCESS

Midcentury American painter Milton Avery, an introvert with a work ethic, reached out to the world through his art, as his preserved New York flat – and Morgan Falconer – attest

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MUM’S THE WORLD

The sketchbooks of a teenage draughtsman, son of a Victorian canal manager, offer Amicia de Moubray a mooring in the domestic realm of 19th-century Staffordshire

FROM THE ARCHIVE

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ELECTORAL ROLLS

Delftware meets chinoiserie in the jewel-like Pagodenburg, a Bavarian elector’s consolation prize to himself in the wake of military defeat.

Text: Angela Arnim. First published: May 1982

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antennae What’s in the air this month, edited by Nathalie Wilson

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Combined on the walls as here, Ichiro Iwasaki’s ‘Pin’ for Vibia (from £228 approx) is as much light installation as LED fitting. It’s available in black or white and floor or table versions. Ring 00 34 934 796 971, or visit vibia.com.

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‘These glasses wear their “imperfections” like an 18th-century woman wore a beauty mark,’ says Murray Moss of his four ‘Crack’ patterns, which can be etched on any Lobmeyr item. While the ironic designs don’t hide the pox, at £107 approx per etching, vessels adorned with them are of a different class. Like the ladies who donned cosmetic spots. Ring 00 43 1 512 0508, or visit lobmeyr.at.

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3 Hunt & Hope’s aim to revitalise needlepoint manifests itself as 12 contemporary patterns, including these particularly fun ‘Camo’ (left) and ‘Deco’ designs (£1,650 per sq m), whose colours can be customised.

Hand-stitching its products in Madagascar using British wool, the company also accepts bespoke commissions.

Ring 020 8964 8422, or visit huntandhope.com.

specialist Pedro da Costa Felgueiras doesn’t use anything so mundane as off-the-shelf gloss to decorate this ‘Oculus’ mirror (from £2,880). His ‘King’s Yellow’ is based on an 18th-century recipe infused with arsenic – minus the poison, of course. Ring Lacquer Studios on 020 7729 4994, or visit lacquerstudios.com.

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5 There be treasure in them thar North York Moors. In his remote workshop in the national park, cabinetmaker Marcus Jacka fashions bespoke items to clients’ specifications as well as a range of wares under the ‘Non-Standard’ label. The latter includes this 44cm-

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PHOTOGRAPHY: © JULES COUARTOU/ CANOVAS (7)

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diameter ash bowl (£950) and oak ‘Orbit’ dining table, which can be dis/assembled in minutes thanks to its pegged construction (from £2,700 for a 190 × 85cm version). Ring 07914 838461, or visit non-standard.co.uk.

6 It may come as a surprise to those who equate Designers Guild with blowsy blooms, but its prewashed and tumbled-cotton ‘Mercer’ bedding is a flower-free zone. The only nod to decoration is buttonholes stitched in contrasting thread. From £40 for a pair of 75 × 50cm pillowcases; available in four colour combinations.

Ring 020 7893 7400, or visit designersguild.com.

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7 Searching for ‘rich jewel shades’? Look no further than Manuel Canovas’s ‘Rivoli’ cotton-mix velvet (£78 per m), available in 34 colours. Ring 020 8874 6484, or visit manuelcanovas.com.

8 At the Surrealist-inspired suites in Le Montana hotel, Paris, Vincent Darré wanted to make guests feel ‘like an eccentric friend gave you a key to his apartment’. That same mate’s zaniness can rub off on your own place: the Invisible Collection sells some of the furnishings Darré employed, including (from left) his ‘Neoclassique’ (£5,250) and ‘Neoantique’ (£5,850) headboards. Ring 07340 002928, or visit theinvisiblecollection.

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9 Oka’s three founders brandished their artist paintbrushes, each creating one pattern that’s been transformed into handmade lampshades.

Shown: ‘Huaca Empire’ (from £91 for a 41cmwide model), available in red, blue or grey and two sizes. Ring 03330 042042, or visit oka.com.

10 Juliet Munro’s diminutive stature combined with nostalgia for the step stool recalled from early childhood prompted her to remake the classic. It’s constructed in Britain from powder-coated tubular steel and stained, lacquered FSC birch plywood, both mostly sourced here.

‘Hornsey’, named after her north London district, is available in ten colours and can be yours for £195. Ring Giggy & Bab on 0333 344 1989, or visit giggyandbab.co.uk $

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antennae roundup Can’t get a handle on chests and chiffoniers? Ever quick on the drawer, Miranda Sinclair pulls out her picks

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1 ‘Jacobean’, £8,575, Ralph Lauren Home. 2 Faux-bamboo five-drawer chest, £1,659, Chelsea Textiles. 3 ‘Palladiana’, by Fornasetti, £14,000, Harrods. 4 ‘Divina’, £27,928 approx, Colombostile. 5 ‘Durbar, £1,595, Oka. 6 ‘Aberfoyle’, £3,325, William Yeoward. 7 ‘Hobbs’, £1,954, Julian Chichester. 8 ‘Zanin’, £1,392, Oficina Inglesa. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r

antennae roundup

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1 ‘Dado’, by Studio Kairos, £3,226, B&B Italia. 2 ‘Wrongwoods’, by Richard Woods and Sebastian Wrong for Established & Sons, £3,860 each, Chaplins. 3 ‘Schubladenstapel’, by Susi & Ueli Berger for Röthlisberger Kollektion, £5,614, Aram. 4 ‘62’, by Greta M. Grossman for Gubi, £3,929, The Conran Shop. 5 Jade lacquered asymmetrical two-drawer commode, £6,480, Talisman. 6 ‘Globo’, from £2,030, Roche Bobois. 7 ‘Bayswater’, from £2,750, And So To Bed. 8 ‘Holland’, £7,076, Davidson. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book $

1 Yellow ‘In Bloom’ Irish coffee mug, $13, Colonial Williamsburg. 2 Large mug, £21.50, Bell Pottery. 3 Squat fluted mug, by

Wonki Ware, £19, The Conran Shop. 4 ‘Basket’, by Andersson for Marimekko, £18, Skandium. 5 ‘Florya’, £38 for a set of four, Oka. 6 ‘Isokon Gallery’, £12, Skandium. 7 ‘Chug’, by Studio Arhoj, £35, Liberty. 8 Basalt mug, by Max Lamb, £40, 1882. 9 ‘Wood’,

by Richard Woods for Hay, £13, Amara. 10 ‘Connor’, £8, Habitat. 11 ‘Melting’, by Studio Arhoj, £24, Goodhood. Background: estate emulsion (‘Folly Green’; ‘Calke Green’), from £43.50 per 2.5 litres; Props: estate eggshell (‘Churlish Green’; ‘Hague Blue’; ‘Arsenic’), from £24 per 750ml; all Farrow & Ball. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r

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P I T T O H

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SHORTLIST

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1 Spigged mug, by Paul Young, £30, Station Pottery. 2 Coffee mug, by John Leach, £16.50, Muchelney Pottery. 3 Crystalline-glaze mug, by Michael Taylor, £13.50, David Mellor. 4 Handmade French mug, £28, Susan Deliss. 5 ‘Cara’, by Takahashi Kougei and Ono Rina, £55, Objects of Use. 6 ‘Slip Trail Fern’, by Hannah McAndrew, £25, Fitch & McAndrew. 7 Coffee mug, £30, Tender Stores. 8 Pint-sized mocha-ware mug, £60, Kate Scott. 9 Sculptural stoneware mug, by Adam Ross, £45, The New Craftsmen. 10 Stoneware mug, by Keiko, £60, Willer. Background: estate emulsion (‘Fowler Pink’; ‘Pink Ground’), from £43.50 per 2.5 litres; Props: estate eggshell (‘Radicchio’; ‘Brinjal’; ‘Blazer’), from £24 per 750ml; all Farrow & Ball. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r

SHORTLIST 1 ‘Utopia’ mermaid/whale mug, £32, Jonathan Adler. 2 Coffee mug, by Tyler Hays, from $140, BDDW. 3 Glass mug, by

Kinto, £8, Nook. 4 ‘Rogue de Fer’, from £259, De Gournay. 5 Hand-thrown celadon/oxblood cup, $250, Frances Palmer.

6 Simple coloured-rim mug, £21, John Julian. 7 ‘Isphahan’ porcelain mug, £42, Oka. Broken mug, stylist’s own. Background:

estate emulsion (‘Lancaster Yellow’; ‘Babouche’), from £43.50 for 2.5 litres; Props: estate eggshell (‘Citron’; ‘Charlotte’s Locks’), from £24 per 750ml; all Farrow & Ball. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book $

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KESHISHIAN

An extremely rare Arts & Crafts carpet, Donegal, Ireland. Circa 1900.

Exhibiting at the Winter Antiques Show, January 19-28, New York City.

73 PIMLICO ROAD, LONDON SW1W 8NE. TEL.020 7730 8810 NEW YORK TEL. 212 956 1586 info@keshishiancarpets.com www.keshishiancarpets.com

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JANUARY 2018 £4.99

THE WORLD OF INTERIORS MAGAZINE. THE NUMBER ONE TITLE FOR INSPIRING AND UNCOMPROMISING STYLE. THE INTERNATIONAL AUTHORITY ON ORIGINAL DESIGN

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Dude with attitude, flash harry

RAYMOND PETTIBON: A PEN OF ALL WORK (by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari; Phaidon, rrp £59.95) The childhood drawings of Raymond Pettibon from the early 1960s, which preface this book, suggest that he was a normal seven-year-old, obsessed with surfing, rockets and cowboys ’n’ injuns. Yet next to these crayon scrawls are strange captions, almost voiceovers, narrating the images with remembrances and warnings from the future: ‘As a boy I passed my life in day-dreams of military glory. There will be a war for you, my father said, when you grow up. Wars run in the family.’

That this artist would return in the 2000s to twist the meanings of his own nascent drawings with such dark commentaries will come as no surprise given that he has spent his entire adult life producing a stream of similarly piercing cartoon-inflected meditations on modern life, with politically sharp caricatures along the way. It all began with a comic strip of his own, Captive Chains, a self-published zine that Pettibon reckons, in an interview here, sold just one copy in 1978.

This is possibly apocryphal, bearing in mind how he has developed his own mythical persona ever since, changing his name from his family-given Ginn to Pettibon (derived from his father’s nickname for him, ‘little one’).

Indeed, it can be tricky to know what to make of this Californian cult figure, arriving too late for Pop art and the sunny sounds of the Beach Boys, but nevertheless not simply the angry, aesthetic equivalent of his brother’s hardcore punk band, Black Flag (for which Pettibon provided cover art).

It might take a similarly unfettered, West Coast mindset to make sense of it all, and so it

books

is with the best essay in this collection by a sceptical, but ultimately captivated, fellow native Los Angeleno, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer. She takes to task Pettibon’s hero-like status and geeky, adolescent male fan base but connects his drawings to his equally voluminous reams of note taking: ‘in their unadorned brevity, directness, immediacy and self-orientation, [they] are the purest form of thought – naked eruptions of the mind’. The book format of this retrospective show at New York’s New Museum allows us to see his source material, his literary cullings, underlinings and crossings-out (he reckons a third of his words are verbatim quotes or adapted from existing texts). In this way, Pettibon is an arch appropriator of culture in the mould of Richard Prince or Jeff Koons, but it is as a purveyor of priapic pulp fiction that he develops a voice of his own.

While never quite reaching the excoriating heights of satire achieved by Hogarth or Daumier, Pettibon consistently lets rip on four pillars of society: the military, religion, government and patriarchy. Hitler, Stalin, Nixon and George W. Bush all receive short shrift from his pen strokes, while an Abu Ghraib reminder reads: ‘This Americans will not endure.’ As well as a feverish draughtsman, Pettibon reveals himself as an epic landscapist, creating apocalyptic vortices of colour and ink or mountainous waves that threaten to obliterate all in their path. In 1989 he scribbled on one work: ‘What I really want to do is to be a painter. That’s the abject, crude, ridiculous fact.’ Pain, rather than paint, would be a better description of Raymond Pettibon’s chosen medium $ OSSIAN WARD is head of content at Lisson Gallery, London r

To order Raymond Pettibon for £50.95 (plus £8 UK p&p), ring the World of Interiors Bookshop on 0871 911 1747

books

THE GREAT NADAR: THE MAN BEHIND THE CAMERA (by Adam Begley; Tim Duggan, rrp £18.99) By the

To order The Great Nadar for £16.14 (plus £4.50 UK p&p), ring the World of Interiors Bookshop on 0871 911 1747

mid-1850s, at the height of the Second Empire, the name Nadar was the talk of Paris. Everyone visited his studios: Gérard de Nerval, who had walked his pet lobster around the Palais-Royal; the poet Baudelaire; painters Delacroix and Daumier; novelists George Sand and Alexandre Dumas, père and fils; and seductively, a young Sarah Bernhardt. Everyone, that is, apart from anyone connected to the court of Napoléon III. Nadar, once a failed bohemian writer, would always strive to épater la bourgeoisie. Thus Nadar the fashionable photographer despised Louis Napoléon, the jumped-up emperor. He had mercilessly lampooned him in a previous life as a caricaturist. That avenue of pleasure was closed off when the new emperor cracked down on press freedom.

As it turned out, the name Nadar was rather too conspicuous. Another photographer, another Nadar, had appropriated his nom de guerre and was stealing both his clients and his thunder. Nadar had been born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon and the new one was his younger brother, Adrien Tournachon, who passed himself off as ‘Nadar Jeune’. The older man sued and won. The precious name was solely his and, boy, did Paris get to know it yet further. His signature in glass tubing was emblazoned in the Boulevard des Capucines on a dazzling new studio building of iron and glass. At night, lit up by gas, it came alive in a blaze of red to match the studio’s plush interiors.

But le tout Paris had always known the wildly red-haired showman, for his careers were many and varied. And, as this roistering biography reveals, Nadar was long on ideas and impetuosity and short on forethought and finances. As a side interest, he developed an enthusiasm for aerial navigation, a near fatal one as it would turn out. A keen hot-air balloonist, he decided it was passé. The future of manned flight lay, he believed, in the propeller or air-screw (his friend Gustave thought of a name for it: ‘helicopter’). In order to kickstart funds for heavier-than-air travel, he devised a mammoth balloon – Le Géant – that would soar to 60m and then crash-land just as spectacularly. Guests would pay to see the launch. The nine on board included his wife and brother, now forgiven. It was waved off by Napoléon III, surely the best possible bad-luck omen.

Le Géant made it to Germany before coming down. All survived a terrible landing and the story made headlines. Despite Nadar’s renown, no funding was forthcoming. The story of his life. After more wheezes, none practical or remunerative, he died at 89 in 1910. He lived long enough to see one Louis Blériot cross the Channel in a monoplane and sent him a telegram of congratulations.

Adam Begley expertly tethers this monstrous balloon of a personality. Nadar the artist, Nadar the self-aggrandiser, Nadar the irrepressible leaps into life out of every page of this elegantly written, touching and often very funny book $ ROBIN MUIR is a photographic historian and curator

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SERIOUS

pursuits Auctions, antique fairs and diverting activities, chosen by Grace McCloud

THE INVISIBLE LIGHTSWITCH®

1 1 Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010, Tate Modern, until 27 Jan. 2 The Ripley Scroll, 1624, Christie’s, 13 Dec

BRITAIN 13 DECEMBER CHRISTIE’S, KING ST, LONDON SW1 VALUABLE BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS. A 17th-century copy of the Ripley Scroll, illustrating with

birds and beastly dragons how to procure the philosopher’s stone, is as good as gold – if not better. Details: 020 7839 9060; christies.com.

