Manor 010 issuu 4

The Region’s Premium Publication Late Spring 2016 Issue 10 | £3.95

Architects in the city Plymouth’s building renaissance

Peter Randall-Page As I see it with the celebrated sculptor

Discarded to desirable Shining a light on an innovative Cornish designer

PLUS

CULTURE SPACE FOOD ESCAPE SCHOOL PROPERTY1

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Trebetherick, North Cornwall

A genuine “once in a lifetime opportunity” on Daymer Bay Polzeath 1 mile, Rock 2 miles, Wadebridge 7 miles, Bodmin Parkway 17 miles (London Paddington 3 hours 41 minutes), Newquay Airport 20 miles (All distances and times are approximate) Exceptionally private and sheltered, this is one of the few remaining properties within Trebetherick that has retained its original character and feel since the 1920s. 7 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, 3 reception rooms, garage block, hard tennis court. Direct access to St. Enodoc Golf Course and the beach at Daymer Bay. EPC: E. About 2.6 acres.

Guide Price £3,500,000

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To find out how we can help you please contact us. christopher.bailey@knightfrank.com 01392 976832

Exbourne, Devon

A unique Victorian thatched house immaculately finished with fine rural views Exbourne 1 mile, Hatherleigh 5 miles, North Tawton 3.1 miles, Okehampton 6.1 miles, Exeter 25 miles (Distances are approximate)

To find out how we can help you please contact us. edward.clarkson@knightfrank.com 01392 976832

Set in the most beautiful, unspoilt countryside, within easy reach of Dartmoor and the north Devon coastline. 5 bedrooms including a master suite, 3 reception rooms and conservatory all recently refurbished to an exceptionally high standard. Landscaped gardens including a walled garden and useful stable building. EPC: F. Guide Price ÂŁ895,000

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Contents Late Spring 2016

26 48 PHOTO: MIKE SMALLCOMBE

32 Regulars 13 TOWN MOUSE, COUNTRY MOUSE Correspondence from across the divide

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MANOR CONFIDENTIAL

14 Features 28 REACH FOR THE SKY

How visionary architects are helping to transform Plymouth’s cityscape

Hayne Open Day and Camper Coffee Launch

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AS I SEE IT...

48

RARE PEAR

50

THE BUSINESS

52

OPERATION RESCUE

Sculptor Peter Randall-Page RA

Style & Beauty 14 TRENDS Latin class, and black and white answers

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BEAUTY TUTORIAL

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MY FEEL-GOOD REGIME

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THE STYLE SHOOT

Beautifully designed leather footwear and accessories created in Topsham

Michelmores interviews Ralph Rayner of the Ashcombe Estate

We profile ChoraChori, a charity that rescues, supports and protects trafficked children in Nepal

Into the blue

Cornish wine shop owner Jon Keast

In to flora

Photostory 32 PLYMOUTH’S SUPER STRUCTURES

Andrew Butler’s striking portraits of some of the Devon city’s iconic buildings, old and new

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58 94 66 90 Culture 58 A RIOT OF ART Artist Jimmy Cauty’s miniature dystopian landscape on show in Exeter

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ART WEEK EXETER

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A HISTORY OF ADVENTURE

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SOUTH WEST MUST SEES...

A guide to this special showcase of Exeter’s vibrant visual arts community

Editor and novelist Jane Johnson’s journey from rural Cornwall to Hollywood

Space 90 SAND, SEA AND SKY We visit Sandhills, a stunning architect-designed home on the Cornish coast

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How Cornish-based Skinflint is breathing new life into discarded light fittings

What’s on around the region

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WORTH MAKING THE TRIP FOR...

Cultural highlights from the metropolis

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WORTH STAYING IN FOR...

Quality time on your sofa

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LET THERE BE LIGHT

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SHOPPING FOR SPACE Brazilian blend

100 Q&A Cathryn Bishop of Cornish Interiors

Late Spring 2016

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106 Food 106 A TESTAMENT OF TASTE Recipes from The Jack in the Green’s new book

110 GIFT FROM THE SEA Harvesting seaweed on the Lizard in Cornwall

113 FOOD PIONEER Ian Wellens of The Cheese Shed, Bovey Tracey

114 FOOD IN THREE ACTS The Curator Café and Kitchen, Totnes

116 GRUBS UP Getting the bug for the latest superfood with Cornish Edible Insects

119 BITES Food news from across the peninsula

123 THE TABLE PROWLER ...dines out at The White Hart, Moretonhampstead and The Cove, Falmouth

Escape 126 GLORIOUS GOTHIC MANOR unwinds at the Hotel Endsleigh on the Devon/Cornwall border

132 KERNOW KNOW- HOW Seycat’s Live Like a Local holiday service

MANOR school 136 NEWS IN BRIEF Cornwall’s best young baker; Shebbear’s summer ball announced; musical masterclass at The Millfield; Trinity appoints new Head

138 COUNT ME IN Professor Ruth Merttens offers the seventh part in her series on how to Help Your Child at Home

Property 147 THE BULLETIN Mark Proctor takes over at Knight Frank, Exeter

150 PROPERTY OF NOTE Eagle House, Launceston

159 SNAPSHOT COMPARATIVE A selection of homes under £800,000 in South West and London

Back page 162 BLACK BOOK Secrets from craniosacral therapist Doremi Hayward Vaardal

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is brought to you by PUBLISHING EDITOR

Imogen Clements imogen@manormagazine.co.uk

COMMISSIONING EDITOR

Jane Fitzgerald jane@manormagazine.co.uk

FEATURES EDITOR

Fiona McGowan FEATURES WRITER

Harriet Mellor ARTS EDITOR

Belinda Dillon belinda@manormagazine.co.uk

FOOD EDITOR

Anna Turns food@manormagazine.co.uk

CONTRIBUTORS

Professor Ruth Merttens, Jared Green, Amy Tidy, Emma Inglis, Naomi Price, Sean Vaardal DESIGN

Guy Cracknell ADVERTISING SALES

Rachel Evans, Rae Muscat, Natasha Radford advertising@manormagazine.co.uk

T H E A RT O F F I N E D I N I N G

Afternoon tea at Gidleigh Park Indulge this April with our afternoon tea experience, introducing Executive Head Chef, Michael Wignall’s new take on tradition. £37.50 per person

To book a table, please call 01647 481 357 or visit www.gidleigh.co.uk

Available daily from 3.30pm – 5.00pm.

Subject to availability. Pre-booking is essential.

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THE COVER Hortensia dress, Topshop Unique, £255; Stylist: Mimi Stott; Photographer: Tom Hargreaves; Model: Laura Eve Thyer; Make-up: Elouise Abbot; Hair: Chelcie Grimes; Wallpaper by Little Greene

© MANOR Publishing Ltd, 2016.

MANOR Magazine is published by Manor Publishing Ltd, Registered office: MANOR Publishing Ltd, 52/54 Higher Compton Road, Plymouth, PL3 5JE. Registered in England No. 09264104 info@manormagazine.co.uk. Printed by Warners Midlands plc.

Hello and welcome to The Design Issue of MANOR. It is a quite beautiful edition, very much focused on the aesthetic, but there is also much more to it.

It is interesting to note that these days we are increasingly deprived of a good read – national newspapers in steep decline, the rise and rise of quick views, transient touch bases, texts over emails, 140 character-limited tweets… the assumption is that we don’t want to read, we don’t have time for it. Magazines for the most part have perpetuated this – how many of us have bought a glossy mag, a thick one at that, only to find that within it there is nothing to read – beautiful pictures and ads maybe, plus a lot of PR masquerading as editorial, but nothing that really nourishes us?

After a year of publication, we’ve had a lot of feedback on MANOR, much of it complimenting us on the visual quality of the publication – its design and photography – but what also comes back time and again is quite how readable it is, like readability is such a rarity.

We pride ourselves on having the best journalists in the region. They all deliver great and riveting copy, which in turn stems from their writing about fascinating issues or people, with which the region is teeming.

So with this, The Design Issue, yes, we showcase the wonderful design – both the output and initiatives – that exist and emerge from the South West, but we we also delve into the subject of child-trafficking, with Harriet Mellor’s heart-breaking account of a trade that is rife between Nepal and India, and how a couple in South Devon have created a charity to tackle it, bring traffickers to justice and rehabilitate victims from slaves back into life-loving children.

We shine the spotlight on Plymouth, a city often derided for its lack of architectural appeal, and reveal through Sean Vaardal’s brilliant article that, in fact, the city houses a plethora of award-winning buildings that make it worth looking up when you’re next there. Andrew Butler’s quite breathtaking photostudy of the city clearly demonstrates this.

Whether it be design, food or arts-related, there is much in MANOR to widen the eyes and stimulate the grey matter. After all, we know you need both, as intelligent beings with a hunger to be informed, who appreciate art and stunning photography, and who are equally moved by stories told well. A good magazine should be as visual as it is readable to deliver a sense of fulfilment. That is what we at MANOR always hope to achieve, such that on putting the title down, you’re left feeling enriched by its content and never shortchanged.

(PS. We’d love your opinion. If you haven’t already please do complete our reader survey at manormagazine.co.uk/readersurvey

Imogen Clements FOUNDER & PUBLISHING EDITOR

The views of the writers in MANOR Magazine are not necessarily those shared by the publisher. Unsolicited manuscripts, artwork or transparencies are accepted on the understanding that the publishers incur no liability for their storage or return. The contents of MANOR Magazine are fully protected by copyright and may not be reproduced without permission.

By submitting material to MANOR Magazine, MANOR Magazine Ltd is automatically granted the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right and license to use, reproduce, edit, distribute and display such material (in whole or part) and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed for the full term of any rights that may exist in such content. The contributor acknowledges that material submitted may

be published in any publication or website produced or published by MANOR Publishing Ltd. The contributor agrees not to submit material where they do not own the copyright and where they have not obtained all necessary licenses and/or approvals from the rightful owner.

With respect to any photographs submitted, the contributor confirms that all necessary model and property releases have been obtained from any clearly identifiable person appearing in any image, together with any other relevant consents required.

Prices and details of services and products are genuinely believed to be correct at the time of going to press, but may change. Although every effort is made to maintain accuracy we regret we are unable to honour any incorrect prices or other details that may be printed.

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EXPERTS IN ILLUMINATION

Melt Pendant

BY TOM DIXON

THE SHOWROOM

2 Bridford Rd, Exeter EX2 8QX 01392 677030 amoslighting.co.uk

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TOWN MOUSE, COUNTRY MOUSE Sweetness

Darling...

I have been wondering for some time, just why are we here? What is our purpose? Don’t answer straight away, sweetie, this is a profound question which requires some thought. I have woken today and decided it is, of course, to help one another through the book that is our life. For example, in all my scribblings to you I am helping you come down from your Notting Hill ivory tower and get back to nature. You, my sweet, regale me with stories of life back there with all its materialism and new age angst, so I don’t forget. It is both enlightening and entertaining. I am very aware that there are, of course, those who look down upon us, but I like to think that rather than disapprove they take on board the little hints we drop as to what awaits – we are, are we not, in the zeitgeist? We must, however, carry on regardless, and with that, I mean to tell you that bright, vibrant colour is very high on my agenda. I feel it will inject some warmth into the little abode. And by golly we need it – I am also investing in a stove for the kitchen. I know, it’s almost summer, but this cottage seems to be chilly all year round. It’s Grade II listed, sweetie, say no more. What else? Oh yes, I am turning carnivore and giving all that dairy so popular in our circles a wide berth. From now on it will be insects and grubs, for their super high-protein content. What, didn’t you know? It’s all the rage. Am quite certain Daylesford Organic will be stocking up as we speak. That’s better, I feel so much more at peace talking about the superficial instead of trying to plough the depths. Let’s leave that to the philosophers, shall we sweetness?

Goodness me, I quite agree. Looking down upon us, really! You’re paranoid. Life is a joy and we must not overanalyze. All this naval gazing is a symptom of a privileged existence. Once upon a time we were lucky to scrape a morsel. We had far more to occupy our minds, like survival! We should thank our lucky stars that now, the biggest challenges that face us, me, are whether to go Latin or monochrome this season, and incorporate florals or bright block colour into my room scheme.

As for insects, sweetness – that is a trend that is so far ahead in my book it is not something I am yet ready to contemplate, whatever the health benefits. Seaweed is where it’s at at Daylesford, and for me, quite delicious.

Full of ions and minerals. I shall stay veggie but extend my repertoire from land to sea.

What more can I reveal? Ah yes, blue eyes. Not the crooner, darling, I’m talking cosmetics. I have been experimenting with blue liners and shadows and who’d have thought, it’s rather fetching, even on an old brunette like me. It’s all down to the application, and, of course, confidence! With my new eyes I plan to look up a lot more – there is far too much pavement staring in the city and not enough eye contact. Plus, one misses so much beauty in architecture, don’t you think? Or in your case, trees. I think the absence of sea views and panoramic horizons in the city means we fail to look at the art there is in buildings. Look out, I’m getting too deep, enough of that. I’m off to brighten my eyes and don my soft leather flats then head out for a flat white, eyes right, and left and up.

WHAT’S COOL IN THE COUNTRY?

WHAT’S HOT IN THE SMOKE?

Crabfest 2016, a celebration of crab and seafood, takes place on Sunday 1 May 2016 at 10am in Salcombe, featuring Mary Berry.

From 5-12 June, Somerset House will host ArDe, a contemporary architecture and design exhibition featuring innovative and groundbreaking design solutions for living.

The exhibition, ‘Collect | Modern St Ives and British Art’, at Porthminster Gallery from 21 May – 25 June, featuring works from Ben Nicholson, Sandra Blow and Sir Terry Frost.

Glenn Close as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard at The Coliseum, showing until 7 May.

Radio 1’s Big Weekend at Powderham Castle, Exeter on 28 May, featuring Coldplay, Ellie Goulding and Jake Bugg.

Piquet in Fitzrovia is getting rave gastronomic reviews. An independent restaurant serving a contemporary menu that combines English and French cuisine with a dash of class.

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Latin class Drop earrings, Whistles, £30

Altuzarra SS16

Latin brings a rich vibrancy to style this season – be it flamenco frills or a Kahlo-esque kaleidoscope of colour, there is much Latin influence running throughout all high street lines, picked up from the abundance seen on SS16 catwalks. With its ruffles and fitted lines, Latin offers a punch and certain sexiness that floral lacks. Think Carmen and inject some hot passion into your wardrobe. Compiled by Amy Tidy.

Necklace, Whistles, £30

Earrings, Accessorize, £8

Dress, Michael Ko, £39

Dress, Marks and Spencer, £75

Leather chain pouch, Whistles, £80

Foldover clutch, Whistles, £95 Blouse, Hobbs, £129

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Bora Asku SS16

trends

Dress, Jigsaw, £129

Dress, Hobbs, £229

Top, Red Herring, Debenhams, £28

Gypsy aztec earrings, Accessorize, £8

Coat, Wallis, £55

Sandals, Zara, £69.99

Sandals, Zara, £39.99

Sandals, Dune, £89

Top, Zara, £22.99

Sandals, Dune, £69

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trends

Black and white answers

Erdem SS16

We always reach for white to set off summer skin tones, and choosing monochrome to provide that additional definition remains strong this summer but also endlessly flexible. Wear it in accordance with mood – go for sharp geometric lines to inject purpose or breeze through the day (or night) in an altogether more romantic Victoriana guise. Compiled by Amy Tidy.

Dress, Zara, £19.99

Top, Jaeger, £50

Top, Marks and Spencer

Skirt, Pied a Terre, House of Fraser, £120 Clutch bag, Red Herring, Debenhams, £18 Shoes Dune, £79

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Shirt, Marks and Spencer, £39.50

Top, Zara, £39.99

Top, Topshop LADIES & GENTLEMENS EMPORIUM

Skirt, Marks and Spencer, £69 Raglan blouse, Topshop, £32

CLOTHING FOOT WE AR ACCESSORIES HOMEWARE DESIRABLE COLLECTIONS FROM EUROPEAN LABELS CHOSEN FOR OUR BOUTIQUES INCLUDING: ANNETTE GOERTZ, ISABEL DE PEDRO, SCOTCH & SODA, MAISON SCOTCH,

Top, Jigsaw, £98

VELVET, HOSS INTROPIA, BIBI & MAC CASHMERE, JAMES JEANS AND MANY OTHER EXCLUSIVE COLLECTIONS. Skirt, Topshop, £55

Shoes, Marks and Spencer, £25

BIBI & MAC 56 FORE STREET, SALCOMBE TEL: 01548 843595

MAC’S GENERAL STORE 51 FORE STREET, SALCOMBE TEL: 01548 844621

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Into the blue Although they’re making a strong stand on the catwalk, blue hues for eyes have a reputation for being difficult to get right. Not so, says make-up artist Elouise Abbott, who reveals how to make the most of this top spring trend.

T

aking blue from the catwalk and injecting it into your everyday make-up bag is easier than you think. Blue has often been the subject of much discussion with regards to who can wear it. Should you wear blue eyeshadow with brown eyes? If you have blue eyes, should you wear blue eyeshadow? With a minefield of conflicting rules, blue eye make-up can seem just too risky to wear. But worry not, there is a blue out there for everyone. It’s about finding the right shade, the right product and the application technique for you. Here are some of my top tips to make help make choosing the perfect blue for you easy.

TOP TIPS FOR ALL EYE COLOURS The circle of colour around the iris is called a limbal ring. The limbal ring often has a dark blue-grey tone, which is what makes dark grey and navy eyeliners incredibly flattering to all eye colours. Navy is also softer and less ageing than black liner.

A soft kohl line is your best bet for a more natural look – smudge it out for a smoky eye. A clean modern graphic liquid liner, my favourite at the moment, is NARS Eyeliner Stylo in Atlantic, which is a dark navy tone. The applicator has a super fine tip, perfect for a crisp fresh line.

If you don’t fancy a full-on blue eye, try blue mascara for a fun splash of colour. Subtle, but just enough colour 18

MANOR | Late Spring 2016

to make those irises pop, and it looks amazing no matter the eye colour. Blue mascara is quick, easy and really brings out the whites of your eyes, too. Benefit They’re Real in Beyond Blue is a fantastic tried-and-tested volumising and lengthening mascara.

IF YOU HAVE BROWN EYES Brown eyes, contrary to popular belief, have the most freedom with blue eye make-up. As brown incorporates the whole spectrum of the colour wheel, brown eyes do not run the risk of being washed out by strong shades of blue. This means you can wear any blues you like. Dark navy eyeshadows create the most stunning classic smoky eye, perfect for all ages. Baby blue works well with olive skin and dark skins, but can be unflattering on mature skin. My favourite colour for brown eyes has to be cobalt blue.

Try the Estée Lauder Double Wear Stayin-Place eye pencil in Electric Cobalt. This wonderful kohl glides on, and also has a rubber tip, which you can use to smudge and blend the colour. When using a strong colour remember that less is more. This kohl is great to create a soft, smudged smoky line, or to line inside the waterline.

beauty Encourage tranquil eyes with the cruelty-free botanicals of Lush liquid eyeliner – Calm is a beautiful lightturquoise colour, a perfect contrast for brown eyes. For a classic spring look, apply a bold retro flick.

IF YOU HAVE BLUE EYES Blue eyes are in danger of being washed out by blue eye make-up. The trick is to avoid a blue that is too similar to the colour of your eyes. Darker navy and teal tones bring blue eyes forward. Combine with golds and browns to create a standout look.

Dior eyeshadow palette in (766) Exubrante is my own go-to palette for blue eyes, with its perfect balance of navy, brown and silky champagne gold. I also love the Diorshow colour and contour eyeshadow and liner duo in Iris. This navy eyeliner and iridescent purple-grey eyeshadow

combination creates a wonderful smoky effect perfect for grey-blue eyes.

IF YOU HAVE GREEN EYES Blue can really draw out the yellow and gold tones in beautiful green eyes. I would avoid a pale blue and opt for a deeper turquoise or navy. Combine with pink and purple tones for the ultimate dramatic look.

I love Chanel Les 4 Ombres palette in Tisse Beverly Hills for green eyes. A stunning palette containing a wonderful combination of turquoise, gold, and lilac shades to make green eyes shine.

beautiful fused glass interior pieces, handmade at our cornwall studio. bespoke design service available. galleries at st ives, padstow, fowey and launceston, cornwall and ripley, surrey. www.jodowns.com

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My feel-good regime Jon Keast lives just outside of St Ives in Cornwall.

He divides his time between home life and running his business, Scarlet Wines. Originally from Bristol, he’s been living in this part of Cornwall for nearly 17 years. Scarlet Wines is a wine shop, deli and restaurant that also sells wine to numerous other restaurants in West Cornwall.

I think I love people most of all. I did an engineering

degree but have found I love the contact with people, staff and customers that Scarlet brings. Wine is naturally a convivial sort of product, and serving people eating out, you often see them at their most relaxed and happy. So it seems to suit me.

My home in Lelant is a quiet spot, even when Cornwall is busy. But I really love the countryside of Penwith – there

is something special about the moors, coast and beaches.

Maybe it is the granite scenery and lack of trees, but I think it is a special landscape.

I was vegetarian for most of my adult life but started to eat meat and fish since opening Scarlet Wines. It didn’t

seem right to be serving and recommending food that I had not sampled myself. I think vegetarian food can be very exciting when done well as it requires such a focus on freshness. Perhaps for that reason, I think Italian food is the style I like above all others, although the whole Mediterranean Spanish, Moroccan thing I like.

Particularly small plates and lots of flavours. I like to cook as I find it a way to relax.

I eat out pretty regularly but with selling wine to restaurants, deciding who to visit can be political! Do you

visit the account you want that you don’t yet have, or the loyal customer who deserves your support? Both are valid arguments but there are only so many days in the week.

A lot of people give me energy, but my lovely partner Sarah energises me most of all. Our household varies

from just the two of us, to six including our four teenagers. They are amazing, inspirational and sometimes exhausting! My team at Scarlet are incredible too, it can be a lot of fun just to be at work when we’re busy.

I really like running, so I love being able to find some

time to myself to get out there, ideally on the coast paths, beaches and dunes. I always some back feeling more alive and more relaxed.

My indulgences: a bottle of wine, some good simple food, good company and the time to enjoy all three. Sometimes

the time part is the hardest to achieve. I also think a good old-fashioned night in the pub is underrated.

I love music, so something live is always good for me.

As for drinks, I’m an exploring type of person. I always

look for something new. I think that is needed if you run a specialist wine, beer and spirits business. So, I’m always looking to taste a new grape, new producer or new region.

The only sad thing is that there isn’t always time to go back to the wines I know I love already. Too many wines, too little time.

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The St Ives Jazz Club is a total gem of a place – worldclass music, and you can usually find a great seat. I’m not particularly into jazz so I just turn up and see what is on; 90% of the time I hear something new and fascinating.

Locally, I’m a big fan of The Sandy Acre 7, who are based in Hayle. Chris Ryan’s bands have always been great and this one is no exception. Further afield, I usually try to get

to Glastonbury, and also to Port Elliot festival. The two are something of a contrast...

I am lucky enough to have a resident artist, Iona Sanders, among the Scarlet team. Iona has done an incredible job

this year organising monthly re-hangs at Scarlet. It keeps the place looking fresh for customers and brings new people to us. So, a big thank you to her.

I thought Grand Budapest Hotel was one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time, probably because I enjoyed

the dialogue and Ralph Fiennes’s character so much.

Before that, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for its wonderful understated Englishness. I don’t think Gary Oldman even speaks for the first 20 minutes.

Shopping for basic foodstuff and horrible boring essentials is just a chore so I buy huge sacks of washing

powder and that sort of thing so I can forget about it for ages. When I have time to cook I see buying the ingredients as pretty enjoyable. As for clothes, I am a typical man shopper. I do really enjoy it but I see it as a mission to be accomplished with speed and efficiency.

My favourite place to visit is London. Preferably via the

wonderful sleeper train from Penzance, staying in a decent

hotel and preferably with a few wine tastings to attend.

I couldn’t live there but for a visit it is the perfect antidote to home. I also really like Exeter these days; the centre is lovely now and it is home to my favourite pub, The Hourglass.

There are two main challenges in my business: keeping

good staff and selling wine in a competitive and crowded marketplace. I think humility, good manners, honesty and perseverance are the key to both.

The things I love most about running Scarlet are my staff, my customers and the products we sell. Being there when

it is busy, the music is on and people are having a good time is a huge buzz for me. It’s also seeing the business develop a life of its own. It sometimes feels like a third child, off and running whether I am there or not.

I am shamefully old school in my cleaning routine. So, I don’t use

much other than my favourite old man soap, Wright’s Coal Tar. It’s getting hard to find (for some reason) so I stock up when I see it. It has a lovely clean smell that always reminds me of my dad!

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Hayne Open Day Hayne, an enchanting new events venue in Devon, staged an Open Day on 19 March 2016, along with 20 suppliers which Hayne partners with on events. These comprised caterers, magicians, performers, make-up artists and dressmakers amongst others. The musicians played, the caterers cooked and the variety of rich creativity that abounded within the location’s lovely setting made for a highly entertaining day. Hayne plans to open its doors again for The NGS Open Gardens Scheme on 24 April and 5 June 2016 from 2pm-6pm where there will be cream teas, live jazz and plants for sale. Photos by Katy McDonnell. haynedevon.co.uk

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confidential

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Camper Coffee Launch Event McCoy’s Arcade of Fore Street, Exeter, revealed a new interior at a special launch event in March. Attended by many of Exeter’s businessmen and women, the launch marked a new era in the shopping arcade’s 150-year-old history and also marked the grand opening of The Camper Coffee Company’s first licensed espresso bar. As well as the very best coffee, Camper Coffee treated guests to a menu of coffee cocktails, including espresso martinis. Photos by Jon Pratt. campercoffee.co

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MANOR | Late Spring 2016

confidential

www.barcarchitects.com Hems Studio, 86 Longbrook Street, Exeter, EX4 6AP Tel: 01392 435051 Call us to arrange a free consultation

MANOR | Late Spring 2016

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PHOTO: MARC HILL

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MANOR | Late Spring 2016

As I see it...

