MAGAZINE
June 2019 £7.00
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WAT C H & J E W E L L E R Y E D I T I O N
LENNY KRAVITZ
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CONTENTS
32 UP FRONT 10 EDITOR’S LETTER 13 THE BRIEFING The winners of the Buildings of the Year 2019 awards 26 A MONARCHY RESTORED How Chelsea’s top landlords are reviving the King’s Road
13 44 PRIZE LOTS
60 CITÉ SLICKER
A rare collection of royal Indian
Bob Bob Ricard’s founder Leonid Shutov on his new Square Mile-
jewels goes under the hammer
based venture
46 WAR IS DECLARED AND BATTLE COME DOWN Why The Clash’s London Calling
COLLECTION
remains as relevant today as it was 40 years ago
CONNOISSEUR
68 ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL
TV hit Big Little Lies
C U LT U R E
The worlds of high jewellery and horology pay tribute to the
32 NICOLE KIDMAN The actress on the success of
82
animal kingdom
54 LONDON’S BEST NEW TERRACES Where to raise a toast to the summer weather 58 RESTAURANT REVIEW
38 THE AGENDA
Taste testing Galvin La Chapelle’s
Masterpiece returns to Chelsea
vegetarian menu
82 QUEEN OF DIAMONDS
Inside Jessica McCormack’s Mayfair townhouse
86 COMING UP ROSES How the golden rosette became Harry Winston’s chosen emblem
90 24
98
90 BEST OF BASELWORLD
116 A COUNTRY OF COLOUR
The top timepieces launching
Exhibition collection at Wempe’s
frontier 124 SEA SHARP The Seychellois people pledging to save the oceans
Bond Street store 98 ENGLISH ENGINEERING Why Roger W. Smith
Three new hotels confirm Cambodia as luxury travel’s latest
this year 96 BEST OF TIMES Patek Philippe unveils its 2019
116
PROPERTY
is considered the best watchmaker in the world
ESCAPE
128 PRIME MOVER A property management company with a difference 131 INSIDER KNOWLEDGE
110 AGAINST ALL ODDS
The latest property news from prime central London
Lebanon’s Beirut is a foodie haven – and the Middle East’s
140 STREETS AHEAD
most beguiling city
The best homes on the market
COV E R Dior’s exquisite Reine des Abeilles No.10 watch is a bejewelled masterpiece with a quirky mechanical movement (p.68).
EDITOR Richard Brown
FROM THE EDITOR June 2019 Issue 13
Bit late to this particular party – though it seems a lot of people are – but Coal Drops Yard; haven’t they done well? ‘They’ being architect firm Heatherwick Studios, property developer Argent, and builders BAM. Between them they’ve managed to transform what was once a Victorian coal depot and, more recently, the epicentre of London’s ecstasydriven illegal rave scene (I managed to miss that party altogether) into London’s most ambitious and uplifting retail destination. King’s Cross, in case you hadn’t noticed, has showered, shaved, donned a Paul Smith suit and put its best Joseph Cheaney-clad foot forward. It started with the redevelopment of St Pancras International, continued with the relocation of Central Saint Martins and Google’s UK HQ, and carried on through the repurposing of German Gymnasium and Granary Square. At the tail-end of last year we got Coal Drops Yard – a shopping and entertainment destination comprising two brick-and-iron sheds connected by a sinuous ‘kissing’ roof. What a pleasant place to spend some time. Can the same honestly be said for any of London’s other shopping districts? How about Oxford Circus? Either of the Westfields? That new outlet at The O2? Is it any wonder that bricks-and-mortar retail is facing oblivion when walking into any modern-day mall is akin to the final, fiery scene of End of Days? OK, so not everyone can afford a Tom Dixon pendant light or to stock their bathrooms with Aesop soap, but that’s beside the point. You don’t have to go to Coal Drops Yard to actually shop. That’s what the internet’s for. In an age where every new bit of tech is designed to keep us indoors – Ocado, Netflix, Deliveroo, those dopey Peloton bikes – it’s uplifting to discover a development that aims for more than mediocre. It may feel ‘Poppy’ – a new term for a privately-owned public space – but since all of the councils are skint who else is going to shoulder the burden of place-making? You can learn more about the excellent (and yes, expensive) food offering at Coal Drops Yard on page 54, and discover how Chelsea’s King’s Road is hoping to reverse its own retail fortunes on page 26. For armchair architects like me, the capital is hosting the London Festival of Architecture this June (p.18). The month-long event is dedicated to explaining why, despite the march of the community-killing, identikit tower block, London remains the best city in the world for buildings. A visit to Coal Drops Yard might just restore your faith.