13 DECEMBER V&A, CROMWELL RD, LONDON SW7 SIMON CURTIS. The reel thing: director Simon Curtis discusses the difficulties of bringing historic figures to life, focusing on his latest film, Goodbye Christopher Robin. Details: 020 7492 2000; vam.ac.uk.

14 DECEMBER SOTHEBY’S, NEW BOND ST, LONDON W1 VICTORIAN, PRE-RAPHAELITE AND BRITISH IMPRESSIONIST ART. Stanhope’s lovesick Penelope

will draw as many admirers as the character herself. Details: 020 7293 5000; sothebys.com.

18 DECEMBER BONHAMS, NEW BOND ST, LONDON W1 PRINTS AND MULTIPLES. All aboard! A rare edition of

Cyril Power’s lino of the Green Line bus, Sunshine Roof, that he printed himself at home is up for grabs. Details: 020 7447 7447; bonhams.com.

OUTSIDE BRITAIN MOROCCO 30 DECEMBER ES SAADI PALACE, AVE QUADISSIA, MARRAKESH PARIS#MARRAKECH. Medjool in the crown: Le Marché aux Dattes, by Jacques Majorelle, is a sweet treasure in this sale staged by Artcurial. Details: 00 33 1 42 99 20 20; artcurial.com.

USA 12 DECEMBER PHILLIPS, PARK AVE, NEW YORK, NY THE EYE OF THE CENTURY. Photographs by CartierBresson (of Malcolm X, Truman Capote, the Bolshoi Ballet) from his last dealer, Peter Fetterman. Details: 001 212 940 1300; phillips.com $

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TOP: © CHRISTIAN MARCLAY. COURTESY WHITE CUBE, LONDON AND PAULA COOPER GALLERY, NEW YORK

LONDON • NEW YORK t:+44 207 738 0202 e:sales@forbesandlomax.com www.forbesandlomax.com

Clockwatching isn’t something we’d normally advocate, but when it involves a journey through cinematic history, it’s a different matter.

Enter Christian Marclay’s THE CLOCK – a 24-hour montage of television and film clips specifying the time of day, correct whenever you watch. UNTIL 27 JANUARY, the 2010 work is on show for free at Tate Modern and, once a month, the installation will be open all night, making for particularly powerful viewing. Translating fiction into reality, the snippets include dream sequences and rush hours, dinners and theatre shows, sex scenes and deaths – climaxing with Orson Welles’s character in The Stranger being skewered on a clock mechanism at midnight. The piece is less a day in the life than a life in a day – a complex, captivating and profound reflection on our existence within an endless cycle. But we’ve hardly space to discuss such lofty notions of time here, not least when all that needs to be said is: if you’ve got some spare you know where to go. Details: 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk.

This page, clockwise from top left: ‘Portofino’ range cooker (from £2,399); Smeg’s new London store, which houses over 300 of the Italian company’s products, is close to Piccadilly Circus; Smeg x Dolce & Gabbana ‘Sicily is my Love’ range (from £399); and the ‘Luxury’ refrigeration range (combinations

from

£17,999).

Opposite: the ‘Dolce Stil Novo’ collection (ovens from £1,199)

TH E WO R L D O F IN TE R IO R S 쮿 PRO MOT I O N

Beauty Built-in ITALIAN BRAND SMEG’S EASY-ON-THE-EYE APPLIANCES CAN NOW BE SEEN IN A STUNNING PURPOSE-DESIGNED SPACE IN THE WEST END. IT’S THE IDEAL SETTING TO EXPERIENCE THE COMPANY’S BUILT-IN MODELS, RECENTLY UPGRADED

This autumn, one of Italy’s super-brands unveiled its plush flagship store in London’s West End, a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus. In the beautifully restored setting of the former St James’s Market, behind the largest single-pane picture windows in the capital, Smeg is showcasing some 300 products, from wine coolers to coffee machines, cooker hoods to combi-microwaves.

Core to the display, spread over three deluxe floors and some 600sq m, are its built-in ovens and fridge-freezers, which have something for everyone, from entry-level options to appliances with topof-the-range specifications. Take the new ovens in its ‘Linea’ and ‘Classic’ collections, for example. With their innovative touch-screen displays – the compact 60cm ‘Linea’ offers an impressive 12 cooking functions and 20 automatic programmes – the sleek A+-rated stainless-steel models feature pyrolitic cleaning functionality and come complete with a revolutionary pizza-stone accessory. Enhancements also include an eco light, quick-start and keep-warm features and an in-built ability to defrost by time or weight.

As well as high energy ratings and impeccable performance, design is central to Smeg, the third-generation Italian family firm boasting

such names as Guido Canali, Mario Bellini, the Piano Design Studio and Marc Newson among its roster of contributors. The ‘Dolce Stil Novo’ range, in chic black glass with copper detailing, comes with space-age retractable handles. Its iconic hobs, whose pan stands are cast from leaves, butterflies, fruit or birds, are a playful touch inspired by 13th-century love poetry. That willingness to step outside the (white-goods) box is also reflected in its collaborations with Dolce & Gabbana, whose hand-painted appliances excite the imagination.

Among its fridge-freezers, the new ‘Luxury’ models allow for a range of smart settings (from rapid-freezing to eco and holiday modes), and drawers can be kept at separate temperatures. Wine coolers can be built-in or free-standing.

At Smeg’s flagship store, a palace of travertine, Corian and steel, shoppers enticed to the area by upmarket brands and wonderful restaurants will find an espresso bar and a delicatessen featuring produce from Smeg’s very own family farm. Indeed the showroom expresses the very same values of high-tech luxury and customer experience as the singular appliances it displays $ Smeg, 14 Regent St St James’s, London SW1 (smeglondon.com)

A TWIST IN THE YARN

The past doesn’t have to be passé – especially when it comes to crewelwork. That the technique, a millennium old, has been so tried and tested leaves all the more room to develop innovative designs.

With animals and abstract patterns as well as traditional tulips and climbers, Max Egger does his worsted. Photography: Anders Gramer

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SWATCH 1 Multi ‘Kashida ZFRU330035’, by Zoffany, £263, Style Library. 2 Multi/ beige ‘No.1’, £150, Alton Brooke. 3 ‘Jacobean CC46’, £145, Coromandel;

trimmed with ‘Délicat Silk Moss Fringe 983-37195-18’, £51, Samuel & Sons.

4 Cartoon ‘Sunset O7934002’, by Boussac, £240, Pierre Frey. 5 ‘Prairie Coteau 4011-316’, by Kravet, £192, GP&J Baker; trimmed with ‘Aurelia Tassel Fringe 985-56144-33’, £72, Samuel & Sons. 6 ‘Kharif 34697-1’, by Clarence House, £543, Turnell & Gigon. 7 ‘Ronda’, £75, Jan Baker Fabrics.

8 ‘Mitra BH001 1205’, by Old World Weavers, £372, Stark. Prices are per m and include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r

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This page: 1 ‘Tambacco’, £84, Jan Baker Fabrics; trimmed with ‘Aurelia Brush Fringe 983-56131-13’, £31, Samuel & Sons. 2 ‘Shima 1225-1’, £165, Marvic Textiles. 3 ‘Liz 10453-75’, £134, Nobilis; trimmed with ‘Orsay Silk Diamond Braid 982-34603-325’, £31, Samuel & Sons. 4 Bottle ‘Indian Loop DMA4236521’, by Morris & Co, £68, Style Library. 5 ‘Gerry SCH-72450’, by Schumacher, £1,450, Turnell & Gigon; trimmed with ‘Bullion Trim Br-39103-147’, by Brunschwig & Fils, £58, GP&J Baker. Opposite: 1 ‘Cathay 2017105-515’, by Lee Jofa, £249, GP&J Baker. 2 ‘Chelidonio AL2019’, by Loro Piana, £161

approx, Fox Linton; trimmed with ‘Calisto Triple-Bead Fringe TF-57251-08’, £108, Samuel & Sons.

3 ‘Izmir BF10730-1’, £159, GP&J Baker; trimmed with ‘Aurelia Brush Fringe 983-56131-13’, £31, Samuel & Sons. 4 ‘Sunburst 1230-2’, £258, Marvic Textiles. 5 ‘Claremont SCH-64310’, by Schumacher, £349, Turnell & Gigon. Prices are per m and include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r

SWATCH

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LIMA

Hand-knotted limited-edition rugs www.aiiostudio.com

260 x 180cm Hand-knotted in Nepal from 100% Tibetan wool Numbered edition of 100 Handmade to order

SWATCH

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1 ‘Cotswold Ecru CC6’, £135, Coromandel; trimmed with ‘Paddington Wool Bullion 984-39891-20’, £118, Samuel & Sons. 2 ‘Wexford F3620-01’, £150, Colefax & Fowler; trimmed with ‘Aurelia Tassel Fringe 98556144-33’, £72, Samuel & Sons. 3 Noir ‘Sakura F2990001’, £300, Pierre Frey; trimmed with ‘Kensington Onion Tassel Fringe 985-56080-28’, £107, Samuel & Sons. 4 ‘Rain Dance FD768-T30’, by Mulberry Home, £139, GP&J Baker; trimmed with ‘Sabine Border 977-56041-25’, £19.50, Samuel & Sons. 5 Gold/black ‘Khiva

ZANJO3001’, by Zoffany, £143, Style Library. Throughout: early 18th-century walnut dining chairs, £1,450 for the pair. Fabric prices are per m; all prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book $

network

Sophia Salaman chooses the best merchandise and events worldwide

From top: rug from the ‘Yoga’ range by Tim Page Carpets; ‘Monkey Bean’

by Colony; ‘Regulator’ faucet from Waterworks; ‘Portatile’ kitchen

by Rossana;

$ Tim Page Carpets creates perfect rugs for residential and commercial spaces round the world. The company works closely with architects and interior designers to create one-off designs, but every year it launches a new collection of its own too. Seen here is the ‘Yoga’ range, which comprises 12 different designs and uses soft and shiny jute fibres to give an understated look. Tim Page Carpets, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7259 7282; timpagecarpets.com). $ Colony’s vibrant ‘Zambezi’ collection is imbued

with the spirit of southern Africa’s greatest river.

Created with the Ardmore Design collective, the range brings to life the company’s designs in fabric form. ‘Monkey Bean’ features the mischievous creatures playing hide-and-seek. In ‘River Chase’ crocodiles appear alongside vines, banana leaves and bird-of-paradise flowers. Leopards and blackbacked jackals form the basis of ‘Bush Bandits’, while ‘Amasumpa’ features a leopard print. Colony, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7351 3232; colonyfabrics.com). $ This winter Waterworks is introducing two new collections of fittings, as well as accessories and furnishings for the bathroom and kitchen. The timeless look and feel of the new pieces draw upon the company’s industrial heritage and eye for classic style. Among the newcomers is ‘Regulator’. Featuring mechanical elements, the range is a sophisticated play on the design of early boiler-room controls. Waterworks, 579 King’s Rd, London SW6 (020 7384 4000; waterworks.com). $ As the trend for open-plan living grows, seam-

‘Figura Modum’ wallpaper by Arte; cushions covered in ‘Semi’ and ‘Melograno’ fabrics by Ailanto Design; cushion and throw

by Evitavonni

$ Arte’s ‘Insero’ collection of wallcoverings is in-

spired by nature, incorporating jute – a robust, environmentally friendly and sustainable woven fibre. The range consists of four designs. Standing out for its simplicity, ‘Uno’ has been created out of wide strips of jute woven together. The foil lustre of ‘Diagonal’ demonstrates how two contrasting materials can complement each other. Sections of jute have been stitched together to create the brick-like patterning of ‘Align’, and ‘Mix’ has a tessellated patchwork design. Arte, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (0800 500 3335; arte-international.com). $ Founded by artist Amanda Ferragamo, Ailanto Design creates luxury fabrics and wallpapers inspired by travel and nature. Based in Italy’s Pratomagno, Amanda draws on the landscape to come up with her collections, each of which is full of colour and life, as well as being totally distinctive. She sketches every design herself by hand. Made using the finest materials, Ailanto’s products bring vibrancy to all spaces. Visit ailantodesign.com. $ Evitavonni strives to create the perfect environ-

ment, through both its interior-design service and its luxurious collection of fabrics, bed linen and accessories. Design director Kate Erwich creates the textile collections, using her passion for quality and craftsmanship as inspiration. They are produced by specialist weavers, who work with natural fibres, such as wool, linen and silk, and neutral palettes that range from warm greys and nudes to rich charcoals, plums and navy blues. Evitavonni, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (0800 130 3180; evitavonni.com).

lessly integrated sitting rooms, kitchens and social

$ Blue and White and Other Stories by William

spaces are becoming ever more sought-after. ‘Por-

Yeoward (published by Ryland Peters & Small) is the designer’s most personal book to date, written while he was undergoing treatment for cancer. In it, he shares his way of seeing colours, textures and forms, and takes readers on a journey of the homes he has worked on, including a coastal retreat with a muted palette of greys and pinks, a contemporary cottage featuring ochre and green, and a redand-black penthouse. To order a copy, visit rylandpeters.com $

tatile’ is Rossana’s solution. The kitchen has been conceived as a series of sculptural objects, an artistic and creative space as well as a practical one. The materials and layout allow for functional and technical aspects to be hidden from view.

Using stone with burnished brass, silver or the company’s signature pewter and trademark veneers, the kitchen becomes a place of both beauty and utility. Rossana, 17 Duke St, London W1 (020 7167 4717; rossana.uk.com).

27 JAN-- 04 FEB 2018

BRUSSELS O N E O F T H E M O S T I N S P I R I N G FA I R S I N T H E W O R L D

ADDRESS

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1882. Ring 020 3002 8023, or visit 1882ltd.com. Alton Brooke, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7376 7008; alton-brooke.co.uk).

Amara. Ring 01376 321100, or visit amara.com. And So To Bed, 591-593 King’s Rd, London SW6 (020 7731 3593; andsotobed.co.uk). Aram, 110 Drury Lane, London WC2 (020 7557 7557; aram.co.uk). B&B Italia, 250 Brompton Rd, London SW3 (020 7591 8111; bebitalia.com). BDDW, 5 Crosby St, New York, NY 10013 (001 212 625 1230; store.bddw.com). Bell Pottery. Visit bellpottery.co.uk. Chaplins, 477-507 Uxbridge Rd, Hatch End, Pinner, Middx HA5 4JS (020 8421 1779; chaplins.co.uk). Chelsea Textiles, 13 Walton St, London SW3 (020 7584 5544; chelseatextiles.com). Colefax & Fowler. Ring 020 8874 6484, or visit colefax.com. Colombostile, 23 Via Durini, 20122 Milan (00 39 02 7601 5653; colombostile.com). Colonial Williamsburg.