Peter Randall-Page RA is an award-winning sculptor and visual artist whose work is informed and inspired by the study of organic form and the natural world. He is renowned for his large-scale pieces, and his most recent major work, ‘The One and the Many’, is on display at Fitzroy Place in London.

I have a huge affection for this part of the world. As a child, my grandparents lived in Looe in Cornwall, so all my childhood holidays were spent in the region. When we started having children, we wanted to move from London to the country. We looked all over the place, but ended up being beguiled by the landscape and special atmosphere of the West Country.

My father was a big influence on my career. I was the only child of two slightly elderly parents and my father made his living as a model maker. He made dioramas for museums: where the background is painted two-dimensional and the foreground is three-dimensional, giving the illusion of depth.

He used to make these things in a shed in the garden and I spent much of my childhood working with him.

I was a curious and solitary child. As a dyslexic child, I couldn’t access information through reading in the way that most people can, so I was thrown back on looking at things. I always carried a magnifying glass and enjoyed looking at the extraordinary patterns and perfection of the way things fit together, both in the organic and the inorganic world.

I only really learned to read properly in my 40s and 50s.

As an adult, I am now a voracious although rather slow reader.

A lot of fantastic opportunities have come my way through happenstance. When I first left art school, I met a sculptor called Barry Flanagan through an old friend who’d sold him a car. I ended up working for Barry for several months in London. He was a highly inspirational person to work with.

Studying natural form and looking at how the world works on a physical level has been my greatest inspiration. I’m fascinated by how those phenomena impact us on an emotional level, so how the world enters our consciousness as emotion as well as knowledge. That’s where I’ve felt the potential in sculpture has been for me.

We all create narratives about our own lives, which gives them a structure and a shape. People in all cultures at all periods of time have tried to breathe meaning into a world that could seem quite arbitrary and meaningless. I’ve always loved being in landscape and coming across those kinds of interventions that aren’t necessarily functional – like wayside shrines in Southern Europe, where you’re walking along a path and come across something that is to do with a spiritual connection with the landscape and the place. I found the same sort of things working in Japan and Korea. And recently, walking in the Himalayas last autumn, I came across amazing objects that people have made which are not to do with physical survival, not to do with agriculture. It’s to do with a kind of genus loci – a spirit of the place.

It’s very easy to feel that human beings are the kiss of death to the natural world. But when you live in a place like Devon, you see the way in which people have worked with the landscape

– building walls, clearing fields, putting up standing stones and crosses. I find that a very uplifting and optimistic phenomenon.

Sculpture is a very particular way of communicating.

We live in a world where we can communicate in such sophisticated ways, mainly through verbal language. I value language a lot – it’s a wonderful way of communicating, from making documentary films to using IT. You could see making objects and then showing them to people as a rather blunt instrument in terms of communicating, but I think it deals with a particular sphere of human experience in an unparalleled way.

Stone, particularly igneous rock, is what the Earth is made of – essentially dumb matter. Congealed magma, it’s just stuff. It has no meaning, other than understanding it on a geological level. So the idea of trying to breathe some kind of human meaning into it is very compelling.

I’ve got a small and brilliant team in Devon. With very big pieces, there’s lots of removal of material and working with machines. Over the years, we’ve established ways of working so that I’m not asking them to make aesthetic decisions on my behalf, but at the same time, I’m able to delegate to them.

Becoming a Royal Academician is extraordinary and meant a lot to me. I had no idea it was going to happen and was extremely honoured and flattered. I’ve always felt a bit of an outsider in a sense. This is partly because I started working in a period when people were predominantly exploring other ways of expressing themselves through performance art, or conceptual art. I was making objects –a traditional way of making art. It’s been quite easy for people to think: why on earth would you be making things out of stone and clay, and drawing with charcoal and ink in the 21st century, when we have all this extraordinary new media? When we moved from London nearly 30 years ago, lots of people thought I was committing professional suicide by moving into the middle of nowhere. So for me, being voted as a RA is a great thing: to feel that my making of objects was acknowledged and valued by my peers – I have been embraced by the establishment in a way.

There’s a place in one’s mind that is quite elusive, but when I’m working and it’s going well, it’s a really special psychological space to be. Once you’ve been there, you want to get back. Although I’m not in that space by any means all the time, it keeps me doing what I do for those moments when I am.

Peter Randall-Page’s solo exhibition of sculpture, drawings and prints, ‘Caught in the Act’, is on at the Gibberd Gallery, Harlow from Friday 17 June to Thursday 1 September 2016. A new two-part sculpture ‘Slip of the Lip’ has just been installed at the Tremenheere Sculpture Garden, Cornwall, continues until May 2017. And in London, his monumental sculpture ‘The One and The Many’ is now permanently sited at Fitzroy Place, as is ‘Shapes in the Clouds II’ in the grounds of Riverwalk House, Vauxhall Bridge which will be open to the public in summer 2016. peterrandall-page.com

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PHOTO: HUFTON AND CROW

Plymouth University’s Marine Building, designed by Burwell Deakins, London

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Reach for the sky Quietly, almost by stealth, Plymouth has been undergoing an architectural renaissance and is now home to buildings winning awards for cutting-edge design. Words by Sean Vaardal.

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ll cities have landmarks that sum up their esprit de corps: Bristol has the Clifton Suspension Bridge; Exeter, its medieval cathedral. But think of Plymouth and a panic can set in as you try to erase Drake Circus shopping centre from your mind – winner of the 2006 Carbuncle Cup “for crimes against architecture”.

Smeaton’s Tower aside, Plymouth has been unfairly perceived as the South West’s architectural poor relation, but over the last decade, a quiet, ambitious transformation has been underway that could turn Plymouth into one of the most vibrant waterfront cities in Europe.

On Union Street, one of Plymouth’s most deprived areas, the Millfields Trust state-of-the art Genesis building has landed like a spaceship amongst the boarded-up shops and dodgy nightclubs. Built by local firms Midas Construction and Form Design Group Architects, the bold glass box – clad in Portland stone and lush vertical gardens – is a celebration of biodiversity and cutting-edge design. Opened last year, Genesis was crowned ‘Building of the Year 2015’ by the Building Forum for Devon and Cornwall. The £4.7 million project was created to provide a new home for small companies and start-up businesses. Genesis has already had a positive effect on the surrounding community, inspiring restoration at the nearby Palace Theatre, which aims to return the derelict Grade II listed building to its Victorian splendour, back when Charlie Chaplin and Harry Houdini topped the bill.

One of the main drivers in Plymouth’s architectural renaissance has been the city’s University. Now ranked in the top 2% of higher education institutions in the world, Plymouth University’s £19 million Marine Building on Cobourg Street is an unrivalled contemporary facility that also houses the Marine Navigation Centre and other prominent marine agencies. The building’s sustainable credentials are enhanced by use of solar gain, natural

ventilation, rainwater harvesting and ‘green roofs’. Across the street, work on Plymouth’s first-ever skyscraper is underway. Beckley Court will be a 22-storey, 78m-high student accommodation block. The top floor will house a sky lounge and common room with dramatic views out towards the Hoe. On completion, Beckley Court will be the city’s tallest building.

The Roland Levinsky building was named by the Huffington Post as one of the world’s most beautiful University buildings. Opened in 2007 as the Centre for Visual Art, it was designed by Henning Larsen, the Danish firm responsible for the iconic Copenhagen Opera House.

Inside is a bustling hub of auditoriums, a cinema, galleries and cafes, connected by multi-level ramps. On the outside, a dynamic wrap of copper sheets stretches from street to sky in a continuous angular façade. As well as being a welcome addition to the developing cityscape, the Roland Levinsky building has become Plymouth’s new cultural and artistic meeting point.

But not all new structures are in the heart of the city.

The Theatre Royal’s futuristic rehearsal centre, TR2, was built on Plym estuary wasteland at Cattedown.

The eye-catching bronze-clad pods beat Sir Norman Foster’s London Town Hall to win Britain’s Building of the Year in 2003. The £8 million project houses the theatre’s production and education programme, as well as local dance companies, joiners, prop makers and wardrobe artists. Judge Dame Antoinette Sibley of the Royal Fine Art Commission said: “It was the overwhelming quality of the spaces which we found so inspiring, and the little surprises which the building throws up as you move around it.” Theatre CEO Adrian Vinken praised architect Ian Ritchie, who was also behind The Louvre Pyramids in Paris: “Ian has designed precisely the influential landmark building which we wanted for Plymouth, a real flagship for development and regeneration.” TR2 also won the Design Excellence award from the American Institute of Architects and

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PHOTO: LLOYD RUSSELL

The Roland Levinsky Building, designed by Henning Larsen

made the prestigious RIBA’s Stirling Prize shortlist, proving that Plymouth can compete with higher-profile cities for ground-breaking architecture.

Despite its bleak concrete skyline, Plymouth is second only to London for listed post-war architectural gems.

Protected buildings include the Le Corbusier-style Westminster Bank Building on Old Town Street and 151 Armada Way, with its green Westmoreland slate, and grasshopper and pelican motifs that won a Premier Award at the Paris Salon in 1957.

As part of town planner Patrick Abercrombie’s 1944 ‘Plan for Plymouth’, the city was transformed from bombed-out wreck to a forward-thinking utopia of its day. Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud called Plymouth’s 1950s city centre “heroic and beautiful”.

English Heritage likened it to medieval York in order to stave off developers’ demolition plans. But by the turn of the millennium, some of Plymouth’s most historically significant buildings were lying empty.

Although Royal William Yard is the largest collection of Grade I listed military buildings in Europe, it was closed during the 1990s until regeneration company Urban Splash and award-winning architects Ferguson Mann brought it back to life. Retaining many of the original features, Royal William Yard has been converted into modern offices, apartments, retail outlets and restaurants.

Opened in 2015, the Plymouth School of Creative Arts sticks out like a sore thumb. Literally. Throbbing red in colour, this metal angular superblock is a building of mesmerising geometries. According to Headteacher Dave Strudwick: “As a school we wanted a building that would provide spaces reflecting our strong and proud specialism around creativity and the arts; spaces that were agile; and studios rather than classrooms, provoking 30

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staff to work in new ways. Having a building that is so different has made sense very quickly to students, who have made very good progress in their learning.” The ‘Red House’ has already connected with the community – the Plymouth Herald includes it in its list of the city’s 10 most interesting buildings. The school is busy in the evenings and on weekends. “For years, this site was just wasteland; now the city is on the front foot.”

Arguably, Plymouth’s greatest asset is its port. The transformation of the Millbay dock area is the city’s largest development since the Second World War. The encompassing high-spec, residential flats and townhouse projects – Cargo, Cargo 2 and Quadrant Quay – have attracted a mix of professional couples, downsizers and first-time buyers. Here, properties are clad in zinc and pre-patinated copper tiles, timber cladding, composite aluminium/timber windows, complete with hip metal balconies. The new King Point Marina opened in 2014, and Millbay will undergo a phased introduction of further waterfront cafes, bars and restaurants, eventually linking the waterfront site to the city centre by a network of new boardwalks and public spaces.

After years of neglect, Plymouth is finally on the up, but other projects have stalled. The redevelopment of the archaic Plymouth Pavilions is long overdue if it wants to attract future headline acts. Plymouth currently has no airport. The old city airport was mothballed in 2011: a situation that cannot continue if Plymouth wants to attract further investment. It is 13 years since David Mackay (the architect responsible for modernising Barcelona in the 1990s) issued his ‘Vision for Plymouth’ clarion call, announcing it “a great city about to wake up and discover itself again”. Mackay passed away in 2014, but not without leaving Plymouth well on its way to becoming the dynamic ocean city of his imagination.

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Over the last decade, a quiet, ambitious transformation has been underway that could turn Plymouth into one of the most vibrant waterfront cities in Europe.

PHOTO: NICK GREGORY - WIDERVUE PHOTOGRAPHY

The Genesis building is clad in Portland stone and features lush vertical gardens

PHOTO: NICK GREGORY - WIDERVUE PHOTOGRAPHY

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So, we asked Andrew Butler for some pictures to support Sean Vaardal’s preceding feature on Plymouth and were so blown away by what arrived in our inbox we decided to make them this issue’s photostory. To look at them you’re reminded of the opening sequence of House of Cards, but this is Plymouth, and Plymouth like you’ve never seen before. As Butler expertly demonstrates, it’s clearly time to take a closer look.

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The Roland Levinsky Building

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The Roland Levinsky Building

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Charles Church with Drake Circus in the background

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School of Creative Arts

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The TR2

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Plymouth College of Art

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Plymouth College of Art

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The Royal William Yard

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The Royal William Yard

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photostory

ANDREW BUTLER Andrew Butler is a commercial photographer working nationally from his base in the South West of England. Andrew specialises in capturing people and their endeavours through a documentary style of photography; his projects include engineering and architecture, motor and vehicle photography as well as corporate portraits and people at work. andrewbutler.net All images Š andrewbutler.net

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Ripe for success From their studio in Topsham, husband-and-wife team Rare Pear make leather footwear and accessories that match design excellence with quality craftsmanship. Words by Caroline Goulden.

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hrough some distinct lack of foresight and a degree of embarrassment, when I arrive to meet British bag and shoe designer Sarah Sherlock I realise I’m carrying my battered old Mulberry wallet and hadn’t dug out a half decent, appropriate handbag for our interview. The co-founder of new footwear and accessories brand Rare Pear is quick to put me at ease, however – dog-eared purses like mine reflect the journey of my life and are something to be treasured and passed on. She then shows me her own purse, in much the same state, and I get my first glimpse of a talented leatherworker who puts a great deal of stock in the material that defines her brand.

“Leather is a gorgeous textile to work with,” says Sarah.

“It takes on a story as you use it, it darkens and gets better with age. I love that.”

Sarah makes up one half of the couple who launched Rare Pear late last year. Together with husband Ben, Sarah is championing British quality and craftsmanship in bags and footwear from their Topsham HQ, having cut their teeth in some of the hottest design capitals and labels in 48

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the world. While Ben worked first for Clarkes here and in Portugal, and then Cat in London, Sarah interned in New York for iconic illustrator Milton Glaser (the man behind the I Heart NY logo) before spending another three years there with Calvin Klein. “Working in New York was the best design education I could have had,” says Sarah. “What I learnt in my three-and-a-half years there has helped me to survive in the fashion industry.”

Meeting at Lacoste in 2005 marked the start of a decade-long dream to have a brand of their own.

Marriage, children, family life and a stint in Amsterdam for Tommy Hilfiger took priority, but in 2015 they made the decision to go it alone. “Ben had a great job as Footwear Development and Production Director for Tommy Hilfiger so it wasn’t an easy decision to leave,” says Sarah. “But Rare Pear is a dream we’d had for a long time. We knew we wanted to make shoes using honest materials, beautiful design and traditional construction, and to do it in a place we loved.”

And that place is tucked down an alley a few yards from the Exe Estuary where, on a sunny spring morning,

feature I walk into the Rare Pear workshop to find bolts of leather in beautiful pastel shades stacked alongside drawers crammed with jewels, bows and vintage buttons.

It’s an inspirational sight, and Sarah’s natural eye for colour, pattern and texture is evident as she talks me through the new Spring/Summer 16 collection. “We’ve gone for pops of colour that complement the honey tones of the leathers,” says Sarah. “Bright zips help frame the gentle metallics of the Georgia cross-body bag, while my current passion for hair-on-hide in soft greys and pinks makes this season’s Wisley cross-body really shine.”

Picking up a muted gold Everyday Mae clutch bag I’ve had my eye on since I walked in, it’s obvious that these guys are at the top of their game. The leather is unbelievably soft – it really needs to be touched to be believed. “Love and care go into every bag or pair of shoes we make,” Sarah says, smiling. “Attention to detail and a passion for making the highest quality products are at the heart of what we do and it’s a standard we’re extremely proud of.”

The finished product is certainly exceptional and belies the couple’s grounding in some of the world’s top design houses. Each bag has beautiful bridal leather tabs and a hand-stamped Rare Pear logo. What’s more, there is a certain exclusivity attached to a Rare Pear piece.

“The collection is organic but with timeless pieces at its core,” explains Sarah. “Ben might use a couple of vintage buttons on a classic pair of our flats, or a suede that’s come off the last of a certain bolt, and you know that you’ve created a signature design but also a one-off.”

The challenges of family businesses are well documented, and I ask Sarah about the approach they take to collaborative design. “Ben translates my madness into beautiful products,” she says, laughing. “The biggest satisfaction I have is when Ben listens to a suggestion and goes away and makes exactly what I had in mind. He understands my aesthetic and it’s why I love working together.”

But are there any reservations about turning their backs on our fashion capital to set up in the South West?

“We made a conscious decision not to set up Rare Pear in London,” says Sarah. “There’s a perception that if a brand is not based there it must somehow be behind in style and thinking, but this is a huge misconception, particularly now. For us, it’s about making something we love in a place that inspires us.”

What London has missed out on, Devon has gained, with Ben and Sarah flying the flag for great, honest craftsmanship that looks fantastic and appeals to a wide age range. Made using Italy’s finest veg tan leather, personally sourced by Ben, and with the softest kid lining, the shoes are stylish and understated and it’s fascinating to hear that the person Sarah would most like to see wearing them is Liv Tyler. “She’s classically beautiful but with an edge,” says Sarah. I think that sums Rare Pear up perfectly.

Rare Pear is a dream we’d had for a long time. We knew we wanted to make shoes using honest materials, beautiful design and traditional construction and do it in a place we loved.

Ben and Sarah Sherlock

Veg tan leather is personally sourced by Ben

rarepear.co.uk

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The Business

Each month, Michelmores shines the spotlight on an inspiring South West business, uncovering the real people behind the success. This month we meet Ralph Rayner, third generation owner of Ashcombe Estate near Dawlish in Devon. Six years after taking over the reins at Ashcombe, Ralph shares the triumphs and the challenges of running the versatile 2,000-acre estate, which includes working farms, a holiday cottage business, adventure centre, shoot and much more.

Portrait by Matt Austin.

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promotional feature Tell us about your business Ashcombe was purchased in 1932 by my grandfather Brigadier Sir Ralph Rayner MBE, who later became MP for Totnes. It has been running as a farm and sporting estate for hundreds of years, but the diversified businesses on the estate were all started by my father.

The holiday cottage business opened in 1997. We currently have 12 large cottages sleeping 136 people which are rented out all year round. We’re in a great location, four miles from the beach, close to Dartmoor and Exeter, with fantastic access to the rest of Devon. The estate itself is set within a secluded valley, and it’s very picturesque – even if I say so myself!

The Ashcombe Adventure Centre, has been running for 26 years and offers clay pigeon shooting, paint balling, quad-biking and many other ways of getting muddy.

Farming is still a key part of the estate, with about 1,000 acres of working farmland, which is used for both livestock and arable crops.

The estate has three core businesses, and employs over 80 people from the village and surrounding areas.

How did you come to take over the estate?

My wife and I moved back to live in Devon from London in 2010, to take over the running of the business after my father retired. I was a fund manager and my wife a corporate lawyer. It was quite a change, but great to get back to our roots – my wife is also from Devon originally.

What is your focus for the business now and for the coming few years?

As is often the way in the hospitality industry, we are constantly updating our holiday accommodation. This is quite a task as the accommodation is let to holidaymakers all year round. We have renovated many of the cottages over the last few years and the work continues.

We are also updating our tenanted cottages in the village, where many of our staff live.

We’re striving to make the estate as efficient as possible, to ensure it continues to be a place that people want to live, work and visit.

What have been the key moments of success so far in your tenure?

In the last year we successfully rented out land for a solar farm to bring in essential income, our newly resurrected Ashcombe Cider won a gold medal at ‘Taste of The West’, and the shoot had its best ever season. We also recently received a Gold Award from English Country Cottages for a 100% perfect feed-back score.

The Ashcombe Scuffle off-roading event has also been a great success for the last five years, bringing lots of people to the estate. It’s really popular in the off-roading calendar, and raises thousands for our local church every year.

I’m always looking to improve and progress things − my expectations are quite high! My approach is to grow things steadily and organically, slowly but surely improving the existing businesses to make them work.

Do you have any advice for someone thinking of setting up their own venture?

Running this business requires strong time-management – something I’ve certainly developed over the last six years.

As a multi-faceted business, we have to keep an eye on all aspects, to make sure everything is always working efficiently.

I would say that making an effort to manage your time well, and learning to delegate in any industry, really pays off.

Have there been any bumps in the road?

Running an estate as a viable business is never without its challenges. When you are doing well in one area of the business, something will knock you back down in another − constant property and land maintenance is certainly a common theme. At the end of the day it’s all about balance, and accepting that we are custodians of the estate for the next generation. My duty is to pass it on to them in a better state than we found it.

Do you see your business as a job or a lifestyle?

A lifestyle or possibly ‘a way of life’ – because the estate is more than a business. It’s a real community. We employ our staff all-year round which is quite unusual in the hospitality industry. Most of the tenanted cottages could be described as ‘affordable housing’ as the rents we charge are far below market, but we have greater responsibilities.

Living and working on the estate, what do you do with any spare time?

Living here allows me to indulge my love of photography.

There are some very special landscapes which I get to capture. ashcombecottages.co.uk

The Cider Barn at Ashcombe

Michelmores is a Top 100 law firm supporting individuals, businesses and institutions in the private wealth sector for over 125 years.

“Michelmores is a powerhouse in the UK. They have invested both time and capital in the building of a strong team providing top quality private client work.” Judging panel, STEP Private Client Awards 2014

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Founder of the charity ChoraChori, Bev Holmes and her husband Philip rescue, support and protect trafficked Nepalese children and, where possible, pursue the imprisonment of traffickers.

Harriet Mellor went to meet them at their home in South Devon. Pictures courtesy of ChoraChori.

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Bev and Philip Holmes

Shailaja (left) and Bev with the first arrivals at the ChoraChori Kathmandu refuge

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ike many families in the remote lowlands of South Nepal, eight-year-old Amit’s parents were probably sending their son away to work in India out of financial necessity. The tiny boy’s ‘home’ for the following year was hard labour in a handbag factory in Bangalore, where, predictably, none of the promised wages materialised to supplement Amit’s family back in the Bara District. The owners would say they were giving him a job and a home, but the UK would call it enslavement. Amit had become one of the thousands of Nepalese children who fall victim to traffickers each year.

He was rescued and placed in a boys’ home in Bangalore. At nine years old, he was physically safe, but psychologically harmed and devoid of nurture; a better outcome than seven days a week in a handbag factory, but without any way of returning to his parents, or of even tracking them down, it came to feel like a prison.

Amit’s story has a rare but more fortunate outcome.

In March, he became one of 17 boys who made it back to Nepal thanks to the tenacious dedication of a charity whose mission is to rescue trafficked children from India.

The operation was carried out with boots on the ground from an outreach team in Kathmandu, and masterminded from the unlikely location of a South Devon coastal village where local mobile phone reception is patchy but a global Skype connection is a lot more reliable.

Bev Holmes is the founder of ChoraChori, which is the Nepali word for ‘children’. Along with her husband Philip, who is Nepal’s leading anti-child-trafficking expert, they engineer the rescue, rehabilitation and repatriation of the victims, with an ultimate aim of stamping the 40-year-old practice out. Their mission statement reads: “To rescue, support and protect trafficked Nepalese children from India, empowering

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To see how a withdrawn and quiet child, whose main experience of adults and daily life was one of cruelty and unkindness, gradually emerge into a buoyant, happy, fun-loving person was wonderful. them and their families to give evidence leading to the imprisonment of all known major traffickers thereby preventing future trafficking.”

“It’s very difficult to escape,” says Bev of the recent rescue mission. “They’re in a country where they don’t know the language or how to get home. Some of the trafficked Nepali children who’ve escaped end up in Child Welfare Committee homes, which are correctional centres. We need to get them out of there because noone else is coming to get them. In fact, many kids run away from there too.”

Working on the ground in Kathmandu is Shailaja, who Bev describes as “such a rare person – one in a million. For us she’s the lead player in the whole thing – she has this amazing ability to analyse the human dynamics, what is happening in a Nepali family, community or village, and work with the situation. If she wasn’t there I’d have stopped the project in Nepal a long time ago.”

To the outsider, the dominant image of Nepal is one of breathtaking beauty, trekking up the world’s highest mountain peaks, with a constant backdrop of vibrant colours and sounds, and beautiful children.

But life for those who are both poor and rural is not an idyllic experience. Even in 2016, human value is still diminished by gender and caste discrimination. Added to that, alcoholism and marriage break-downs change family circumstances, and it’s in the Nepali culture to seek work elsewhere. The porous Indian border provides an easy exploitation route for those young, excess mouths to feed.

How Bev came to be linked to Nepal and Philip is an incredible story. He was a Lieutenant Colonel army dentist whose first wife, Esther, spiralled to such a dark place as a result of infertility that she took her own life. Esther was a social worker and later a judge, and the couple had lived near a Nepalese community in the UK. They also sponsored a Nepalese child through ActionAid. Determined that Esther should be associated with a fitting legacy, Philip quit the army and set off to Nepal where his charitable work began to take shape, releasing children from Nepalese prisons. A sentence for a parent meant incarceration for their offspring – either stigma or lack of family meant there was no-one left on the outside

Amit, aged 10, overjoyed to arrive at the ChoraChori refuge in Kathmandu

to care for them, consigning them to a life locked up with prisoners, and deprived of a childhood.