DEPUTY EDITOR Ellen Millard ONLINE EDITOR Mhairi Graham CONTENT DIRECTOR Dawn Alford EDITOR-AT-LARGE Annabel Harrison EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Abisha Sritharan CLIENT CONTENT MANAGER Sunna Naseer HEAD OF DESIGN Laddawan Juhong DESIGNER Ismail Vedat GENERAL MANAGER Fiona Smith PRODUCTION MANAGER Alice Ford COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR Rachel Gilfillan BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT DIRECTORS Samantha Lathan Danielle Thirsk BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT EXECUTIVE Madelyn Curnyn BRAND EXECUTIVE Dom Jeffares MANAGING DIRECTOR Eren Ellwood PUBLISHED BY
RICH ARD B ROWN Ed itor LUXURYLONDON.CO.UK
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TH E B R I E F I N G T H E L AT E S T N E W S F R O M T H E W O R L D O F L U X U R Y
P.14 JOIN THE CLUB BMW unveils the new Mini Clubman
P.16 DESIGN RIGHT The Building of the Year Awards 2019
P.18 CAPITAL GAINS London’s Architecture Festival returns
P.20 FIRE AND ICE Climbing the seven volcano summits
P.24 MARI-TIME Rolex’s white gold Yacht-Master
Beijing’s PuXuan Hotel celebrates innovation and tradition with a high-tech design and views of the Forbidden City (p.22)
BMW UNVEILS THE NEW MINI CLUBMAN THE VARIABLE FIVE-SEATER IS IMPROVED WITH A MODIFIED DESIGN AND INNOVATIVE EQUIPMENT FEATURES
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Buyers of the new model will have the option of a sports suspension that will lower the car’s ride height by 10mm
The new Mini Clubman also offers adaptive LED headlights with a Matrix function for the high beam
Unveiled at Autoshow Shanghai 2019 in April, BMW’s new Mini Clubman has had a facelift, albeit a minor one. Most noticeable is the newly designed radiator grill, which now extends across the entire bumper, and new LED rear lights, available in an optional Union Jack design. There are three new colours to choose from – red, green and black – and several new alloy options, including 16inch, 17-inch, 18-inch and 19-inch. When it comes to the drive, buyers have a choice of three engines and two transmissions, which include a three-cylinder and fourcylinder petrol engine along with one fourcylinder diesel engine, which can be specified with either a six-speed manual transmission or a seven-speed Steptronic transmission. From £20,000, mini.co.uk
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BUILDINGS OF THE YEAR 2019 ANNOUNCED ARCHDAILY’S ANNUAL COMPETITION AWARDS INNOVATIVE STRUCTURES MADE FOR RELIGIOUS, CULTURAL AND EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES
A subterranean art museum buried beneath China’s Bohai Bay; a shopping centre carved out of two abandoned railway stations; and a miniature angular cabin, hidden in a forest in upstate New York. These are just three of the buildings that scooped gongs in the Buildings of the Year 2019 competition, a prize by ArchDaily that awards designers for their innovation across 15 different categories. From religious structures to hotels to hospitals, the world’s most beautiful architectural feats are honoured. Representing London, the Heatherwick Studiodesigned Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross (pictured
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CLOCKWISE FROM MAIN IMAGE WEIHAI HOSPITAL OF TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE, GLA ARCHITECTS, PHOTOGRAPHY ©LI YAO; MORPHEUS HOTEL, ZAHA HADID ARCHITECTS, PHOTOGRAPHY ©VIRGILE SIMON BERTRAND; COAL DROPS YARD, HEATHERWICK STUDIO, PHOTOGRAPHY ©HUFTON + CROW; MORPHEUS HOTEL, ZAHA HADID ARCHITECTS, PHOTOGRAPHY ©IVAN DUPONT
above right) won first place in the Commercial Architecture category, while a Gianni Botsforddesigned bungalow in Notting Hill scored the top spot for Best Applied Products, thanks to its undulating copper roof. In Scotland, The Macallan’s new distillery, designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners to blend into the Kingussie landscape, won the award for Industrial Architecture. Grass-covered peaks top the timber roof, which crowns an open-plan production space where, thanks to the new design, The Macallan can increase its whisky production by a third if required. Overseas, Zaha Hadid Architects waved the flag for Britain in Macao, the home of Morpheus Hotel (pictured bottom left), which was awarded first place in the Hospitality Architecture category. Inspired by the fluid forms of traditional jade carving, the centre of the voluptuous building is punctured by a series of voids, which provide an “urban window” that connects the hotel to the city. But perhaps most breathtaking of all is the Weihai Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine (pictured top left). Designed by Beijing-based GLA, the large complex imitates the style of the traditional bungalows that were once located on this site. The result is a striking series of courtyards that look more akin to a spa than a healthcare facility.
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30
400
600,000
THE NUMBER OF DAYS
THE NUMBER OF EVENTS
THE NUMBER OF VISITORS LAST YEAR
LONDON FESTIVAL OF ARCHITECTURE RETURNS
MARVEL AT THE CAPITAL’S BEST BUILDINGS, BRIDGES AND STRUCTURES IN THIS MONTH-LONG CELEBRATION OF DESIGN TALENT
The world’s largest annual architecture festival returns to the capital this June with a bumper crop of events, talks and tours. The London Festival of Architecture runs throughout the month and celebrates the best design talent the capital has to offer – and this year will be focused on four designated festival hubs in the City of London, London Bridge, the Royal Docks and the ‘Heart of London’ district, which covers St James’s, Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. Highlights from the programme include a walking tour hosted by the Migration Museum on 2 June, which throws light on the diverse communities in east London and the City; a series of miniature landscaped spaces, called ‘parklets’; and an exhibition on the brutalist works of Belgian architect Léon Stynen at the Royal Docks. 1-30 June, londonfestivalofarchitecture.org
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THE SEVEN VOLCANIC SUMMITS IN PICTURES ADRIAN ROHNFELDER IS THE FIRST TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHER TO CLIMB THE WORLD’S SEVEN HIGHEST VOLCANIC SUMMITS – AND CAPTURE THEM IN STRIKING IMAGES