Ring 001 800 446 9240, or visit shop.colonialwilliamsburg.com. The Conran Shop, Michelin House, 81 Fulham Rd, London SW3 (020 7589 7401; conranshop.co.uk). Coromandel. Ring 0118 979 6222, or visit coromandel. co.uk. David Mellor, 4 Sloane Square, London SW1 (020 7730 4259; davidmellor.co.uk). Davidson, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7751 5537; davidsonlondon.com). De Gournay. Ring 020 7352 9988, or visit degournay.com. Farrow & Ball. Ring 01202 876141, or visit farrow-ball.com. Feldspar. Ring 01837 82070, or visit feldspar.studio. Fitch & McAndrew. Ring 01556 680220, or visit fitchandmcandrew.co.uk. Fox Linton, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7368 7700; foxlinton. com). Frances Palmer. Ring 001 203 227 7204, or visit francespalmerpottery. com. Goodhood. Ring 020 7729 3600, or visit goodhoodstore.com. GP&J Baker, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (01202 266700; gbjbaker.com). Habitat. Ring 0344 499 4686, or visit habitat.co.uk. Harrods, 87-135 Brompton Rd, London SW1 (020 7730 1234; harrods.com). Jan Baker Fabrics. Ring 01544 327247, or visit janbaker.co.uk. John Julian, Manor Farm Barns, Burcombe, Salisbury, Wilts SP2 0EJ (01722 744805; johnjulian.

co.uk). Jonathan Adler, 60 Sloane Ave, London SW3 (020 7589 9563; uk. jonathanadler.com). Julian Chichester, 1-4 Queens Elm Parade, London SW3 (020 7622 2928; julianchichester.com). Kate Scott. Visit katescottceramics. co.uk. Liberty, Regent St, London W1 (020 7734 1234; libertylondon.com).

Lorfords, 9 Langton St, London SW10 (020 3434 3133; lorfordsantiques.com).

Marvic Textiles, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7352 3119; marvictextiles.co.uk). Muchelney Pottery, Muchelney, Langport, Somerset TA10 0DW (01458 250324; johnleachpottery.co.uk). The New Craftsmen, 34 North Row, London W1 (020 7148 3190; thenewcraftsmen.com). Nobilis.

Ring 020 8767 0774, or visit nobilis.fr. Nook, 153 Stoke Newington Church St, London N16 (020 7249 9436; nookshop.co.uk). Objects of Use. Ring 01865 241705, or visit objectsofuse.com. Oficina Inglesa, 329 Business Design Centre, 52 Upper St, London N1 (020 7226 4569; oficinainglesa.com). Oka. Ring 03330 042042, or visit oka.com. Pierre Frey, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7376 5599; pierrefrey.com). Ralph Lauren Home, 1 New Bond St, London W1 (020 7535 4600; ralphlaurenhome.com). Roche Bobois, 421-425 Finchley Rd, London NW3 (020 7431 1411; rochebobois.com).

Samuel & Sons, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7351 5153; samuelandsons.com). Skandium, 86 Marylebone High St, London W1 (020 7935 2077; skandium.com). Stark, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7751 5858; starkcarpet.co.uk). Station Pottery. Ring 07711 628337, or visit paulyoungceramics.co.uk. Style Library, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 3457 5862; stylelibrary.com). Susan Deliss. Ring 07768 805850, or visit susandeliss.com. Talisman, 79-91 New King’s Rd, London SW6 (020 7731 4686; talismanlondon.com). Tate Shop.

Ring 020 7887 8869, or visit shop.tate.org.uk. Tender Stores. Visit tenderstores. com. Turnell & Gigon. Ring 020 7259 7280, or visit turnellandgigon.com. Willer, 12 Holland St, London W8 (020 7937 3518; willer.co.uk). William Yeoward, 270 King’s Rd, London SW3 (020 7349 7828; williamyeoward.com) $

Top left: 1 Colour-dotted mug, by Klevering, £12.95, Liberty. 2 ‘Dazzle’, by Peter Blake, £10, Tate Shop. 3 Gold bone-china tea mug, £45, Feldspar. For paint colours see page 16. Top right: Multicolore ‘Daisy F2947001’, £211.20 per m, Pierre Frey. All prices include VAT

38

FOLLY À DEUX

The Stoelties’ way of life involves buying and doing up properties, from a dar in Marrakesh to a Dutch castle. The couple’s reserves. Though usually subscribing to the maxim ‘Never let authenticity get in the way of good taste’ here, says Barbara

A 19th-century daybed after Thomas Hope sits before a fireplace inlaid with Wedgwood plaques in the manner of Flaxman’s The Muses. On the mantel, a Sèvres biscuit oil lamp after a design by Louis-Simon Boizot sits between a pair of Russian Empire porte torchères and in front of an American Regency mirror. The stucco pillars were René’s brainchild

latest venture, a Gothic Revival gatehouse in Flanders, is alive with custom paint colours and antiques from their own Stoeltie, they achieved a spirit of romantic whimsy by listening to the period architecture. Photography: René Stoeltie

This page, clockwise from top left: a plaque of Dionysus ushers one into the Green Room; the Neo-Gothic mahogany sofa is William IV; a stucco bust of Homer and a Danish biscuit figure by Bing & Grøndahl, both 19th-century, top the Bernhardt pianoforte of 1835; the hand-painted fin-de-siècle pendant lamp originally hung in Victor Horta’s Brussels house. Opposite: silver ex-votos punctuate the walls, whose colour was inspired by a trip to St Petersburg

This page: the kitchen is dominated by a Georgian secretaire cabinet (the ‘drawers’ fold down to become a writing surface), whose broken pediment is echoed by the horns of a bovine trophy above the door. Beyond, in the drawing room, a faux-marble plinth supports a stucco bust of Minerva. Opposite: a Dutch brass chandelier hangs above 18th-century porcelain from Tournai in Belgium. The tablecloth is by Malabar and the chairs are from Ikea

PICASSO’S

famous words ‘I do not seek, I find’ cannot begin to express what we have gone through to discover the properties in which we have made our home for nearly four decades. The long catalogue of our moves through several different countries provides clear proof that we are ‘seekers’ first and foremost. Insatiably curious, we are incapable of walking past a house without imagining what is hiding behind its façade, and we have never been able to walk round the wall of a large property without wondering what lies on the other side of the boundary.

In the footsteps of the sleuths created by Agatha Christie, we push open the gate of a château without worrying about a sudden confrontation with a vicious dog (or angry caretaker) and we are undaunted by the presence of a sign marked private in our need to satisfy our hunger for new discoveries. Just like the late, great interior decorator Nancy Lancaster, we managed to tour a magnificent manor house twice because, on the second occasion, we entered via the garden; but when you are overly curious this is only to be expected…

The list of our former residences is so long that our selection will have to be confined to the wing of a 17th-century castle in the heart of the Netherlands, a manor house hidden in the Irish countryside, a 42sq m mezzanine squeezed in behind the Champs-Elysées, an 18th-century mansion in Burgundy, a dar in the medina of Marrakesh (WoI July 2006), a Neoclassical house below the Acropolis, a 19th-century château in the Sologne and one floor of a fin-de-siècle house in Berlin. None of these was able to cure our itchy feet, but rushing headlong into a new property adventure by moving into an old gatehouse in the Neo-Gothic style, in the heart of Flanders, was not part of our plan.

We have always adored the flamboyant Gothick style of Strawberry Hill, the pseudo-Medieval fantasies of Schinkel and the signature ‘restorations’ of Viollet-le-Duc, much preferring their creations to the authentic architecture of cathedrals. Vaulted ceilings, gargoyles and stained glass are all very well – as long as they were created several centuries after Chartres cathedral, in a villa in Potsdam or in an English country house. We can draw more inspiration from the Neoclassicism of Robert Adam, the Egyptian Revival-style furniture at Malmaison and the ‘troubadour’ style so dear to Madeleine Castaing (WoI Sept 2004) than from ancient Rome, the pyramids of antiquity and the fortified castles of the Middle Ages, and we often quote the maxim of the late Mariga Guinness: ‘Never let authenticity get in the way of good taste.’

Imagine how thrilled we were at our first encounter with La Conciergerie. Protected from prying eyes by an imposing gate, surrounded by ancient woodland, part of a vast estate harbouring an 18th-century château complete with moats and a lake, it had all the right ingredients for us. There was no way we were going to let this exceptional Gothic-style residence, built in 1824 by an aristocratic family and previously inhabited by the château’s game/gatekeeper, to slip through our fingers.

After just one visit and the completion of a few formalities, we were delighted to become the tenants of a ‘folly’ embellished by a tower worthy of Pelléas and Mélisande.

Four decades of property ventures have taught us that you have to heed what a house has to say to avoid the fatal Top: the bedroom is papered with ‘Edenderry’ from David Skinner. A French bronze table lamp rests on a mock-porphyry bedside plinth designed by René. Above: a 19th-century Limoges porcelain chocolate cup and saucer sits on the English wooden mantel. Opposite: a Hundi lamp from Grays antique centre in London hangs above a ‘pencil post’ king-size bed, by Ethan Allen, covered with an antique Indian bedspread. The firescreen is embroidered

error of transforming an 18th-century Loire château into a Swiss chalet, or dressing up a New York loft as a rustic cabin in Sweden. We were adamant that there would be nothing contemporary in the interior design of our Flemish dacha: no room here for our Verner Panton chairs, our 1960s-style Altuglas table and other relics of ‘vintage’ design. It was our intention to create an interior inspired by the authentic architecture of the gatehouse. Sorry, Mrs Guinness. This time we were going to fashion a home that would offer us the luxury of living in a timeless cocoon, and also give us the opportunity of designing a fanciful, romantic garden alongside.

Through our time spent in Weimar and St Petersburg, and our photographic reportages in the houses of Goethe (WoI April 2011) and Schiller, we discovered a new palette of colours, including shades that we dubbed ‘Pavlovsk pink’, ‘Russian blue’ and ‘Biedermeier green’. René obtained them by mixing different pigments with lime and, typically for him, he was soon climbing ladders armed with a tin of paint and a roller. A subsequent visit to our reserves confirmed that we had plenty of furnishings and period pieces with which to create a real window on the past.

The redecoration of the Conciergerie was problem-free because we did not have to worry about pulling down walls and partitions and undertaking major conversion work. The ground floor, with its entrance hall, two square living areas and kitchen, was modest in scale, but the whole area was perfect in the symmetry of the doors and windows and its very high ceilings. The tower, with its spiral staircase, was high and narrow, like a lift shaft, but had happily retained its original features and the bedrooms upstairs. We used ‘Edenderry’ patterned wallpaper from David Skinner’s historic Irish collection for a country-house feel.

Finally, our stock of furniture and objects fitted into the ‘dacha’ with remarkable ease. Ideal locations were found for the convex Regency mirror, the Gothic-style English sofa, the consoles, the daybed based on an original design by Thomas Hope, the armchairs, the prints, the lamps, the Empire-style mahogany bookcase and the American bed with its ‘pencil posts’. Taking stock now, we have to conclude that we have never had more fun decorating a house.

The garden required a greater effort as it was no mean feat to transform an immense area of lawn sloping gently down towards a lake and extending into a densely wooded park.

René made a start on the work by mapping out the outline of the beds with pegs and cord; then he added a Neoclassical statue depicting Venus Genetrix, some copies of the famous ‘Marlborough’ bench by Lutyens and 19th-century cast-iron troughs painted black.

These days our garden is bursting with all manner of trees, bushes and shrubs, along with bewitchingly fragrant roses bearing captivating names such as Schneewittchen, Roxane, Pierre de Ronsard, Grand Siècle, Burgundy and Frédéric Mistral. The absolute master of this domain goes by the name of Marcel, our faithful bulldog, who has been part of our lives for seven years.

In Brussels, they are saying: ‘The Stoelties are living in a chapel.’ And they add, with a sigh: ‘We’ve seen it all now.’

Perhaps. But with us, you never know… $ Top: the Gothic Revival gatehouse, complete with quatrefoil windows piercing the façade, was built between 1820 and 1824. The Directoire-style tubs, designed by René, contain palms of the Canariensis variety. Above: a French tole lantern serves to illuminate the way up the bell tower, whose winding oak staircase is original to the house. Opposite: like all the colours in the folly, René created ‘Biedermeier green’ by combining limewash with pigments

PAINTINGS THROUGHOUT: © THE MILTON AND SALLY AVERY ARTS FOUNDATION. ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE MILTON AND SALLY AVERY ARTS FOUNDATION AND VICTORIA MIRO, LONDON/VENICE

This page: Wader, dated 1963, depicts the artist’s daughter, March. The setting is probably a rental house in the Catskills, upstate New York. Opposite: Avery painted Excursion on the Thames in 1953, during his and Sally’s only trip to Europe.

Seen from Tate on Millbank, the boat is packed with people

E A SE L ACCE S S According to his grandson, the painter Milton Avery was always ‘sitting on the periphery’. Yet this discreteness afforded him a singular, undisturbed view of the world and its inhabitants. Nowhere is this more in evidence than on the walls of the New York apartment he shared with his wife, Sally, where pictures of well-loved places and people reveal how his art opened the door to life and friendship. Text: Morgan Falconer. Interior photography: Gautier Deblonde

This page, clockwise from top: the Averys took a functional approach to furniture in their New York apartment, exemplified by the foldout table in their workroom. Sally introduced midcentury pieces, like the Mies ‘Barcelona’ and Eames chairs, only after Milton’s death; their daughter, March, kept amaryllis plants like these by a window. The portrait in red is of artist George Constant, a friend of the couple; the lobby leads into the workroom

This page, clockwise from top: much of the furniture in the sitting room appears in Milton’s paintings. The table, however, is a recent addition. It can be rearranged into a long snaking form. The portrait on the right, from the 1930s, is probably of Sally; a jovial Milton self-portrait, c1963, hangs below one of his sketches; the front door has been stripped of paint to reveal cold-rolled steel. Pictures here were often given away or sold, then easily replaced

Above left: Milton and Sally regularly attended life-drawing lessons in the apartments of their friends – Grey Nude, dated 1943-44, derives from such a class. Above right: Dark Fir, created in 1962, was likely inspired by the Catskill Mountains.

He had made an almost identical version a decade before

This watercolour, Old Mountain, dates to 1943. It probably depicts a landscape in Vermont, where Milton and Sally often worked. Milton’s increasingly free approach to watercolour is in evidence here, as is his openness to abstraction and nonassociative colour, seen in the splodges of teal and fuchsia

WHEN EUROPEAN

painters came to New York in the 1960s, they were often struck by the industrial buildings in which many of their American peers had their studios. European easel painting had long been domestic in scale and ambition – made for the home and made to record its life. Yet the sprawling studios Stateside allowed canvases like murals that spoke of vaulting dimensions and universal truths. Milton Avery might have been ‘self-evidently American’, as the critic Clement Greenberg once said, but as anyone can see from the New York home and studio he once shared with his wife, the artist and illustrator Sally Michel, he had an older, maybe European sense of how life and art connect. Milton and Sally have long gone, but the walls of their apartment are still crowded with the faces of the people they knew. As their grandson, Sean Cavanaugh, said when he toured me around the rooms off Central Park: ‘Basically, if you crossed paths with them, you ended up in a picture – even if you were the kid from next door who delivered the newspaper.’ Even animals were put to use. ‘We’re always pushing to have a barnyard show, because there are a lot of cows and pigs and chickens. Cows don’t move very fast, they’re an interesting shape and you can walk up pretty close to them. So there you go, you’ve got a model!’

To encounter this vivid social world is jarring, given Avery’s reputation. Writing in the catalogue of his Whitney Museum retrospective in 1982, Barbara Haskell remarked

that he ‘lived and worked as if to avoid biography. He left no significant autobiographical remnants. He wrote virtually nothing, participated in no organisations and spoke with such reticence that scant oral testimony was recorded.’ Whatever joy Avery’s pictures might exude – and they are alive with it – art was always a matter of craft and livelihood for him. He was born in upstate New York in 1885; later, his family’s struggles would leave him working in factories by the age of 16. It wasn’t until he was in his mid-twenties that, almost by accident, he attended a life-drawing class. ‘Work,’ he would say (quoting a mid-19th-century hymn), ‘for the night is coming, when man’s work is done.’ Avery’s ‘night’ came in 1965; Cavanaugh never met him, but as he says, ‘All the anecdotal stories suggest a quiet man, sitting on the periphery of the action, sketching, then chiming in with one quick bit of wit and going back to sketching. My grandmother was the social person and she filled in all the silences.’