Philip’s story and work appeared in a broadsheet that was picked up by Bev; then a television producer asked him to appear on the daily show she was on. “I thought it was an amazing article,” says Bev. “It really struck a chord, because it was about turning your life around from something really awful happening to building something really positive. My interests were well beyond television at that point and the idea of this one man who was getting these children out of prisons at that stage was riveting.”

Bev kept in touch with charity updates, felt compelled to help, and eventually the acquaintanceship became a relationship. In the meantime, Philip’s involvement went from proactive volunteer with a laptop to developing an official charity of which he was CEO. Having conquered the prison system, Philip turned his attention to circus trafficking – a practice that was prolific in India.

Philip explains how he became immersed in and compelled to make a difference to a horrific system that took place behind a cutesy facade. “Nepali girls were sought after because of their exotic looks and lightskinned beauty,” he says. “Their parents would be tricked into 10-15-year illegal contracts with a thumbprint – or sometimes the price of a bottle of whiskey. Once inside MANOR | Late Spring 2016

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The whole purpose of this and everything that we do, from research to rescue to repatriation to rehabilitation, is that all those things will lead to finding the actual traffickers and putting them in jail.

A mother overjoyed to be reunited with her boys whom she believed to be dead

This mother promised the ChoraChori team that she’d never send her son to India again

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the high metal circus fence, they couldn’t get out and risked death, or certainly severe beatings, if they did.

They performed their circus routines three times a day, seven days a week. Up from 4am until midnight. It was unrelenting physical and sexual abuse. We were the first to research this in 2002 and then thought ‘what are we going to do?’ Carry out rescue operations and bring these kids back.”

With this work in progress, it made sense for the couple to base themselves in Nepal. The two-year plan stretched to eight, and Bev developed her own role to complement Philip’s work.

Along with fellow worker Shailaja, they provided the rescued children with the educational and therapeutic support they so badly lacked. “I worked every day with the scores of kids we looked after, aged three up to 18 years old, kids from prison, street kids and trafficked kids from the Indian circuses,” says Bev. “We ran activities that were not only fun and creative but were of enormous benefit to these kids who had very little and who’d been badly abused – in circuses and elsewhere – many of whom suffered from PTSD. To see how a withdrawn and quiet child, whose main experience of adults and daily life was one of cruelty and unkindness, gradually emerge into a buoyant, happy, fun-loving person was wonderful.”

Bev and Philip were devoting their professional life to rescuing children, but on a personal level they very much wanted to bring up their own, especially those who needed a home. “Even before meeting Philip, I’d thought about international adoption. It felt extra meaningful that there were already kids who really needed the love.”

So the couple embarked on the lengthy process with the complicated Nepalese system and eventually adopted a baby daughter. Nepal then ceased international adoption in the country before once again changing the law to one child of each sex. After a painful but patient negotiating of the red tape, a toddler boy followed a few years later.

During 2004-2011, up to 350 circus kids were rescued, with many of the traffickers brought to trial.

A change in the law, circus raids and a 20-year prison sentence was enough of a deterrent for those still in business to cease trading. Many of those who went down did not go quietly. During the final year, Philip went head-to-head with intimidation, political corruption and full-on attack but they managed to wipe out the practice of circus trafficking. With their mission accomplished, it seemed timely to relocate with their own kids.

“The Himalayas are a very special place, so I wanted to come and live somewhere I saw equally as special for a childhood in the UK,” says Bev. “South Devon has very wild natural coast and countryside. I’d had teenage holidays there, and been to Exeter Uni.” The Nepal connections continued. Whenever possible, they went back with their children – roots and dual heritage are paramount to their parenting – but for

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Shailaja (far left) with the first 26 boys to be brought back from Delhi, rescued last Christmas

Bev something was lacking: the pull of Nepal and her own drive to charity work. Which is how she initiated the charity ChoraChori.

“My kids were growing up, I missed Nepal and my work there so much,” she says. “I wanted to rebuild that connection again alongside Shailaja. I’m involved with welfare of the kids, understanding the needs of schools in Nepal and village communities, sourcing and coordinating volunteers, filming and photography of projects. Philip also works alongside and we bring different strengths, overlapping to support and guide our Nepal staff. He does the strategic planning, fundraising, communications and, obviously, the legal know-how, governance of the charity, and financial management.”

Philip is equally as passionate in continuing and evolving the Nepalese work: “The whole purpose of this and everything that we do, from research to rescue to repatriation to rehabilitation, is that all those things will lead to finding the actual traffickers and putting them in jail. If you find the victims, bring them back, protect them, support them and gain their confidence, then they’ll give evidence against the traffickers. And just as with the circuses, we can hoover up the traffickers, put them in jail and the trafficking stops.

“Even though life changes, I’m still trying to resurrect the maximum that you can out of the terrible trauma of my first wife. Then, as time goes on, there’s other motivating factors such as how Bev and myself met, and setting an example to my children feels really important – that hopefully they could be proud of what their parents are doing and maybe put something back in themselves.”

ChoraChori officially started in early 2015, followed a few months later by the 8.1-scale earthquake that annihilated 8,000 people, and vast swathes of buildings and places. It also created a generation of orphans.

As a result, funds and the umbrella of support were immediately extended.

“We’re currently rebuilding our third school in the little villages near Kathmandu. They are very remote and so hard to reach – many lost entire homes or floors of their buildings. We also provide Temporary Learning Centres and school lunches for 85 kids.”

Entirely on their own initiative these refuge boys began modelling the home of their dreams

The rebuilding – with earthquake-proof structures – is only part of the problem: faith has been replaced by fear. “People are really psychologically affected,” says Philip. “A second big earthquake on 25 May shook them up even more than the first. And there have been 450 aftershocks since.”

As a charity, needing and raising money is neverending and ongoing. The couple has taken up marathon running for the cause, plus they’ve been given a boost with some current and significant benefactors.

ChoraChori is featured in an episode of Undercover Angel, a series by Nat Geo People, aired internationally in May, where some of the world’s wealthiest and most successful business people go undercover to make a difference in the lives of underprivileged communities across the globe. Also, three cyclists are currently pedalling 7,000km from Shanghai to Kathmandu to provide ChoraChori with £50,000 to build a refuge to accommodate the next intake on their rescue hitlist.

“Our next phase will literally be ‘kicking down the door’,” says Philip, “which is a central part of our work removing girls from domestic labour. They find it harder to run away – we hope to physically remove them from imprisonment.”

chorachori.org.uk

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EXETER, YOUR NEW SHOWROOM IS OPENING SOON...

Discover your new showroom which includes Breitling and TAG Heuer branded areas as well as a selection of Fashion Jewellery and Watches.

OPENING MAY 2016 Goldsmiths Exeter 12-13 High Street, Exeter EX4 3LH

www.goldsmiths.co.uk

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Culture Aftermath Dislocation Principle comes to Exeter as part of Art Week Editor and novelist Jane Johnson | South West must sees Worth making the trip for | Worth staying in for

Sydney by Jane Cope. Jane is taking part in Exeter Open Studios, 14-15 May, 10am-5pm.

You can visit her studio at 7 Parkfield Way, Topsham EX3 0DP janecope.com

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As part of the inaugural Art Week Exeter (9-15 May), a secret city location will host the Aftermath Dislocation Principle – a miniature dystopian landscape inside a 40ft shipping container. Words by Belinda Dillon.

Photos by Thomas Mayer.

Gallows and Searchlights

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A

truncated flyover juts brokenly into midair against a backdrop of abandoned tower blocks. A DHL lorry rests amid the crumpled remains of a McDonald’s drive-thru, its golden arches in bits. And everywhere there are police cars and riot vans; officers in high viz jackets swarming around crashed vehicles and smashed concrete in bursts of yellow. This vast 1:87-scale landscape is a model village from hell; a dystopian urban nightmare depicting a postevent world where the only people left are the cops and media crews. As one officer teeters at the lip of a chasm, we infer that he is not just peering over the precipice but is staring into the abyss – because without civilians, there is no one left to police.

culture Created by musician-turned-artist James Cauty (in collaboration with L-13 Light Industrial Workshop), the Aftermath Dislocation Principle (ADP) is an art installation brimming with gallows humour and political bite. A vast spread of fantastically detailed and realistically dramatized narratives made from traditional model-making components, it evolved from a previous series of works called ‘Riot in a Jam Jar’, which mimicked the way in which the media focus on and magnify single scenes from episodes of civil disturbance; simplifying and sensationalizing complex situations into bite-size nuggets for mass consumption. But whereas the jars depict confrontations between officers and civilians, the ADP reflects a world where only the police and media remain. “The ADP is an observation of an unexpected outcome when the state takes control,” says Cauty.

Protest has always been an important aspect of Cauty’s work: following the frenzy around allegations of Saddam Hussein’s access to chemical weapons, Cauty produced ‘Stamps of Mass Destruction’ – a collection of various denomination stamps featuring the Queen wearing a gas mask; in 2007 he responded to the US troop surge into Iraq with ‘Operation Magic Kingdom’, a series of images showing US forces wearing Disney masks; ‘Smiley Riot Shields’ are ex-police riot gear painted with a yellow smiley face. While he doesn’t claim to offer solutions to the problems of the modern world, Cauty creates work that illuminates clearly that all is not what it seems. “Recently I spent three months making a utopian tower of babel called New Bedford,” he says. “On the surface it would appear the builders are creating something positive, but scratch the surface and other things are going on…”

The installation itself – housed in a 40ft shipping container with peepholes drilled into the exterior for ease of viewing – has taken Cauty’s team of 33 volunteers, helpers and staff around 147,000 hours to complete, which includes gathering materials and locating specific components necessary to build a landscape that is so detailed and intricate. “Most of my time spent around model making is taken up with creating and maintaining the landscape in which the narrative can take place,” says Cauty. “Surprisingly little time is spent creating the scenarios within the landscape. When I see large groups of police officers in real life standing around at events, there is a tendency to want to pick them up and reposition them, or change the angle of their heads or just chuck them all in a box and put the lid on. Other people who have spent time around the ADP have noted a similar unsettling effect: it’s as if the real police force are now somehow diminished.”

The ADP tour is visiting sites across the UK that have witnessed civil disobedience, so launches at Bruton Art Factory (scene of the 1831 Reform Act Riots) on 23 April, then on to the Trinity Centre in Bristol (various since the 1793 Bristol Bridge Riot) from 29 April, and arrives in Exeter on 9 May, before heading on to another 30+ locations. Exeter is on the roster thanks to the Bread Riots

of 1854, which saw a crowd of 200-300 people (mostly women and children, according to the Exeter Flying Post’s reports of the event) protesting against rising food prices.

At each stage of the tour there will be the chance to engage with documentary material about the making of the piece, as well as literature on the history of civil insurrection in the UK, and its cause and effect on social order.

As with Cauty’s previous works, audiences can acquire individual parts of the installation. “There will be things for sale on the UK Riot Tour, from glow-in-the-dark riot shields to chunks of the ADP we had to cut off so we could fit it into the container,” says Cauty.

What does Cauty hope the installation will instil in the current population of Exeter? “We hope to engage young people with the work who would maybe not be interested in going to a gallery or museum,” he says. “Seeing the ADP might discourage them from engaging in ultra violence or antisocial activities like joining the police force, or it may have the opposite effect – we just don’t know. It’s an experimental touring off-grid artwork… anything could happen.”

The Aftermath Dislocation Principle will be in Exeter during 9-15 May. For full tour details and dates. jamescauty.com

Junior Insurgents Escaping

The End of the Road

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Art Week Exeter

A city-wide arts initiative, AWE sees arts professionals and organisations collectively curate and facilitate events and installations to showcase Exeter’s vibrant visual arts community. Exeter’s Culture Director, Martin Thomas, says: “AWE is a brilliant opportunity for residents and visitors to immerse themselves in culture. Dozens of artists and venues have come together to get Exeter buzzing with creativity. Get involved and enjoy great art in a beautiful city.”

Exeter Open Studios Across the city, artists and makers throw open the doors to their workspaces and invite the public to swing their beaks around all manner of creative output. Free brochures are available at Exeter TIC and city arts venues, but you can also visit openstudiosexeter.co.uk for a comprehensive list of participating artists and their locations.

Friday 13 – Sunday 15 May at various locations

Museum of Contemporary Commodities MoCC is a digitally networked arts project exploring the deep links between data, trade, place and values that shape our everyday lives. Visit the city centre MoCC shop-gallery (10am-6pm, Wednesday - Saturday between 4-21 May, location tba) to add your own things to the museum and converse with a talking-doll museum guide and commodity expert called Mikayla; on 6-7 May the shop will host Devon Rescue Dolls to show you how to hack Bratz and Barbies. From 10 May, artist Louise Ashcroft will be exhibiting Discrete Infinity

Sensory tea cup ‘contraption’ by Autonomous Tech Fetish

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at Exeter Phoenix’s Gallery 333, and running drop-in workshops open to all ages that invite you to Re-make the Internet out of paper on 13 May, 10am-2pm, at Sid’s Cafe, St Sidwell’s Centre, and 11am-2pm on 14 May at Exeter Phoenix. From 4 May, Exeter Library’s FabLab will host Autonomous Tech Fetish’s DIY digital ‘contraptions’ in advance of running their Data Buffet: All You Can Input and Maker Workshop on 20-21 May. 25 April – 21 May at various locations. Visit moccguide.net for further details

culture

Sean Lynch The Weight of the World is a solo exhibition by Irish artist Sean Lynch, featuring three new video commissions and the UK premiere of the projected video element of Adventure: Capital, which represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2015. Split across two venues – Exeter Phoenix and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery – Lynch’s new works are directly informed by artefacts from the museum’s collection of over one million objects, in particular its recent acquisition of the Seaton Down Hoard, one of the largest hoards of Roman coins ever found in Britain, discovered by a metal detectorist in east Devon.

From 14 May at RAMM and Exeter Phoenix. rammuseum.org.uk, exeterphoenix.org.uk

Adventure Capital, 2015 by Sean Lynch PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE ARTIST, KEVIN KAVANAGH GALLERY, DUBLIN AND IRELAND AT VENICE

TOPOS From 12 May, TOPOS Exeter is showing art-article by Berlin-based artist and curator Konstantin Bayer – an exhibition that invites audiences to follow the artist’s plans to build an installation out of things bought through Amazon. This will be accompanied by a TOPOS discussion event on Friday 13 May at 6pm.

See toposexeter.uk for further details and location information

NOSE Now in its fifth year, NOSE started out as the popup fringe event to Exeter Open Studios but has since grown into its own peculiar personality. Aiming to present contemporary art interventions in public spaces, NOSE2016 is presenting work on the theme of ‘Trade and Exchange’. Details were still being firmed up as we went to press, but one confirmed installation will be the Art Vending Machine (at the Bike Shed Theatre) where you can purchase original pieces of artwork by regional artists, crafters and makers, priced from £1. And on Sunday 15 May, at Barnfield Crescent 10am-4pm, the Art Car Boot will provide the perfect opportunity for a good old rummage – expect original artwork, vintage and ephemera, plus a pop-up cocktail bar, street food stalls and entertainment.

9-15 May at various locations. See nose2016.wordpress.com for more details

Art Vending Machine

For full details of everything that’s happening during and around Art Week Exeter, visit artweekexeter.org.uk

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Like the epic Icelandic tales adored by editor and novelist Jane Johnson, her own story winds its way from a rural childhood in Cornwall through to the worlds of publishing, rock-climbing and blockbuster movies. Words by Fiona McGowan.

O

ne of the pivotal moments of Jane Johnson’s life came 11 years ago, when, as a successful editor at Harper Collins, she took a trip to Morocco to research a novel that she was writing – and to do a bit of climbing in the dramatic Atlas mountains.

The novel was to be based around the extraordinary story of a congregation of Cornish villagers who were kidnapped from their church by a band of Barbary pirates in the 1600s, and sold into the white slave trade in Morocco. She wanted to find out about the culture of the Berbers and get a handle on the life they might have led. After a few weeks of dragging her climbing partner Bruce around while she did her research, they headed to the tucked-away town of Tafraoute, popular in the winter months with walkers and climbers in search of some summer sun. There, they planned to tackle an intimidating face called The Lion’s Head – an endeavour they thought would take all day. The evening before they set off on the route, they joined some climbers at the best restaurant in town.

“Abdel, the owner, opened the door to us in turban and robes – looking the absolute picture of a man from several centuries beforehand,” Jane says. “I turned to Bruce and said, ‘That’s my Barbary pirate chief.’ He had considerable bearing. He made quite an impression.”

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By late afternoon the next day, Jane and Bruce were in a bit of a pickle. Hundreds of feet up the cliff, they had reached a big overhang, under which they had to do a “delicate traverse with a big yawning void under our feet”.

Jane led the way, only to discover that recent unseasonal rains had washed a mudslide across her route. Retreat was the only option, but with night closing in fast, there was no way they could abseil back to the ground. Realising they would be ‘benighted’, they lowered themselves into a nearby gully and Jane called the only person in the area whose number she had: Abdel at the restaurant. She told him that they were safe, but would not be returning that night. “We passed a very, very chilly night. T-shirts and jeans and nothing to eat.” The next day, after safely abseiling to the ground, Jane and her climbing partner prepared to leave for home, stopping off at the local souk for some last-minute shopping. It was here that Jane was approached by Abdel. “He appeared out of an alleyway and took me by the arm and put this tent-shaped ring on my finger. And he said, ‘That’s to make sure that you have shelter wherever you go.’”

Just over six months – and a very genteel courtship – later, she and Abdel were married. Jane gave notice to Harper Collins that she was going to quit her job and move to Morocco. “It was a huge risk,” she admits, “but

feature I think being a climber prepares you for taking risks. It’s always calculated risk. When my friends said, ‘What on earth are you doing?’ I told them, ‘I have a mobile phone and a credit card. I’m a modern woman. I can get myself home if I need to. If it’s not working, then I’ll just come back.’” In fact, the publishing company did not want to lose her, and offered her the option of working remotely – still managing her authors while she spends winters in Tafraoute and summers in Mousehole in West Cornwall.

“It is very possible to do what I do without being in the office,” she explains. “As long as you’ve got a good team working with you – and I do have a great team. In fact, I’ve had more bestsellers in the time that I’ve been out of the office than in the time when I was in it.”

Jane’s journey began near Cornwall’s Fowey estuary, where she led a “very outdoorsy life. In those days, you just put children out of the door after breakfast and didn’t expect them home till teatime. It was a really idyllic childhood in many ways. A gang of us would be down at the beach, swimming or running around, dressing up as Zulus and hitting each other with sticks. I had a little rowing boat – I used to go up and down the Fowey River, fishing for mackerel…” A highly imaginative child, she was always making up stories and adventures, making up her own rules. It meant that she never really conformed to other people’s norms, and had a streak of rebelliousness that has led her to follow her dreams with

Jane never really conformed to other people’s norms, and had a streak of rebelliousness that has led her to follow her dreams with determination and passion. determination and passion. After getting a degree in English at university in London, she went on to study Old Icelandic. “Partly because I wanted to be different to everybody else,” she says. “But largely because of the wildness of the Icelandic sagas – they really spoke to something in me. I absolutely loved them. And that’s probably why Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings drew me in as well. That huge imaginative landscape…”

Shortly after finishing her Masters, a serendipitous meeting with a neighbour led to a job as a secretary at a publishing company – Allen & Unwin. “It was a small publishing company, run by the owner, but it was eventually bought out by Harper Collins,” she says, somewhat ruefully. “I was the world’s worst secretary, but I got promoted out of my area of destruction quite quickly. They saw that I had ability in other areas and made me an editor.” There could have been few better

Village near Tafraoute, Morocco

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You take your opportunities in life and you follow your heart doing the things that you love, and I do think you get rewarded from time to time.

PHOTO: VIGGO MORTENSON

On the set of The Return of the King, the third film in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy

The centenary edition of The Lord of the Rings, illustrated by Devon-based artist Alan Lee

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places for a Lord of the Rings obsessive to have ended up: Allen & Unwin published all of Tolkien’s works.

“I was incredibly lucky,” she enthuses. “You take your opportunities in life and you follow your heart doing the things that you love, and I do think you get rewarded from time to time.”

In an increasingly corporate-ised world, the publishing industry today is slipping into a dangerous scenario of chasing down the next bestseller and the magic marketing figures. Editors are hard-pressed to do their job of nurturing authors, while bogged down in admin and hitting marketing and sales targets. And Jane says a lot of the number crunching is pointless: “You can’t ever work out how many copies a book is going to sell, because every single book is different and the environment into which you sell that book is different.”

Smaller, artisan publishers offer some respite from this hamster-wheel whirr, but as soon as they have any success, they tend to get bought out by the big companies and lose their identity. It is testament to her tenacity and integrity that Jane has managed to maintain her role of managing and developing authors.

feature In her early days at Allen & Unwin, she was dedicated to managing and improving Tolkien’s works – in fact, it was thanks to her vision that they caught film director Peter Jackson’s eye. She had commissioned Devon-based artist Alan Lee to illustrate the centenary editions of the Lord of the Rings books, and Canadian John Howe to create calendars: “As watercolour artists, I felt that the way they used their colour palette and their style fitted Tolkien’s world better than the brightly coloured poster-paint type pictures at that time,” says Jane. When a little-known New Zealand film-maker saw the pictures, “he reacted in just the way any Tolkien fan would have reacted. He actually used them on his presentation board to take to Hollywood when he was pitching to create this incredibly ambitious trilogy of films.” Against the odds, Jackson succeeded in his pitch and the films were put into production. In 2000, Jane was invited to visit the set in New Zealand. “At first, I couldn’t imagine anyone doing it justice,” she says, “but I think they did a most phenomenal job. When I got down there and saw the level of care and attention that was going into the creation of the world and every artefact in it, I was completely blown away. It was lovely because I was sharing my passion with all these other passionate people. And we were all in this enclosed little imagined universe.” She paid for herself to go back again and again, and ended up being asked to write the companion books for the film.

Among the talented authors that Jane manages and supports today is George R R Martin, author of the Game of Thrones series – now the HBO mega-hit TV series. Working with him over a long period of time is a great example of why editors need to be able to focus on their authors, says Jane. “He just worked and worked away, writing what he does over all those years, never expecting to become such a cultural phenomenon. He was my author for many, many years. The series had had a certain level of success, but nothing like bestseller-dom at the time. But I’d fought to have it re-printed and to keep it going all those years. So it’s very, very pleasing to see it come to such great fruition.”

As the summer approaches, Jane is looking forward to spending more time with Abdel, who closes down his restaurant in the scorching summer months and moves to Cornwall, where he has been welcomed with open arms. “Whenever we go back, people are happier to see him than they are to see me,” says Jane, grinning. “He had them all speaking French in no time at all. He cooks when he comes here, too: that’s a great treat for friends who come over.” Abdel spends much of his time painting abstract landscapes of the coastline, while Jane continues her idyllic life of writing historical novels (“you basically need a degree to write a proper historical novel,” she says), managing her authors for Harper Collins – and doing a bit of rock climbing on the dramatic granite seacliffs of West Cornwall.

Jane (centre) with her publishing team Natasha Bardon and Emma Coode sitting on the Iron Throne from Game of Thrones

Jane’s new book The Pillars of Light will be published later this year

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South West must sees...

Overall winner: Richard Bloom, Tekapo Lupins

Blooming gorgeous

Started by a group of professional garden photographers in 2007, International Garden Photographer of the Year has quickly grown to become the world’s premier exhibition of garden and plant photography, attracting more than 20,000 entries from around 30 countries. The exhibition at RAMM features the winners from these categories: The Beauty of Plants; Beautiful Gardens; Wildlife in the Garden; Breathing Spaces; Bountiful Earth; Trees, Woods & Forests; Wildflower Landscapes; Greening the City; Photo Projects and Under 16s.

23 April – 28 August at Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. rammuseum.org.uk

A new view “Do you have to leave the county in order to establish yourself as an artist?” That was a question posed at the close of the first iteration in 2014 of ‘Drawing a Presence’, a four-year programme inviting artists aged 15-25 to express their opinions about life in Cornwall, and it forms the provocation for a new exhibition of work by young artist-led collectives to be held at Newlyn Art Gallery. It’s a great opportunity for the next generation of makers to present their work in a public gallery – and for audiences to get a sense of the county from a different perspective.

Until 25 June at Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall. newlynartgallery.co.uk The Keiken Collective

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culture

Textural healing

PHOTO: DOUG ATFIELD

‘What Do I Need to Make it OK?’ is a touring exhibition featuring specially commissioned work by five artists who explore damage and repair, disease and healing – through stitch and other media. Works include Basketcase by Freddie Robins (left), who uses precision machine-knitted wool and crochet in unsettling combinations with found objects, creating distorted fabric faces and bodies which examine human fear of illness and death.

Until 8 May at Devon Guild of Crafts, Bovey Tracey. crafts.org.uk

Potted history After studying in London – including a spell as assistant to acclaimed potters Bryan Newman and Colin Pearson – ceramicist John Pollex moved to Plymouth in 1971, subsequently opening his own studio on the Barbican.

Embedded in the English slipware tradition, his work has become increasingly colour-oriented, and in the mid-1980s he began to incorporate paintbrushes, sponges and more recently spatulas into his practice, bringing an abstract quality to his intensely vibrant earthenware slips. John’s work is often a visual reference to his interest in Zen Buddhism, in particular the immediacy of brush strokes in Zen calligraphy. This solo exhibition features a full portfolio of sculptural and functional thrown work, including some more recent pieces with a matt slip finish.