On a bicycle, Adrian Rohnfelder pedelled above the steaming rainforests of the Kilimanjaro massif, crossed the Atacama Desert in Chile and ventured to the glaciated Mount Sidley, which is so remote few people can claim to have seen it. Since 2008, when Rohnfelder was left awestruck by the immensity of Indonesia’s volcanoes, the photographer undertook a personal mission to climb the highest of the world’s volcanic summits. As the first travel photographer to climb all seven of these immense mountains, the adventurer has seen some of the most striking sights of the natural world – and captured them in a series of snaps. Thanks to publisher teNeues, these images are now available for the world to see in a new book. Volcanic 7 Summits: Dreams of the Unknown captures the beauty and spectacle of the world’s most immense volcanoes, from the neon surface lava to the clouds of smoke and intense heat that erupt from these colossal craters. Volcanic 7 Summits: Dreams of the Unknown by Adrian Rohnfelder, published by teNeues, teneues.com
Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro is the highest of the seven volcanic summits at 19,308 ft, and the highest volcano Rohnfelder climbed Mountaineer Mario Trimeri became the first person to climb both the seven volcanic summits and the seven summits in 2011
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CLOCKWISE FROM RIGHT ‘DIRTY THUNDERSTORM’ AT SAKURAJIMA VOLCANO IN THE SOUTH OF JAPAN; THE VIEW INTO THE HEART OF THE EARTH AT THE BOILING LAVA LAKE ERTA ALE IN ETHIOPIA; EXPLOSION OF COLOURS IN THE CAUCASUS MOUNTAINS, ALL IMAGES ©VOLCANIC 7 SUMMITS: DREAMS OF THE UNKNOWN, PHOTOGRAPHY ©ADRIAN ROHNFELDER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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TRADITION AND INNOVATION COLLIDE IN BEIJING’S NEWEST HOTEL THE PUXUAN CHAMPIONS MODERN ARCHITECTURE MOMENTS FROM THE FORBIDDEN CITY
Located above museum and auction house the Guardian Art Centre, and just moments from the Forbidden City, the PuXuan Hotel and Spa in Beijing marries modern architecture with 800 years of Chinese history. Designed by German architect Ole Scheeren, whose portfolio includes the Beijing Television Cultural Centre and The Interlace apartment building in Shanghai, the hotel has 92 rooms and 24
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suites, which have been decorated with handcrafted and artisanal furniture by Hermès-owned Chinese lifestyle brand Shang Xia. Each room boasts uninterrupted views of the Forbidden City and one of Beijing’s oldest neighbourhoods, the DongCheng District. There’s a choice of two specialist restaurants, Rive Gauche and Fu Chun Ju, the latter of which champions local provenance and offers seasonal menus made from the finest native ingredients. The former, as the name suggests, brings a taste of Paris to China with classic French bistro dishes courtesy of chef Ivan Miguez. A highlight of the hotel is the PuXuan club, which serves as a “personal townhouse” apartment. Guests of the club have access to state-of-the-art technology, private meeting rooms, a library and domestic kitchen and dining areas. Rates at The PuXuan start from CNY 2,680 (approx. £301) per night in a Deluxe Room, including breakfast, subject to 16.6 per cent surcharge, thepuxuan.com
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ROLEX REVEALS FIRST YACHT-MASTER IN WHITE GOLD THE PRECIOUS METAL IS PAIRED WITH A MATT BLACK CERAMIC BEZEL AND BLACK LACQUER DIAL
The new Yacht-Master 42 comes with a fiveyear warranty
In 1926, Rolex founder Hans Wilsdorf unveiled his ‘Oyster’ wristwatch. Waterproof and dustproof thanks to a patented screwed-down bezel, caseback and winding crown, the robust timepiece proved rather handy at sea – where it began to replace onboard chronometer clocks. The brand quickly asserted itself as the sailors’ watchmaker. The first three yachtsmen to complete solo round-the-world voyages in under a year – Sir Francis Chichester, Bernard Moitessier and Sir Robin KnoxJohnston – all did so while wearing a Rolex wristwatch chronometer. The brand’s first official partnership with a yacht club dates back to 1958, when it formed an alliance with the New York Yacht Club. To celebrate its nautical ties, in
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1992 Rolex launched the Yacht-Master range – watches characterised by their distinctive bidirectional rotatable bezels and raised 60-minute graduation, the first 15 of which were graduated minuteby-minute. This year, the brand extends the range with a new 42mm model in 18kt white gold. The watch’s hands and hour markers are filled with a luminescent material that emits a long-lasting glow, while its case is guaranteed waterproof to a depth of 100 metres. Since 2015, Rolex has pledged that all of its watches will be accurate to −2 /+2 seconds per day – twice the precision required of Switzerland’s official chronometer testing institute. Yacht-Master 42, £21,400, rolex.com
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT KING’S ROAD; MARY QUANT AND ALEXANDER PLUNKET GREENE, PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN COWAN, 1960, COURTESY OF TERENCE PEPPER COLLECTION AND JOHN COWAN ARCHIVE; CHELSEA OLD TOWN HALL, 1908; KING’S ROAD SIGN
BELOW 19TH-CENTURY MEWS HOUSE, RETROFITTED BY CADOGAN ESTATES TO PASSIVHAUS STANDARD; LEFT CADOGAN HALL, ©ROY HARRIS/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT RABBIT RESTAURANT ON THE KING’S ROAD; DUKE OF YORK SQUARE; DUKE OF YORK RESTAURANT, OPENING MAY 2019
A MONARCHY RESTORED
W H AT E V E R H A P P E N E D T O T H E K I N G ’ S R O A D ? O N C E T H E E P I C E N T R E O F L O N D O N C O O L , T W O D E C A D E S O F A S H I F T E A S T – C U L T U R A L LY T O S H O R E D I T C H , T O M AY FA I R O N T H E R E TA I L F R O N T – H A S L E F T T H E FA M E D STREET TIRED AND SIDELINED. BUT THINGS ARE CHANGING. LANDOWNERS C A D O G A N , H A L J A N D M A R T I N ’ S H AV E L A U N C H E D W H AT A M O U N T S T O A R E S C U E P L A N : R E S T O R I N G H E R I TA G E S H O P F R O N T S , M A K I N G T E R M S M O R E FAV O U R A B L E T O I N D E P E N D E N T S H O P S A N D B U I L D I N G A C A L E N D A R O F COMMUNITY EVENTS. BUT IS THIS JUST GLOSS ON A LOST CAUSE?