It is said that the constancy in Avery’s work ethic was mirrored in his style. After he evolved his own, lightly anecdotal fusion of abstraction and figuration in the mid-1940s, he never wavered, even while the rise of Abstract Expressionism left him on the margins. Yet the pictures in the apartment betray a wider range of style and mood than is usually associated with him. There’s an early inky and melancholic portrait of his mother; some slightly later windy Impressionism; the comic-naive tone of some American scene painting from the

The artist, photographed here in his previous apartment on 11th Street. He lived and worked at this address between 1938 and 1959. This picture must have been taken in the mid- to late 1950s when Avery was in his seventies, since Vine, the large canvas that hangs behind, wasn’t painted until 1955

1930s; and then his mature style – clean, airy, zesty. Avery isn’t known as a world traveller, his common terrain being New York and New England, yet you can also find pictures to correct that impression. Victoria Miro gallery recently showed a painting he made in London, when the couple holidayed there in 1952, and it has also produced a two-volume publication including a facsimile of a South of France sketchbook from the same year, and a picture essay of the artist’s New York home and studio, photographed by Gautier Deblonde.

The French connection can seem inevitable, since critics habitually reference Matisse when writing about Avery’s work.

Sally was sceptical. ‘[Milton’s] things are much more philosophic than Matisse’s,’ she once pointed out, ‘they’re very sort of New England, sparse New England things.’ Looking at the bleached restraint of White Pitcher, from 1946, you might agree, yet the picture is also undeniably steeped in French Modernism. It comes from a period when Avery was very open to Matisse’s influence: Grey Nude, from 1943-44, is another example. He had been aware of Matisse since the 1920s, but after being represented by the Frenchman’s American dealer, Valentine Dudensing, in 1935, his interest was renewed.

Becoming part of the Valentine Gallery improved Avery’s finances considerably – and it must have been a relief, since Sally’s work as an illustrator had supported them for years.

Mark Rothko considered him a great inspiration and the two were good friends; nevertheless, Avery’s fortunes waxed and

waned. The acquisition of the spacious abode marked a typical moment of up and down for him: as his health faltered in the late 1950s, forcing the couple from the Greenwich Village walkup apartment they had long occupied, commercial success enabled them to move uptown to one of the grander Art Deco buildings built just before the stock-market crash of 1929.

Of course, standards of luxury then and now have changed and the apartment is one of a dwindling number of prewar homes near Central Park that remain largely unaltered. It recalls a time when prosperity in New York was a more modest affair. Beyond the clutter of paintings of family and friends, there are no bold statements of personality; time alone has lent it distinction, with many of the items of furniture acquired from friends over the years as they passed out of fashion. And accident often introduced the furniture into paintings: Young Couple (Husband and Wife), from 1963, depicts Cavanaugh’s parents sitting in the chairs you can still see in the living room.

After Milton’s death, Sally continued to live and work here until she died in 2003, aged 100. Since, it has been largely untouched, though the art on the walls regularly rotates as works come and go from shows. It’s quiet – except for the cacophony from the walls: the sounds of friends, human and animal $ A series of portrait paintings by the artist will be presented by Victoria Miro at Art Basel, Miami Beach Convention Center, 1901 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach, FL 33139 (artbasel.com), 7-10 Dec. ‘Milton Avery’ is published by the gallery, rrp £55. Visit victoria-miro.com

In the Averys’ bedroom in their final home is a large portrait of Milton wearing a striped blazer – possibly the one photographed opposite – drawn by his wife in 1962. Sally was also responsible for the carved-driftwood sculptures below it. Also on the chest is a ceramic piece by March Avery

CREATION STO RE YS In the middle of Milan, Roberto Gerosa has taken a former frozenfish warehouse and fashioned it into a magical kingdom. Raising the roof and adding a suspended upper floor, the art director/ decorator has filled his live-in studio with books, bric-a-brac, quirky bespoke furniture and the tools of his trade – textiles, embroidered trim and lamp-making materials. My job is all about atmosfera, he tells Lee Marshall. Photography: Simon Upton

Left: Roberto’s ‘vineyard’ occupies the central courtyard of a classic Milanese condominium built in the early 20th century. He makes jam out of the uva fragola (Concord) grapes. At the back is a Tibetan curtain with the hanging-knot symbol – he does a lot of charity work with refugees from the region. Top: in the living-room part of the huge downstairs space, the floor is in marine plywood and the curtains are raw Chinese silk. The curvaceous couches, designed by Roberto, come from the Uso Project

This page, clockwise from top left: a brass crown umbrella stand, made by the owner, sits inside the entrance; just inside the front door, one can see a solid-brass clothes hanger, a Napoléon III ebony table and a big ‘bad-taste’ Chinese vase picked up at a British antique market; silk, velvet and cotton pillows made by Roberto sit on a pouf covered in heavy linen; vintage pine bookcases from Monica Lupi overlook the drawing table. Hanging down is an iron, string and paper jellyfish prototype by Angelica Gerosa, the owner’s daughter. Opposite: the suspended staircase, whose treads are made from red sandalwood, is by Mauro Mori

Right: on the suspended library, a walkway that connects two sleeping areas, three lamps made by Roberto – one in copper and parchment, another a striped-cotton sconce, and a marbleised-paper ‘lyre’ – sit in front of an Art Nouveau partition found in Paris. It has been cleverly extended at the sides by the carpentry workshop Falegnameria Maran. Top: at the other end, beyond a velvet bean bag, giant bamboo columns frame a view of the owner’s own cushion collection. Above: thanks to the insertion of a steel H-beam, the roof could be heightened and this upper level inserted

Right: a ‘Ptolomeo’ self-supporting bookshelf by Bruno Rainaldi overlooks Roberto’s bed, with its cotton-tulle canopy and silk-velvet cover with Indian embroidered brocade. Roberto’s crocodile-print-leather and brass night table on castors stands on a dyed sheepskin rug. Top: a wall-hung Muslim hand-of-Fatima decoration with zinc eyes looks towards a vintage mirrored cocktail cabinet. Above: in the adjoining bathroom, the tub and towel rail, both brass, are by Fratelli Ciulli Firenze and Giamperi Milano respectively

IN THE CENTRAL

courtyard of a Milanese apartment block on the edge of the city’s Chinatown, where you might expect to find bicycles or a janitor’s lodge, a jungle intervenes. Palms, loquats, plumbago, aspidistras and other frondy obstacles complicate the linear route. All of a sudden, you emerge into an alfresco sitting room. Overhead, Concord grapes – known in Italian as uva fragola due to their characteristic strawberry flavour – dangle enticingly from a rustic pergola. You would be forgiven for asking yourself: ‘Am I really in the engine room of the Italian economy, the country’s design, fashion and finance capital? Or have I strayed into some leafy Casablanca arbour?’

‘I had to excuse myself recently when I was on holiday with friends at the seaside,’ says the creator of this delightful anomaly, Roberto Gerosa. ‘It was lovely and all, but I needed to get back to Milan for the grape harvest.’

The sweet confusion continues inside, when you enter the huge, high-ceilinged, open-plan space that serves as Gerosa’s – what, exactly? ‘I think of it simply as a studio,’ says the genial creative volcano, ‘because for me there’s no line between work and private life.’ The hybrid nature of the place reflects, perhaps, the hybrid nature of Gerosa’s work, which he has always struggled to label. ‘I’m the one people call in a panic after the architects have finished,’ he explains, ‘when they realise they’ve been handed a space they can’t actually live in.’ Describing himself as ‘part art director, part decorator, part interior designer’, he hazards that his job is all about atmosfera, before hesitating and adding, ‘the only problem with that word is that there was a tacky advert in Italy in the 1970s for a make of brandy – it was “The brandy that creates atmosfera”’.

Atmosphere is not lacking inside this former frozenfish warehouse, which Gerosa moved into around 15 years ago, when the pungent freezer-room walls were still in place. At the time, it was one big space; Gerosa immediately set about reinforcing the pitched roof, using a cast-iron joist that was delivered in sections and bolted together in situ. This sits on two smaller horizontal iron beams at either end, which in turn rest on masonry columns. ‘It’s ugly,’ Gerosa comments of this makeshift solution, ‘but it works.’

The height gained allowed the designer to insert an upper floor – basically a large platform in the shape of a capital I with thick serifs, with a bedroom at either gable end.

The wide walkway that connects them, underneath that central joist, is a suspended library/sitting area with bookcases on one side and a railing overlooking the living space on the other. It feels like a bouquiniste’s balcony, a Parisian association reinforced by the Art Nouveau wood-and-glass screen and doors at one end, behind which is Gerosa’s bedroom. He found this elegant séparé in France and had a local carpenter replicate it in an extension that fits under the sloping roof beams on each side, in a simpler style that looks like a cross between a Milanese tram and the Bridge of Sighs.

As for the iron staircase that links the two floors, Gerosa calls it a capriccio. He had originally wanted a zigzag shape, but when told it wouldn’t work, came up with an even more audacious design, a flight in which each step hangs from the beams above on slender iron rods. The steps were made by a frequent collaborator, furniture sculptor Mauro

Mori, out of single blocks of lagati, or red sandalwood, imported from the Seychelles.

Yet what is so engaging about this penumbral Milanese hideout is the way its treasures are not coddled or indulged.

This is a collector’s lair and art director’s warehouse just as much as an interior-design project, and star pieces like the round leather-covered, brass-studded 18th-century occasional table in Gerosa’s bedroom, which came from a theatre in Venice, have to make their voices heard above the hubbub, the effortlessly tasteful clutter.

Some details are unexpectedly modest, like the large panels of marine plywood Gerosa used as flooring in the main downstairs space, an idea he copied from a friend in London. Others are breezily grand, like the mismatched, jauntily upholstered armchairs that surround the long, rustic French dining table. ‘Guests always end up sitting around this table,’ Gerosa comments, ‘so I want them to be comfortable, and I’m not a fan of dining chairs.’ In the designer’s main upstairs bathroom, with its brass bathtub and shower unit, a sinewy tree trunk of a sink carved to his own design from a single block of Carrara marble by stonecutters at Tenerani Marmi yearns to take centre stage. Its pretensions are gently mocked by the Ikea clock that hangs from the mirrored screen behind.

The tools and materials Gerosa uses for his creative pursuits – or simply collects – are everywhere. Bolts of brocade, linen and other textiles are neatly folded on shelves in the design-studio half of the main ground-floor space, which the decorator likes to be able to access even at night when struck by inspiration – ‘That’s my creative time,’ he explains. More bolts of fabric form tottering towers at one end of the upstairs library lounge, while back downstairs colourful upturned cones, like a haberdasher’s take on those stone cairns walkers leave behind, are formed of spools of ribbon and embroidered trims: passamanerie, as Italians call them, are a particular passion of Gerosa’s.

In a workshop off the garden courtyard, he also makes table and standard lamps, using parchment, goat skin, silks and other fabrics, glass and mirror fragments, and rolls of thick copper wire for the frames. But nothing in Gerosa’s cave of wonders stays in its box for very long. His lamps wander into the main space, climb onto his architect’s drawing table, scale bookcases and – having shed their shades – hang naked from the ceiling, like saucy mobiles.

There’s just one minimalist space in an office/workshop/ archive/storeroom/apartment that is a faithful reflection of its owner’s restlessly creative personality and penchant for digressions. The downstairs Turkish bath consists of nothing but a stone bench running along two sides, lined in rare zebrino marble from Carrara – with its soft cream-and-grey safari stripes, this was a fixture in upscale Milanese interiors of the 1930s and 1940s, especially in foyers. Look closely, however, and you’ll notice a typical Gerosa touch. There’s nothing smooth about the finish: at the art director’s insistence, the marmista delivers raw panels, with the teeth of the rotary saw still imprinted on the stone. ‘I like to see the marks’ is his simple explanation – a phrase that might be taken as this eclectic designer’s motto and mission statement $ To contact Roberto Gerosa, visit robertogerosa.com

Adding sombre notes to the kitchen are a NapolĂŠon III ebonised cabinet, a slate blackboard and a Perlino Nero marble sink by Tenerani Marmi Carrara. The Tessuti Busatti cloth beneath hangs from a bamboo rod

Isy uses the first-floor ‘salon’ for meetings, but also as a private sitting room. On the desk is a paper sculpture by Christian Astuguevieille.

Joel Parkes, who uses dead wood repaired with pewter and pigments, made the artworks on the tables below the shuttered windows

SPLIT DECISION When Isy Ettedgui found a Georgian town house for sale in central London, she knew what to do. Realising it would make both a great new home and flagship shop for her revived leather business, she bought it, in spite of the planning risks, and set about dividing it into working and private areas. Her upstairs residence, filled with shrewdly chosen art and objets, proves the gamble paid off. Text and photography: Tim Beddow

Opposite: Isy calls this room her den/library. Above the fireplace L’Atelier by Alberto Giacometti is flanked by spindly bronze figures that could be by the same artist, but in fact come from Mali. Above: Shiny Books, a 2000 photograph by Abelardo Morell, hangs at the other end. Below: the dining table, by Patrick Gilles and Dorothée Boissier, displays a pair of André Dubreuil ‘Perles’ candleholders

Isy worked with designers from Plain English to create her kitchen. It features worktops, splashbacks and shelves (displaying antique Lalique and Daum vases) of Italian Arabescato marble, and high black stools by India Mahdavi.

The painting, Les Goudes, is by Maurice Estève

Above: Gilles and Boissier designed the sofa in Isy’s room and the bed to match. Below left: the pair also created the cupboards.

The sculpture is by Maillol. Below right: this staircase, moved from the shop below, leads to the roof. Opposite: Saint Laurent marble lines the spare bathroom, where an Aboriginal fish (a creature loved by Joe) bought from Alistair McAlpine lies beneath the mirror

ISY ETTEDGUI

would undeniably agree that the enduring love of her life – aside from her late husband, Joe, and their three children – would be Connolly (formerly Connolly Leather), the classic British outfit, founded in 1878, that exemplifies high-end quality. ‘It has been my baby,’ she freely admits. She was introduced to the family firm in 1989 when it invited Joe to sponsor a competition to design a chair for his chain of fashion stores, Joseph.

Smitten from the outset by the (then) bespoke company, which had made the benches in the Houses of Parliament and been the preferred leather designers for car makers – Ferrari, Jaguar, Bentley and Rolls-Royce among others – Isy opened its first shop, designed

by Andrée Putman, in a Belgravia mews in 1995 (WoI Aug 1995).

Their landlord, the Duke of Westminster, was so happy to have Connolly in one of his mews that he gave them a year rent-free.

The shop felt new, fresh, classy and soon had scores of devoted aficionados. But it also had its blips and, after a major downturn in the USA, had to close its doors in 2010. But Isy remained steadfast. And when she saw an 18th-century town house on a street off Savile Row with shop and domestic/living possibilities on the floors above up for grabs in 2014, she realised it was too good an opportunity to miss. ‘I think I was subconsciously always looking for a new Connolly location,’ she says.

In typical Isy fashion – recalling successful past projects – the designers she called were the Parisian duo Patrick Gilles and Dorothée Boissier, whose first job in London had been Isy and Joe’s flat in Chester Square. Now celebrated, with a hotel in St Barts on their 2018 agenda and the Ritz Madrid scheduled in 2019, they designed not just the shop (which opened last year) but Isy’s home above, to achieve seamless continuity between the two.