23 April – 31 May at 45 Southside Gallery, Plymouth.

45southside.co.uk

Belly Dancers

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Police Dog Hogan With eight members in the full line-up and instruments including guitar, accordion, banjo, mandolin, fiddle and trumpet, Police Dog Hogan produce fun, foot-tapping country-folk that won’t fail to put a smile on your face. The Guardian columnist Tim Dowling is on banjo – you never know, you might end up in next week’s copy… If you miss them in Honiton, they’re at the Plough Arts Centre in Great Torrington on 15 July, then at the brilliant Sheldon Open Air Theatre (where there are amazing burgers to be had) in the Teign Valley on 16 July.

12 May at The Beehive, Honiton. Tickets: £14. beehivehoniton.co.uk

The nitty gritty Soil Culture is a three-year arts and environment project, coordinated by the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World (CCANW), based at Dartington, which aims to use the arts to inspire a deeper public understanding of the importance of soil.

This group exhibition, featuring work from a series of international residencies, reveals how artists have explored the roles of soil in carbon sequestration, peat layers in national parks in the South West, production of soil, soil from a holistic and ecological perspective and the cultivation of soil.

‘Soil’ by Sophie Mason

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Until 4 June at White Moose Gallery, Barnstaple. white-moose.co.uk

culture

Open for business Following the largest number of artists participating in 2015, the 12th annual Open Studios Cornwall will see artists and craftspeople throwing open the doors to their workspaces for nine days. You can expect the full gamut of media, styles and subject matter, including playful, vibrant paintings by Melanie Stokes, who will be exhibiting at Pine Lodge, Carrallack Lane, in St Just. Check website for opening times.

May 28 – June 5 at various venues across Cornwall. openstudioscornwall.co.uk Majestic Rogue by Melanie Stokes

Thomas Bossard “You pinched my red one” Oil on canvas 20x20cms

Sally Dunham “Just the One” Ceramic height 12cms

62 Church Street, Falmouth, Cornwall TR11 3DS 01326 219323 | 07913 848515 | info@artworldltd.com | www.artworldltd.com MANOR | Late Spring 2016

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Worth making the trip for...

Insider art

19 April – 1 July 2016 at American Museum in Britain, Bath. americanmuseum.org

PHOTO: © JEREMIAH GOODMAN

As well as working as an advertising illustrator, contributing to publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Interior Design Magazine, Jeremiah Goodman also painted numerous lush portraits of interiors, including the homes of design greats such as Caroline Herrera and Diana Vreeland, and celebrities including Greta Garbo, and Sir John Gielgud. Mostly painting on illustration board in a combination of transparent watercolour and opaque gouache, Goodman’s work is infused with a sense of old Hollywood glamour. ‘Jeremiah! Inspired Interiors’ is his first European show.

Greta Garbo, Library, New York, 1990

The other side Featuring video and installation work, photography and sculpture, ‘Art from Elsewhere’ deals with current social and political issues through the eyes of contemporary artists from around the world.

Shown jointly at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery and Arnolfini, the exhibition is a chance to see work by artists from Africa, Asia and the Far East who explore themes such as life in conflict zones and migration.

22 April – 17 July at Bristol Museum and Arnolfini. bristolmuseums.org.uk arnolfini.org.uk

Flag, Shilpa Gupta

American scream Alt-folk Americana with a deliciously Gothic twist – that’s the feast in store when you enter the world of husband-and-wife duo Brett and Rennie Sparks in their guise as The Handsome Family (left). The NME encapsulated their appeal when they wrote: “Each song is like an abridged Flannery O’Connor story read aloud by Johnny Cash, hovering somewhere between the metaphysical and the mundane.” Couldn’t have put it better myself. Get listening.

1 June at 100 Club, Oxford Street, London. 7.30pm, £20 adv. the100club.co.uk

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culture

Mayfest

PHOTO: RICHARD DAVENPORT

Once again, Bristol’s city-wide festival of contemporary theatre and performance presents a rich roster of work by artists and companies from Bristol, the UK and beyond. Highlights include Symphony, an intimate performance for one audience member at a time by Verity Standen (18 & 20-22 May); Spymonkey/Tim Crouch’s new show The Complete Deaths (at Bristol Old Vic, 1718 May); and Bryony Kimmings’s Fake It ‘til you Make It (at the Tobacco Factory, Theatres, 16-21 May), a brilliant piece about clinical depression and men, made in collaboration with her partner Tim Grayburn. The festival vibe is augmented by pop-up internet station Mayfest Radio, featuring interviews, music, and specially commissioned audio work.

12-22 May at various locations across Bristol. See mayfestbristol.co.uk for full programme and ticket details.

Bryony Kimmings and Tim Grayburn, Fake It ‘til You Make It

Renaissance man

Until 3 July at Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London. £15, members free. See vam.ac.uk to book.

PHOTO: COURTESY DUHAMEL FINE ART, PARIS

‘Botticelli Reimagined’ explores the enduring impact of the Florentine painter Sandro Botticelli (14451510) from the Pre-Raphaelites to today. Now celebrated as one of the greatest artists of all time, Botticelli was largely forgotten after his death, only to be rediscovered around 1800. The exhibition includes more than 50 original works by Botticelli from great collections across the world shown alongside more recent masterpieces of art and design, including work by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, René Magritte, Elsa Schiaparelli, Andy Warhol and Cindy Sherman.

Venus after Botticelli, 2008, by Xin Yin, Guillaume Duhamel. Private collection

Last chance to catch...

As a follow up to his brilliant urban bleak-fest Pomona, playwright Alistair McDowall has gone interstellar. X is the story of the British crew of a research base on Pluto as they lose touch with Earth and start to fall apart, stranded in the dark. Directed by Royal Court AD Vicky Featherstone, it’s a dark study of loneliness and the loss of self.

Until 7 May at Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square. Tickets from £10. royalcourttheatre.com

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Worth staying in for...

Bad to the bone?

On the morning of Monday 8 July 1895, 13-year-old Robert Coombes and his 12-year-old brother Nattie set out from their East London home to watch a cricket match at Lord’s. Their father was away at sea, and their mother, they told neighbours, was visiting family in Liverpool. Over the next 10 days, Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents’ valuables to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside. But as the sun beat down on the Coombes house, a strange smell began to emanate from the building… The Wicked Boy is Kate Summerscale’s latest foray into the dark heart of the Victorian family, in which she uncovers a fascinating true story of murder and morality. Part documentary writing, part true crime account – and with more than a tantalizing whiff of sensation à la Wilkie Collins – it is a fitting follow-up to 2008’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, and once again examines the intertwining of the detective novel with the ascent of real-life detectives. Riveting.

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Accounts . Wealth . Legal www.prydis.com tel. 01392 432431

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culture

All killers, no fillers Despite immediate access to myriad movies on demand via any number of cable, satellite and online streaming services, have you ever found yourself trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of click-reject, click-reject, click-reject? So many films and yet not one you fancy watching… If this sounds familiar, then take a look at Mubi: the curated cinema club that each month gives you access to 30 hand-picked classic, cult and independent films – a new one every day. Membership costs just £4.99 a month (£39.99 for the year), but there’s a 30-day free trial to give you a taste of what’s in store. In April, films on offer include The Passage, the first in Roberto Minervini’s Texas Trilogy; the Jack Nicholson classic Five Easy Pieces; and British writer-director Ben Wheatley’s first film, the supremely unsettling black comedy Down Terrace. mubi.com

Live and local Just released on Island Records is The Hope Six Demolition Project, the ninth studio album

by PJ Harvey, her first since the Mercury Prize-winning Let England Shake in 2011.

Harvey is touring this summer, and will be headlining at the Eden Sessions at Cornwall’s Eden Project on 27 June. pjharvey.net

Bovey Castle is a stunning country estate tucked away in the heart of Dartmoor National Park, with newly refurbished bedrooms, 22 individual country lodges, an 18 hole championship golf course and a vast array of outdoor pursuits from off road driving to falconry and archery.

Book in at The Elan Spa to experience relaxing ESPA treatments, whilst the dedicated ‘Gentlemen’s Quarter’ offers traditional wet shaves for the discerning gent.

Visit Smith’s Brasserie for relaxed ‘best of British’ classics, or the Great Western Restaurant for a night of exclusive dining.

North Bovey, Devon, TQ13 8RE T: 01647 445000 E: info@boveycastle.com www.boveycastle.com /boveycastlehotel @boveycastle MANOR | Late Spring 2016

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There’s no denying that floral prints are in beautiful bloom this year, be it fashion or interiors. We thought with this style shoot we’d bring the two together to create what can only be described as quite dazzling arrangements.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY TOM HARGREAVES STYLED BY MIMI STOTT WALLPAPERS BY LITTLE GREENE

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Kimono sleeve maxi dress, Glamorous at Topshop, ÂŁ44

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Long crossover dress, Zara, ÂŁ39.99

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Pepe Jeans floral print dress, ASOS, ÂŁ130

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Hortensia dress by Topshop Unique, £255; ring, £6, Divine, Chagford

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Bardot off-the-shoulder top, Topshop, £35; floral skirt, Topshop, £36; necklace, £22, Divine, Chagford

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Printed tunic, Zara, ÂŁ39.99

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Printed tunic, Zara, £39.99; belt, stylist’s own

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Photographer: Tom Hargreaves Model: Laura Eve Thyer Stylist: Mimi Stott Make-up: Philippa Spring Hair: Chelcie Grimes Location: Exeter Phoenix Wallpapers by Little Greene Archive Trails Collection littlegreene.com

Stockist: Amos Lighting amoslighting.co.uk

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24A West Street, Ashburton, Newton Abbott, Devon TQ13 7DU

Tel: 01364 653613 www.barnesofashburton.co.uk 88

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Space Sandhills, North Devon | Skinflint Shopping for space | Designer’s Q&A

Period stilletto light by Holophane skinflintdesign.co.uk

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Sand, sea and sky The combination of a design-savvy client and a stunning location meant the creation of this contemporary coastal property was an architect’s dream. Words by Imogen Clements.

Photos by Tom Hargreaves.

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space

S

andhills was a very contemporary brief for a modern Westcountry home. The location was idyllic, right on the coast overlooking North Devon’s magnificent Saunton Sands and Braunton Burrows. The property needed to accommodate three generations of the same family comfortably and harmoniously, giving each one space to enjoy privacy and reflecting the design requirements of each family.

The client gave the brief detailed thought, considering all of their senses: they wanted to experience views from bed, hear the sounds of wind and waves when stepping out onto the balcony; they asked for warming shafts of sunlight, efficient functioning of space and storage for easy-to-clean spaces, and snugs where children could escape from adults entertaining friends.

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The property needed to accommodate three generations of the same family comfortably and harmoniously, giving each one space to enjoy privacy and reflecting each one’s design requirements.

On the original site, as with so many coastal locations in the South West (and something to bear in mind if you ever happen to be looking to build a stunning sea-view abode), there was an old bungalow. This was demolished, and BARC Architects, led by Caroline Shortt, delivered this stunning home in its place.

There were, of course, planning considerations with such a prestigious location – the site is set within an important landscape area; the estuary is designated as a UNESCO Biosphere. Planning policies that needed to be taken into account related to the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Heritage Coast, Coastal Preservation Area, Sustainable Development and Development in the Countryside.

There were also sustainability stipulations to meet.

The clients made clear their aspirations to build an energy-efficient home. Sandhills was therefore designed incorporating high levels of insulation, air-tight construction and renewable resources to assist with the heating and hot water demands of the property.

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space The northern wall of the building used a solid concrete construction, which acts as an anchor for the rest of the structure. This allowed the south-facing, seaview openings to be maximized while providing a high level of thermal efficiency. The walls, floors and roofs were all designed to surpass building regulations in terms of thermal performance.

Year-round use of the property was also a key consideration in the design. Sandhills was divided over three levels, with part of the entrance level forming a separate flat. The flat was intended to be occupied for the whole year, while the remainder of the house would only be occupied by family and friends for about 30% of the year. As a result, the flat was thermally isolated, meaning the heating and hot water demand could be reduced to serve just the flat while the rest the house was not occupied.

The clients were keen to make full use of the government’s renewable heat incentive operating at the time, and so the building was designed with plenty of roof area to accommodate solar panels.

The project took a year and four months to complete.

The result is a beach house which makes full use of its prime location. It is nestled into the Saunton hillside, hence the name, and its stepped appearance separates it into distinct elements.

Interior rooms move seamlessly into exterior spaces.

They incorporate secret hideaways, window seats, reading and study areas. Bespoke glazing connects the inhabitants to the surrounding elements, while also protecting them, and ensures maximum exploitation of those jaw-dropping views. Light and warmth levels were all met, and older and younger generations can all enjoy the house equally, with the property linking upper and lower levels through sliding doors.

“This brief was an architect’s dream,” says Caroline.

“The stunning location and aspirations of the client were hugely influential in informing the building’s design and it was important that the final result was sensitive to both. We worked closely with the client and contractor throughout the process to deliver this wonderful home, which blurs the boundaries between inside and out, and takes full advantage of the breath-taking views.” barcarchitects.com

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From their base in Penryn, Skinflint Design are doing more than simply upcycling discarded light fittings – they’re preserving a piece of our industrial heritage.

Words by Fiona McGowan.

“I Sophie Miller

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went to Berlin not long after the Wall came down,” remembers Sophie Miller of Skinflint Design. “I have photos of this desolate wasteland, and pictures of Gorbachev with graffiti sprayed over them. I think that’s why I’ve always been fascinated by the Eastern Bloc.” This lifelong fascination forms part of the creative impetus of the Falmouth-based company that she set up with husband Chris in 2007. Industrial chic is very much in the zeitgeist right now, and Skinflint’s highly functional salvaged lighting hits the Shoreditch Houseslash-steampunk vibe right at its sweet spot.

From outsized anglepoise floor lamps to Polish street lamps reinvented as kitchen pendants, Skinflint’s reclaimed designs are all about bringing a no-nonsense factory aesthetic into the home – but they also have a story. “We’re drawn to lighting from the Eastern Bloc because of the look of it,” explains Sophie, “but the history is also very interesting. With the standardisation that they had over there, you can get the same light in three different sizes, and they can be found in factory after factory after factory. I love finding out about the heritage of the lights – they’re so entwined with our social history.”

And it’s not just the history of Eastern Europe – much of the collection comes from the UK, too: “Lots of our lights come from the factories in the Midlands because so much British industry was based there.” There is something nostalgic about these lights, salvaged from the carcasses of giant factories before they have been razed to the ground. And yet it also seems refreshingly positive that a company like Skinflint is preserving a piece of our recent past, which might easily be overlooked as a grim

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Dental surgery floor light

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From outsized anglepoise floor lamps to Polish street lamps reinvented as kitchen pendants, Skinflint’s reclaimed designs are all about bringing a nononsense factory aesthetic into the home.

Polish street lights by Mesko

era – a small, almost organic growth coming from the ashes of former industrial giants.

Sophie’s background leads from a childhood in Hertfordshire to a Fine Art Painting Degree at Central St Martins, to a seven-year career in the film and TV industry, working as an art director and set designer.

As a keen stage actor, she briefly flirted with an acting career. “But I decided that, while it would be great fun, the life wouldn’t be for me at all. I didn’t like all the ego and the fact that everyone was constantly chasing after parts.” So it was behind the camera that Sophie’s creativity flourished, and her interest in design was ignited. When she met her now-husband Chris Miller, a designer at renowned architectural lighting company Isometrix, they spent hours of their free time trawling auctions and salvage yards to find interesting ‘bits and bobs’. Clearly, sourcing the items was as much of a buzz for them as actually upcycling them and putting them into innovative settings. “I look back and join the dots and can quite easily see how I got to here,” says Sophie as she sits in the office of Skinflint’s studio on the outskirts of Falmouth.

A move to Cornwall was a less obvious element in the ‘join the dots’ career path. When their daughter was only six weeks old, Sophie and Chris made the move away from their London stomping ground. “I’d been tied to London for so long,” explains Sophie, “and always felt that I wanted to move out, and I wanted to get quite a long way away.” She pauses, thinking about the major 96

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shift that they made with a tiny baby in tow. “It was a bit of a gamble – everyone thought we’d gone absolutely barking mad. But I thought we’d be more mad to stay.

And if it all went really, really wrong, we could always start again somewhere else.”

Being in Falmouth, however, was the impetus that they needed to set up their own business. With their combined experience and their love of rescuing discarded items, it didn’t take long for Chris to get the first project that would catapult Skinflint into existence. Back in London’s salubrious Primrose Hill, Chris and Sophie were asked to consult on an industrial-style lighting scheme for a high-end renovation that was to last two years, and led to them building up an impressive network of local skills and salvage companies around Europe. Several years later, their business has consulted for numerous private interior design projects, sourced lighting for eateries and clubs including Benugo, Jamie’s Italian, GBK and Soho House, and they have a limited range of lights that can be bought in Heal’s. Their reclaimed lamps, lights and shades can be bought online and they sell to individuals and companies around the globe, from Australia and the Far East to the US and Europe.

Skinflint is a small, sleek-looking business, but, like the proverbial swan, there is a lot of hard paddling that goes on beneath the surface. All of the sourcing of salvaged lights is done by Sophie and Chris, who take regular trips to auction houses and salvage yards around the UK and Eastern Europe, with their two young

children in tow. Recently, the family went to the Czech Republic, where they sourced some exquisite glass pendant lights, travelling from Cornwall to Prague by train. Caught up in a rail strike in Germany, they found themselves standing on a platform late at night, waiting for a sleeper train to take them to Prague that never turned up. The journey ended up taking 12 hours longer than expected. “The children are used to doing things like that, which is a really good education,” Sophie says.

“They learn that when things don’t go right, you have to figure out what you have to do. You have to be flexible.”

It does help that the children are part home-educated and enrolled part-time at a local Steiner-inspired school.

Their flexible education means that they can be involved in the equally flexible cultural education of travelling around, imbued in the world of social history that is behind every salvaged item that their parents discover.

It is when the lights arrive at the workshop in Cornwall that a different sort of graft begins. Each light is painstakingly taken apart and careful plans are drawn for reconstruction (“It’s like a jigsaw”). Each element of each item requires a different treatment: they are polished or sealed, and have different finishes applied to them.

Desk lights need rewiring and have to be PAT tested.

The components then return to the studio for reassembly, before they are put on the website or sold to buyers, designers and home-owners. Again, Sophie says, flexibility is key: “When things arrive, they can be pretty battered, and sometimes you’ll get 50 lights that all appear to be the same, but they’re covered in muck and paint. They get taken apart and then we discover that we actually have three different styles.” One of the huge advantages of locating themselves in Penryn (Falmouth’s ship-building district) is the access to local specialists who can restore the individual components: “We use a lot of people who work in the ship-building industry. It’s a really rich place for skills – and so important to support the local economy.”

While almost all of the lights get sold out of Cornwall, all of the money comes back into the county, Sophie explains – going back into wages for the Skinflint team and paying for the refurbishing contractors.

Skinflint’s environmental policy says a lot about its founders and their genuine integrity. Their packaging is almost entirely made of recycled materials: even the bubble wrap – vital for preserving the lights and fittings in transit – is made of partially recycled plastic. All the products used in the renovation of the lights – from paint to polish to paint-stripper (“we use sodium bicarbonate”) – is environmentally friendly. And, of course, they salvage stuff – a noble art in a world that is frenetically spinning on the hamster-wheel of consume-disposeupgrade… and repeat.

Retro spotted Czech pendants

skinflintdesign.co.uk Vintage medical floor light

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Brazilian blend As so often, interiors take their cues from catwalks, so in keeping with the Latin theme and looking to the forthcoming Olympics, we’ve compiled a spread that celebrates Brazil. We don’t need tropical temperatures – the right colour combination alone will inject sufficient warmth, and fun, into a room. Compiled by Amy Tidy.

Marks and Spencer Mirror, Marks and Spencer, £149

Conran Wall Art, Marks and Spencer, £85

Cushion, John Lewis Fruit bowl, Next, £8 Mariska Meijers cushion, Amara, £132

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Kartel diffuser, Amara, £54

space John Lewis

Jug, John Lewis, £18

Halcyon Days candle, Amara, £55

Halcyon Days Palm trinket tray, Amara, £225

Plate, John Lewis, £8 Sunny Todd stools, Amara, £280

Design your own Snuggler John Lewis, from £449

Le Creuset dish, Amara, £175

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Q&A Cathryn Bishop, founder of Cornish Interiors, has more than 15 years’ experience in interior design and project management.

She is based in Royal William Yard, Plymouth, where Cornish Interiors has a showroom selling a range of furniture, lighting, soft furnishings and home décor, all sourced and curated by Cathryn and her team.

What are you currently working on?

We’re working on projects in New York, Barbados, the Channel Islands and across the UK. Closer to home, I’ve just finished designing a new development of holiday cottages and lodges called Martha’s Orchard, situated on the North Cornwall coast, just minutes from Constantine Bay. The brief was to design the interiors of two large houses, creating a friendly and relaxed space where guests could feel comfortable and at home.

We used a New England beach house theme as our inspiration. We’ve also just begun work on a luxury private home on the North Cornish coast as well as some concept design with the National Trust.

the country and the National Trust wanted to rent it out as a holiday home. We restored it with the help of a historical buildings expert, using original Art Deco pieces sourced across the UK and using fabrics and paints that were sympathetic to the period.

How would you describe your style?

We don’t have a ‘house style’ as such – we take our lead from what our clients want. However, growing up near the sea in St Kew, Cornwall, studying in Falmouth and working on a lot of coastal properties means that the coast inspires me greatly. I love to create relaxed and fresh spaces that bring the bright, beautiful and dramatic atmosphere of the coast inside. The best way to achieve this is by

What have been your most challenging and satisfying projects?

Highlights have been a private house in Mawgan Porth, which was perched on the cliff above the beach, and a lakeside lodge in Windermere, another stunning location. We also designed a villa called Portland House in Dorset for the National Trust. The villa is the last remaining example of Spanish Hollywood Art Deco in

Showroom

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Dean Clarke House, Exeter

space we love the furniture made by Mark Product, Tandem Design, Jacques Cabin, Tom Raffield. Then Individual Interior Solutions for curtain making and upholstery; Amos Lighting for lighting design; and South West Shopfitters, Touch or Shawstephens for bespoke joinery.

Suppliers from further afield include Donna Wilson, Ella Doran, Porta Romana, Christian Liaigre, Andrew Martin and Foscarini for great impact lighting.

What emerging trends are there in interior design?

Two Hoots, Perranporth, Cornwall

borrowing from the beach’s colour palette and introducing a range of natural materials and textures through the addition of well-designed furniture and flooring.

Everybody’s loved grey in all its forms for some time, but now people are ready for more colour. People like Abigail Ahern and Will Taylor (author of Bright Bazaar) are leading the colour revolution. Metallics are still huge, but rather than all copper, people are mixing up golds and bronzes too.

What has been instrumental in growing your business?

A lot of our work has come through recommendations and word of mouth. We run a very flexible design practice, which ranges from full interiors projects to our Design and Inspire service. This is a service we’ve developed over the last few years for customers who want ideas and advice, but don’t require the full services of an interior designer. We will go to the client’s home, talk through how they want to use the space and make sure we understand what furniture or features they want to keep. We then go away and create a visual mood board and design instructions to help bring our ideas to life, which will include colour schemes and furniture styles. If requested, we’ll help them source materials.

Who in particular has been a source of inspiration for you?

I particularly love the work of Kit Kemp, her designs are so rich – the Ham Yard Hotel in London is a gorgeous place. I’ve been lucky to work a lot with Jill Stein on some great projects – she’s an incredibly inspirational women and a naturally talented designer. I’m part of a women’s networking group called South West Women in Construction; we work across all disciplines, from engineering to architecture, and inspire one another.

Young designers are a rich source of fresh inspiration: I’ve recently taken on a role at Plymouth College of Art, as Programme Leader for their Interior Decoration, Design & Styling BA Hons, and am looking forward to working with the next generation of designers.

Who are your go-to suppliers?

We try and source locally where we can, and there is a wealth of great suppliers in the South West. Locally

cornishinteriors.co.uk

Private house, Mawgan Porth, Cornwall

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Naturalmat The quality of sleep

Exactly what have you been sleeping on? A direct question, maybe, but considering the amount of time you spend lying on it, a pretty important one.

W

hen it comes to duvets, many of us, for comfort reasons, opt for feather-filled over synthetic, but where mattresses are concerned, few of us know what comprises our own and whether it’s delivering the very best quality sleep. Interestingly, after decades in labs experimenting and concocting synthetics in search of the holy grail in comfort, we’ve come to realise that it’s often best delivered by nature.

It was by accident that Mark Tremlett and Pete Tindall realised that this premise also extended to mattresses, but on doing so, they went on to create a premium product so good it is sought after by some of the very best hotels in the world – a luxury mattress that is entirely natural and offers a blissful slumber like never before.

They hit upon their eureka moment working on boats: when creating upholstery for yachts, it became clear that synthetic materials commonly used to cushion prestigious decks weren’t cutting it.

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“Synthetic materials trap moisture rather than release it,” explains Mark. “There is no natural ventilation meaning that cushions were remaining damp rather than drying.” This presented obvious comfort issues for an otherwise luxury market. “We experimented with using natural fibres and saw a marked difference in performance, comfort and durability of the upholstery we were fitting.”

Around this time, Mark’s wife was expecting their first child and thoughts turned to matters nursery.