Words: Josh Sims
K
ing’s Road has always been at the forefront of fashion – since its creation. And it’s still a place people want to see and be seen in. But we know we have to attract more creativity,” says Hugh Seaborn. “There’s been such a dramatic shift going on in retail over recent years that now it’s a priority. King’s Road is a famous destination and it can continue to be so, but we have to get the right balance between heritage and innovation.” Seaborn could be the man most likely to make the change. He’s CEO of Cadogan, estate manager – read landlord – of much of Chelsea, having been associated with the area ever since Baron Cadogan wed Elizabeth Sloane some 300 years ago. And, after a long project revamping Sloane Street, Cadogan – the biggest owner of property along the King’s Road – is turning its attention there. Anyone who has visited the iconic road of late might have noted change in the air. There’s a 180,000 sq ft scheme around the Curzon Chelsea cinema in the works. Other developments, such as the revamped Duke of York Square, have seen a fresh influx of independent retailers and interesting restaurants, with foodies and drinkers better served still by the Pavilion Road quarter, with its hip grocers, butchers and bakers (if not yet candlestick-makers). There’s a sense that someone has been pulling strings to achieve a much more carefully considered spread of businesses. Walk along the street and the shopping opportunities suggest a subtle shift away from the predictable international brands and more ubiquitous high street names. There are the likes of The Cotton Story, a business that specialises solely in T-shirts; or Peloton, a clothing brand – even more specialist – for indoor biking. There are brasseries that focus on ‘wild food’. Heck, this could be Shoreditch. Look online and the King’s Road even has a swanky new website. The shift towards the progressive and upbeat has been a long time coming. The King’s Road has been on the slide – albeit from an exceptional cultural high – for at least two decades. It has been left behind. “Look at many of London’s big property owners and they’ve all begun to manage their areas so the whole is greater than the sum of their parts,” notes Seaborn. “There’s a demand for retail to be more interesting now – retailers recognise that and the same should go for retail property owners.” There is, he says, great change happening on the King’s Road. “And about time, really.” Perhaps 1998 was the beginning of the downturn for this Chelsea thoroughfare. It was on the King’s Road in that year that Starbucks – considered by many the epitome of the cookie-cutter effect of corporations on our high streets – opened its first British branch. The following years saw the road – named because it belonged to King Charles II, who built it to link St James’s Palace to Fulham – slip into mundanity, full of household name brands and safely middle-
class shoppers, its independent spirit having moved east. Even the big money had begun to take steps towards Mayfair and Marylebone, where, it seems, there has been a coordinated effort to build a new, dynamic image. It was certainly all a long way from the world of Mary Quant – the designer currently being celebrated in a major retrospective at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Back in the late 1950s and into the Swinging Sixties, of course, the King’s Road – note how its importance is still underscored by that definite article – was the epicentre of London cool. The girls of the King’s Road wore the rebellious mini-skirt popularised by Quant through her Bazaar shop. The Rolling Stones used the King’s Road as their headquarters. Eric Clapton and Germaine Greer lived in the Grade II-listed Pheasantry. The Fantasie, at number 128, was one of London’s first espresso bars – established back when a coffee shop was still considered chic and continental. Mods scooted and occasionally scrapped with rockers here. John Osbourne was inspired to write The Entertainer after an evening at the Chelsea Palace of Varieties, his play then staged at the Royal Court Theatre – already winning a reputation for the most progressive of productions. The Chelsea Set, as it quickly became known, was, as Quant described lovingly, a “bohemian world of painters, photographers, architects, writers, socialites, actors, conmen and superior tarts”. Chelsea, with the King’s Road at its heart, was London’s answer to New York’s Greenwich Village. By the end of the 60s its more traditional retailers had been replaced by a two-mile stretch of pace-setting independents: Granny Takes a Trip, I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, Kleptomania. The Chelsea Drugstore, then on the corner of Royal Avenue and the King’s Road, sold everything from pharmaceuticals to records. It even ran – with tongue firmly in cheek – what it called a ‘flying squad’ service, which delivered packages to customers by way of motorbike-riding women wearing purple catsuits. The King’s Road was where things happened. And then where they didn’t. The Chelsea Drugstore would become a McDonald’s. Four years ago Heal’s, another of the road’s famous landmark stores, also closed, becoming a Metro Bank. With the downturn biting hard, the road was left with empty shopfronts and small shopkeepers claiming their problems were exacerbated by the influx of big retail names,
“King’s Road is still a place people want to be seen in... But we have to attract more creativity”
SHOPS ON THE KING’S ROAD
SAATCHI GALLERY, ©WILLY BARTON/ SHUTTERSTOCKCOM
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only problem we have is keeping up with demand.” “From time to time landlords lose sight of what they should be focusing on, and for some landlords, signing a high-street multiple won’t be an issue,” agrees Martin. But, he says, landlords have a responsibility to help keep areas alive. “Have we always lived up to that? I think the jury would say no. We have to be thinking about where the future lies and meeting the needs of retailers, residents and visitors. I think we’ve kind of been shocked into addressing that.” So can the cultural importance of the King’s Road ever really be revived? There’s not been much wrong with the King’s Road of late, of course, with its designer labels and multi-million pound properties – even if the thing it most inspires is visits by Japanese tourists. But, as Martin puts it, “the King’s Road may never be as it was in the 60s again, but it’s not too much to ask that it should be relevant.” Part of the problem has been that the properties on this long road are controlled by many landlords, unlike, say, Regent Street or Covent Garden, which are both managed by a sole body. But now three of these landlords – Cadogan, Martin’s Properties and the HALJ Group, together nudging 50 per cent ownership of the road’s retail units – are teaming up to play their part in the King’s Road’s revival. And it’s these three who are largely responsible for this new era of (as the buzzword has it) ‘curated’ retail – and, by turns, of curated community. Change on the King’s Road is happening fast. The road has seen some 14 new restaurants open over the past 18 months – another six are on their way. New shops to note include the likes of Cefinn, Rixo and Essentiel Antwerp. But the progress is in more that shopping opportunities. While the road’s cultural offer is upping the ante – towards the end of this year, the Saatchi Gallery, for example, will exhibit the largest collection of King Tutankhamun’s treasures seen outside of Egypt – there are also several on-going restoration projects, from Chelsea Old Town Hall to the former Gaumont cinema, as well as several heritage shopfronts. Even creatives of the kind who once helped make the King’s Road a youth mecca in the 1960s are being given a warmer welcome: the Fashion School, which opened earlier this year, is being followed by a restoration of the Rossetti Studios as a subsidised space for working artists. More studio space – with capped and affordable rents – is also promised. Next summer should see the opening of a new hotel by Sloane Square from hoteliers Jean-Louis and Gilbert Costes, their first outside Paris. “By this time next year you’re going to see some highly visible changes on King’s Road,” promises Martin. “That’s all part of a process that takes time. People will always hark back to King’s Road’s glory years, and they’re still part of the road’s appeal, but there’s also a lot of rather romantic views of that era, and by harking back we miss what is good about it now. King’s Road is far from done.”