‘Isy is a belle âme [a beautiful soul], as we say in French,’ says Dorothée, ‘a luminous woman with great warmth and generosity.’

Yet – with a touch of trusted guidance – she also knows what she wants and, most importantly, the quality she strives for.

Perhaps it was her eight years working for this magazine at its inception with the owner, Kevin Kelly, that honed an unerring eye for detail and excellence. While at WoI, Isy met Joe, said farewell to Condé Nast and then, after a spell running her own advertising business, came the Connolly moment in the late 1980s.

Fast-forward to October 2014, when Isy decided to take the plunge with 4 Clifford Street. The former gallery with offices above needed an extra floor to make it suitable as a home, but there were big risks involved. ‘I had to sell where I was living to invest here,’ says Isy, ‘and of course planning permission, which had been re-

fused before, could have gone either way.’ She completed in December and then applied for planning, before Gilles and Boissier made their initial visit. It was the first time they had worked on a Georgian town house. ‘We had to play with the listed parts,’ explains Dorothée, ‘invent classical elements, add modern touches, reinvent the layout, adapt to Isy’s wishes and keep the charming, non-symmetrical beauty of it.’

A year later the planning application was accepted. ‘Until we knew, there had been a lot of tension,’ says Isy, ‘and I was glad to have Donald Insall (a specialist conservation architectural practice) on my side.’ Her old flat, meanwhile, had not sold, so financial anxiety continued to lurk round every corner.

Work began soon after they had the good news. While basement and ground floor were logically going to be used for the shop, ‘the first floor is transitional,’ says Dorothée, ‘being used both to show furniture and objets, but also as another living room for Isy.’ Everything had to be brought in and out of a very small listed doorway. Above are all her private rooms, reached from the ground floor by a newly panelled 18th-century staircase, a tad lopsided with age. ‘It is a bit like a boat here; not a big space, so we worked very closely for what I needed – three bedrooms, three bathrooms and the other essential rooms – in basically a very small space,’ says Isy. The décor is very much a fusion of Joe’s and her tastes. ‘I introduced Joe [who died in 2010] to interiors, as he was of course more fashion-oriented and his aesthetic more modern than mine, which leans towards texture and warmth,’ says Isy. ‘We complemented each other well.’ Patrick and Dorothée were in tune with her preferences and ‘presented plans, layouts and materials for working sessions in which we’d discuss, then adapt and correct to Isy’s wishes’.

‘I love things that are tonal and natural,’ Isy says. This is assuredly a throwback to her early years in Africa and remains a passion that extends to much of the handmade leather and cashmere in the shop downstairs. Born in Nairobi, she lived in myriad African countries – among them Kenya, Malawi, Botswana, Lesotho and Niger – until she returned at 23 for university. Her father’s work involved developing new systems of governance for Commonwealth countries gaining their independence.

‘My childhood in Africa certainly had a magic and mystery, and I’m sure gave me a more liberated style of expression. Early on I came to love texture, earthy colours and craft pottery.’ All this is reflected throughout the apartment in sandy colours, tribal artefacts and a certain sparseness. The Warhol in the dining room is painted in tones of pale straw and diamond dust, and the tall lamps in the sitting room might seem to be modelled on African spears, though they were actually designed by Christian Liaigre.

Her approach, married to Joe’s preference for black, straight lines, simplicity and eye for comfort and quality in every detail, explains the relaxed but luxurious atmosphere. Here, this seems as defining as the building itself, with its Georgian proportions ‘that seem so human and comfortable’, the architects and craftsmen, or the work of Patrick and Dorothée.

Isy has an inimitable sense of what she enjoys in her home.

Readers will be relieved to know that her previous flat did finally sell, so she can lala salama (sleep well), as they say in East Africa, in her new home $ Gilles & Boissier, 10 Rue Portalis, 75008 Paris (00 33 1 45 41 74 96; gillesetboissier.com). Connolly, 4 Clifford St, London W1 (020 7952 6708; connollyengland.com)

Top: the Savile Row skyline is visible from the sunny roof terrace, with its black rattan Lloyd Loom furniture. Opposite: in the spare room, signed Horst photographs surround the bed, which Gilles and Boissier designed. Underneath are stowed vintage Prada suitcases

The blue-and-white scheme of the garden salon is repeated in the four adjoining rooms.

The ceiling, part figural, part ornamental, was painted by Johann Anton Gumpp. The salon’s bijou proportions meant that when parties of people called in for refreshments, food and drink had to be served through the windows

ELECTORAL ROLLS

At the 1719 Pagodenburg, located in a royal palace complex outside Munich, Elector Max Emanuel would take tea after sporting pursuits and frolic with his mistresses. The pleasure pavilion’s chinoiserie interiors, all the rage in the early 18th century, brought consolation to a ruler newly returned from a decade’s exile after defeat in the Battle of Blenheim. Text: Angela Arnim. Photography: Fritz von der Schulenburg. First published: May 1982

GREAT BATTLES

can have surprising outcomes, and none more so than that of Blenheim (1704), which resulted in two outstanding – if utterly different – buildings: Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, and the Pagodenburg pavilion in the park of Munich’s Nymphenburg Palace. But whereas the former was the reward given by Queen Anne to the First Duke of Marlborough for leading the allied armies to victory over the French and Bavarians, Elector Max Emanuel of Bavaria awarded himself the Pagodenburg as a consolation prize, and also to celebrate the end of more than ten years’ exile after his defeat on the field.

‘Building, no less than hunting, is the sport – one might also say the occupational disease – of kings,’ writes Wilfrid Blunt in his biography of a descendant of Max Emanuel, the mad king Ludwig II, who as a young man actually lived in the Pagodenburg for a while. In 1715, when the Blue Elector, as Max Emanuel was known, returned from exile in Paris he showed no sign of having got over the disease. He immediately set in train a programme of works on the Nymphenburg estate. This was far from the first time he had sought to compensate for his shortcomings as a soldier with architectural triumphs.

Something of a flâneur, a glittering Don Giovanni, Max Emanuel plunged Bavaria into one of the worst crises of her history through his excesses. That said, he also left some of the most beautiful Baroque buildings in the world.

The occupational disease was an expensive one and Max Emanuel’s subjects

must first have thought they had good reason to grumble at the cost of that therapeutic folly, the Pagodenburg. However, the elector silenced criticism by entrusting the building of the pavilion to a local boy: Joseph Effner, a court gardener’s son from Dachau.

Under Effner, the Pagodenburg became what we might describe as a job-creation scheme, with Bavarian craftsmen used throughout. It was a revolutionary move, since hitherto the electors of Bavaria had mainly chosen to commission the most up-to-date styles from Italian and French masters. But local did not have to mean provincial. The architect had trained in Paris in the Régence style, that entr’acte between Baroque and Rococo. In Paris, Effner acquired a taste for themes drawn from East Asia.

But Orientalism of this kind is hardly apparent on the exterior of the Pagodenburg, in spite of its name. Only the upward slant of the pediment faintly evokes the idea of a Chinese temple. The sculpted columns show that the classical influence was far stronger. The name derives, rather, from the cheerful mixture of chinoiserie and Rococo in the interior decoration, a gamut of recent fashions.

The ground plan of the Pagodenburg is believed to have been designed by the elector himself. It is in the shape of a Maltese cross: the garden salon, a small octagonal room eight metres across, at the centre and extended cruciform arms.

This became a kind of trademark of Max Emanuel – he had used the plan before, when running up two other hunting lodges: (the unfinished) Bouchefort, in

Top: the parquet floor and gilded architraves offer a visual link upstairs between the blue-and-white delftware scheme and the red- and blacklacquer ones. Above: around 2,000 faience tiles were used for the ground floor and staircase walls. Opposite: the motifs, incorporating pagodas and other exotica, allude to China and porcelain production, which from the 1740s onwards would have a major new centre in Nymphenburg

Top: the boudoir’s white-and-gold panelling is by Joseph Effner. Although the style is Régence, the room’s bizarre shape lends it an exotic air.

Above: the Chinese salon features painted-silk wallpaper and black-grounded lacquer brushwork. Resting on stucco consoles, the graceful cast-iron balconies from the workshop of W. de Groff are decorated with fleurs de bronze. Opposite: the staircase viewed from the Chinese salon

the Spanish Netherlands, where he had served as governor; and Fürstenried, in a game forest near Munich. This skilful layout was much admired by his contemporaries in court society. In 1722, the elector conceded to a special request by sending the drawings of his folly to a cousin, Margravine Franziska Sybilla Augusta von Baden, who soon built a Pagodenburg of her own in the grounds of Château Favorite Rastatt.

The rooms on the ground floor are governed by this central plan. Max Emanuel owned no Chinese tiles so he chose blueand-white Dutch faience tiles – nearly 2,000 of them – for the ground floor and staircase walls. But both upstairs rooms are lacquered and decorated with Chinese scenes.

Max Emanuel had inherited the Nymphenburg estate, the summer residence of the Bavarian electors at the start of the 18th century (and, much later, the kings). Its focal point was an old summer villa, built in an easy-going Italian style by Agostino Barelli. Max Emanuel extended it into what is still one of the most accomplished, yet simplest and most accessible palaces of the world. He commandeered fountains, supervised canals and, after his exile, completed the park behind the palace. The Pagodenburg stood for leisure and pleasure, whereas the later pavilions represented the chase, eating and the demands of contemplation.

Like our own Charles II a generation previously, Max Emanuel was an addict of pallamaglio, an Italian golf-cum-bowls cum-croquet lawn game that gave Pall

Mall in London its name. Max Emanuel constructed a course next to the Pagodenburg and would rest there after a game. Other sport required periods of rest too, and soon the little folly became the scene of suppers with preferred mistresses.

Years later, in August 1863, Bismarck visited the Nymphenburg. In his autobiography, he describes sitting next to Prince Ludwig (later Ludwig II) at meals, opposite his mother. The queen kept telling the footmen not to fill the glasses so often, a stricture her son evaded by handing his to them behind his shoulder. The prince was living that summer in the Pagodenburg, leaving to attend lectures in physics and mathematics at Munich university.

By this time, the grounds behind the palace had changed radically. At the end of the 18th century, a passion for things English swept Munich (a great park in the city is called the Englischer Garten). The Nymphenburg Park did not escape. A landscape architect, Freiherr Ludwig von Sckell, had paid a visit to Britain and picked up ideas from Sir William Chambers and Capability Brown. As part of these anglicised transformations, the Pagodenburg was given lakes, ponds and streams of its own. Where in Max Emanuel’s day he would have looked out over a vista of mazes, hedges and walls, there was now a ‘natural’ landscape enclosed behind a ha-ha. So, the story ends, as it began, with an English victory – of a kind $ Pagodenburg Pavilion, Nymphenburg Palace Park, 80638 Munich. For opening times, ring 00 49 89 179080, or visit schloss-nymphenburg.de

Previous pages: view from the Chinese salon into the red-lacquered Kabinett with a French chest of drawers. Top: an ebony table inlaid with a chessboard sits in an alcove. The concave mouldings, ornamented by lattice work and leaf-and-strap stucco, follow sketches by Joseph Effner. Above: a view across the lake to the classical façade. Opposite: the boudoir and Chinese salon as seen from the red-lacquered Kabinett

This page: Henry records ‘A flycatcher’s nest behind the hinge of the flower garden door at the Navigation Office, Stone’. On the facing page, a ‘committee boat’ – from which races on water were judged – and an industrial canal boat sit above paintings of flowers and fruits

Below: a ‘cabbage wearing a ‘bluecoat’, sprout from nature’ as worn by pupils and a little portrait at charity schools. of one of Henry’s Bottom: a Chinese brothers, John slipper and purse, Robert Moore, perhaps seen on a

trip to the British Museum, faces people looking out on an industrialtown panorama from a church tower

MUM’S THE WORLD ‘Mama’s great jug’, ‘Mama’s candlestick’, ‘Mama’s mother-of-pearl bookmark’… As many captions in these watercolour albums attest, a teenager named Henry Moore, painting in the 1840s, was content to record the little details of his domestic sphere. Although his horizons widen to take in architecture, animals and acrobats, his pictures are remarkable for capturing Victorian middle-class life with all the fresh immediacy that only a child can muster. Text: Amicia de Moubray

Top: a view of Stone, a Staffordshire canal town, from the navigation office.

Middle left: ‘Mama’s opal bottle’ and ‘Mama’s breadpan’ sit opposite the family scullery – a middle-class Midlands service room painted with attention to detail.

Middle right: ‘A prize pig’, a naive image reminiscent of earlier, 18thcentury stock portraits, faces a ‘Dragoon in undress’, a lancer and a hussar. Bottom: across from cherries and blooms is a Spanish flower girl after Murillo. Where, one wonders, did Henry see this picture? It was published in the Art Journal in 1835

Top: another of Henry’s brothers, Arthur Clayton Moore. Facing him stand pipe-smoking pensioners in Greenwich. Middle left: the cart shed at the Stone navigation office sits opposite a rotund Christmas plum pudding.

Middle right: elaborately decorated Twelfth Night cakes were popular at Christmas until the 1860s. The verso page features Henry’s mother’s mocha-ware jug and Tudor tracery with stained glass.

Bottom: Worcester Cathedral’s organ faces Mike, a jay, and Dicky, a canary, probably the Moore family’s pet birds

HENRY MOORE – not the Henry Moore

but an amateur artist born in 1831 – would be amazed that his two little marbled notebooks of watercolours, painted when he was a teenager, are the source of much interest. But his books are captivating both for the domestic details he paints (Mama’s muffineer, Mama’s opal bottle) and for the fascinating glimpse they give of life in the north Midlands in the 1840s, at the very heart of the industrial revolution.

Henry’s father was agent of the Trent and Mersey Canal, at Stone in Staffordshire, a small town just south of Stoke-on-Trent and the Potteries. It seems that the Moore family lived on site in the Stone navigation office as it features in many of Henry’s pictures, including views of its slate roofs, strongroom, brewhouse, check office and cart shed; canal bridges and factory chimneys also recur. The double-page image of Stone with its church spire soaring above the rooftops is enchanting, as is a view of the town’s handsome brick workhouse painted with a striking red pigment.

Built in 1793, its inmates were employed making blankets, linens and mops.

Before the internet it would have been a lengthy task to track down the family. Now just typing in ‘Moore navigation office’ instantly produces the compelling diaries of James Caldwell, one of those remarkably energetic characters so typical of the age. A lawyer and Josiah Wedgwood’s executor, he was involved in many local businesses including Wood & Caldwell, a pottery set up by Enoch Wood. Most importantly for the purposes of this story, however, he was also chairman of the Trent and Mersey Canal, the country’s longest man-made waterway, which stretched some 93 miles.

In his diary Caldwell records the appointment of Moore as agent of the canal company on 13 January 1835. At that time the network, with its far-reaching tentacles, played an extraordinarily significant role in daily life, transporting newly manufactured goods all over Britain.

Henry’s two notebooks are being sold by Justin Croft, an antiquarian book dealer who specialises in what he calls ‘personal one-off’ manuscripts, adding ‘it is the amateur who really interests me. Art by untutored people jumps off the page. I like the immediate relationship between the book and the person. It is akin to looking straight into someone’s front parlour.’

In this case that’s almost literally true: one of the more intriguing of Henry’s images shows a modestly furnished room inscribed ‘Sitting room, 18 Calthorpe Street, London’. The room has a richly patterned carpet typical of the 1840s (it’s painted elsewhere in the notebooks as a detail entitled ‘Mama’s carpet’), a pair of Regency chairs, simple curtains with a red pelmet and a pile of books. Elsewhere, ‘My bed, Calthorpe Street’, a creampainted wooden bedstead with simple decoration, points to the same location in Bloomsbury, part of a development by Thomas Cubitt near Regent’s Canal. It seems likely that Moore Senior had a London residence for his job as canal agent.