“Considering the pure emphasis placed on all products baby-related,” Mark recalls, “we were astonished by the abundance of cheap, nasty mattresses – effectively slabs of synthetic foam covered in waterproof plastic – that you were supposed to lay your newborn child on.”

So Mark and Pete set about developing an all-natural baby mattress and trialled it in research. The demand was somewhat conclusive: as many as 28 out of 30 mothers who attended the focus group ordered one immediately, and so Naturalmat moved into the world of sleep.

promotional feature The natural – or should that be organic – next step into adult mattresses followed swiftly. Given the degree of craftsmanship that goes into each mattress, together with the very finest raw materials expertly combined to elicit maximum comfort, Naturalmat moved straight into the premium sector. Luxury hoteliers were quick to recognise Naturalmat’s comfort and eco-credentials, and hotels that trade on the highest-quality sleep – such as Claridges, Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons and Magdalen Chapter – began to fit out their deluxe bedrooms with Naturalmat. As guests experienced the quality of sleep offered by a Naturalmat bed, so domestic orders too began to grow, and Naturalmat began to sell direct to the consumer from its shop in Notting Hill, its showroom in Devon and later from the website, while still serving the marine, nursery and hotel sectors.

Such is the growth in popularity of its all-natural product that Naturalmat’s offering now goes beyond mattresses to encompass beds and bedding. No corners are cut, with every component boasting the Naturalmat allnatural credentials: bed bases are made of FSC-certified solid timber finished with organic wool and coir, and covered in a choice of organic fabrics; unbleached organic cotton duvets containing organic wool or goose down inners; and cotton-encased organic wool pillows centrestitched ‘to cradle your head’.

The new Naturalmat showroom in Topsham (right) showcases it all and is worth a visit. If all you come away with initially is a centre-stitched pillow, it’s impressive to see for yourself inside a Naturalmat mattress: the intricate layering and arrangement of component raw materials and the quality in the craftsmanship that goes into each to deliver a comfort that’s five star. It showcases why Naturalmat leads the premium market in natural sleep. naturalmat.co.uk

WHAT’S IN A NATURALMAT BED? The mattress

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Coir from the husks of organically grown coconuts from a Fair Trade initiative farm.

100% organic lambswool treated with an extract of essential oils – lavender, lemon and eucalyptus – to make it anti-dust mite, anti-bed bug and anti-moth. It is ideal for asthma and allergy sufferers. Wool is naturally fire retardant, rendering all tuftings chemical free.

Organic latex from the sap of rubber trees from the only certified organic rubber plantation in the world.

The highest-quality natural fibres including cashmere, mohair, horsetail hair, silk and bamboo.

Unbleached cotton covers and tickings treated with a revolutionary natural anti-bed bug treatment

The base

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FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified solid wood timber, glued and screwed together – not simply stapled

Bedding – pillows and duvets

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Organic wool or goose down encased in unbleached cotton.

A closed loop mattress cycle – no Naturalmat mattress need go into landfill.

All materials are recyclable and biodegradable. At the end of the product’s life, all materials can be recovered and recycled into alternative uses.

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C’est magnifique!

Hearth & Cook brings a new experience to home lovers and makers. Expertly gathered together in our showroom in Exeter is a selection of the finest products designed to

transform homes and inspire wonderful culinary creations, including a touch of je ne sais quoi from the renowned French cooker specialists, La Cornue. Visit our showroom now to see many of these appliances in action or browse our website for more information.

Our La Cornue Design Studio one of the most comprehensive in the country - is now ready to explore!

• RANGE COOKERS FROM LA CORNUE AND ESSE • MORSØ STOVES & OUTDOOR LIVING RANGE • ASHGROVE BESPOKE KITCHENS 104 MANORPlace, | Late Spring Find us in Oaktree 1002016 yards behind Carrs Ferrari & Maserati.

Call 01392 797679 www.hearthandcook.com 14 Oaktree Place Manaton Close, Matford, Exeter, Devon EX2 8WA

Food Recipes from The Jack in the Green | The Cornish Seaweed Company Food Pioneer Ian Wellens | The Curator Café, Totnes | Cornish Edible Insects Bites, the latest news and events from across the region | The Table Prowler

PHOTO: WELL SEASONED PR

Lemon sole Veronique by Matthew Mason of The Jack in the Green, near Exeter.

See page 108 for the recipe, taken from the acclaimed gastro pub’s new book jackinthegreen.uk.com

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PHOTO: WELL SEASONED PR

Chicken liver parfait

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food

A testament of taste The Jack in the Green at Rockbeare, near Exeter, is regarded as one of the region’s finest gastro pubs. In a new recipe book, head chef Matthew Mason shares some of his favourite dishes that the enthusiastic home cook can recreate and enjoy. With easy-to-follow recipes, the book features soups, bread, fish, salad, meat, game, snacks and desserts.

MANOR is delighted to present three recipes from The Jack Cook Book Volume One for you to try. Bon appétit!

Chicken liver parfait Serves four - six (depending on the size of your ramekins) “Made with Creedy Carver’s excellent free range chicken livers, this dish remains as popular as ever. At home I recommend cooking these parfaits at a low temperature in a Bain-Marie as this will ensure a gentle and even cook. A perfectly baked custard, whether it’s chicken or a sweet brûlée mix, should be set but also completely smooth and creamy and ideally chilled in the fridge overnight. This recipe and its presentation have been adapted over the years and the consistency has improved considerably since the introduction of our new Rational combi oven. This enables us to cook the parfaits to a precise core temperature of 65˚C – perfect every time.”

INGREDIENTS

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100g fresh chicken livers (room temperature) 55g foie gras (room temperature) 200g warm melted butter 3 eggs 50g shallots 10g garlic 1 bay leaf Sprig of thyme 5g salt 3g pink salt or table salt 2g pepper 3g sugar 50ml Port 25g Brandy 50ml Madeira A little olive oil

METHOD

Pre-heat your oven to 110˚C and have a deep-sided roasting tray at the ready. Finely slice the shallots and garlic and place into a medium-sized pan with the olive oil, thyme and bay leaf. Cook on a low heat for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the Port, Madeira and Brandy and then reduce until barely any liquid is left. Set aside to cool.

Place the livers, foie gras, seasonings and the reduction (minus the bay leaf ) in a liquidiser and blend for a minute. Then add the eggs and blend for a further minute. (Be sure that all the ingredients are of a similar temperature when combining or the mix may split and become grainy).

Pass the mixture through a fine sieve. Slowly add the warm melted butter (as if you were making mayonnaise) blending continuously.

Pour your egg-based custard mix into ramekins (or chosen serving dishes) until they are about two-thirds full. Then place them in the tray and add enough freshly boiled water so that it comes nearly two-thirds of the way up your serving dish, adding the last of the hot liquid when the tray is in situ. Having placed it in the middle of your oven, cover tightly with tin foil.

After 15-20 minutes check the parfaits by gently removing the foil and giving the dish a wobble - if it is still runny leave for a further 5 minutes and repeat the process until the custard mix is set firm. Leave to cool for 15-20 minutes before chilling overnight in the fridge.

We have taken to serving our parfaits in mini kilner jars which are great for storage and they will keep for a number of days sealed in the fridge. When ready, serve at room temperature with toasted brioche and some redcurrant jelly.

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Lemon sole Veronique Serves two “Hugely popular at the Jack, this lemon sole dish has become a menu staple and is our version of a classic. It may sound obvious but for your end product to taste great it is imperative that you begin with wonderfully fresh fish and preferably from a day boat. Look for bright and clear eyes, rich red gills and a healthy slime - fresh fish smells only of the sea. If buying whole lemon soles ask your fishmonger to remove the head, skin both sides and trim the fins and tail so you end up with an oval shape. These are simply fabulous plainly grilled with brown butter, capers, shrimps and some finely chopped dill. With so much of the work done beforehand and taking only minutes to finish, this is a great dinner party dish.”

INGREDIENTS

• Olive oil • A knob of unsalted butter • 2 large lemon sole, filleted and skinned (450g - 500g fish minimum) per person • 50g white seedless grapes • 50g samphire, stalks removed • 50g fresh peas • 50g broad beans • 4 spears of Westcountry asparagus INGREDIENTS FOR YOUR SAUCE

• • • • • • • • •

A drizzle of olive oil A knob of butter ½ an onion, finely chopped 1 clove of garlic, peeled and finely chopped 3 sprigs of fresh tarragon, finely chopped 90ml glass of sweet white wine 100ml double cream 250ml fish stock 1 lemon

METHOD FOR YOUR SAUCE

(This can be made ahead of time and re-heated when required). Heat a heavy-based pan over a medium heat.

Sweat off the finely chopped onion and garlic in a drizzle of olive oil and a knob of butter without colour for 1 minute before adding 90ml of sweet white wine. Reduce the volume by half and then add 250ml of fish stock.

Continue to reduce the fish stock by approximately half. Finish by adding 100ml of double cream and bring to the boil. Pass the remaining liquid through a sieve.

If necessary, reduce the remaining liquid to a saucelike consistency then emulsify with a hand blender or whisk until light and frothy. Finally add a squeeze of lemon juice and salt and pepper to taste.

METHOD FOR YOUR FISH

METHOD FOR YOUR VEGETABLES

First peel the grapes by blanching them in rapidly boiling water for 30 seconds. Immediately refresh in iced water. The skins should now slip off and be easy to peel.

Following the natural line, divide each lemon sole fillet in half lengthways and remove the cartilage. Refrigerate until needed.

When ready to cook, season the fish on both sides with a pinch of salt and a few twists of freshly ground white pepper. Heat a non-stick frying pan then add a drizzle of olive oil and a knob of butter.

Place the fillets in the pan and cook over a mediumhigh heat for 2 minutes before turning and cooking for a further 1-2 minutes (depending on the thickness).

Remove from the heat and finish by squeezing a little lemon juice over the fillets once cooked.

(If you are low in confidence when cooking fish then you can simply grill your fillets of sole).

Blanch the peas, broad beans and asparagus in a pan of salted boiling water for 2 minutes. Then immediately immerse in iced water to stop the cooking process. Set aside the vegetables until needed. The broad beans (once cooled) can now be popped out of their jackets. Other seasonal alternatives would work just as well.

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TO PLATE

When ready to plate, drop the blanched vegetables along with the samphire back into a pan of boiling salted water. Re-heat for 1 minute until al dente. Then toss in a little salted butter and sprinkle around the fish along with the grapes.

Re-heat the required amount of sauce, whisk in the finely chopped tarragon and spoon over and around.

Edible flowers can be added to the dish not only for the presentation but also the fresh summery flavours that they can add.

food Crème brûlée Makes six ramekins “Probably one of the most popular desserts in our history! The combination of the hard crack and caramel flavour with the silky semi-set custard beneath is one of the all time greats. I know that most restaurants will offer brûlées and will have an opinion about how best to serve them – well this is ours. Remember to use only the freshest free-range eggs and good quality vanilla – we use Tahitian vanilla pods if you can get them. They should be soft, pliable and glorious to smell. To fully recreate this classic you will need to invest in a kitchen blowtorch. These are cheap, readily available and well worth the investment.”

INGREDIENTS

• • • • •

8 large free range egg yolks 150g caster sugar 90ml milk 900ml double cream 1 vanilla pod, split and seeds removed

METHOD

Put the milk, cream, the vanilla pod and its seeds together into a saucepan and bring gently to the boil over a low heat. Beat the eggs and sugar together until pale and thick. Pour the hot cream over your egg mix whisking continuously. Be careful, it is hot and may splash.

Be sure to whisk well, don’t dither about at this point or you will end up with very expensive sweet scrambled eggs. Pour through a fine sieve and allow to cool completely. You could even make the mix up to this point the night before. It needs to be given time to settle.

Pre-heat your oven to 100°C. When you are ready to cook, skim any froth from the surface. Divide your mix into six equal sized ramekins and place onto a deep-sided baking tray. Pour freshly boiled water into the baking tray, enough to come two-thirds up the sides of the ramekins.

Bake in the oven for 90 minutes or until just set. To test, remove a ramekin from the water and shake the centre. If it appears to be runny place back in the oven and check at 5-10 minute intervals until ready.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the water bath (Bain-Marie). Many people believe that this is the correct consistency and temperature for a brûlée to be eaten. However I prefer them chilled overnight which gives you a firmer texture.

The golden brown caramelised topping is done at the

last moment. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon of caster sugar evenly over the top. Wave the blowtorch over the sugar starting at the edge farthest away, working towards you until the sugar has all caramelised. Remember the sugar will be super hot and can give you a very nasty burn.

Your finished glaze should be between 1-2mm thick, completely caramelised and hard as glass.

VARIATIONS

You could use any sized ramekin dish you like. Try using a large shallow one for a higher proportion of crunchy brûlée to rich cream. Demerara sugar may give you a crunchier topping but won’t stay that way for long. You could caramelise some thinly sliced banana over a rum flavoured brûlée.

Try sautéing some rhubarb and vanilla sugar until caramelised and bake under your custard for a delicious infusion or soak some sultanas or raisins in Calvados and add to your custard for an alternative base.

The Jack Cook Book Volume One is available to buy from Darts Farm at Topsham, Christopher Piper Wines in Ottery St Mary, The Five Bells in Clyst Hydon and from The Jack in the Green, priced at £25. You can also purchase a copy by calling 01404 822240. P&P is £2.50.

As part of The Jack in the Green’s ongoing support for the local community, £5 from every book will be given to FORCE Cancer in Exeter.

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Rich in vitamins and minerals, kelp is the new superfood.

Fiona McGowan visits The Cornish Seaweed Company to find out more. Photos by Daniel Gradwell.

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ursting with vitamins, awash with minerals, full of fibre and proven to help fat-loss…

No, it’s not yet another new diet fad, it’s seaweed – used by cultures around the world for millennia as a staple part of their diet.

From the Inuit to the Incas and the Irish to the Japanese, coastal-dwelling people have relied on this lowly plant to provide vitamin C and all the minerals that a body needs.

What’s not to love?

Well, unfortunately, seaweed has a bit of a bad name.

First of all, its slimy texture (it’s actually an algae, not a plant) is enough to put people off. The very thought of how it would taste (salty?) can produce an ‘eurgh’ reaction in the most open-minded of foodies. And yet so many of us love a sushi roll, and happily eat the sweet fried seaweed of Chinese cuisine. The other thing that bothers some people is the possibility of pollution – the idea of sewage being pumped into the sea near seaweed beds in the shallows of our oceans makes it less than appealing as a foodstuff.

The Cornish Seaweed Company, founded by friends Caro Warwick-Evans and Tim van Berkel in 2012, can turn that negativity on its head - the exacting science and labour-intensity behind the sustainable harvesting of seaweed is eye-opening, to say the least.

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Tim’s as a conservationist are key to the development of the business. Having worked on projects around the world – Caro was a tall ships chef and then sailor, she’s been a competition snowboarder and rafting instructor, and a renewable energy engineer for grassroots community projects overseas – has stood her in good stead for pioneering a new business. “Growing up in Southampton,” she says of her yearning for exploration, “I just wanted to see what the world was about.” Dutchborn Tim is also incredibly well-travelled: he worked on conservation projects in Borneo, Honduras, Peru and Bolivia before washing up on the shores of Cornwall.

Four years ago, the two friends were living in vans near Falmouth, eating lentils and brown rice, with Tim working in the kitchen at Zizzi and Caro cleaning holiday lets to make ends meet (“We were living on £50 a week”). They hit on the idea of hand-picking seaweed after Caro heard a radio programme about seaweed farming. “I thought – we have this amazing seaweed resource here, so why don’t we use it?” The pair decided to investigate further. “There was no-one else to follow in this country, but we found an organic seaweed producer in Ireland,” says Caro. “We went out there and spent several weeks with them, learning about all the processes.” Back in Falmouth, during a period of what can only be described as intense trial and error, Caro

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Seaweed is the ultimate superfood. It contains 56 different minerals – basically everything your body needs to function. and Tim found areas of seaweed and began to harvest it: using scissors to cut different types from rocks at low tide, building special drying racks and then selling it in local farmers’ markets.

With their scientific minds and knowledge of conservation, not to mention the fact that they are both keen cooks, they began to spread the message about edible seaweed. It started to seep beyond the farmers’ markets, and it wasn’t long before their sustainably packaged goods were selling in farm shops, delis and health food shops around the region. Top chefs took an interest – seaweed is in the zeitgeist now, and as Caro says, “seaweed comes in very different flavours. It can be treated like any other vegetable – it can be steamed or fried or sprinkled on food as a condiment.” She seems remarkably unfazed as she reels off the names of chefs who have ordered their seaweed: Heston Blumenthal, River Cottage, Jamie Oliver, Nathan Outlaw… And a number of Tesco and Waitrose stores now sell Cornish Seaweed Company’s freshly harvested seaweed.

Harvesting the seaweed fresh comes with its own issues. In order for it to be properly saturated when it’s picked, it can’t have been semi-drying on the rocks at low tide, so Tim and various team members have to don diving gear and cut it from the sea-floor. It then has to be rushed to a cleaning factory, packaged up and transported around the country to the supermarkets. “We built the business with no investment, and now, four years later, we employ 10 people,” says Caro.

As for pollution concerns, Caro says that the Food Standards Agency is all over the seaweed to check that it reaches required cleanliness levels – which is why they get their seaweed rigorously tested for heavy metals and pollutants at a lab before drying it in a polytunnel and selling it. The location that was chosen to harvest is on the rocky reaches of the Lizard peninsula – far from the madding cows, farmers’ fields and conurbations that are likely to create polluting run-off into streams and rivers after the rain. “We don’t harvest after heavy rains, anyway,” adds Caro, “just to be on the safe side.” Presumably also to avoid the danger of scrambling about on steep cliffs and slippery rocks with great bags of seaweed on their backs…

“Everyone who works here is in really good shape,” she admits. “It’s hard work on your body.”

It’s sustainably harvested, too. Caro and Tim and the team have licensed use of a five-mile area of the Lizard, and ensure that they only cut certain sections of seaweed before moving on to a new area, enabling the seaweed to

Tim and Caro harvest seaweed on the Lizard peninsula

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continue growing healthily. As for the nutritional benefits – it’s almost enough to convince you to eat the stuff raw, straight off the rocks. “Seaweed is the ultimate superfood,” enthuses Caro. “It contains 56 different minerals – basically everything your body needs to function.”

Needless to say, she and Tim incorporate it into their diets – they’ll have a shot of flaked kombu in the morning, a sea-salad lunch and maybe sea spaghetti for dinner. It’s a far cry from the lentil and rice diet of four years ago.

Although Caro says she’s always had a healthy diet, she’s noticed that she gets a lot fewer colds since eating seaweed.

One of the staff members is using sea spaghetti to help lose weight – tests have shown that it inhibits the expression of lipids: the enzyme that breaks down fat. And if you don’t break down the fat, it won’t get into your body. This is the theory, anyway – and Jamie Oliver has credited it for his recent weight loss, so it must be true, right?

What is not in doubt is that seaweed is incredibly good for you, and with such a wide variety of flavours and cooking options, it’s definitely one to experiment with. Cornish Seaweed Company sells five different types of dried seaweed online and in delis and farm shops around the region. You can also stick it in your bath. But that’s a whole other level of engagement… cornishseaweed.co.uk

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Seaweed comes in very different flavours. It can be treated like any other vegetable – it can be steamed or fried or sprinkled on food as a condiment.

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Food Pioneer Ian Wellens FOUNDER OF THE CHEESE SHED IN BOVEY TRACEY “I remember it distinctly: November 2005, a Saturday morning. I was at home in Bovey Tracey when suddenly, from nowhere, there it was: The Idea – sell Westcountry cheese on the internet. I had been working as a music lecturer and occasional composer but somewhere there must have been a subconscious desire to do something different.

A keen cheese buyer at our local deli, I suspect the two things – a slight dissatisfaction with my situation and a real love of local cheeses – just magically came together.

“There were a few problems to get over – no experience in selling anything, never having set up a website, and no particular technical aptitude – but the idea received an early leg-up when I took James Mann, the local deli owner, out for a coffee and a chat. He quickly agreed to help, and after the archetypal steep learning curve, The Cheese Shed was born, receiving its first order in May 2006.

“Ten years on, our ethos is the same as it was then. We’re interested in the beautiful handmade cheeses from this region (almost everything’s from west of Bristol). It’s ‘great cheese from off the beaten track’. If you imagine one of those cheese shops you might see in rural France or Italy, which only sell the produce of their region, well, that’s us – only here, and online. As well as catering to cheese enthusiasts, we also serve the gift buyer, and look after wedding customers (we’re probably the largest supplier of cheese wedding cakes, with more than a thousand going out each year).

“It’s an idea built on foundations laid by some truly pioneering people – a group of cheesemakers who, from the 1970s, re-started the idea of artisan cheesemaking at a time when it was at a truly low ebb. Since then, the attitude to food has transformed in these islands, and the modern appeal of local food, seasonal food, small producers and organics show no sign of going away. I love the fact that we’ve been a part of that: we’re out there telling the world about these truly fantastic cheeses, putting the spotlight on the brilliant makers, helping them (and the people who work for them) to thrive. And at the centre of it all is the product, that amazing stuff we sell. As I write we have just introduced something new: the clothbound ewes’ milk cheese from Mary Quicke and her team. Bowled over by its truly extraordinary depth of flavour, I breathlessly tweeted ‘mind blown’.

After all this time, it’s still thrilling, still a privilege, to be able to sell something this good.

“Landmarks? Well, in 2012 we bought a bank.

HSBC had suddenly closed down in Bovey, leaving a small building up for sale, conveniently right next to James’s shop. Buying it was a stretch, but wow, what an improvement on the previous situation, where the business was split between my garden shed and the deli.

Moving in really enabled us to zoom ahead. Around the same time, we also created the Cakebuilder. This online tool for designing cheese wedding cakes (above) is still the only one of its kind, and our customers love the fact that decisions about cheese types and sizes, about the colour and proportions of cheese cakes, are entirely in their hands.

“It’s good to look outside the business, too; to try and make a difference. Last year we started asking our customers if they’d give a pound to charity – whatever they give, we’ll match. The response has been incredibly gratifying, and so far we’ve been able to give useful amounts to The Helen Foundation, Farms For City Children and Shelter.

“On another front, September 2016 will see the third Nourish festival take place in Bovey. This festival, which we co-founded, features fantastic food and craft events alongside Proms-quality concerts: this year the stunning Calefax Reed Quintet are flying in from Amsterdam, and the iconic Brodsky Quartet will play Schubert’s Death and The Maiden. In Bovey Tracey! Oh, and one more thing: in amongst the food stalls, you will find some better-than-average cheese.” thecheeseshed.com nourishfestival.org

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Food in three acts

Harriet Mellor hangs out at The Curator Café and Kitchen in Totnes to find out just what is their magic formula. Photos by Nick Clements.

Owner Matteo Lamaro

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hat is the magic formula that can make one place a teeming success while others, which seem to have equal credentials, can spectacularly flounder? The Curator Café is one of those uplifting examples. From the moment it opened in Totnes, a town already awash with excellent coffee from 40 independent outlets, the punters of all ages and walks of life began filling the bum spaces on the white and wood interiors throughout the day. Being blessed with ample pavement space, the coffee culture also spills out of the café doors, whatever the weather, from 7.30am until 6pm.

Writing as a native of West London’s Golborne and Portobello roads, and a former frequenter of Soho, I recognise in The Curator’s atmosphere a similarity to the vibrantly busy Portuguese and Italian hang-outs that predate the dull coffee corporates by many a decade.

Italian owner Matteo Lamaro agrees that there’s something special in the vibe, but being a bean aficionado, he believes the quality of his coffee is a big lure. “It was a gamble, but I felt embraced by the community – I never wanted to create a pretentious place with barriers,” he says. “It is very important to have a good environment. Something different done locally. We use a very artisan skilled master roaster.

Two guys who are friends of mine in London, and when I need more coffee, they go to a little room where they have the roaster and roast the beans for us. It’s not mass production. It’s the passion the person puts in roasting the beans. It takes a long time and is not an easy process so really I respect that.”

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with complex cases in Manchester, followed by seven years in London’s Spitalfields. The unlikely location of South Devon became the next destination, when the recession hit public services. His wife, Sarah, who worked with children with learning disabilities, got a job in Dartington, plus she had relatives here, while Matteo took the opportunity to jump ship and dig deep into his culinary roots. They brought their one son, and now have a second.

“For many years, I wanted to do something with food using Italian producers,” says Matteo. “I took voluntary redundancy from my job, got a lump sum, moved here and I started doing the markets, selling coffee with biscotti and panettone made by my brother, a baker in Italy. His wife’s family are the fourth generation of bakers.”

Matteo became the opportunist proprietor of The Curator after being approached on his stall by locally based fashion photographer and filmmaker Nick Clements, whose international biography includes advertising and editorial shoots for Peroni, Harley Davidson, and Vogue. Originally, the idea was to use the ground floor of the townhouse he owned as a café that could showcase his magazine, Men’s File, with the local clientele providing a good footfall to appreciate his stylish wares.

“In exchange for me running the café, Nick wanted to collaborate on creating the interiors and right setting.

No other landlord would do that and his taste was all the things I always wanted in a café.”

Nick’s magazine has since become such a huge hit with the male Japanese market that he’s stepped back from The Curator to concentrate on overseas. In the meantime, Matteo set about expanding. He took his

food exclusive coffee blend to nearby Dartmouth and opened another café called Woodroast. Building on the success in Totnes, and to some extent the simplistic philosophy, Matteo opened the Curator Kitchen, quietly without fanfare or any advertising. Like the café below, it became massively popular, so much so that Sarah has also joined the business.