pushing up prices and killing what local personality the road still had. These days the King’s Road’s glorious history has been co-opted by the excruciating Made in Chelsea. “King’s Road has at times lost its way,” concedes Tom Martin, executive chairman of family-run Martin’s Properties, the second largest of the King’s Road’s landlords. Martin’s mother Peta recalls how the arrival of Bazaar struck her as explosive against “the drabness of the shops” around back then. “The 60s was an exceptional period,” says Martin. “It’s why the King’s Road is globally renowned. That creative market has moved east and we can’t replicate that. And Shoreditch will face its own challenges in time. “But the fact is that we live in the 21st century and there’s a recognition that the King’s Road isn’t getting the attention it deserves. We’ve tried to bring change through more informal channels but it hasn’t worked. And now there’s a recognition that time is of the essence – that if we let the situation run on for much longer we’d be too far along the curve.” All roads, and areas, have their rise and fall. Scenes run out of steam. Creative generations shift their locus, according to the zeitgeist, just as much according to rents. Driven, no doubt, in part by the buzz of the King’s Road, property on and around it saw rocketing prices even 50 years ago: a shop worth around £4,500 in 1950 was worth £30,000 by 1967 and £45,000 by 1969. Small wonder that, in retrospect, the punk movement – the King’s Road is often cited as its early 70s birthplace, thanks to Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s Worlds End shop – might be taken more as the street’s swansong than an indication of its still youthful spirit. What followed – the piecrust collared or loud-trousered Sloane of the 1980s – could, stereotyped as it is, hardly provide a more telling counter to the anti-establishment rebelliousness that preceded it. It’s the Sloane Ranger, rather than the punk or the mod, who would have felt most at home on King’s Road until recently. “King’s Road has certainly lost that element of cool over recent years. Look more recently and at one point there were three L.K. Bennett shops down here. Why three?” exclaims Leo Mellis, co-founder of The Cotton Story. “I think the major landlords would put their hands up and admit they haven’t always got it right. But you’re seeing them getting much pickier about who signs leases now, which is as it has to be, and I think changes that are happening now will see King’s Road win a new credibility. It’s working for us. The
“There’s a recognition that the King’s Road isn’t getting the attention it deserves”
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hen Nicole Kidman accepted her best actress Golden Globe award for her role as Celeste Wright in the hit HBO series Big Little Lies, in her speech she thanked her mother, a nurse who wished she’d been a doctor, for never setting limits on what her daughters could be. “My achievements are her achievements,” declared the actress. Kidman also paid tribute to her female costars Reese Witherspoon, Zoë Kravitz, Laura Dern and Shailene Woodley, saying, “We pledged allegiance to each other and this is ours to share” – and praised “the power of women”. Hollywood has been feeling the power of women in the form of #MeToo and the response to revelations about film mogul Harvey Weinstein’s behaviour – and Big Little Lies, which launched in 2017, was one of the catalysts in that process. The series not only highlighted a liberating shift towards female talent, and a move away from big-budget Hollywood studios towards TV cable and streaming, it also voiced the domestic and sexual violence that can lie under the surface of apparently successful women’s lives. Kidman, who also scooped an Emmy for her role as the abused Celeste, said in her Golden Globes speech, “I do believe and I hope that we can elicit change through the stories we tell and the way we tell them. Let’s keep the conversation alive.” Kidman is personally committed on that score. She has pledged to work with a female director at least every 18 months, to help address the fact that only four per cent of Hollywood movies are made by women. And she does not shy away from roles that open up debate. She took an Oscar for her 2002 portrayal of the troubled Virginia Woolf in The Hours, and followed that up in
T H E
R E V O L U T I O N A R Y
NICOLE K I DMAN A S T H E M U C H -A N T I C I PAT E D R E T U R N O F B I G L I T T L E L I E S D R AW S N E A R , T H E L E A D I N G AC T R E S S FOR CLOSE TO FOUR DECADES, NOW A PRODUCER AND DIRECTOR, DESCRIBES THE POWER OF HER A-LIST SISTERHOOD
Words: Dawn Alford
PHOTOGRAPHY ©KATHY HUTCHINS / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
“I cannot believe how Big Little Lies entered the zeitgeist. It’s really been a huge eye-opener for me on the power of TV”
NICOLE KIDMAN IN THE OMEGA CONSTELLATION MANHATTAN CAMPAIGN, OMEGAWATCHES.COM
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It’s a similar story on screen. Big Little Lies is a powerful vehicle for its female leads. As Kidman, 51, points out, it’s unique in that elsewhere “you don’t get to see six women in a show and follow all of their lives in a complicated and deep way. I don’t know another show that has six female leads.” The second season of the hit series begins in June this year. “I cannot believe how Big Little Lies entered the zeitgeist,” says Kidman. “It’s really been a huge eye-opener for me on the power of television, the power of that particular story and how it connected. It was glorious, actually. While it was first being broadcast, people were coming up to me, saying: ‘What happens next?’ Audiences were obsessed.” Given that success, it’s perhaps surprising that there was a question mark over the series ever going to a second season – and perhaps even that the first series was made. When Kidman and Reese Witherspoon first optioned the novel of the same name by Liane Moriarty, back in 2014, there was no #MeToo. Kidman has said that even getting the series made “felt like a coup.” Viewing figures were respectable; initial reviews weren’t wildly enthusiastic. Then Big Little Lies took off and flew. There was no second volume to the original novel, so Kidman and Witherspoon asked Moriarty to write a further 200 pages that served as a template for the second season, scripted, like the first, by David E. Kelley. They also persuaded Meryl Streep to take on the role of Celeste’s mother-in-law. “Meryl signed on without having read any script, which is a big support of us as a group of women,” says Kidman. “She was: ‘I want to be in the coven,’ and she’s definitely in it now. I was terrified,” adds this world-renowned star, disarmingly. “You’re acting opposite the great one. I get nervous anyway – but to be opposite her and not want her to think, ‘Who is this amateur?” It’s not hard to see why Streep wanted to join the “coven”. The relationship between the women of Big Little Lies is clearly a powerful force. “The desire to spend time together again was a big part of the decision to do another season,” says Kidman. “We’ve now worked together for well over a couple of years and the bonds between all of us are deeper and stronger. We go out all the time, we talk, we help each other – it’s a very strong connection. We’re all so different, yet we complement each other.” A decade ago, Kidman has said, she was on the verge of stepping away from her acting career. Again, she has her mother to thank for keeping her going. “I wasn’t being sent anything that was terribly interesting,” she recalled in an interview. “In this industry, they go, ‘You’re kind of past your date.’ I met an incredible man and had two children and was on a completely different path. It was my mum who persuaded me to keep my toe in the water. I am so glad I have a very opinionated, strong mother who’s very wise and I do listen to her.” And now? “It’s lovely at this stage of my life and career to be doing something that I’ve never done before. I’ve never been a part of something that reached so far, globally.”