It was probably when Henry was living in the capital that he visited the nearby British Museum and sketched Egyptian artefacts – also, most likely, the red silk Chinese lady’s shoe and purse.

He must also have gone to Greenwich as evidenced by a charming picture of a group of pensioners from the borough, looking out to a boat, one with a wooden peg leg, one smoking a clay pipe.

The notebooks were executed when Moore was between the ages of 14 and 17; one is dated 1848. A relatively prosperous middle-class life is revealed in his lovingly rendered pictures of ‘Mama’s candlestick’; a coffee pot; ‘Mama’s mother-of-pearl bookmark’; a dainty cup of white porcelain with blue decoration described as ‘Mama’s breakfast service’; ‘Mama’s great jug’ (a fine example of mocha ware); the pattern of the dining-room tablecloth and the bedroom carpet. Food historians will love the stout plum pudding topped with sprigs of ivy and the ornately decorated Twelfth Night cake. One of the most appealing pictures is ‘still life’: a scullery with a dustpan and brush, a long roller towel on the back of a door and a plain, probably pine, kitchen table, the whole painted in an almost monochrome palette.

Apart from their obvious appeal to social and architectural historians, what is particularly striking about Henry’s pictures is their charmingly naive quality; it makes his notebooks all the more compelling. There is striking immediacy about them. ‘[Henry] had a clear observant eye and was obviously intelligent and curious,’ reckons Croft.

The boy’s interests were wide-ranging.

He painted his beloved mother’s possessions, fireworks, flowers, architecture, railways and boats. There’s even a sweet picture of a flycatcher’s nest tucked into an iron gate hinge. Henry clearly had a keen antiquarian bent judging by several pages of heraldic subjects, including bright shields.

The Gothic Revival was in full swing, and it was only a few years after the eccentric 1839 Eglinton Tournament, when scores of aristocrats donned specially made armour to take part in Medievalstyle jousting in Scotland. Alas, he did not paint his parents; but he did portray his four rosy-cheeked siblings.

In acknowledgement of Henry’s intellect, he was sent away to boarding school in Bromsgrove, another canal town, 60 miles away in the neighbouring county of Worcestershire. He was fortunate to be there under the legendary headmaster John Day Collis, who turned it into one of the best schools in the country. According to its records, the pupil won prizes every year and he was awarded a scholarship to Worcester College, Oxford, in 1849. He took both a BA and an MA, spending some 15 years in Oxford before entering the church in London.

His older self would doubtless be amazed that the prologue to one of his notebooks ends with two lines that ring true nearly 170 years after he was working on them: ‘In short, oh courteous reader, here you will find/ All that will please the eye and charm the mind’ $ Justin Croft Antiquarian Books. Ring 01795 591111, or visit justincroft.com

Opposite: a hasty, unfinished sketch of an acrobat performing in the big top faces the back of the navigation office, Stone, drawn from an upper window.

This page: a study of melons above Henry’s bed in Calthorpe Street, Bloomsbury, topped with a candlewick spread

Carefully sited, the Saltbox catches the sunrise and has views of nearby water rills. This patch of land, complete with a skeletal willow, featured in the opening credits of The Danish Girl

Twitch Switch Birdwatching in style? That’s the idea behind the Saltbox, a shepherd’s hut in place of a chilly hide on the Isle of Sheppey, its lavish bed a dreamy place to spot waders and wildfowl through the vast windows. The brainchild of Georgina Fulton, it’s one of five simple structures, inspired by the area’s farming history, introducing a whole new breed of migrators to the marsh – Kate Jacobs among them. Photography: Sean Myers

This page: the small deck in front of the windows is painted black, forming a frame when looked through from inside. The weathered outdoor furniture – silvery Adirondack chairs and a rusty fire pit – sits unobtrusively in its environment. Opposite: a large bed is at the centre of the hut’s design. All the reclaimed wood, sourced by Plankbridge, was originally part of Dorchester’s old bus station

On Elmley National Nature Reserve, a vast expanse of marsh is enclosed on one side by a turfcovered sea wall, and around the more distant edges by low undulating hills. This creates a huge natural arena where dense flocks of lapwing and golden plover swoop and soar above the rough, tussocky grass, rustling reed beds and silver rivulets – all under a boundless sky.

It’s the sort of spectacular scene that one can generally only enjoy on a windswept walk or while crouched in a draughty bird hide. But Georgina Fulton, whose family have successfully combined livestock farming and conservation here on the Isle of Sheppey for 40 years, wanted to offer a more enticing visitor experience. ‘The sunrises and sunsets here are so spectacular, it felt wrong that we were the only ones to witness them,’ she says. ‘And we believe the best way to safeguard the natural environment is to get people passionate about it, so we wanted to find ways to draw in visitors that might not normally come to a nature reserve.’

The former marketing manager lived in London before taking on Kingshill, the family farm at the heart of the reserve, in 2013 with her husband, Gareth, who is now estate manager. The Isle of Sheppey, a little over an hour from London on the Thames Estuary, is a curious mix of little towns and industrial plants old and new – such as a brickworks that fuelled Victorian London’s building boom – set against a wild and lonely landscape.

Bird numbers spike in winter as vast flocks of wildfowl and waders, such as brent geese and black-tailed godwit, migrate from the Arctic and Scandinavia. So when the couple were considering overnight guests, cosy shepherd’s huts made more sense than glamping stalwarts like the yurt. ‘Shepherd’s huts seem to fit naturally into the landscape here because they have always had a place on Sheppey,’ explains Fulton. It doesn’t take an etymologist to spot the clue in the island’s name – today, a thousand Romney sheep still graze the reserve, as well as 750 beef cattle.

Fulton’s research quickly led her to Plankbridge, a company making traditional shepherd’s huts founded

by Richard Lee in 2000. Lee lives in Dorset, in the heart of Hardy country. His daily walks used to take him just a stone’s throw from the writer’s cottage, past an ancient shepherd’s hut. It’s possible this structure might have been the inspiration for a vivid lambing scene at the beginning of Far From the Madding Crowd, in which the reader gets to know the capable hero, Gabriel Oak. Lee, then a maker of bespoke garden rooms and kitchens, hoped to buy the hut. But perhaps it’s serendipitous that it fell into other hands, prompting him to build a carefully researched replica. Customers began commissioning their own versions, which quickly became the focus of Plankbridge’s business. Today a team of 12 highly skilled craftspeople works in a huge, neatas-a-pin workshop, complete with its own foundry, on a downland farm near Piddlehinton.

Plankbridge has now made many hundreds of shepherd’s huts and restored countless more. Though the company places an emphasis on traditional techniques Top: the reserve occupies a large portion of Sheppey. ‘The skies are incredible,’ says Georgina, ‘and there’s such a beautiful quality of light, even on cloudy days.’ Above: the bench behind the bed opens out to form a child’s bunk. The phragmite-print cushion was commissioned from Whitstable firm Fable and Base. Facing it is the kitchen (opposite). Guests can also order homemade food from the Fultons

and materials, it’s not enslaved to the past. It was this mix that appealed to Georgina, who has since commissioned five huts for Elmley, with plans for more.

‘Richard really gets what we’re trying to achieve here,’ she explains. ‘We want our guests to be luxuriously comfortable but still within the landscape. Gareth and I generally draw up the design direction and specifics – like layout, materials and colours – but Richard interprets these in his own way and always exceeds our expectations, coming up with ideas that make the huts more special.’

The first three commissioned by Georgina each had their own characters, but were all along traditional lines.

They proved extremely popular, spurring her on to add a further two. One of these was the Saltbox. Though its more daring design departs from some hut conventions, it still complements its surroundings. Its name is taken from Kingshill Farm’s former moniker, which changed from Salt Box after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when James II’s boat was apprehended on the nearby Swale attempting to flee William of Orange.

The clean lines and flush form of the Saltbox give the structure a modern simplicity, emphasised by the timber shingles that cover walls and roof. Lee chose Scandinavian western red cedar for its ability to withstand the elements and for its subtle silvery finish once weathered. The interior of the hut belies its boxy form, feeling surprisingly light and lofty. This is down to the wall of fold-back glass doors – an innovation for Plankbridge – that capitalise on the views, effectively creating a livein nature hide. The generous bed with Romney-wool throws is placed to allow its occupants to owl-watch, stargaze and take in the sunrise, all in toasty warmth.

Behind the headboard, a clever little sofa-cum-bench doubles as a foldout bed for small children. This in turn faces a nifty little kitchen with flamed-copper splashback and yacht oven. Behind this is the shower room, where aged copper fittings glint against inky walls. The whole nature reserve may be entirely off-grid, but apparently guests are invariably reassured by the presence of a ‘proper loo’. Pluckier visitors can also enjoy an exhilarating outdoor shower-with-a-view. The Saltbox makes use of reclaimed timbers, sourced from a friend of Lee. ‘The wood was Gareth’s idea, inspired by the cosiness of old Alpine ski huts,’ says Georgina.

She has put a lot of thought into the details, with bespoke textiles commissioned from a local maker to echo the flora of Elmley, such as the phragmite reeds sprouting on cushions and voile curtains.

The Fultons are happy to have achieved their goal of helping the nature reserve reach a wider audience.

‘People come from all over Britain, but many of our overnight guests are from Sheppey itself. Vast as the reserve is, they didn’t even know we were here and that’s what makes all the work worthwhile’ $ Elmley National Nature Reserve, Elmley, Isle of Sheppey, Kent ME12 3RW. For more information or to book, ring 07930 847520, or visit elmleynaturereserve.co.uk. Plankbridge. Ring 01300 348414, or visit plankbridge.com Top: the bathroom is behind a sliding door in the kitchen. It’s been painted with Farrow & Ball’s ‘Inchyra Blue’, and the copper pipework has been left exposed for practical and aesthetic reasons. Above: the cedar shingles cladding the house have already weathered. Opposite: true to the language of agricultural buildings, the shower area has been constructed in galvanised corrugated iron

Ceiling hooks in the old kitchen would once have been hung with tools wrapped in newspaper or oilcloth to keep them dry and in working order.

Today, a travel birdcage made by Regine’s father for his canaries dangles overhead instead.

The buckets by the fire are full of turf used for fuel

CO U N T ER C U LT U R E Though its tills closed in the 1990s, the shop that now forms artist Regine Bartsch’s studio in County Kerry looks like it might be open – the rooms retain the 19th-century décor of the first, enterprising proprietor, Catherine O’Neill, while its shelves are still stacked with tacks and locks. To these mementos of commercial and domestic life the artist has added the marks and tools of her own trade, finds Sophie Barling. Photography: Ricardo Labougle

This page, clockwise from top: the other end of the kitchen doubled as a carpentry workshop for the house’s previous occupants. Regine’s rug collection came from her parents’ days living in Turkey and the Middle East; beneath a clock advertising Goulding’s manures – once sold here – is a framed photograph of Regine’s mother-in-law, Nora O’Neill, with her bicycle in front of the shop she now owns; the door leads to a yard, where the family horse used to be kept. Other outbuildings stored paraffin, smoked and salted fish, and pig’s trotters. Now the stable is piled high with turf

This page, clockwise from top: in the first-floor sitting room, as elsewhere, much of the furniture was installed in the 1870s, when Catherine O’Neill and her husband lived here as a young couple; the room’s large windows overlook Cahersiveen’s Main Street. The ‘Persian carpet’ on the floor (in fact patterned linoleum) and the wallpaper – whose ornamental corners seem to anticipate Art Deco – both pre-date Catherine’s death in 1910; members of the O’Neill family gaze out from old photographs dotted round the room, including this one above the mantelpiece

THERE ARE certain places that seem to have been waiting for a particular someone. Such a place exists on Main Street in Cahersiveen, southwest Ireland. Lying at the foot of Beentee Mountain on the spectacular Iveragh Peninsula, this busy but unassuming market town appears largely untouched by the coachload tourism that marks other spots on the Ring of Kerry loop. The typically colourful house façades are here – like jars on a sweetshop shelf, each one a different hue – but not brash.

Locals shout greetings to each other across the street, and peat smoke scents the air. Among the more faded shopfront signage – O’Donoghue, O’Shea’s – one name looks fresher than its neighbours: ‘C. O’Neill’ is writ large, gold on black, framed by bright scarlet gloss.

It’s in this house and former hardware shop that Hamburg-born artist Regine Bartsch – the someone in question – has her studio. Regine grew up in Finland and Syria, where her father ran branches of the Goethe-Institut. She had just finished an MA in textiles back in Hamburg when one of her professors told her of a job going in a remote corner of Ireland. Regine duly arrived in 1978 to set up a studio in nearby Ballinskelligs, teaching local women to weave for a project translating the Book of Kells into tapestry. ‘I was going to stay for a year,’ she says, ‘and I’m still here.’

One of the reasons for her staying on – so that Kerry intonations now obscure most of her German accent – was the Irish artist Pauline Bewick, whom Regine collaborated with soon after arriving. She credits Bewick, now a good friend, with much of her initial progress. ‘She’s so generous and enthusiastic; she just opened every door for

me. Very quickly I got into a much smaller art scene than it is now. Now it seems as if every second person in Ireland is an artist or a writer or a musician, but at that time it was cosier and it was just wonderful.’ Early on, too, she became friends with her now partner, whose family built the O’Neill house with its store in the 1870s. ‘One day when we were “courting” many years ago,’ Regine recounts, ‘he said: “Do you want to see the shop?” And he showed it to me and it was like a different world. I remember coming out of here and back on to the street and thinking: “What was that?!” I suppose it made me fall in love with him.’

Behind the old counter in the shopfront, Regine’s paints, brushes and sketches now mix on shelves still packed with leftover stock from when O’Neill’s was last trading: tacks, locks, wicks, briar pipes, an old display case of Clarke’s cigarettes. But it’s upon entering the kitchen at the back that you feel most surely, despite the gentle ticking of a clock, that time has stood still. The turf burning in the fire gives out its sweet scent, recalling earlier days as well as present life. ‘I brought carpets because I grew up in the Middle East,’ Regine says. ‘My partner’s great-uncle William, who was the last person to actually live here, in the 1940s, had a card table set up over there. And my father-in-law used that side of the kitchen for his carpentry, while his wife baked on this side. So everyone has left their mark.’

Essentially, however, very little has changed since the days of Catherine O’Neill, the ‘C’ of the shop sign, who was here until her death in 1910. In 1875, at the age of 25, she found herself widowed, pregnant with her fifth child and left to run a young business alone. She was clearly more than up to the

Top left: Regine’s old Mercedes is parked outside the shop. Just visible in the right-hand window is a découpaged papier-mâché figure by the artist. ‘That’s myself, in my ski trousers that I wear all winter long here in the studio,’ she explains. Top right: the shop itself last traded in the 1990s and its shelves still carry old stock. Now it serves as an informal gallery, with some of Regine’s paintings leaning against the counter. Opposite: bundles of tarred string, made to tie hay stacks, hang in the landing. A portrait of Catherine O’Neill tops the fireplace in the adjoining room

task. Surviving from her time are some beautifully block-printed paper tea packets, ready to be filled with her signature blend of leaves and advertising her impressive emporium: ‘Catherine O’Neill: Grocery, Spirit, Mackerel Curer & Corn Merchant, Flour, Meal, Grass Seeds, Manures, Cement, Lime, Tars, Nets and Ropes.’ Upstairs, her elegantly furnished rooms now look like they’ve been dunked whole in some of that tea. They have the kind of patina that only age bestows, the sitting room’s wallpaper wrinkled as old skin, wearing its framed prints and sepia photographs like favourite jewellery.