“Our cooking style is based on ‘la Cucina Povera’, which translates as ‘the poor people’s food’. It has become a new way of interpreting Italian food in general but my influences come from my father’s side of the family.

The food is very traditional and regional, especially from Le Marche, which is famous for duck ragu, and Puglia, where the food is orecchiette, with strong bold flavours and seafood.”

The Curator Kitchen concept for dining can be eaten in three acts: Antipasti, Primi and Secondi, with much of it about tasting and sharing. The menu is written in permanent marker on a huge wall-mounted roll of brown paper that can be torn off each day, and is accompanied by detailed explanations from the waiting staff, who are as animated about the food and wine as their owner. For the arduous purposes of research, I sample cuttlefish with blistered peppers, chilli and mint, oven-dried tomatoes, salt cod – a speciality of Ancona – pig’s cheek with fettuccine and pangrattato, crab risotto with saffron rice, mushroom arancini balls and calf ’s liver. Pudding is tiramisu in an espresso cup, and a tiny glass of Visciolata – a chilled wild cherry wine.

Some of these specialities will stay, with seasonal variations, in the spring menu. “We are using wild garlic, nettles, wild fennel, lamb, octopus, local seafood, cardoons, local greens and edible flowers. If we are lucky enough we’ll have some dandelion leaves to use in some Puglian recipes.”

The fresh food is, obviously, all sourced locally in Devon, but the authentic stuff, including wine free from pesticide and sulphate, is transported from Italy – particularly from Matteo’s region of Ancona. Much of what is produced by his beloved “Italian food heroes” originates from up a rural Italian farm track before making its way to Totnes.

“The way I’ve been brought up, especially with my grandmother’s cooking style, was really simple.

There was no fanciness, but always an obsession with all my family about where the food came from. My dad was always looking for the little people – it was important that everything was genuine or artisan, so we’d have wine from a small farmer, amazing prosciutto from another. Most of my relatives were in Rome, so for Christmas and Easter we used to drive across the mountains and on the way we used to go to a farmer to buy a lamb and just put it in the car.”

The open kitchen at The Curator is ‘the theatre’, with local head chef Eddy Stoddart – only 28, Eddy has an impressive CV, initially learning his trade in Fingals and

the Carved Angel, then officially with Jane Baxter in the Riverford Field Kitchen, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Bangkok and London. Eddy’s number two is Yoshimi from Japan, who takes great pleasure in producing the fresh squid ink pasta you see drying over the kitchen’s wooden beams. They have recently been joined by a 22-year-old from Matteo’s region of Italy.

“The concept is about simplicity but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to produce behind the scenes,” says Matteo. “I wanted a chef who is able to understand my influence and create his own version. Eddy is a great chef and the perfect guy to carry on the legacy, although we have arguments every day!”

Like the style of the food, the décor – designed by the Workshop Collaborative – is clean and simple with stylish and nonchalant touches. “Everything you have here has been carefully chosen, from the wine to this glass, these forks, to the way this table is put together,” says Matteo.

But the 26 table settings and enduring popularity mean it’s quite hard to cater for large parties of diners, so Matteo is expanding his concept and going up another floor. “We are going to create a new environment to host private bookings or large groups. The room will be called ‘The Cellar’, with wall wine racks. The room will be very different from the others with a very elegant and cosy feel.”

The Curator Café and The Curator Kitchen, 2 The Plains, Totnes, Devon TQ9 5DR. 01803 865570 thecurator.co.uk Woodroast, 2 Smith Street, Dartmouth, Devon TQ6 9QR. 01803 832115

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Teriyaki locusts

John the Baptist was partial to locusts and Aristotle waxed lyrical about cicada – man has eaten bugs for millennia. There’s even a word for it – entomophagy – as Emma Inglis discovers when she meets Fred McVittie from Cornish Edible Insects.

I PHOTO: COURTESY FRED McVITTIE

am eating a bug. Not any old type of superscuttle, black, under-the-rug type crawly, but an insect selected just like any other food for taste and sustenance. It is a locust roasted in some teriyaki seasoning. And, surprisingly, it tastes good. Like a spicy, shell-on prawn with a nutty hint and a chickeny flavour.

In fact, it’s so good that I might have another.

Dr Fred McVittie (left) has convinced me to eat insects. McVittie is the impetus behind a new business, Cornish Edible Insects, and he believes that we should all eat more bugs. He is one of a small but growing number of people stalking pubs, lecture halls and classrooms with plates of crittery snacks in an attempt to persuade us all

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food PHOTOS: EMMA INGLIS

that insects are highly nutritious, palatable and far more sustainable than livestock.

Eating animals exacts a high toll on the planet, he tells me. The bigger the beast, the more food, land and water needed to produce the final edible product. A cow requires approximately 10kg of feed and 15,000 litres of water to produce 1kg beef, and its carbon footprint is considerable. Insects require far less feed and water. For example, crickets require just 1.7kg of food to produce 1kg of meat and 1,000 times less water. What’s more, they produce a fraction of the greenhouse gasses pumped out by cattle, and are rich in minerals, vitamins and proteins.

Of course, man has eaten bugs for millennia. There’s even a word for it: entomophagy. The Greeks and Romans ate them. John the Baptist was partial to locusts and Aristotle waxed lyrical about cicada. In many parts of Africa, Asia and Central and South America, insects are still eaten as part of the traditional diet. The UN estimates that around 2 billion people (about 30% of the world’s population) are consuming insects.

So why do we have such an aversion to eating insects in the West? McVittie thinks ‘cultural habit’ isn’t the only issue standing between Western consumers and a plate of multi-legged munchies. Another reason may be that people see bugs as an inferior food. “People associate the eating of insects with the Far East, the Third World and developing nations, and there’s a stigma attached to them. They are seen as a food for the ‘other’ or a food for the poor,’’ he says. “Of course, it’s not only a prejudicial view but also incorrect, as in many places they are not just eaten opportunistically but because they are tasty, interesting and nutritious.”

In 18th-century America, lobsters were similarly stigmatized, says McVittie, served only to slaves and prisoners. “They were chucked out on the quaysides. No one wanted to touch them.” Well, everyone knows how much you pay for lobster these days. It’s fun to think of critters enjoying the same rise to gourmet stardom.

Already, one celebrity chef in the South West has served up insects as delicacies. Devon-based Peter Gorton created a menu with bugs in every dish. The evening – titled ‘Crunchy Cuisine and Tasty Tales’, and featuring dishes such as mushroom and mealworm soup, and candied locust and mango sorbet – was a sell-out.

McVittie, a former lecturer in the theatre department at Falmouth University, loves the artistry of bug eating.

A meal is such a strongly performative act, he tells me.

“The composition, the courses, the experience of putting something into your mouth and the way the flavours interact and the different characters of the food come forward, even those feelings of revulsion or aversion that we might have. We’re mobilizing all sorts of aesthetic facilities when we eat, which is really interesting. Insects can play a huge part in that performance.”

So are there dramatics at his insect-tasting sessions?

Are people gagging on a cricket and point-blank refusing

Stuffed peppers

Coffee and waxworm cookies

Emma Inglis finds insects surprisingly edible

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INSECT INFO Seven bugs coming to a plate near you.

MEALWORMS The larval form of the mealworm beetle, mealworms are high in protein and fibre. They taste a little like almonds.

Actually, I’m always surprised by people’s readiness to eat the insects.

Mealworm taco

cornishedibleinsects.co.uk

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CRICKETS Crickets are low in calories, and high in minerals like calcium and iron. They taste like nutty shrimps.

LOCUSTS Locusts (below) are easy to harvest as they occur in swarms. They are a popular snack in Israel, and the only insect to be considered kosher.

WAX WORMS The larvae of the wax moth, wax worms are a good source of protein.

Fat content is a little higher than other edible insect species, but don’t let that put you off this grub isfavoured for its sweet, nutty mushroom flavour.

ANTS A whole range of ant species are eaten across the world; their flavour is pleasantly sour. This is because ants secrete an acid when threatened. Ant eggs are also eaten; in Mexico they are known as ‘escamoles’ or ‘Mexican caviar’.

BEES Many indigenous people around the world eat bees: unsurprisingly, stingless bee species are most commonly munched. Bee larvae are also prized in many cultures.

PHOTOS: EMMA INGLIS

a wax worm? “Actually, I’m always surprised by people’s readiness to eat the insects,” says McVittie. “I’ll arrive at the tasting sessions with a wide range of foods that include ‘gateway’ foods, such as a banana muffin made with cricket flour or a chocolate-covered insect, right up to something that is very clearly an insect. You’d imagine that people would leave the insect and go for the muffin, but actually that is not the case. People are very up for eating the insect.”

Currently, McVittie imports most of his bugs. “But I would like to get more involved in the production side. I am ideally placed in Cornwall as it’s a county already associated with food and innovation. There’s a willingness to try new things here.” Already, he has started to breed mealworms in his garden and is working with students on the Sustainable Design course at the University of Falmouth to make domestic-scale mealworm houses. Plans are also afoot to design a mealworm farm for the Eden Project.

People may view McVittie as extreme but he’s certainly not alone in believing that insect-eating is a good idea. The UN thinks so too. Its Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has already laid out a series of arguments in favour of entomophagy in publications over the past decade, including a recent report, ‘Edible insects: future prospects for food and feed security’. Not only does the report extol the merits of eating insects but supports the view that people in the West should eat more of them. However, for this to occur, the FAO concedes that several things need to happen, including ‘a change in consumer preferences’.

McVittie thinks that’s possible, and is doing all he can to make it so. “Wouldn’t it be fantastic,” he says.

“Imagine!” I try to conceive a bug-eating future where we all have a tank of crickets on our kitchen shelf and nip outside to our mealworm houses to grab some grubs for lunch. And, actually, yes, I can almost imagine it. But, then, I’ve eaten a locust now. So anything is possible.

GRASSHOPPERS Gram for gram, grasshoppers contain more protein than beef. They have a similar flavour to shrimp and are best eaten when roasted or deep-fried.

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Bites Perfect pairing Andy Appleton, the former head chef at Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Cornwall, has set up a new restaurant, Appleton’s at the Vineyard, at Trevibban Mill Vineyard and Orchards near Padstow.

The café offers an Italian-inspired menu including dishes paired with Trevibban’s organic wines and ciders.

The intimate, south-facing restaurant will also use produce grown in the on-site herb and vegetable garden, as well as lamb from the Southdown sheep reared in the vineyard.

“I had some really great offers, a lot from London, but I went with my heart and my gut,” says Andy. “It just felt right, and still feels right. It’s all here: the venue, the kitchen, the vegetable garden and the wine.”

Trevibban Mill Vineyard, which opened last year, is Cornwall’s first organic viticulture business. It has already won one gold, three silver and nine bronze medals for its wines. Since buying the land between Padstow and Winnard’s Perch roundabout in 2007, husband-and-wife team Liz and Engin Mumcuoglu have planted 1,700 Cornish apple trees and 300 other fruit and chestnut trees. Last May they opened the tasting room and shop, adding tours around the vineyard.

“Since the day we opened, customers would sit on the terrace enjoying the evening sun and ask if they could stay for dinner, but, at the beginning, all we could

Liz Mumcuoglu, Andy Appleton and Engin Mumcuoglu

manage were simple cheese and charcuterie plates,” says Liz. “Having a range of dishes, where visitors can try our wines paired with fantastic locally sourced food, made by a renowned chef, was the natural next step.”

Appleton’s at the Vineyard will be serving lunch on Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, with lunch and dinner on Friday and Saturday. trevibbanmill.com

Sam Moody at The Elephant Sam Moody, executive head chef at the Bath Priory, will join forces with fellow National Chef of the Year Simon Hulstone on Friday 13 May when he takes over the kitchen at the Michelin-starred Elephant in Torquay. Sam is one of nine talented chef friends Simon has invited to serve up specially created menus using locally sourced ingredients at the Elephant. Sam, who was awarded a Michelin star in 2012, describes his food as simple with the emphasis on fresh produce, flavour and balance. His six-course menu will include: wild garlic velouté with River Test crayfish, salt ling with tomato and curry, and marsh lamb with carrots and pearl barley. The menu is priced at £50 per head.

Further chef collaborations at The Elephant will include Steve Drake, chef proprietor of Drakes in Ripley, on Thursday 16 June; Luke Tipping, chef director at Simpsons, Edgbaston on Thursday 7 July; Adam Bennett, executive chef at The Cross in Kenilworth on Wednesday 17 August. elephantrestaurant.co.uk

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Walking lunch A new valley walk created in the heart of the Duchy of Cornwall’s estate, near Lostwithiel, makes it possible to walk between Restormel Castle and the Duchy of Cornwall Nursery – with the promise of a delicious lunch at the end.

Beginning at the castle, the Restormel Woodland Walk enables visitors to explore the Norman Fort – once owned by the Black Prince and home to the first Duke of Cornwall – before continuing through Duchy farmland to the Duke of Cornwall’s 17th-century Restormel Manor at the head of the Fowey valley.

Close to the banks of the River Fowey, surrounded by beech, sycamore and lime parkland trees, this area is home to a diversity of wildlife and it is also Cornwall’s largest and oldest deer park, dating back to the 12th century. It is also a breeding site for very rare native Cornish Black Bees.

The walk finishes at the Duchy of Cornwall Nursery, where visitors can pick up a few plants for their garden before taking sustenance at the award-winning café.

With a focus on Cornish suppliers, the talented team of chefs, led by head chef Richard Du Pille, produce virtually everything on site.

Richard’s suppliers include Looe fisherman Julian Clemens, Tywardreath Butchers and Origin coffee.

The café menu changes seasonally; in spring and summer, visitors can enjoy delicious sandwiches, salads, homemade bread and cakes on the terrace, which has astounding views over the Fowey valley. Duchy café serves food, snacks and light lunches every day from 9am until 4.30pm.

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Duchy Nursery will be holding a special guided walk from 11am1pm on 20 May led by experts from English Heritage and Duchy of Cornwall. Tickets cost £20. To book please call 01872 872668. duchyofcornwallnursery.co.uk RESTORMEL WOODLAND WALK Distance: 1.2 miles (approx.)

Time: 35 mins Difficulty: Moderate as there are some steep sections and the terrain is uneven in parts.

food

A FEAST OF FESTIVALS It’s that bountiful time of year when foodies hit the streets (and the beaches) to celebrate the best of the South West .

PHOTO: FAVIS OF SALCOMBE

Crabfest, Saturday 1 May, Island Street, Salcombe. salcombecrabfest.co.uk

Food Fair at Dartington will showcase the wares of 40 of Devon’s finest food and drink producers. This year will see the return of the Dartington Cider Bar and the nearby Devon Drinks shop will celebrate local refreshment (alcoholic and non-alcoholic). TV chef Mal Harradine will cook alongside regional food heroes in the Cookery Theatre while outside there will be cooking demonstrations by Big Fire, and Rachel Lambert will lead food-foraging walks around the estate.

Food Fair at Dartington, Sunday 29 – Monday 30 May. The Shops at Dartington. dartington.org

St Ives Food and Drink Festival, Porthminster Beach, Saturday 14 – Sunday 15 May. stivesfoodanddrinkfestival.co.uk

PHOTO: ADAM GLASSON

Salcombe Crabfest will celebrate crab and all things seafood from the South Hams on Saturday 1 May. The volunteer-run festival will be opened by Mary Berry, who will talk about her life, favourite recipes and the new series of The Great British Bake Off. Talks and live demos from distinguished chefs will include Jane Baxter from Wild Artichokes as well as chefs from local restaurants including The Harbour Hotel, South Sands Hotel, The Ward Room, Winking Prawn and the Fortescue Inn. Visitors can also enjoy hands-on crabpicking tuition from Favis of Salcombe, commercial crabfishing talks, crab pot making, music, and wine tasting.

All monies raised by Salcombe Crabfest will be donated to a number of local charities including The Salcombe Young Centre, which plans to use the money to install a safe weatherproof playing area and carry out essential maintenance.

St Ives Festival of Food and Drink is bang on the beach at Porthminster, where an impressive line-up of celebrity chefs will appear over the weekend of 14-15 May. These include: Jack Stein; The Fabulous Baker Brothers; Gizzie Erskine; Chetna Makan and Ping Coombes. This community-focused festival will also feature top chefs from pubs, restaurants and hotels across the region who will share their knowledge through demonstrations and talks.

Wine, cider and beer producers, chocolate and cheese makers, fruit and vegetable growers as well as meat, chutneys, curry and bread produced in Cornwall will all be available in the food producers’ market. There will also be live music and entertainment and an Open StandUp Paddle Board Race.

Bristol Food Connections is a new kind of food festival, offering experiences, inspiration and learning about the way we think about food. Over nine days in early May, thousands of people across the city will break bread together at events of all shapes and sizes. The programme includes celebratory feasts and banquets, brain-food discussions and debates, cooking demos and community events covering everything from cooking skills to soil, children’s events to foraging walks. All events are designed to be fun and educational, helping the public to engage with the social, environmental and economic challenges we face in feeding our growing population. Food Connections aims to connect people to all aspects of their food and will host the BBC Food & Farming Awards.

Bristol Food Connections, Friday April 29 – Saturday 7 May. bristolfoodconnections.com

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Signature dish

sttudyinn.com

Mozzarella, broad bean, olive, lemon and rocket salad Serves four INGREDIENTS

• • • • • • • • • •

2 balls of mozzarella 400g broad beans, podded or smashed peas Handful of black olives, stoned and halved 250g rocket, washed Lemon zest 1 tbsp Dijon mustard 1 tbsp sherry vinegar Sea salt 200ml extra virgin olive oil Juice of half a lemon

METHOD

Blanch the broad beans or peas until tender. Drain and season, add stoned small black olives. Toss the rocket. Tear the mozzarella into four. Put the leaves on the plate with the mozzarella. Sprinkle over the olives and beans. Drizzle with the vinaigrette and lemon.

For the dressing PHOTO: DANIEL SCOTT

Put the mustard and the sherry vinegar into a bowl and add a generous pinch of sea salt and pepper. Gradually add the extra virgin olive oil to emulsify. Squeeze in the lemon and whisk to combine. Check the seasoning. A wonderful spring lunch.

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PHOTO: DANIEL SCOTT

Emily Scott is the chef-owner of St Tudy Inn near Wadebridge, which she took on as a going concern 18 months ago. Much of her inspiration comes from time spent cooking in France, where she grew up. She trained formally at Tante Marie but says she learnt most by spending time in different kitchens around other chefs. Her knowledge of classic techniques informs her approach to cooking.

When Emily moved to Cornwall she ran The Harbour Restaurant in Port Isaac, where she developed The Harbour Kitchen, offering bespoke catering for suppers, shoot dinners, celebrations and weddings, and everything in between. Emily says it’s in her kitchen where she feels most at home, and loves nothing more than bringing friends and family together around a table. In January, St Tudy Inn was shortlisted as ‘one to watch’ in the Top 50 Gastropubs Awards. Emily recently created a special St Tudy Ale with Caron Archer from the Padstow Brewing Co. The beer is made with three types of hop, and four types of malt – one in particular to give its aroma and copper colour – and Emily describes it as a “real session drinking ale, with citrus notes, that we believe will work in all seasons”.

For her signature dish, Emily has chosen a fresh, summery salad. “It is in the simplicity of the dish that I find much of the pleasure,” says Emily. “Crisp peppery rocket, salty black olives, the zesty acidity of lemon, the freshness of the beans all balanced by creamy mozzarella. Food for me is not about a meal as such but ingredients associated with a place. My last meal on Earth would be a white peach eaten in Bagnol, Provence, on the balcony of my grandfather’s house. Disappearing to Burgundy for three years after training at a catering college in London was formative in shaping the food I now cook. In France I found my ethos of food and how I wanted to cook and live. Bringing people together makes me happy, breaking bread, sharing a table, conversation and laughter.

“I think you can serve the best food in the world but if your service doesn’t match or if it’s not very comfortable or doesn’t feel right then I think it almost doesn’t matter what comes out of the kitchen. It’s a combination of everything – it’s a bit of theatre.”

food

The Table Prowler The White Hart Hotel, Moretonhampstead, Dartmoor It’s a lovely thing, settling into a dining room after a day of moor walking. Achy legs and hungry stomachs welcome the relief of a soft padded chair and a menu, stuffed full of fresh, local produce complemented with a well-rounded wine list. This is what it is to be seated in the cozy dining room of the White Hart, a Grade II listed hotel in the centre of Moretonhampstead, itself right in the centre of Dartmoor.

The family-run business is a brilliant base to explore the rest of the national park, either on foot or by car, but also to enjoy some rather comfortable hospitality.

The restaurant crowd when we visited was a mixed affair – a gathering celebrated a birthday in the main dining room, while couples on romantic retreats were dotted around the smaller area by the bar. Certainly not pretentious (there’s undecanted ketchup and mustard on the table), the White Hart feels intimate yet stylish, and the service is local, friendly and chatty. The menu serves pub classics like beer-battered fish and a pie of the day, alongside more refined offerings that focus on local produce and which change seasonally. There are also daily specials, from which we ordered.

The highlight was a huge plate of Brixham mussels, so plump and light they must have still been in the ocean

that morning, topped with a fillet of pan-fried sea bass (£14.95) and drenched in a cream, wine and dill sauce.

The Dartmoor venison with roast seasonal vegetables and juniper jus (£14.95) came a close second; it was rich, earthy and satisfying. For dessert, I’m never one to go past a menu that boasts bread pudding (£6.50), and with more walking coming the next day, this wouldn’t be a day to try. It was decent, but the temperature variations made me wonder if it had been hastily microwaved. In fact, perhaps due to the busy night, we waited some time for our food to arrive, but all in all, what was lacking in timeliness was made up for with freshness and scale.

Perhaps most enticing was the seamless graduation from evening meal to nightcap. The bar is well equipped with a whisky cabinet from which you’re encouraged to choose. As we were staying upstairs it would have been rude not too. I suggest you do the same. whitehartdartmoor.co.uk Food 8 | Service 7 | Location 8 | Ambience 8

The Cove, near Falmouth We arrived at The Cove on a sunny afternoon, children in tow. The restaurant, suitably named, is set on a balcony overlooking a sandy cove. There are large conservatory windows that protect diners from the elements but were crystal clear to allow full appreciation of the view. It’s hypnotic. The sea stretches on and on to a single tanker turning slowly on the horizon. Back on the inside, The Cove is neat and tastefully decorated – John Lewis Home-esque. Indeed, everyone eating there was neat and well groomed, John Lewis-style; everyone, that is, except for us, who’d shown up late in scruffy, wornall-week leggings and sea hair. The staff were nevertheless welcoming and we proceeded to order: crispy tiger prawns for me followed by hake with bacon and red onion velouté; and for him the Fal Bay Seafood Feast. The children had their usual – fish and chips.

The tiger prawns were delicious: each a good size, wrapped in rice spring roll wrapper and fried rather than battered, and all the better for it. They came with aioli and a dab of parsley pesto. The fish and chips were of a quality entirely unappreciated by seven-year-olds but good enough to plunder by eye-boggled adults – chunks of cod lightly battered with very good jumbo chips.

The Fal Seafood Feast arrived with a silent flourish –

this was definitely the star choice: a bowl with mussels, scallops and monkfish in a marinière sauce upon which was another large chunk of cod, upon which was a succulent lobster tail. Resting on the bowl was a thin slice of ciabatta toast laden with caviar, prawns, crab, and aioli.

My hake looked good but was always going to be upstaged. The fish was fresh and plentiful, the bacon somewhat sparse but that didn’t matter, the red onion velouté the perfect sweet foil for the smooth creamy hake. The lamb’s lettuce and saffron-yellow light sauce gave the dish top marks for presentation.

It was a very good meal – a little bit of waiting for the mains but this was doubtless down to the rather elaborate Fish Feast holding us up. The meal with drinks came to £75, which is not cheap but not expensive either. Price, environment (any lack of character was made up for by the jaw-dropping view) and general ambience (shame about the muzak) made The Cove a very pleasant and safe culinary experience that’s mediumpriced. It was, in all, ‘very John Lewis’. thecovemaenporth.co.uk Food 9 | Service 8 | Ambience 8 | Location 9

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crafting your space

Photo:Van Ellen + Sheryn Architects

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Escape Hotel Endsleigh, Devon | Seycat’s Live Like a Local holiday service

The garden at Hotel Endsleigh hotelendsleigh.com

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Sensitively refurbished to retain its wealth of history and to bring its magnificent gardens back to full splendour, Hotel Endsleigh is a treat for the senses.

Words by Naomi Price.

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One of the delights of Endsleigh’s garden is its herbaceous border, said to be the longest in the country and recalling Hestercombe or Forde Abbey.

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J

ust in time for the driveway turning, past the mist-shrouded miles of Dartmoor’s enigmatic contrasts, the skies suddenly clear. Revealed is a sea of pink acres, tumbling down and down, bringing a delicate scent on the early spring breeze. That’s Endsleigh’s own home-bred rhododendrons – ‘Endsleigh Pink’.

Set within 100 acres of its own secluded valley on the border of Devon and Cornwall, Endsleigh is a bit of a microcosm of Dartmoor itself. Lush parkland rolls down to two miles of the River Tamar, while high on the wooded escarpments above, enchanted landscapes of exotic and native trees are constantly nourished by the waterfalls, streams and rills that run glistening on granite steps or sparkling on giant ferns.

At the centre of it all, among gardens landscaped by Repton, sits a granite hunting and shooting lodge built for Georgiana, Duchess of Bedford, to evoke memories of the Scottish highlands from which she had to prise herself away to marry John Russell, the 5th Duke of Bedford, in 1803.