the space of a year with her appearance in Lars von Trier’s experimental Dogville, a role opposite Anthony Hopkins in The Human Stain that Rolling Stone magazine described as ‘mesmerising’ and the lead in Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain. She is currently set to play Gretchen Carlson, the Fox News anchor who filed for sexual harassment against company chief Roger Ailes, in the film Fair & Balanced. In 2018’s Destroyer she was almost unrecognisable as tortured undercover cop Erin Bell. In the same year, Kidman played Atlanna in Aquaman, which, she says, is her children’s favourite (particularly the goldfish-eating scene). The children she is referring to are Sunday Rose, 10, and Faith Margaret, eight, her young daughters with country music star Keith Urban. The couple were married in 2006 and live in Nashville, Tennessee, where, Kidman has said, the pace of life is similar to that of Australia, where she grew up. She was born in Hawaii to Australian parents and the family returned to Sydney when she was four. Brought up as a Catholic, she is still a church-goer, and says she has “never really been a party girl.” She was close to both her parents; she has described her late father, a biochemist and psychologist, as a “very gentle man with a really strong social conscience … he would always notice if you had told a funny story, or if you did something kind that helped someone out.” She is discreet about her previous marriage to Tom Cruise, and about Connor and Isabella, the children she and Cruise adopted, both now in their 20s. “They have made choices to be Scientologists and as a mother, it’s my job to love them,” she told The Guardian in 2018. The relationship with Cruise ended in divorce in 2001, shortly before she took on the Oscar-winning role in The Hours (she said at the time, “I wasn’t really functioning. When I watched it a year and a half later, I could see how raw I had been, probably the worst place in my life.”). The Hours was made in Weinstein’s studios, as were other films Kidman has worked on. She says she never experienced harassment personally – as a teenager she was chaperoned closely on set and she was married young, at 22. But, she told The Guardian, “I think it shows that there has been an awful lot of hidden violence against women, and that people have been sitting on these things.” A UN goodwill ambassador since 2006, she has worked on violence against women programmes in various countries and says “I know the patterns,” adding “I have certainly got friends who have experienced this, not just in this industry but in all industries. But still it was a massive eye-opener.” Kidman is committed to championing women in other areas of her life, too – and in more positive lights. The actress has been a brand ambassador for Omega watches since 2005 and, in 2015 when she marked 10 years with the brand, she celebrated by holding an exhibition of a history of ladies watchmaking – the first of a number of events the horologer held in celebration of women.
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DUCKIE THOT, AUBREY’S SHADOW, LONDON, 2017, ©TIM WALKER STUDIO
P.38 DAIRY DATES The best exhibitions and events in the capital this June
P.44 UNDER THE HAMMER Christie’s presents an exceptional collection of royal Indian jewels
P.46 LONDON CALLING The history and hysteria behind The Clash’s debut album
C U LT U R E MUSIC,
MUSEUMS AND
MASTERPIECES
Tim Walker’s ethereal snaps are set to be the subject of a new exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum this September. Don’t miss it.
T H E A G E N DA YOUR CURATED GUIDE TO CULTURE IN THE CAPITAL Words: Ellen Millard
CHELSEA MASTERPIECE RETURNS TO CHELSEA
BELOW ROMANO: BRITISH MOSAIC, ATTRIBUTED TO THE DURNOVARIAN SCHOOL, EARLY 4TH CENTURY AD. FROM THE ROMAN VILLA AT DEWLISH DORSET, 237CM X 190CM, COURTESY OF EDWARD HURST
M AY F A I R THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS UNVEILS ITS 251ST SUMMER EXHIBITION Following its landmark anniversary last year, The Royal Academy of Arts is due to open its 251st Summer Exhibition this June. British painter Jock McFadyen is co-ordinating this year’s show, and will curate a selection of works shown in the main gallery, where paintings by the likes of Polly
Morgan, Charles Avery and Mat Collishaw will go on display. Artworks by Tracey Emin, Yinka Shonibare and David Nash will also be among the 1,200 pieces exhibited, which have been selected from 16,000 entries. As with last year, the Summer Exhibition will continue outside on Bond Street, where flags created by Royal Academian Michael Craig-Martin will be flown. 10 June – 12 August, Burlington House, W1J, royalacademy.org.uk
ABOVE JOCK MCFADYEN, POOR MOTHER, PHOTOGRAPHY BY LUCID PLANE
This June, Chelsea welcomes the return of London’s leading crosscollecting fair, Masterpiece. Setting up residence in the Royal Hospital Chelsea for one week, the event will unite more than 150 collectors of art, design, furniture and jewellery. 27 June – 3 July, £38.50, masterpiecefair.com
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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT KEITH TYSON, IKEBANA – WATERFALL STAGE (BOSS LEVEL), COURTESY OF HAUSER & WIRTH; MAKIKO NAKAMURA, MOONS OF SATURN, COURTESY OF JOHN MARTIN GALLERY; MAKIKO NAKAMURO, MOONLIGHT, GHOSTS, SPIRITS, ANGELS, COURTESY OF JOHN MARTIN GALLERY
M AY F A I R LONDON’S HISTORICAL ART DISTRICT IS CELEBRATED WITH A SERIES OF EVENTS For the first time in its six-year history, Mayfair Art Weekend will close a monthlong celebration of the district’s creative talent. Galleries, hotels, restaurants and members’ clubs will be given the opportunity to curate their own cultural experiences through the month of June, while a weekend agenda of free talks, tours and workshops will close the event – starting with Gallery HOP!, an evening of private views and receptions held in Mayfair’s best galleries. 28-30 June, mayfairartweekend.com
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M AY F A I R ARTIST ISABELLE VAN ZEIJL CREATES SELF-PORTRAITS INSPIRED BY OLD MASTER PAINTINGS
OPPOSITE PAGE OWN, 2019, THIS PAGE, FROM LEFT ISABELLE VAN ZEIJL; I LOVE HER, 2019; ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF ISABELLE VAN ZEIJL AND THE CYNTHIA CORBETT GALLERY
Merging Old Master paintings, historical heroines and modern couture, artist Isabelle van Zeijl creates and poses as ethereal characters in her self-portrait series. Mirroring the noblewomen who sat for Dutch master painters, the artist poses in extravagant headpieces, vintage lace and historic armour from the 1600s – proving that her role is just as much costume designer as it is photographer and model.