Regine, then, is continuing an O’Neill tradition of female custodians, and it requires some hardiness. She and her partner live down the road, but much of her time is spent here, digging out the peat turf from the old stables at the back to feed the kitchen stove, or hauling it up several flights of stairs to her studio at the top of the house (‘My calves have doubled in size with all the climbing!’ she wails). When we visit, she’s preparing for an installation in Cambridge for David Parr House (WoI March 2015). In one corner of the studio there’s an unfinished painting with vertical strips of colour, repeated slices of a view of a stone house with a red door and hills beyond. They represent snaps taken from her bedroom every morning – not for the exhibition, Regine explains, but ‘part of a year-long contemplation of the weather. It was initially done to prove to my partner and my eldest daughter, who claimed the weather wasn’t terrible here, that it’s beyond terrible. And then when I looked month by month and started making drawings of them, lo and behold it really isn’t that terrible… It actually cured me of my preoccupation!’

And if, weather permitting, the rugged Kerry surroundings provide plenty of food for ‘meditations’, as she calls her landscape paintings, the house, too, cries out for artistic response. In 2015 Regine did a series of mixed-media works capturing its interiors at night. For these she used part of the shop itself as her canvas: large, brown-paper sacks once containing sugar and made up of at least six layers, which she painstakingly separates into individual sheets, before preparing them with gesso.

The effect of her acrylics, pastels and graphite on this material perfectly reproduces the creased wallpaper, the cracked linoleum flooring.

This is a place that appeals to the senses – and therefore to memories, real and imagined. On the landing, Regine pauses to inhale the tarry smell of bundles of string hanging on hooks. ‘That reminds me of Finland: we used to have a house on a lake and they would tar the boats there.’ (There are other personal coincidences: in one room full of Sacred Heart pictures and other Catholic imagery, she shows me a 19th-century print of a priest in Syria.

‘Look at that! It made me feel so at home when I first saw that.’) Reaching the bottom of the stairs, she swings round the newel post. ‘It’s so natural to do that, isn’t it? Just feel how smooth and polished the wood is, like silk to the touch – all the years of people doing exactly what I’ve just done.’ At the back door, we examine where the O’Neills’ horse rubbed its flank against the doorpost. ‘I feel incredibly lucky to have been allowed to be here in this house,’ Regine says, ‘with so much family history. It’s a great privilege.’ The feeling, one senses, is mutual $ To contact Regine Bartsch, ring 00 353 876 866 448, or visit bartsch.ie/regine

Top left: the master bedroom was once Catherine O’Neill’s, who used to let out rooms to travelling tradesmen or people coming for fairs. Regine often sleeps in this room if she’s been working late, and visiting collaborators, such as Pauline Bewick, have also stayed here. Top right: turf fires heat the water for the house. ‘I wash my hair here because at home down the road there’s so much copper in the water it turns my hair green,’ says the artist. Opposite: cradling a plant pot in the bathroom – once a bedroom – is a highchair given to Regine in the 1970s for her eldest daughter

inspiration Some of the design effects in this issue, recreated by Augusta Pownall 1 2

1 The Saltbox bathes in the Elmley nature reserve’s fine natural light, but after dark, guests will be grateful for the Tinsmiths lamps (page 97). This classic enamel pendant costs £98.75.

Ring 01531 632083, or visit tinsmiths.co.uk.

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Across the water from the Isle of Sheppey, Whitstable-based textile studio Fable and Base produces sustainable fabrics, including ‘Phragmite’. The reed design, used on this cushion (£60), is also seen in the Saltbox on page 98. Ring 07976 367140, or visit fableandbase.co.uk.

3 Two smart wing chairs flank the breakfast

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table in the Stoelties’ gatehouse home (page 42). They picked up theirs in a flea market, but Max Rollitt has one for £8,350, based on a beloved 1690 walnut piece of his mother’s. Ring 01962 791124, or visit maxrollitt.com.

4 Will the peripatetic Stoelties stay put

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in their Flanders abode, given the pains they’ve taken to hang all that wallpaper?

With David Skinner’s ‘Edenderry’ in the bedroom (page 46; £133 approx per 10m roll), we’d be tempted to stick around. Ring 00 353 623 2780, or visit skinnerwallpaper.com.

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Who could curl their lip at this carved giltwood ‘Pavilion’ daybed? Not the Stoelties surely – their Regency example takes pride of place by the fire (page 40). This version costs £13,996 from English Georgian. Ring 020 7351 4433, or visit englishgeorgian.com.

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7 In Roberto Gerosa’s cavernous former fish warehouse, swaths of fabric separate dining

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PHOTOGRAPHY: SIMON WITHAM (2, 4, 6, 7, 10)

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Though screens are normally used as room dividers, the one in the Flanders sitting room instead offers a contrast in colour, as well as a place to hang favourite prints (page 42). Jacqui Cowen’s bespoke partitions start at £2,200 (without fabric), depending on size and number of folds. For the same rich ruby hue, try covering it with (from top) Hainsworth’s red ‘Broadcloth’ (£120 per m), or dark scarlet or bright scarlet ‘Melton’ (£90 per m). Ring 01264 810398, or visit jacquicowen.co.uk. Ring 01132 570391, or visit hainsworth.co.uk.

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from sitting rooms (page 59). High ceilings demand wide stripes – like Clarence House’s blue silk ‘Mikado’ (£727.40 per m). Ring Turnell & Gigon on 020 7259 7280, or visit turnellandgigon.com.

8 Khaled Mahmoud’s mini-model of a mosque (£1,071 approx) is 35cm high and painted bright Klein blue, making it easy to spot in the Milanese warehouse (page 63), despite its diminutive size. Ring Zoom on Art on 00 39 347 389 5473, or visit zoomonart.com.

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9 A bookshelf reachable from bed is quite some luxury. The Italian interior designer-cum-art director’s leaning tower (but in Milan, rather than Pisa) comes courtesy of Bruno Rainaldi. His ‘Ptolomeo’ bookcase (page 64) costs £1,150 from the Conran Shop. Ring 020 7589 7401, or visit conranshop.co.uk.

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Roberto Gerosa is clearly not keen on stepping out of bed on to bare boards, as the carpet and sheepskin rugs on his bedroom floor corroborate (page 65). Think pink when it comes to yours, and snap up this curly Tibetan sheepskin in malaga courtesy of Sheepskinhouse for £149. Ring 020 3868 5161, or visit sheepskinhouse.co.uk.

11 Gilles & Boissier’s ‘Althea’ bed, £15,053 approx, is an elegant yet modern take on the four-poster without any of the fabric fripperies found on older styles. The clean lines suit Isy Ettedgui’s chic Mayfair apartment, decorated with the help of the French duo, where it can be found in the master bedroom (page 77). Ring 00 33 1 45 41 74 23, or visit gillesetboissier.com.

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12 The ironwork banister (page 82) might not be the first decorative feature you spy at the Pagodenburg in Nymphenburg Park, but once you’re finished feasting on the the delft-tiled walls and chinoiserie doors, take a look. Pouenat’s ‘Rampe Classique’ is equally elegant and costs from £1,065 approx per m. Ring 00 33 1 43 26 71 49, or visit pouenat.fr $ 12

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This page: John Michael Wright, John Lacy, c166870, oil on canvas. Opposite, top left: faience charger, 1680. Top right: Charles II’s Bible, 1660. Bottom: Anon., engraving of Charles II, c1661

Restored to the limelight, twisted constructs, plus Charlotte Edwards’s listings

EXHIBITION

diary

ALL IMAGES: ROYAL COLLECTION TRUST/ © HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II 2017

Charles II: Art and Power THE QUEEN’S GALLERY Buckingham Palace Rd, London SW1 At the coronation of Charles II on 23 April 1661, London’s streets burst into colour. Carpets and tapestries were hung from house fronts, city companies processed with banners, and fountains ran with wine. So splendid was the pageant that Samuel Pepys’s eyes were ‘overcome’. Recording the ceremony in his diary (posthangover), he averred that ‘besides the pleasure of the sight of these glorious things, I may now shut my eyes against any other objects […] as being sure never to see the like again in this world’.

It was a stark contrast to the state of affairs Charles had found on returning from exile. The Commonwealth government had sold off the contents of his father’s houses and palaces, from tapestries valued at £2,000 to blankets at six shillings. At the king’s command, goods were returned to the crown – one witness recorded how ‘carpetts, hangings, pictures, medeles, inscriptions, and peeces of art, rich beds, curtines, and vallame [vellum] com in hilter-skilter’ to Whitehall. (The Royal Academy reunites 150 works from this collection in a forthcoming exhibition.) But Charles’s ambitions went beyond mere recovery. His years spent in the courts of Europe, particularly at that of his cousin Louis XIV, had taught him much about expressing magnificence and power through art. At the Restoration, he ensured that the visual arts would create a stage-set for kingship – and play a vital role in legitimising royal authority.

Ritual and display were consequently of huge importance when Charles assumed the throne. The Parliamentarians had melted down the coronation regalia, so he commissioned mace, orb and sceptre anew, while the spectacle of public dining was

enhanced by a dazzling array of plate. Windsor Castle was transformed by the Italian artist Antonio Verrio into a Baroque palace, with paintings on ceilings and staircases representing the king as something approaching a divinity – the diarist John Evelyn thought it ‘stupendious’. A Bible was bound for Charles’s personal use, gorgeously embroidered with coloured silks and silver wire. The message could hardly have been clearer: it was out with Puritan austerity and in with regal splendour for court and church alike.

The Restoration was celebrated in the popular arts, and portrait prints brought the king’s image into ordinary homes. Artefacts, from Delft chargers to inn signs, bore the symbolic royal oak, commemorating how Charles had hidden in the branches of a tree after the battle of Worcester.

Charles also loved art for its own sake, and this exhibition abounds with evidence of his tastes and interests: here are the sleepy-eyed ‘Windsor beauties’, ladies of the court painted in fashionable undress by Peter Lely (‘good but not like’ was Pepys’s judgement). The Merrie Monarch was famously fond of the theatre, and in 1660 reopened the playhouses and decreed that women, not boys, should take female parts.

He commissioned an unusual triple portrait of his favourite actor, John Lacy, in three of his most celebrated roles, and hung the painting in his dining room at Windsor.

Did he, one wonders, overlook rumours of Lacy’s affair with his own mistress, Nell Gwyn? CHARLES II: ART & POWER runs 8 Dec13 May, Mon-Sun 10-5.30 (24 Dec 10-4, closed 25 & 26 Dec) $ SUSAN OWENS is the author of ‘The Ghost: A Cultural History’ (Tate)

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EXHIBITION

diary

FROM TOP: PHOTO: SITE PHOTOGRAPHY; PHOTO: MARIO DE LOPEZ; PHOTO: YIGAL PARDO. ALL WORKS: © MONIKA SOSNOWSKA, COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HAUSER & WIRTH

Monika Sosnowska HAUSER & WIRTH Savile Row, London W1 Artists can be interested in architecture for plenty of reasons, even if they didn’t train that way. There’s the character of building materials, for a start; think of Carl Andre’s emphasis on the qualities of brick. Then there are the aesthetic crossovers between two parallel streams of Modernist practice – the frequent starting point of Ellsworth Kelly’s intense simplifications. Other artists might delve into the psychological effects of the built environment (Bruce Nauman’s charged appropriation of the corridor, for example) or its echoes in history or society (Cyprien Gaillard’s explorations of architectural failure). And, as we all grew up in man-made settings, there are links to personal histories too (a motorway bridge is the designated portal to childhood memories in the work of the 2008 Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey).

The Polish artist Monika Sosnowska engages with all five of these strands.

Returning to her native country in 2000 after studying abroad, Sosnowska crisscrossed Warsaw, photographing the architectural impact of the political upheavals after 1989: hasty, largely cosmetic renovation alongside dereliction and demolition.

These images fed into a sculptural practice that plunged viewers into changed spaces alluding to the dramatic post-Communist reshapings of city and society. For 1:1, at the Venice Biennale in 2007, she buckled a huge black steel frame, based on models for postwar estate housing, to jam it into the classical structure of the Polish Pavilion.

It should look, she said, ‘as if two buildings have been constructed in the same space and have to live in symbiosis, or rather to parasite on each other’. Such a potentially uncomfortable cohabitation suggests how the present cannot entirely escape its past.

In other whole-room installations, Sosnowska’s distortions appear unconstrained by gravity, as if to mock the aspirations of soaring towers. Recently, she has mixed these large-scale interventions with groups of smaller works. This throws more emphasis on the construction materials used – concrete, steel beams, reinforcing rods – and how they have been warped and misplaced (by fabricators, incidentally, who normally make the same objects ‘straight’). Sosnowska subverts the functional logic and underlying geometric aesthetics of her subjects: market vendors’ stands, which seem to have been kicked in (Untitled, 2012), or a fire escape (Stairway, 2010), which bristles insectoidally while leading nowhere. Untitled, 2015, works the other way round: a plant seems to be overtaken by built elements, inverting how nature colonises an abandoned structure.

At Hauser & Wirth, Sosnowska’s forms will emerge from the fabric of the gallery, exploiting a particular advantage of architectural art: it can be integrated seamlessly into its setting, turning site specificity into a natural state. Sosnowska’s surreal and edgily comical parasites will be like larvae burrowing out from within, threatening the very stability of the building and, by extension, society. ‘Architecture arranges, introduces order, reflects political and social systems,’ Sosnowska has said; ‘my works are about introducing chaos and uncertainty.’ That purpose acts as an analogy for the personal and social impact of where we live and have lived; for how – as the artist has put it – ‘architecture creates life, in a way’. MONIKA SOSNOWSKA: STRUCTURAL EXERCISES runs until 10 Feb, Tues-Sat 10-6 (closed 24 Dec-1 Jan) $ PAUL CAREY-KENT is an art writer and curator based in Southampton From top: installation view, 2013, Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery, Canada; Untitled, 2015, concrete, painted steel, installation view, 2017, Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles; Stairway, 2010, metal, PVC, installation view, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel

EXHIBITION

diary 1 1 Hull raisers – Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The Six Paintings about the Temporary Loss of Eyesight (They are Painting the Boat), 2015, at Tate. 2 Wheel deal – Raphael’s St Catherine, c1507, at the National Gallery.

3 Some front – a Sykes and Fowke design for the South Kensington Museum, 2 c1865, at the V&A.

BRITAIN LONDON ALICE BLACK BERWICK ST, W1 Until 26 Jan. Wed-Fri

10-6, Sat 11-4. An economist by training, Adia Wahid makes diagrammatic or grid-like abstract paintings about the conflict between mechanised industry and the human psyche.

AMANDA WILKINSON BREWER ST, W1 Until 21 Jan.

Tues-Sat 11-6. Korean artist Jewyo Rhii never stays in one place for longer than three years, and her art – in this case, a wall-like horizontal sculpture hung with drawings – reflects this sense of precariousness. See the Showroom.

BRITISH MUSEUM GREAT RUSSELL ST, WC2 Until 14

SCIENCE MUSEUM EXHIBITION RD, SW7

Until 3

Jan. Mon-Fri 10-6. Nearly 100 years after Georg

Jensen showed his silverware here, the gallery assembles a sterling show of jewellery and objects by the Danish smith and other Nordic designers. Plus, Ethel Gabain lithographs.