Now it’s the property of Olga Polizzi – hotelier, designer and reinventor of buildings. Hotel Endsleigh follows on from Tresanton, Polizzi’s other Westcountry hotel at St Mawes, full of the feel of the sea and light of its Cornish surroundings. “I fell madly in love with Endsleigh from a distance,” says Polizzi. “I bought it with my heart, not my head. I knew I had to protect it.”

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Endsleigh was built in the ‘cottage ornée’ style. Also known as Strawberry Hill Gothic, it was an eccentric reaction against neo-classicism, in which details such as intricate thatching and rusticated embellishments are brought to stolid Gothic layouts. Endsleigh was spared the more fussy flourishes, but its idiosyncrasies are behind its rare Grade 1 listed status.

When Polizzi bought Endsleigh in 2004, the place was in a state of decay: a dour, Gothic carapace with some of its features barely recognizable from neglect.

She restored a log-pillared loggia on the terrace and discovered the overgrown traces of a parterre, its subdivisions now filled with tulips in spring and a purple wash of salvias in the summer.

Recently, she’s refurbished the stable block, making several suites sprinkled with odd bits of striking furniture such as Regency demi-lune tables and campaign chests.

The drawing-room is eclectically modern and traditional, with re-velveted sofas in shocking Schiaparelli pink, Italian Empire marble-topped console tables and blockprinted floral linen armchairs (commissioned from Mulberry). Often, it’s adorned with gun-dogs sitting happily before a well-kept drawing-room fire.

Upstairs, many of the hotel’s 17 rooms retain the original chinoiserie wallpaper depicting deep-hued songbirds meandering amongst trailing bamboos, and glossy camellias, even finding their way into bathrooms.

Refurbishments feature revived editions of Cole &

escape

Son wallpaper designs with huge floral pattern repeats, complementing the exterior: you can reach out of the window and touch the gorgeous dinner-plate blooms of a Victorian Magnolia ‘Exmouth’ planted next to the house.

In 1814, it was Humphrey Repton, successor to Capability Brown, who won the contract to remodel the estate of the 5th Duke of Bedford (outspoken Whig politician and great-great grandfather of the philosopher Bertrand Russell) who, besides much of London and the whole of Covent Garden, owned a third of Devon and Woburn Abbey.

In an age that favoured the extremes of exacting formality and unbridled wilderness, Repton set about ordering nature. At least, most of it was nature, but much was artifice. Back in the day, the trick lay in fusing the two, so that it was impossible to tell where any of it began or ended.

It was intense hydraulic and engineering endeavour that was to produce the sunken pools and the casual wildernesses which, once upon a time, had been part of the landscape. Unruly watercourses were dammed and diverted. Haphazard steps were cut into the hillside, eventually to be covered with moss and lichen, over which tumbled the redirected springs and rills with which the landscape abounded. It was all made to look as if had always been there.

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and recalling Hestercombe or Forde Abbey. At 12ft across, it’s one of the deepest: high summer sees its length filled with drifts of the pinks and purples from Polygonum bistorta and Campanula lactiflora. In mid-spring, it’s blue with swathes of Iris sibirica and 33 varieties of tulip; in the autumn, it’s red and green with sedum, crocosmia, Alchemilla mollis and euphorbia. The border wears a different look in every season, but at all times its soft planting is punctuated by bold structures of Chusan palms and the bright scarlet stems of Cornus alba.

In structure, it’s how Repton designed it (he provided before-and-after popover pages in his garden Red Book), but it’s lost the stiffness of Georgian precision and gained a loose informality – almost prairie-like in its canvas.

Above the border runs a tunnel formed by a series of rose arches of ‘Princess Louise’, a David Austen hybrid, underplanted with lady’s mantle and twining above a cobbled path where the sunlight falls in dappled patches, and the scent is heavenly…

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spinach, for example. He’ll bring Italian southern accents (he comes from Abruzzo) to wild Devon venison with a sauce of celeriac, tarragon, cavolo nero and a jus of cherries. Exceptional just on its own.

It’s not without irony that Endsleigh now functions once again with the purpose for which it was built.

Endsleigh is still the fishing and shooting lodge that it was designed to be. You can hire the estate’s ghillie for a day’s salmon-fishing, go shooting, have a morning with the falconer, his goshawks and barn owls, and even get a day out on a hireling with the local hunt.

The 13th Duke of Bedford, who died in 2002, is reported to have said: “I don’t like fishing or shooting or hunting or any of the English gentleman’s occupations.”

But then he’d never stayed at Hotel Endsleigh.

Allow yourself to imagine a simpler, more beautiful place, like nowhere else in England.

Order your free 2016 Islands Guide www.visitislesofscilly.com

Endsleigh is a granite hunting and shooting lodge built for Georgiana, Duchess of Bedford, to evoke memories of the Scottish highlands from which she had to prise herself away to marry John Russell, the 5th Duke of Bedford, in 1803.

Prices range from £190 for a classic double room in the quiet season. Suites cost between £225 and £500 during high season or bank holidays. Dinner is £44 for three courses à la carte.

An hour with the ghillie plus a rod (March to October) costs £45-£85 per day.

For falconry sessions and hawk walks contact westcountryfalconry.com. It’s £130 per couple for two hours, with sessions pp from £65. David has trained his barn owls to deliver rings to the best man at weddings.

Shooting over 1,600 acres is available with the Hardicott Shoot. The price is £39 per bird + VAT to include a basket of lunch and drinks.

Flights to over 30 destinations this summer for business or pleasure

Cholwell Riding Stables (01822 810526) offers mounts for all abilities for hacking on wild Dartmoor.

Reflexology sessions are offered by the inspired Tokyo-born and trained Tamami (“the feet speak to me”) Benjamin from £45 per session. hotelendsleigh.com

It’s Easy from Exeter

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With her business partner, Jane Seymour has set up a service that provides local knowledge to holidaymakers visiting Cornwall. But it’s so much more than flagging up where to get the best fish and chips, as Fiona McGowan discovers.

Jane Seymour pictured at Sennen, Cornwall

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S

ay ‘concierge service’ and you conjure up all sorts of different images, from a hotel concierge giving advice on the best places to visit (and avoid), or perhaps the uber-exclusive service provided by the likes of Quintessentially: providing everything from entry to private members’ clubs to booking a top-flight chef to cook your dinner. Or even, as a friend said, “Is that when you get your wine and women fixed up for you?”

Hmmm.

Seycat Live Like a Local is none of these, although the service it provides reaches to the uber-exclusive level for those who want it. The idea behind Jane Seymour and Mark Caterer’s business is to provide local knowhow to people visiting Cornwall. The majority of holiday-makers, says Jane, book accommodation well in advance (because they have to) and then find themselves, the day before the trip, trawling through TripAdvisor, wondering what activities to organise. That certainly sounds familiar – who hasn’t engaged in last-minute calling around only to discover that the top-rated places are fully booked (of course they are)? Do you take a punt and pick the one with two stars and a handful of bad reviews? Where will you eat? Where will you shop?

Panic sets in as you cram your clothes into your luggage: will you need wetsuits? Snorkels? Will you be going out to a nice restaurant? Do you need to dress up? Or is outdoor-wear de rigueur in Padstow?

Jane Seymour sits back in the early spring sunshine outside a converted stone chapel that overlooks fields and the gently rolling landscape of West Penwith. The chapel is called Dreamcatcher, and is now an exclusive yet idiosyncratic holiday home: another of Jane’s projects.

The woman moves fast: she and her partner Mark bought the place in August 2015, moved to Cornwall from London in September, and completed it before Christmas. The place was stripped and re-fitted to a fivestar spec, with its unusual features – a minstrel gallery, arched stain-glass windows and cavernous ceilings – brought to the fore. Jane, who is clearly passionate about interior design (in spite of a career in finance) has adorned the place with quirky features, such as bathroom tiles that look exactly like grey wooden panelling, wallpaper that replicates stacked suitcases, and another of old-fashioned metal baskets (“the ones you used to get at the swimming pool,” Jane reminds me). It certainly has the wow factor, while being cosy and comfortable.

It’s the sort of place that you could comfortably spend a rainy week without getting cabin fever… “Or have a party here,” says Jane. “One guest asked if it was OK if she had a party. Of course, I said it was fine. They must have tidied up afterwards, but there were an awful lot of bottles in the recycling. And the volume on the stereo was on VERY loud…”

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escape frankly any of the things that locals are tapped into. By scouring the region and meeting suppliers and organisers, she makes the judgment call on who her clients would like to use. Mark, meanwhile, works on the books in the evenings, and spends his days working as a labourer: converting a cottage in Mousehole. It’s a far cry from what they were doing this time last year: both of them were working in private wealth management firm Quilter, where Jane was senior marketing executive and Mark worked in risk management. Working long hours in their luxurious offices for some of the wealthiest clients in the world, the idea of working hands-on with builders and outdoor activity suppliers, and with fishermen and foragers, must have seemed like a dream.

There is some serious drive here.

“I am definitely a risk-taker,” admits Jane. “And I’m very determined. If I’ve got my heart set on doing something, I’ll make sure it happens.” This is clear from her journey through life – as a young mother living in Cornwall, she began working at Abbey National on the till. Before long, she took it upon herself to approach the area manager when he came to visit. “He was a godlike figure who everyone was a bit scared of,” she says.

But she convinced him to give her a more senior job, working her way up from customer services advisor to qualified financial advisor by the time she was 24. When her children were 10 and 11, she upped sticks and moved to Bristol to take up a marketing position in a building society. It was a big transition, but you get the feeling that major shifts are a driving force for Jane. Some years later, having set herself up as a successful financial

Dreamcatcher

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marketing consultant, she made another break – leaving her business in Bristol and working for an investment management firm in London. It was in London that she met Mark, and they hatched their plan to leave the corporate life and start again in Cornwall.

To see the attention to detail in Dreamcatcher, for which she created and sourced all of the interior design elements, and to hear her talk about the complex array of services and activities that she has personally assessed for her clients who visit Cornwall, takes my breath away.

“I am very methodical,” she says by way of explanation.

“There were three months of planning before the ‘Go’ button was pressed on Live like a Local. Being adaptive is important, too. The website has changed about four or five times thanks to the data that you can get hold of now. With Google analytics and social media – plus we’ve got some clients now and we know what they look like – we understand more about the market and we’re learning on a day-to-day basis to maximise the investment.” Spoken like a true marketing professional.

The range of services available in the region is phenomenal, and it’s down to Jane to select the best providers – both on a personal and a professional level.

A job she clearly loves. “People are looking to have it laid on for them. One thing we organised was flying a couple to the Scillies for the ‘Low Tide Experience’, where you can walk between Tresco and Bryher – it only happens twice a year. The locals put on a lovely lunch with lobsters and crabs on a barbecue, and a Prosecco bar. Then they’d go razor clamming with local fishermen after lunch and have a journey back to the mainland on

The range of services available in the region is phenomenal, and it’s down to Jane to select the best providers – both on a personal and a professional level.

a rib. And recently,” she says, warming to the theme, “I arranged a semi-educational nature experience for a family that started with a beachside foray with Rachel at Wild Food Foraging, then a visit to Gwel An More in Portreath for a meet-the-animals session, so you can hand-feed the rescued foxes, hold a barn owl and meet the reindeer. Then, in the evening, they go to St Stephen for some star gazing using state-of the-art telescopes, with a guide to talk them through the night sky.”

A concierge service in Cornwall is clearly less about lifting the velvet rope into excusive clubs and cultural events that you might expect in the cities, and more about getting deeply involved in the very nature of the environment. Almost as an aside, Jane tells me that she has set up another business in the eight months she’s been living here: a bespoke service for ‘boutique weddings’ – catering for 40 guests or fewer. She will act as location scout for the most individual and quirky venues, and plan the entire event. Whether it’s in the vaulted rooms of Dreamcatcher – it was a chapel, after all – or in a whole gamut of interesting settings, Jane is now in possession of a marriage licence, so all systems are go on the wedding front, too. What is perhaps more impressive is how she maintains all of this with the calmest of voices and the relaxed air of someone who is on holiday herself. “It’s because I’m doing what I love,” she says with a smile.

“I’m very outdoorsy: I love nature – walking and surfing and gardening, and I do a lot of foraging.” Jane has clearly come back to her true home. livelocaluk.com

OPEN THE D OOR TO LUXURY… AND REL AX

Cornish Gems offer over 170 luxury holiday homes, cottages and apartments to rent throughout Cornwall.

Our Boutique for Two collection is perfect for those seeking the quality of a boutique hotel with the independence of self-catering.

Shake the sand from your toes, sink into the bath with the coast still in sight and pop the cork on the bubbles we’ve left in the fridge.

Short breaks and last minute deals available, plus your dog can come too.

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For teachers and parents of children studying in the South West Schools news in brief

Cornwall’s best young baker crowned winner of the Great Truro High Bake-Off A YEAR 5 PUPIL from Mylor Bridge has been crowned Cornwall’s best young baker in the Grand Final of the Great Truro High Bake Off. Rick Stein’s Head Pastry Chef was on hand to judge as the contestants competed to cook a traditional Victoria sponge following the classic WI recipe. As a true technical challenge, the bakers were given identical ingredients but given creative freedom in their decoration and filling.

Gold prize in the countywide competition went to Connie McGannity from Mylor Bridge School, with Oscar Haywood from Constantine Primary School awarded silver, and Kaia Sawalha from Connor Downs Academy receiving bronze.

Other bakers taking part in the final were: Scarlett Berry from Devoran School; Evie Groves from Archbishop Benson Primary School; Rosanna Benney from Mawnan School; and Amy Frankland from Truro High School.

The young bakers had been whittled down from nearly 200 children from 12 local schools in the search for Cornwall’s best young baker.

The panel included Truro High’s Head of Food, Mrs Lisa van der Lem, and Stuart Pate, the Head Pastry Chef at Rick Stein’s Patisserie Padstow. The competition was organised by Truro High School for Girls and open to young bakers in Years 5 and 6 from across Cornwall.

First prize included a voucher for a Rick Stein Children’s Cookery Course in Padstow, and Connie’s whole class is now invited to take part in a half-day food workshop, including cooking and food science, at Truro High School during the summer term. Truro High is a 2015 Good Schools Guide Gold Award winner for its Home Economic teaching.

Gold winner Connie McGannity

Contestants with their creations

Shebbear College celebrates 175 years with a midsummer ball SHEBBEAR COLLEGE is proud to announce that Joey the Lips will be performing at its midsummer ball – celebrating 175 years of the College – on 25 June 2016. There will be a grand marquee with Champagne bar, and a three-course gourmet meal will be provided by Dartmoor Kitchen. The 136

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dress code is black tie, and during proceedings there will be a grand Prize Draw and Charity Auction.

Welcome drinks are at 6.30pm and carriages at 1am.

Tickets: £75 each. For further information contact info@ midsummerball.co.uk.

school

BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s principal flautist delivers masterclass at The Millfield

Matthew Featherstone with Millfield pupil

THE MILLFIELD PREP Music Department held a wind extravaganza masterclass featuring classes on brass, oboe, flute and jazz band with special guest Matthew Featherstone, the principle flautist with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

Matthew’s class included flute beat-boxing and an open masterclass for flute pupils. A group of pupils played for Matthew and the audience, and Matthew performed Debussy’s Syrinx and Zoom Tube, a contemporary composition, both for solo flute.

Other classes on the day included Blow Brass!, involving a very fast tuba solo, an oboe group performance, and a dynamic contrast and ensemble skills session for the jazz band. It was a musically enriching morning for all involved.

Trinity appoints new Head IN SEPTEMBER 2016 Trinity School will appoint Lawrence Coen as new Head. Mr Coen (left) has a clear philosophy on education: “Education should enable every child to develop in as many arenas as possible and be prepared for the challenges that a rapidly changing word will hold for them. Whilst failure is never the objective, it offers a unique opportunity to learn, provided that there is a network of support to enable the pupil to move forward stronger and more confident.

“The educational needs of students in the 21st century extend beyond memorising facts to facing challenges, dealing with ‘obstacles’, innovation and effective contribution to a team. Creating a school where a few at the top succeed is relatively straightforward but the real challenge is to push through the entire cohort who all achieve at or above their expected level, as well as leaving with attributes that enable them to be determined, optimistic and emotionally intelligent.”

Mr Coen will be at the Devon County Show and available to meet at Stand 81 on Row A along with other members of staff from Trinity.

WHAT FUTURE WILL YOU MAKE? Explore our new degree titles – from BA (Hons) Product Design & Innovation to BA (Hons) Creative Advertising & Brand.

Limited places still available to start this Sept 2016.

Visit and apply now plymouthart.ac.uk

Open Days 23 April & 18 June

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In Help Your Child at Home, Professor Ruth Merttens provides parents with advice on how they can assist their children’s learning. In the seventh part of this exclusive series for MANOR, she focuses on helping teenagers with maths.

A

s our children grow older, it gets progressively harder to help them with their learning – especially when they really struggle. This is partly because what they are doing gets harder and we may not ourselves be experts in chemistry, masters of mathematics or remember how to identify the difference between a fronted adverbial and an extended noun phrase! It is also because the recipient of our assistance – the teenager – is no longer willing to be helped in the same way as they were when younger. Indeed, most adolescents have a very different idea of what constitutes ‘good’ parental help than does the parent.

HELPING WITH HOMEWORK “Can you help me with my maths homework?” asks Joe, usually at the most inconvenient time, just as you are trying to get his younger sibling to bed or cook supper.

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Of course, as a conscientious parent, you put aside all else, and sit and look at the offending homework – worst luck: it is on adding fractions. You get your head around it, digging deep in your memory to resurrect the half-forgotten methods, and begin to explain to your reluctant, increasingly fidgety son. And this is where the trouble starts. Joe’s one idea is to get this homework out of the way just as soon as he can, and by expending as little mental effort as possible. His idea of your helping him is that you should simply tell him the answers. Your idea of helping him is that you should teach him how to do it for himself. This discrepancy becomes increasingly evident as you both proceed in this doomed venture.

This is especially true in maths. The problem is worsened by the fact that teaching methods have changed, technology has advanced, the curriculum has been updated, and so the strategy or procedure that you

school remember is often not the one they have been taught at school. Your attempt to show your son or daughter how to do something can often fall on deaf ears as it doesn’t mirror what they were shown at school. Worse still, it can confuse or disrupt their tentative understanding, doing more harm than good.

However, there is no doubt that good parental support throughout your child’s schooling can and does make all the difference. As I am constantly reiterating, the single biggest factor in children’s educational success is their parents. So how best to help?

First, be explicit and strike a deal with the teenager about homework, at least in relation to maths. Explain that you are not going to just give them the answers. But at the same time, you do understand that they may not be receptive to, or need, a fully blown lesson on fractions at that moment, just when they are under pressure and struggling to get homework done for the morning. So strike a deal: you will do a quick example with the first one, and will then work through the others swiftly with them, so that effectively you are in the driving seat as you do them together. This will be quicker, but you will write a note underneath the homework stating ‘done with assistance’. This alerts the teacher to the fact that help was required. It is essential that the teacher realises this – the best of all outcomes is that they do further teaching on this topic, enabling your son or daughter to ‘get it’. This ‘deal’ effectively puts the onus for helping the child to understand the maths back on the teacher, which is where it belongs. Teenagers are not stupid, and in most cases they do actually want to succeed, in their school work as elsewhere, despite any bluster to the contrary. So the reason for this deal will make sense, even if they don’t like it.

The alternative is that you set aside time later in the evening when the pair of you engage in some work together to help the teenager understand this particular bit of maths. It is here that you need to tread with care.

It is essential that you take your lead from them, rather than insisting on your own way of doing it. The best idea is to use a professional source: one of the most reputable is the BBC Bitesize website, which provides not only practice questions but also very clear explanations and even video clips to aid these. A reputable revision guide can also serve this purpose. The point here is to create a situation in which you and your reluctant offspring can together focus on an explanation which neither of you generated, and so one with which neither of you has any ego-involvement or any reason to do anything other than make sense of it. The enterprise of shared engagement, of jointly making sense of the piece of teaching, can be genuinely productive. It often enables a real dialogue in which a great deal of learning can take place – on your side as well as the student’s. It is then possible to use either the practice questions provided or to return to the homework to test if you have both really ‘got it’.

NUMERACY We would all agree that we want our children to be numerate. But what does this mean? Well, it means that we want them to be able to work things out in their heads, and also to be able to do sums on paper if they need to. In real life, most calculations are fairly easy and actually we need a fast, approximate answer. For example, if we are buying three pizzas at £4.99 each, we need to know that this will cost about £15. We do not need to know that they cost exactly £14.97. And this type of situation where we need to have a good sense of the answer is a frequently occurring one. It follows that it is crucial that children can do such calculations swiftly and easily, with confidence.

They need to be really comfortable with numbers, to have a good sense of how one number relates to another, to be able to do a quick rough calculation. All this is as essential to learning mathematics at secondary school as it is necessary as a general life-skill. Secondary maths teachers are constantly bewailing the fact that their students fail in the complicated maths procedures not because they don’t understand the algebra, geometry or trigonometry, but because they can’t do the sums!

Therefore, teachers nowadays are most concerned to make sure that children develop a very real understanding of numbers, that they are comfortable with them, and that they can manipulate them in their heads. As well as teaching pupils to perform written procedures, teachers need to make sure that children can move around the numbers without any problem – adding ten or 100 or numbers close to that, e.g. 345 + 69 can be seen as 345 + 70 (415) – 1, and rounding numbers to get an approximate answer, e.g. spending £6.49 out of £10 leaves about £3.50. If children can perform mental calculations efficiently, it means that they are better at doing the written calculations as well, and a lot more confident.

To be numerate, students need three things: • A really good understanding of how our number system works • A good ‘bank’ of memorised number facts • A set of images that help them to carry out different mental and written calculations Maths is an abstract subject. To calculate effectively, especially as the calculations get longer and harder, it is essential to have some images or models to help us. Take the calculation 1001 - 587. In Y10 and 11, we ideally need pupils to be able to do this mentally, without writing anything down. This is because it may be part of a piece of algebra or a longer procedure and we do not want them to have to stop to do a separate written calculation. The mental image of a number line is extremely useful here. Shut your eyes and picture the numbers on a line going from 587 to 1001. Now zoom in on the section around 590. If 600 is in the middle of your ‘close-up’, there is 587 and then 3 more to 590, and 10 more to 600. That is a ‘ jump’ of 13, and we then MANOR | Late Spring 2016

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need to jump 400 to 1000 and 1 more. In all we have jumped 13 + 401 which is 414 along the number line in our heads. Helping children to internalise helpful mental images such as the number line is very much part of helping them develop an understanding of numbers. Finding change (the DVD player is £69.99, how much change from £100?) and counting up to find how long we have to wait (it is 4:20 and the bus comes at five to five) are really good ways of developing numerical fluency.

It is a sad fact that far too many teenagers have simply forgotten all those number facts that they learned at primary school. It cannot be over-stressed that no-one can succeed at GCSE maths and beyond if they struggle to remember five sevens, how many threes in 24 or what number to add to 3.7 to get 10. Making sure that our adolescent children do not ‘lose’ these facts is vital. And it is an area where parents can make a vast difference. Play games, both ‘sit-down games’ and also oral games played as you are driving in the car or walking along. Constantly bombard them with number facts and use bribery to encourage them to play along.

Use technology – there are a plethora of sites offering games and activities that practise these number facts – ask the teachers at school to recommend some, as they will have their preferred ones. The activities below this article are all part of practising these facts and keeping students numerically fluent – an essential prerequisite for succeeding in mathematics.

HARDER MATHS Certainly we would agree that it is not really a parent’s job to teach algebra, revise a geometrical theorem or explain probability to a reluctant teenager. However, if the teenager can be persuaded that maths, and indeed numbers, are not boring but intriguing, not difficult just playful, then the chances of good grades and success in exams become that much greater. Attitude is crucial, but in mathematics, confidence is even more so.

As parents, we have a role here. If we hate maths and anything to do with numbers, and we say so, then there is zero encouragement for our children to be different. Why should they work at a subject that we all agree is boring and difficult? However, if we try to change our attitude, and actually find ourselves enjoying playing with numbers, it is remarkable how much our children benefit – especially as teenagers. So start playing with numbers. There are many puzzles and playful conundrums available (ask the teacher for suggested websites) and we provide four lovely playful activities in this article. Since it is the play we are interested in – spotting the patterns and solving the puzzles – using a calculator is allowed, at least some of the time.

Encourage as much arithmetic, especially mental, as possible, but don’t spoil the activity by insisting that everything is done the hard way!

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SOME ‘DOS AND DON’TS’ • DO remember that basic mental maths is an essential. Keep practising the arithmetic – in games, in daily activities related to money or weights, lengths, times, etc.

• DON’T think that it is only the times tables that have to be memorised. Some addition and subtraction facts are even more important – knowing the pairs of numbers to make 10 and using these to help give instant answers to questions like: “What goes with 67 to make 100?” and “How much do you add to 3.4 to make 10?” and “What is the change from £10 if I spend £6.45?” Practise all the memorised number facts, including doubles and halves, times tables and addition/subtraction facts.

• DO ask your teenager questions about their preferred methods – in a sympathetic and genuinely interested manner. How does how he or she work out this? How do they prefer to find the answer to that sum? Encourage them to explain their ways of working to you.

• DON’T force your method of doing things on your teenager. It is always a mistake to confuse by trying to teach too many different ways of doing something – the way you were taught to do something may not be the preferred method nowadays.

• DO involve older children in real life maths calculations. “How much will we have left from the money we got from Granny if we buy this DVD?” or “How much longer is it until Dad’s birthday? Suppose we save £2.50 a day, how much will we have?”