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Twenty of Zeijl’s whimisical portraits will go on display this June in The Camouflaged Beauty of Fashion – the artist’s largest solo photography exhibition to date – at the Royal Opera Arcade Gallery, which has been organised by The Cynthia Corbett Gallery as part of Mayfair Art Weekend. 24 June – 30 June, Royal Opera Arcade Gallery, Pall Mall, roa-galleria.com
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CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT COURTESY OF MARIELLA AGOIS; ©MARTA TUCCI; COURTESY OF ANA TERESA BARBOZA; VIVIENNE WESTWOOD GOLD LABEL AW 14/15. COURTESY OF VIVIENNE WESTWOOD
BERMONDSEY THE FASHION AND TEXTILES MUSEUM WEAVES THE STORY OF PERU’S RAINBOW TEXTILE ARTS
Peru’s world-renowned heritage of fibre arts and costumes is celebrated in a new exhibition at the Fashion and Textiles Museum. Weavers of the Clouds explores the nation’s long history of textile craftsmanship and its influence on design and fashion. Rarely seen objects from private collections and national museums, such as London’s British Museum, will be on display, including a fourcornered hat, dating from 600 AD, a Shipibo costume from the Amazon rainforest and a rare pre-Hispanic tunic created in orange, yellow and blue macaw feathers. Colour is key to the textile traditions of Peru, and visitors can expect to see a rainbow palette of hues and exquisite pattern design in the form of traditional costumes, tapestries and accessories. 21 June – 8 September, £9.90, 83 Bermondsey Street, SE1, ftmlondon.org
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GLORIOUS GIFTING
CELEBRATE THE DADS WITH SOMETHING SPECIAL FROM THE ROYAL EXCHANGE THIS FATHER’S DAY
PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE FOR A FULL LIST OF STORES THEROYALEXCHANGE.CO.UK THE ROYAL EXCHANGE, EXIT 3 BANK, CITY OF LONDON EC3V 3LR
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UPCOMING ESTIMATE: TB A
Diamond, cocholong, sapphire and titanium brooch by JAR An exceptional array of Indian jewellery and gems will go under the hammer at Christie’s
PRIZE LOTS
New York this June. Offered from the Al Thani collection, the listings include more than 400 diamonds, stones and jewelled objects – including this diamond, cocholong, sapphire and titanium brooch by Parisian jeweller JAR. Maharajas & Mughal Magnificence, 19 June, christies.com
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP DIAMOND, COCHOLONG, SAPPHIRE AND TITANIUM BROOCH BY JAR, ©CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD 2019; LE SUITES DES SALTIMBANQUES, PABLO PICASSO, COURTESY OF BONHAMS; PATEK PHILIPPE 18K GOLD MANUEL WIND CHRONOGRAPH BRACELET WATCH, COURTESY OF BONHAMS
UPCOMING E ST I M AT E : £1 50,000 – £200,000
Patek Philippe 18kt Gold Manuel Wind Chronograph Bracelet Watch
UPCOMING ESTIMATE: £ 170,0 0 0 – £ 250,000
Bonhams presents this rare Patek Philippe bracelet watch as part of its Fine Wristwatches auction this June. The 18kt gold timekeeper has a manual wind movement adjusted to eight positions. The silver dial is adorned with polished bullet markers and subsidiary dials at three and nine o’clock for constant seconds and 30 minute recordings. Fine Wristwatches, 19 June, bonhams.com
Le suites des Saltimbanques, Pablo Picasso This complete and framed set of 15 drypoints and etchings was created by Pablo Picasso between 1904 and 1905 and are considered to be his first foray into printmaking. Prints and Multiples, 13 June, bonhams.com LUXURYLONDON.CO.UK
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WA R I S DECLARED AND B AT T L E COME DOWN FORTY YEARS AFTER ITS RELEASE, L O N D O N C A L L I N G , T H E C L A S S I C P O S T- P U N K ALBUM BY THE CLASH, REMAINS ONE OF THE G R E AT E S T R E C O R D S E V E R I N S P I R E D B Y T H E C A P I TA L – A N D A S F R E S H A S E V E R
Words: Rob Crossan
THE CLASH IN SAN FRANCISCO, 1979
The Clash members had already ridden of the punk rock scene that erupted
t
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meet Ivan from Brixton, and ask whether he’ll come with his hands on his head or on the trigger of a gun when the law comes calling. We travel to civil-war ravaged 1930s Spain to find ‘bullet holes in the cemetery walls’ and ‘the black cars of the Guardia Civil’. And we find escape, too; chiefly in a brand new Cadillac whose young female owner has a few choice words to say to her father: ‘balls to you Daddy’ and ‘I ain’t never coming back’. We haven’t seen much of that fiery protagonist since she sped off into the night on just the second track of London Calling. But the album itself has stuck around for four decades and counting, regularly featuring in lists of Best Ever Albums, sneering and snarling at everything ranked around it. This is an album named after London and loosely based around the city. And, just like the city itself, there’s nothing myopic or parochial about this record, not least in terms of its scope of ambition. ‘When I play [my guitar], you’re hearing my life come out in microcosm,” said Mick Jones, who, along with singer Joe Strummer, bassist Paul Simonon and drummer ‘Topper’ Headon had already ridden the first, chaotic, choppy waves of the Big Bang of the punk rock scene that erupted into being during 1976. The Clash supported the Sex Pistols on their debut tour, though the vast majority of gigs were cancelled by venues and local councils who considered punk rock to be something akin to the arrival of the devil on horseback. Even today the band remains somewhat in the shadow of Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious and co, considered too serious and ambitious compared to the supposed authenticity of the Pistols. London Calling, the band’s third album, was released in the last month of the 1970s. The Pistols had imploded, Vicious having died of a heroin overdose, and the initial wave of punk bands had been exposed as predominantly egotistical chancers who couldn’t sustain their initial, amphetaminefuelled success.