FLOW NEEDHAM RD, W11 Until 13 Jan. Tues-Sat 11-6.

Kaori Tatebayashi translates the gourds, artichokes, lizards and snails of Dutch still-life painting into ghost-white stoneware.

FREUD MUSEUM MARESFIELD GARDENS, NW3 Until 4

Feb. Wed-Sun 12-5. Women who (perhaps con-

trary to Freud’s low expectations) changed the course of psychoanalysis. Princess Marie Bonaparte, an author and practitioner in her own right, arranged Freud’s flight from Nazioccupied Vienna – and smuggled out his antiquities collection to boot.

GAZELLI ART HOUSE DOVER ST, W1 Until 6 Jan. MonFri 10-6, Sat 11-7. Invited to take up a residen-

cy at Harrow School, Jane McAdam Freud found the ‘studio’ on offer was an abandoned junk room. Her new sculptures are made from its odds and ends.

4 Working order – medal, USSR, 1985, at the British Museum. 5 In the balance – a bhughola (‘earth ball’), 1571, at the Science Museum.

6 Sweeping statement – Hassan Massoudy’s work, at the October Gallery. 7 Analyse this – Athena figurine, at the Freud Museum

HANNAH BARRY HOLLY GROVE, SE15 Until 13

Jan. Tues-Sat 11-6. Eight artists respond to JG Ballard’s slippery novel The Unlimited Dream Company.

LYNDSEY INGRAM BOURDON ST, W1 Until 5

6

poised, rhythmical compositions of Iraqi artist/calligrapher Hassan Massoudy.

CECILIA BRUNSON PROJECTS ROYAL OAK YARD, SE1

THE FINE ART SOCIETY NEW BOND ST, W1

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OCTOBER GALLERY OLD GLOUCESTER ST, WC1 7 Dec27 Jan. Tues-Sat 12.30-5.30. Word perfect: the

Mon-Fri 10-6, Sat 11-5. Jadé Fadojutimi’s loose, limber paintings, not so much landscapes, she says, as ‘the façade of a sense of place’.

penetrative photographs of circus performers, one of several series in which she documented (at some personal risk) life on the margins of Chilean society under Pinochet.

4

have extended their loan of Michelangelo’s Taddei Tondo, last shown here in his pairing with Sebastiano, so you can see this breathtaking marble in the context of other works (by Leonardo and Raphael) made around 1500. Until 4 Feb, all four versions of Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s painting Lake Keitele (1905).

Jan. Mon-Thurs, Sat, Sun 10-5.30, Fri 10-8.30. A staggering show on the Scythians counters the barbaric picture painted by early Greek historians. Highlights include a woman’s shoe studded with tiny drilled pyrite crystals, and a coat trimmed with dyed purple squirrel fur. Until 18 March, in the red: money and labour in Communist countries.

Until 19 Jan. Tues-Fri 12-6, Sat 12-5. Paz Errázuriz’s

3

NATIONAL GALLERY TRAFALGAR SQUARE, WC2 Until 28 Jan. Mon-Thurs, Sat, Sun 10-6, Fri 10-9. The RA

Jan. Mon-Fri 10-6. Alien invasion: for his new photographs involving the work of other artists, Miles Aldridge poses otherworldly naked models in Maurizio Cattelan’s installations and invites an eerie mannequin-like stranger to stay with Gilbert & George.

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PIANO NOBILE PORTLAND RD, W11 Until 19 Jan. Mon-

Fri 10-6, Sat 11-4. Vigorous landscapes (Spain,

Israel, New Zealand) by David Bomberg and his pupil Leslie Marr. See Chichester.

PIPPY HOULDSWORTH HEDDON ST, W1 Until 6 Jan.

Until 31 March. Mon-Sun 10-6. The first standardised

weights from the Indus Valley, and the birchbark Bakhshali maths manuscript are on display as part of a season on Indian science.

THE SHOWROOM PENFOLD ST, NW8 8 Dec-27 Jan. Wed-Sat 12-6. Jewyo Rhii and Jihyun Jung in-

vite you to devise stories using their kinetic sculptures as props. See Amanda Wilkinson.

SOTHEBY’S NEW BOND ST, W1 11-19 Jan. Mon-Fri 9-4.30. Visionary coloured-pencil drawings

and cardboard sculptures from the stables of Outside In, the charity for artists excluded from formal training and the gallery system.

STEPHEN FRIEDMAN OLD BURLINGTON ST, W1 Until 27 Jan. Tues-Fri 10-6, Sat 11-5. Sea change: known

for his stylised portraits (he’s working on Obama’s), Kehinde Wiley shows new work inspired by maritime painting traditions.

TATE MODERN BANKSIDE, SE1 Until 28 Jan. MonThurs, Sun 10-6, Fri, Sat 10-10. In addition to in-

stallations, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s first big show in the UK includes paintings made up of fragmented, cropped or layered imagery. Until 18 Feb, a graphic designer’s collection of printed paraphernalia from Soviet Russia. Plus, Modigliani and his models.

V&A CROMWELL RD, SW7 Until 7 Jan. Mon-

Thurs, Sat, Sun 10-5.45, Fri 10-10. Sup-

plement the splashier shows (on opera, Balenciaga) with smaller displays, such as this absorbing history of the V&A’s architecture. Until 28 Jan, jacket required: Folio Society books and bindings. Until 5 Feb, the Woman’s Hour Craft Prize: winner Phoebe Cummings’s dissolving clay fountain, and jewellery made from mudlarking finds by Romilly Saumarez Smith (WoI Jan 2016). 9 Dec-8 April, bear scrutiny: the making of Winnie-the-Pooh.

EXHIBITION

diary

1 OUTSIDE LONDON BELFAST MAC Until 14 Jan. Mon-Sun 11-7. Cheng

Ran’s epic eight-hour film about the disappearances of mountaineer George Mallory, artist Bas Jan Ader, and a Chinese fishing trawler lost at sea for eight months. Plus, for a Hayward Touring exhibition, artist John Walter selects work that adopts a ‘shonky’ aesthetic, privileging the awkward, clumsy or handmade over clean lines and a slick finish.

BEXHILL-ON-SEA DE LA WARR PAVILION Until 7 Jan.

Mon-Sun 10-5. Stripy saucepans, strings of saus-

ages, a hideous baby and the ever-present threat of violence in Jonathan Baldock and Emma Hart’s unnerving take on Punch and Judy shows. Until 28 Jan, spanning the gallery, Roy Voss’s elegantly skeletal wooden sculpture is the ghost of a pier once planned for the Pavilion (but rejected due to its cost).

CHICHESTER PALLANT HOUSE GALLERY Until 28 Jan.

Tues, Wed, Fri, Sat 10-5, Thurs 10-8, Sun, bank hols 11-5. Paula Rego’s sketchbooks. Until 4 Feb,

curated with London’s Ben Uri Gallery, this David Bomberg exhibition emphasises his Jewish identity and engagement with the Middle East. See Piano Nobile, London.

EDINBURGH CITY ART CENTRE Until 18 Feb. Wed-

Sat 10-5, Sun 12-5. Four Scottish-based artists united by an interest in drawing. Until 13 May,

rarely or never before exhibited art from the city’s collection: minor works by major figures, major works by minor figures, anomalies in art history, and new acquisitions.

LIVERPOOL TATE LIVERPOOL Until 18 March. MonSun 10-5. Surrealists in Cairo. See Dec issue.

Plus, John Piper’s peculiarly British interpretation of European Modernism. Plus, in Mary

Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley’s bizarre videos, a cast of historical characters deliver speeches in rhyming verse in painstakingly constructed black-and-white tableaux.

MARGATE TURNER CONTEMPORARY Until 14 Jan.

Tues-Sun 10-5. Over 70 biomorphic sculptures

by Jean Arp (WoI Aug 2012). Plus, troubled waters: Tracey Emin selects turbulent Turner seascapes to team with her 1998 work My Bed. Until 11 Feb, John Davies’s scarecrow-like figures occupy the sea-facing Sunley Gallery.

PORT SUNLIGHT LADY LEVER ART GALLERY Until 15 April. Mon-Sun 10-5. Fifties fashion, as worn by

Liverpudlian couture model June Duncan.

SOUTHAMPTON CITY ART GALLERY Until 6 Jan. Mon-Fri 10-3, Sat 10-5. The East London Group

counted haddock-smokers, park-keepers and window cleaners among their number, and Sickert and Coldstream among their tutors. But how did two of them end up representing Britain at the Venice Biennale?

WAKEFIELD THE HEPWORTH Until 28 Jan. Tues-Sun, bank hols 10-5. The body – whole and in part,

cast in latex or crossbred with inanimate objects – is a site of experimentation in the sculpture of the Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow (1926-73), who spent her teenage years in ghettos and concentration camps.

YORK YORK ART GALLERY Until 15 April. Mon-Sun

SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY Until 28 Jan.

MonWed, Fri-Sun 10-5, Thurs 10-7. Rubens’s c1616

10-5. Collage artist John Stezaker selects ‘uncanny landscapes’ by Paul Nash. Until 10 June,

painting of his rosy-cheeked little daughter is one of his most famous portraits, but a later depiction of Clara Serena, c1623, has only recently been accepted as the artist’s. Equally tender, if rather more wistful, it captures the girl not long before her death at the age of 12.

Until 25 March, think big: Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831) sizes up to William McTaggart’s The Storm (1890).

ceramic artist Sara Radstone’s vessels and mysterious, menhir-like standing sculptures.

Until 21 Jan. Mon, Wed-Sun 10-6, Tues 10.30-6. Exploring race, ‘blackface’

GATESHEAD BALTIC

and media manipulation, Los Angeles artist Edgar Arceneaux recreates a controversial performance at Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. Plus, the artist also curates a group show responding to Martin Luther King’s speech accepting his honorary degree from Newcastle University in 1967. Until 4 March, a new sound piece by Susan Philipsz.

1 Well, this is awkward – Hundertwasser’s Rogner Spa, 1993-97, in Belfast. 2 Model behaviour – June Duncan as a child actor, c1932, in Port Sunlight. 3 Shape shifter – John Piper, Abstract I, 1935, in Liverpool. 4 Bunch up – Anthony Hatwell, Vase of Flowers, 1972, in Edinburgh. 2

3

FRANCE PARIS INSTITUT DU MONDE ARABE Until 14

Jan. Tues-Fri 10-6, Sat, Sun 10-7. Masterpieces of

Christian art from the Middle East.

MUSEE DU QUAI BRANLY-JACQUES CHIRAC Until 21

Jan. Tues, Wed, Sun 11-7, Thurs-Sat 11-9. Trees of heaven: reliquary figures, ancestor heads and spirit masks made in (and hewn from) Africa’s Atlantic equatorial forests. Until 1 April, Peruvian culture before the Incas.

IRELAND DUBLIN NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND

Until 14 Jan. Mon-Wed, Fri, Sat 9.15-5.30, Thurs 9.158.30, Sun 11-5.30. Astonishing water-

4

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colours by the neglected Irish artist Frederic William Burton, perhaps known only for his soppiest, most Pre-Raphaelite painting, The Meeting on the Turret Stairs (1864). Until 11 Feb, William Orpen’s paintings of landscapes mutilated by war.

HARROGATE MERCER ART GALLERY Until

7 Jan. Tues-Sat 10-4, Sun 2-4. Geometric textiles by Yorkshire lass Sheila Bownas (1925-2007). Until 14 Jan, Katharine Holmes re-traces her artist grandmother’s tour of Britain, making new work in the places she painted before her.

5 In the dock – Paul Nash, Harbour and Room, 1940, in York. 6 Go for a Burton – Frederic William’s portrait Mrs George Smith, née Elizabeth Blakeway, 1873, in Dublin. 7 Gift of the Gabon – mask, late 19th century, Upper Ogooué, in Paris

USA NEW YORK PAUL KASMIN GALLERY 293 TENTH AVE Until 13 Jan. Tues-Sat 10-6.

Lee Krasner’s ‘Umber’ canvases of 1959-62: raw abstract compositions in a limited palette, created during insomniac nights in her late husband Jackson Pollock’s studio $ 7

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JOURNAL OF AN ENGINEER

CORE TRUTHS? On 12 October 1992, an earthquake struck Cairo. This seismic event, albeit relatively small, was unusually destructive, causing 545 deaths and injuring thousands. It was the most damaging catastrophe to affect the capital since records began, and it marked the beginning of my adventure restoring Egypt’s pyramids.

Soon afterwards, I was contacted by a Unesco consultant who was helping preserve the city’s historic monuments. He was aware of my structural-engineering company, Cintec International, having used one of our patented systems to stabilise Windsor Castle after the fire in 1992, and charged us with strengthening the city’s Al Ghuri mosque. The project was a great success and was followed by another seven mosques and maq’ads (loggias of Cairene mansions).

Eventually, this was increased to 22 historic structures. Backed by the government, we then helped restore a Pharaonic temple in the Western Desert known as Hibis, before going on to repair part of the burial chamber of the Red Pyramid. This project caught the attention of National Geographic, who filmed the restoration.

We were then asked to assess the damaged ceiling of the Step Pyramid burial chamber, 29m above the sarcophagus up a vertical chamber. Because the original timber beam was falling apart, the ceiling was too. We used our specially designed water ‘airbags’ to temporarily support dangerous hanging stones and inserted our patented structural anchors to permanently secure the masonry.

Despite drilling holes over 4m deep, we never encountered stones more than 40cm wide. This appeared to directly contradict the common belief that the large stones on the outside of the pyramid were used all the way through, leading me to question accepted theories on the construction of these ancient monuments.

The main problem with existing hypotheses is that, from a builder’s perspective, the process would have been more difficult than

it needed to be. Why would the Egyptians have hauled huge stones from kilometres away unless it was absolutely necessary? The core and filling would never be seen, so why use quarried blocks that took time (and presumably money) to extract and transport to site?

In my forthcoming book, I explain why I believe the pyramids consist of three ‘layers’, suggesting that the Egyptians would have used internal ramps in the inner core of the pyramid, building from the inside out. These ramps started in the middle and would have zigzagged across the full internal width, matching the height of the middle-core stones as the pyramid was built. The heavy beams for the roofs of the burial and relieving chambers could then easily be raised and positioned through the side of the pyramid. As most of the inner fill stones were much smaller, they could be easily handled by men with the aid of animals.

This theory explains the ‘mystery void’ recently found in the Great Pyramid of Giza, which, I believe, would have been used as a temporary staging area for the large burial-chamber beams. When they were finally put into position the cavity would have then been filled with lightweight material, which shows up differently in scans.

Though my theory hasn’t been proven, I have been asked to carry out tests on the Bent Pyramid in order to work out how much changes in temperature have affected its outermost layer (thermal movement has robbed the other pyramids of their cladding). I am sure this will also reveal more of the ancients’ secrets.

Over the years I have been lucky to have helped restore some of the world’s most important historic monuments, embracing as I go modern theories to preserve the past. I hope others will join me $ Peter James’s book, ‘Saving the Pyramids: Modern Engineering and Egypt’s Ancient Monuments’, is due to be published by University of Wales in April.

Cintec International. Visit cintec.com

ILLUSTRATION: MAXWELL HOLYOKE-HIRSCH

RESTORING THE BURIAL CHAMBER OF ONE OF THE PYRAMIDS, PETER JAMES FOUND SMALL STONES, A DISCOVERY THAT FLIPPED EXISTING CONSTRUCTION THEORY ON ITS HEAD. TO UNCOVER THE ANCIENT BUILDERS’ SECRETS, HE SAYS, WE HAVE TO LOOK FROM THE INSIDE OUT