• DON’T give maths a bad press. Comments like “personally, I could never do maths…” or “I always hated numbers…” or “I’m more of a language person myself…” or “maths is so boring…” will give your child a perfect excuse to hate maths as well. Certainly, such remarks do not motivate them to try.

• DO encourage your child to play with numbers, to wonder about why some things work out as they do and to work with you to solve mathematical puzzles and answer intriguing questions. Why is 9 the most magical number?

• DON’T let your teenager reach for their mobile phone every time they need to do a calculation.

Having that calculator to hand is a disaster for pupils’ maths. Make them do it in their heads or by making a few jottings on a scrap of paper. Reward if necessary, but DON’T – repeat DON’T – let them reach for the mobile.

school

FOUR FUN WAYS TO PRACTICE NUMBER FACTS Race to 100 Walking along (or driving), take turns to say a number between 2 and 10. Keep a running total. E.g. I say 5, Joe says 6 and then 11 (adding 6 to 5). I say 7 and then 18 (adding 7 to 11). Joe says 9 and 27 (adding 9 to 18). I say 4 and 31 (adding 4 to 27). And so on. Two rules: you cannot say a number larger than 9 or less than 3; and you can’t say the same number twice in row. First person to get to 100 EXACTLY wins.

Bingo Draw a board each (see illustration below) and choose six single-place decimal numbers to write on it. Then take turns to spin two coins. Heads are even digits (2, 4, 6, 8), tails are odd digits (1, 3, 5, 7, 9). Look at your coins and generate a single place decimal number with appropriate even/odd digits. So if I threw a head and a tail, I could make 3.6, as 3 is odd and 6 is even. But if both were heads, then I could make 2.6. If the number goes with any of the numbers on your board to make 10 then you can cross it out. (This game gets harder as it progresses!)

Fizz buzz Play this as a family – the more of you there are the better. Sit round the table, have two or three 10p coins in front of each person. You count in ones from 1, each person round the table saying the next number. BUT if your number is a multiple of 3, you must not say the number but instead must say ‘fizz’; if your number is a multiple of 5, you must say ‘buzz’. So the count goes: ‘one, two, fizz, four, buzz, fizz, seven, eight, fizz, buzz, eleven, fizz,’ etc. Fifteen is fizz-buzz. The pace of the count must be fast, and if anyone makes a mistake, they put one of their 10p coins into the centre of the table.

Once you get to 60 (fizz-buzz), you stop. People keep the 10ps they haven’t had to pass into the middle.

Double or quit Put a £1 (or £2 if you are feeling rich) coin on the table.

Look at your mobile phone display. Pick two numbers that touch by a side or a corner and say them as a two-digit number, e.g. you could say 35 or 78… Whatever number you say, your partner doubles it, e.g. 70 or 156. Look at the answer. Do the digits each touch on the mobile? E.g. 7 touches 0 by a corner, and 1 touches 5 and 5 touches 6 – so yes! If the answer is yes, then your partner scores a tick. If no, they score nothing. Then they say a number, using the same rule (two digits must touch on the mobile display), e.g. 62. You double it. Do the digits of the answer touch on the mobile? 124, yes! If so, you score a tick. First person to score ten ticks wins the pound.

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school PLAYING WITH NUMBERS

Riveting reversals

Durer’s square magic

1. Think of a three-digit number with consecutive digits, e.g.

123. Multiply this by 13 and write down your answer.

2. Now reverse the digits in the three-digit number, e.g.

321, and multiply by 13 again. Write down your answer.

3. Find the difference between the two answers and write it down.

4. Repeat with a new three-digit number with consecutive digits, e.g. 234 or 456. Make sure you write down the difference between the two answers.

5. Repeat with several other three-digit numbers with consecutive numbers.

What happens? Can you think why this is the case?

1. Complete Durer’s square. Every row, column and diagonal must add to 34.

HINT: Find the difference between your two three-digit numbers and multiply by 13.

1. Choose a three-digit number with consecutive digits, but this time multiply by a two-digit number of your choice.

Revise the digits of the consecutive number and repeat.

What happens this time?

Pursue your own line of enquiry. What else could you try?

How about four-digit numbers with consecutive digits? Or keep the three-digit number the same and reverse the digits of the two-digit number? Explore and see what else you can find out.

3

2

13

5 9

8 6

7 14

1

2. Now use the opposite corners to create two three-digit numbers, e.g. 161 and 413.

3. Find the difference.

4. Use the same opposite corners to create two different numbers, e.g. 116 and 134.

5. Find the difference.

6. Repeat this – there are four different ways of doing this!

7. Now repeat this using the square of four numbers in the centre of Durer’s square. Again, use the pairs of corner numbers to make a three-digit number and find the four possible differences.

Discuss what you notice about the answers. There IS a pattern to be found. (The answers are all multiples of what number?)

Challenge! Create a new 4 x 4 magic square with 9, 16, 7 and 2 in the corners.

Magic multiplication squares

Why is it so?

1. Look at this square 1 12 10 2. Multiply the numbers along the top row. Write the answer.

15 2 4 3. Multiply the numbers along the second row. Write the answer.

4. This is the magic constant of a multiplication magic square. So every row and every column multiply to give the exact same product!

5. Work out the bottom row.

6. Now check all the columns and rows!

1.

2.

Discuss what you notice about the diagonals.

Discuss what you notice.

7. Let’s try to get a really magic multiplication square! Each row, each column and both diagonals multiply to give the same product.

8. Start with this.

12 1 18

• Use algebra to find out why this works.

• Give each number a letter, e.g. a is your first number, b is your second number and c is your third number.

• Now do steps 2 to 5 using letters instead of numbers.

Remember that the first two-digit number will be 10a + b, the second might be 10a + c, etc.

• Go slowly and carefully – can you prove why it is so!

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3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Write down any three numbers less than 10, not including 0.

Use the numbers as digits to create six different twodigit numbers.

Add the six numbers. Write the total.

Add the original three numbers.

Divide your answer in step 3 by your answer in step 4.

Circle your answer.

Now choose three different numbers less than 10 and repeat steps 2 to 5.

Do this at least five times.

9. Use these clues to help you create a truly magic multiplication square.

• The missing numbers are all single digit numbers.

• Two of the numbers in the middle row and both the missing numbers in the bottom row are all factors of 12.

• The remaining number in the middle row is a factor of the number touching its bottom right corner but it is not a factor of the number above it.

Check your square is truly magic by multiplying each row, each column AND the numbers along each diagonal.

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HELP YOUR CHILD AT HOME PART EIGHT In the next part of this exclusive series, Professor Ruth Merttens will focus on how to help your teenager with reading. If you have missed an issue and would like to access a part of the series, please write to school@manormagazine.co.uk

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Available throughout Devon and Cornwall, and on sale on all major air, road and rail routes from London into the region, MANOR is read by approximately 100,000 informed, quality-discerning readers with a base in, or hankering after, the South West.

The Region’s Premium Publication Late Spring 2016 Issue 10 | £3.95

Featuring fashion, beauty, design and property, MANOR is on a par with any national glossy in terms of quality, while weaving in the very best of the South West.

It is the only magazine that is read by South West residents from Bristol to Land’s End, as well as by Londoners with an interest in this corner of the UK, be it property, schooling or leisure.

Architects in the city Plymouth’s building renaissance

To find out more about advertising your brand in MANOR, please email advertising@manormagazine.co.uk or call 07887 556447

Peter Randall-Page As I see it with the celebrated sculptor

Discarded to desirable Shining a light on an innovative Cornish designer

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Homes of Distinction

Through attention to detail, innovative use of technology, and bespoke styling, every Burrington Estates home is unique.

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Property The Bulletin | Property of note: Eagle House, Launceston Snapshot comparative

Woodlake Barn, Ashburton On the market with Fine & Country. Guide price: ÂŁ775,000. See page 159 fineandcountry.co.uk

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NEAR SALCOMBE, South Devon

â– Guide

Price ÂŁ1,300,000

Stunning barn conversion currently used as a highly successful exclusive family holiday property, providing spacious, luxury and modern accommodation complemented by a generous garden and meadow amid the rolling hills of South Devon. EPC Rating D. Web Ref 90935.

Exceptional barn conversion | local beaches nearby | level garden and 5 acre field For further details please contact our Prime Waterfront & Country House Department on 01548 857588

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property

The Bulletin Mark Proctor arrives to head up Exeter’s Knight Frank office from London’s Belsize Park and Primrose Hill.

Originally from Devon, Mark, 39, brings several perspectives and much property insight with him. He has spent the last 15 years selling London property and witnessed the incessant rise in prices in the capital, but being from the South West, he also brings with him an insider’s knowledge of the region.

As with our As I See It feature, we put Mark ‘on the couch’ and hear his views as both a property professional and South West house hunter.

I’m a Devon boy. I was brought up on the River Dart but have lived all over Devon, settling in East Devon. I left Devon at 25 years old following university then headed up to London. My extended family still live in the region. My wife’s family is from Topsham.

You could say that, to some extent, property was in my blood, along with the sea. My mother was a conveyancing solicitor, my father an architect, but I’m also from a family of sailors – my grandfather was the well-known boat designer Ian Proctor, who designed The Topper and The Wayfarer.

Although I lived in London for 15 years, I never felt like a Londoner. I am very work focused and was highly successful in London – I opened what was to be Knight Frank’s most successful new office there, and managed the most successful Knight Frank team in the capital for a period – but every other weekend (sometimes every weekend) I would, as a keen surfer, head down to Devon and Cornwall.

Children are a great catalyst. I always felt that I would come back to the South West but it was when we had our second child that I decided I wanted them to have the wonderful childhood here that I’d had. Furthermore, down here we’re near the grandparents and instant babysitting!

Although the pace of the market is different in London, I believe that the level of service that you expect from your agent shouldn’t change. If the market is slower, there are even more reasons to be proactive, be it with regard to instructions, valuations and reaching out to buyers from outside the area.

There’s much I feel I can bring to the Westcountry market from my experience in London. It’s a highly competitive and very dynamic market up there. I plan to bring some of that London dynamism to the property market here. That’s really what I think I can offer – a London mindset with a Devon background coupled with an in-depth knowledge of the territory.

I don’t believe there are many agents out there who know the coastline in Devon better than I do. My family is from the South Hams and very involved in sailing. I’m a keen surfer and sailor who knows the SW surf and shores better than most. Most agents operating in the West Country weren’t brought up here, and if they were, probably haven’t been as actively engaged with the region as I have. As a cyclist, surfer and sailor, I take advantage of all that the West Country has to offer: moor and sea.

We’ve just come off the back of the most phenomenal year in waterfront at Knight Frank South West – possibly down to the stamp duty rise on second homes, which may have focused vendors worried that stamp duty would put downward pressure on prices.

Last year we were lucky that both the Cornish and Devon waterfront markets fired simultaneously along with our rural sale. This led to one of our most successful years ever, billing over £100 million worth of property.

The Exeter city and Exe Estuary market are increasingly becoming highly attractive territories for buyers, and many of them relocating from London. This is down to Exeter’s connections with London: the airport, the general infrastructure that’s being invested in Exeter. Where once people, and younger actively working families, might have looked to Bristol as a place to relocate to, now they are looking at Exeter in the same light. It’s a totally different landscape to what it was – sea with modern city services. I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather live.

Knight Frank Exeter 01392 423111 mark.proctor@knightfrank.com

The Exe Estuary looking towards Lympstone MANOR | Late Spring 2016

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Ladock, Cornwall

A delightful farmhouse, outbuildings, barns and three detached holiday cottages Truro 7.4 miles, St Austell 9 miles, Newquay 13 miles, St Mawes 15 miles, Fowey 17 miles, Falmouth 17 miles (Distances and times approximate) Farmhouse with income stream from 3 luxury holiday cottages (4 Gold * status award) each with full residential planning use. The main house has lovely views, 3 bedrooms, 2 reception rooms and farmhouse kitchen. Various outbuildings including stabling. In all about 25 acres, further 19 acres are available by separate negotiation. EPC: E. Guide Price ÂŁ1,375,000

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To find out how we can help you please contact us. christopher.bailey@knightfrank.com 01392 976832

Topsham, Devon

One of Topsham’s finest and most historic houses Exeter 4.5 miles. M5 (Junction 30) 2.5 miles. London Paddington approx.. 2 hours from Exeter St David’s. (All distances and times approximate).

To find out how we can help you please contact us. edward.khodabandehloo@knightfrank.com 01392 976832

Shell House is a charming 4 bedroom Grade II* listed house located in the heart of Topsham. The property benefits from direct water access, wonderful views over the Exe Estuary, riverside gardens and off street parking.

Guide Price £950,000

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property of note

Offering quick access to two coastlines and two moors, Eagle House in Launceston is a Georgian gem packed with charm and history

I

n the poem Eagle One, Eagle Two, 20th-century Cornish poet Charles Causley describes this property’s principal and most striking features: Eagle one, eagle two, Standing on the wall.

Your wings a-spread are made of lead, You never fly at all.

Legend has it, however, that the twin eagles that stand so proudly on the property’s gate posts do in fact take flight by the light of a full moon in the direction of the nearby River Kensey.

For Eagle House in Launceston, Cornwall, it all began with a lottery ticket. Corynder Carpenter, constable of 13th-century Launceston Castle, presented his fiancée with the ticket in 1764 and, having won it, proceeded to marry her and have a grand Georgian house built nearby for them both to enjoy. With eight bedroom suites, the red brick property with stuccoed rustications and a Delabole slate roof would have made an elegant and admirable abode for the young couple.

In the 1800s, the property became a prison for Napoleonic naval officers. By all accounts, it was during this ownership that the two iconic eagles were added, along with a statue of Britannia who looks down upon them, and the ornate plasterwork that decorates the house throughout.

Poet and writer John Betjeman described Eagle House and its surrounding properties as “the most perfect group of Georgian buildings in Cornwall”. One only has to admire the gate piers, wrought-iron railings with fleur-de-lis finials, large sash windows and granite coping to see why.

When the Napoleonic War ended in the early 19th century, Eagle House became a family home before it was converted into a hotel in the mid 1960s. Gerry Dunlavey, the current owner, bought the property with its garden of half an acre in August 2013. “It struck me as an absolutely classic Georgian building, which had retained much of its charm of the era and plenty of Georgian features.” Having previously lived in a very similar Georgian townhouse, as well as a Victorian vicarage and Regency rectory, Mr Dunlavey was no stranger to period properties, but it was his son and daughter who would relocate from East Anglia to take

Poet and writer John Betjeman described Eagle House and its surrounding properties as ‘the most perfect group of Georgian buildings in Cornwall’.

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property of note

It is rare to see a property of this beauty come to an open market and it is deserving of becoming a fantastic family home.

on Eagle House. Brother and sister team Sophie and Alexander Dunlavey continued to run the property as a local hotel for two and a half years, but it has recently been granted planning permission to be returned to a private home.

Christopher Bailey of Knight Frank describes the property as having “significant architectural importance to the county and beyond. It is rare to see a property of this beauty come to an open market and it is deserving of becoming a fantastic family home.” With four spacious bedroom suites on the first floor and a further four on the second, the exciting part is that this could become a private home with a ready-made income stream, appealing to buyers looking to offer bed and breakfast facilities, Airbnb accommodation, or even self-catering holidays utilising the seven-bedroom extension located on the lower ground floor.

With its impressive selection of reception rooms featuring ornate fireplaces and bay windows on the ground floor and a magnificent ballroom in the basement, this is a fantastic property for anyone who enjoys entertaining. Dinner guests would be hard pressed to find a more inspiring entrance hall, the room that current owner Mr Dunlavey will miss the most.

“With its fine rococo plasterwork and open string staircase adorned with ornate detailing, topped off with the wonderful chandelier, this is most definitely my favourite feature, and one to be celebrated.”

Although the kitchen is currently located on the lower ground floor, the new owners could easily convert the current bar area, office space or even 152

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conservatory, which has French windows leading out to the terrace, into a fantastic kitchen, subject to listed building consent. New owners needn’t be put off by running costs: the red bricks serve to retain a surprising amount of heat throughout the winter months. Due to its central location, Eagle House has no freehold parking, but does come with a 12-year transferrable parking lease on a lot just a 30-second walk away and in view of the house.

With both Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor only a 20-minute drive to the east and west, the Dunlavey family have never found themselves short of fantastic walks and stunning scenery. “Launceston is also perfectly situated in between the two coastlines; if it’s raining on the north coast, you can head south, and vice versa,” explains Mr Dunlavey. Located just a stone’s throw from the Devon border, this property would appeal to markets of both counties and is in striking distance of the market town of Tavistock, which boasts excellent schools and shopping facilities.

Eagle House is a property of the past and of the future. There is no doubt that with just a few cosmetic adjustments, this Georgian gem could become a handsome and lucrative family home with plenty of stories to tell.

Eagle House is on the market with Knight Frank.

Offers in excess of £675,000. knightfrank.com

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EAST PRAWLE, South Devon

■ Guide

Price £825,000

Outstanding sea views can be had from this former coastguard’s cottage with 5 bedrooms situated in one of the most spectacular coastal locations. A superb opportunity to purchase a dream home in which to relax, away from the hectic pace of life. EPC Rating F. Web Ref 54375.

Spectacular coastal location | easily accessed beaches and coves from the end of the garden | successful holiday letting business For further details please contact our Prime Waterfront & Country House Department on 01548 857588

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NEAR TOTNES, South Devon

â– Guide

Price ÂŁ2,000,000

A rare opportunity to purchase a unique, quality 5 bedroom country residence with detached lodge situated on the River Avon, just 6 miles from Totnes, including woodland and approximately half a mile of the River Avon. State-of-the art electricity generation, heating system and own water supply.

EPC Rating C. Web Ref 87848.

Tranquil private idyllic location | fishing rights on River Avon | approximately 20 acres For further details please contact our Prime Waterfront & Country House Department on 01548 857588

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Devon’s the big attraction.

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The West Country Relocation & Investment Property Exhibition MAY 23RD – 24TH, PARK LANE, MAYFAIR, LONDON. Every year, more and more people are relocating from the South East to the West Country in search of a better lifestyle or property with investment or development potential.

So if you’re thinking of selling your property this year and want to reach this affluent market - don’t miss out.

Properties will be marketed at a prestigious Park Lane estate agency showroom and promoted on Zoopla, Rightmove, PrimeLocation, the London Metro and leading independent estate agency offices in London and the Home Counties.

Tel: 01392 427500 • www.wilkinsongrant.co.uk Call-in for special pre-exhibition terms and for your property to be included in the next edition of ‘Inspire’ magazine.

PROPERTY & ACQUISITION AGENTS MANOR | Late Spring 2016

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DARTMOUTH, South Devon

â– Guide

Price ÂŁ1,250,000

An opportunity to purchase a beautifully presented historic Grade II listed townhouse with magnificent river views, located on the historic quayside at Bayards Cove. Drawing room, dining room, kitchen, 4/5 bedrooms, 1 en suite. Garage. No EPC required. Web Ref 71613.

Magnificent river and sea views | level walk to town centre | nearby garage For further details please contact our Prime Waterfront & Country House Department on 01548 857588

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property

Snapshot comparative A selection of properties from around the South West along with a London bolthole for under £800,000.

Marina Heights, Torquay Guide price £525,000

Devon

An elegant ground floor apartment, which is a spacious, warm and welcoming home benefitting from exceptional coastal views across Torbay to the English Channel and beyond. Built in the early 1800s, the property was converted in 2008, and occupies a large area of single floor space providing three bedrooms, all of which enjoy balconies with lovely coastal views over Torquay marina. fineandcountry.co.uk

Bozion Barn, Washaway Guide price £785,000

Cornwall

A pair of beautifully restored barns providing an attractive home and additional holiday let or annexe.

Set in a beautiful area of Cornwall with outstanding rural views, paddock and stables. Seven bedrooms, three receptions, three bathrooms, garden, land/ paddock and outbuildings. humberts.com

Woodlake Barn, Ashburton Guide price £775,000

Devon

Woodlake Barn is a splendid family residence that has undergone major architectural refurbishment to provide an environmentally friendly home with a contemporary interior, yet still retaining much of the building’s character.

Situated at the end of a tree-lined private drive in an idyllic rural setting, this unique property offers peace and tranquillity overlooking its own lake, garden and woodland in approximately three acres. fineandcountry.co.uk

Chelsea Manor Gardens, SW3 Guide price £745,000

London

A superb, bright, top floor, one-bedroom flat with stunning views across the south of London. Located on a quiet street moments from the Kings Road, in a well-maintained portered block with lift and communal garden, making it the ideal pied-à-terre or rental investment. Positioned on Chelsea Manor Gardens, this property offers great access to the Kings Road’s while the flat itself is quiet. knightfrank.com

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COOKERY COURSES

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back page

BLACK BOOK

After a career in interiors in London, Doremi Hayward Vaardal relocated to St Ives and retrained as a craniosacral therapist. Here she shares some secrets from her little black book.

In 2006, we ditched the big city in search of a new life by Another bonus of living in such a design-rich and diverse the sea, turning the St Ives holiday home my parents built in place is that present-buying becomes an excuse to seek out 1974 into my family’s permanent home. It required complete something new or original. At Make Industries in Penzance renovation to drag it into the 21st century, and in search of you can always find a locally sourced gem or two, from inspiration I stumbled across Hidden Art Cornwall, which hand-carved wooden pens to jewellery. My most recent find supported up-and-coming designer-makers. has been Faye Wilson (also known as Stuff Made from In an old cowshed I came Things); this year I bought across Lucy Turner’s beautiful a job lot of her Cornish Maid reconditioned G-Plan sideboard cuffs stamped with catchphrases covered in cream, laser-cut such as ‘ansom’ ‘bleddy bewty’ Formica flowers. I love the and ‘gert lush’ and they brought upcycling ethos coupled with smiles to all my girlfriends’ faces. original design and colour.

Living in such a beautiful More recently, I have part of the country means we encountered stunning bespoke need only step out of our front work from Hannah Tunstalldoor to find magical places to Behrens (as Frank & Bell), explore. Our family favourites who hand-sews lampshades using are trips to the far west, to vintage fabrics she has collected on Porthgwarra, where our son her travels. Ed Lefroy, owner and can play in the smugglers’ caves designer of Lambert & Stamp, before we hike up the coastal restores and recovers antique path to visit the coastguard at Porthgwarra armchairs with quirky prints. If Gwennap Head, who will you like it, Ed can print it and always happily take you in cover a chair in it: from Penguin and point out any ships on the Classics book covers to tropical horizon. At Cape Cornwall birds. Charlie and Katy Napier we climb the giant boulders take garden furniture to the next in Priest’s Cove, or dip our level, and I am still saving up for toes in the tidal miners’ pool, one of their handmade parasols to before taking in the view from bring a touch of grandeur to my the top of the Carn looking unkempt garden. out at the Brisons, the rocky I have also found some of formation out to sea at the only the best artisan food right on my Cape in England. If our daytrip doorstep. When searching for is between March and October, a wedding cake, I came across we must stop on the way home Nicky Grant, creating cake to have the best cream tea in magic from her home less than Penwith at Rosmergy Farm, Priest’s Cove and Cape Cornwall 10 minutes from my house. She where the scones come fresh out is also a bespoke chocolatier, and of the Aga all day long. her fresh handmade chocolates are the best I have ever tasted Nowadays my design love is purely a hobby. My last and are my go-to gift for special occasions, especially the project was a tiny fisherman’s cottage in the heart of St Ives’s Cornish Seasalt Caramels. downalong called Honest Cottage; it was an utter joy The best coffee is served by Mike at Mount Zion Coffee uncovering the old ship’s mast that serves as a ceiling beam in in St Ives. It’s tucked behind the harbourfront in a tiny studio the lounge and it is still my own personal doll’s house – we that used to belong Mike’s father and grandfather, both artists rent it out to holidaymakers year round. and woodcarvers in St Ives’s 60s heyday. This is no average As life has moved on, Cornwall has enabled me to takeaway coffee joint and Mike is no average barista – his tag discover a new world in the form of complimentary therapy. line is ‘we’re not quick’ – but even I can taste the quality and I practice from my home and also a beautiful space in the care he puts into every cup. centre of Penzance called Mudita House.

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The all-new Audi Q7 The Legend continues.

Few cars have what it takes to become a legend.

But the all-new Audi Q7 is one of them. It’s lighter, more agile and more advanced – with seven seats, a luxurious interior and quattro® all-wheel-drive designed to take on the most challenging conditions.

The Legend continues on a test drive at Exeter Audi.

Book yours now.

Exeter Audi

Denbury Court Marsh Barton Exeter Devon EX2 8NB 01392 825425 www.exeter.audi.co.uk Official fuel consumption figures for the Q7 range in mpg (l/100km) from: Urban 42.2 (6.7) – 44.8 (6.3), Extra Urban 47.1 (6.0) – 53.3 (5.3), Combined 45.6 (6.2) – 49.6 (5.7). CO2 emissions: 163 – 148g/km. Standard EU Test figures for comparative purposes and may not reflect real driving results. Range of figures stated reflect optional downgrade from the standard 19” Alloy Wheel to 18” wheel.

Other optional wheels may also affect emissions and fuel consumption figures.

Marshall Motor Group Ltd Registered in England No. 295579. Registered office Airport House, The Airport, Cambridge CB5 8RY. Marshall Motor Group Ltd is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. We are constantly looking to improve our service and your call may be recorded. Finance subject to status. Terms and conditions apply. Models shown for illustrative purposes only. Subject to model and colour availability. Offers applicable at Exeter Audi and are at the promoter’s absolute discretion.

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