A lot can happen in 65 minutes. From the moment the needle (and you really should be playing this record on the format for which it was originally made) hits the grooves on London Calling to the moment when, just over an hour later, the album ends, seeming to almost leave smouldering ash on the turntable, we witness the death of a gambler in an opium den (‘seized and forced to his knees and shot dead’); get lost in a supermarket where special offers of ‘guaranteed personality’ are in short supply;
OPPOSITE PAGE MICK JONES AND TOPPER HEADER AT BRIXTON ACADEMY, JULY 1982, PHOTOGRAPHY ©JON JACKSON THIS PAGE MICK JONES (LEFT) AND JOE STRUMMER AT TOWER THEATER IN PHILADELPHIA, MARCH 1980, ©JOHN JOE COFFEY
the first waves during 1976 LUXURYLONDON.CO.UK
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Here then, was something very different. This double album (sold for the price of a single one) showed The Clash as a band with a depth of intelligence, style and raw, red-eyed, vapour-trailed soul that dwarfed the movement from which they originated. The title track was a dire forewarning of the decade to come. Speaking of a ‘nuclear error’, a new ice age, the flooding of the capital city and the sun’s end, London Calling spoke of no less than the imminent destruction of the city and the fields and oceans surrounding it. “In the 70s, when we formed the band, there was a lot of tension in Britain, lots of strikes, and the country was an economic mess,” commented Simonon in a 2013 interview. “There also was aggression toward anyone who looked different, especially the punks. So the name The Clash seemed appropriate for the band’s name.” The 1978-1979 Winter of Discontent saw rubbish piled 20 ft high in Leicester Square and grave diggers on strike; the December 1979 timing of the album’s release further reflected the anger, anxiety and trauma of the final throes of the decade. The band knew it. The LP was sold with a sticker which proclaimed The Clash as being ‘the only band that matters’. Although the recording process itself would test the mettle
of even these hardened, committed rock ‘n’ rollers to breaking point. Producer Guy Stevens’ reputation was forged from his work with early 70s rock acts such as Free and Mott the Hoople. Stevens, however, was a chronic alcoholic and by the end of the decade, he had swapped the studio for the pub. Strummer, undeterred, set out to find him, working his way through the pubs situated off Oxford Street that Stevens was known to frequent. “I went up to him and tapped him on the shoulder,” Strummer recalled in an NME interview at the time of the album’s release. “He looked around and it was like a son finding his father in one of those corny old films. He looked up at me and said ‘Have a drink’.” During 18-hour recording sessions over a period of around six weeks, Stevens spent much of his time producing London Calling by pouring wine into pianos while Strummer was recording, smashing up chairs in front of representatives of CBS records, sleeping under the console and swinging ladders around the studio. This frenzied havoc was reflected in the wildly disparate range of styles heard on the album, which lurch and swagger around reggae, old-school R&B, jazz, rockabilly, ska, pop, soul and rock.
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Critical acclaim and huge sales were instantaneous upon the album’s release. It sold two million copies and critics lined up to pay tribute to its immense breadth and vitality. ‘This is an album that captures all The Clash’s primal energy’, wrote The New York Times, going on to note how ‘a brilliant production job by Guy Stevens… reveals depths of invention and creativity barely suggested by the band’s previous work.” Rolling Stone magazine would later name London Calling the album of the 1980s – it wasn’t released until January 1980 in the United States. And yet, amid these raw seams opening up on the rock coalface, there was a sense of finality and closure to London Calling. The Clash were being touted at this time as ‘the last great rock band’ and the album itself was originally intended to be called The Last Testament. The sleeve itself suggests a sense of closure on the first era of guitar rock. The vertical and horizontal pink and green lettering on the sleeve is an exact replica of that on the cover of the eponymous debut album by Elvis Presley. While the King of Rock and Roll is joyously holding up a guitar on his 1956 album, on London Calling Simonon is caught flinging a guitar back down towards the floor. “We didn’t have any solution to the world’s problems,” said Strummer when asked, two decades after its release, about the influence of London Calling. “We were trying to grope in a socialist way towards some future where the world might be less of a miserable place than it is. If Karl Marx was unable to do it then there’s no way four guitarists from London could do it.” The momentum didn’t last. Their next album, Sandinista!, was a sprawling, two-and-a-half hour long triple album that tested the patience of even the most dogged fans. The subsequent departures of Headon and Jones prompted a catastrophic downturn in the quality of output that reached its nadir with the band’s final album Cut the Crap in 1985. As for Stevens, barely two years after the release of London Calling, he would die of an overdose aged just 38. Strummer himself only lived to be 50, dying of an undiagnosed congenital heart defect in 2002. And yet the sheer youthful exuberance, the abandonment, the thirst for knowledge, the hunger for change, the adoration of the city and, most importantly, the desire for the new and a dismissal of the old, still shine through in 2019. The freshness of London Calling, if anything, only seems to improve, as the issues it addresses remain as ever-present and as seemingly insoluble. “You have to think to yourself, ‘What would you do if you did rule the world?’” said Strummer in an interview recorded shortly before his death. “It’s a tough question and I don’t think we had an answer to it. Not that we should have done, but we did try to put our minds to pose those kinds of questions. Whatever use that was. But we did try.”
OPPOSITE PAGE JOE STRUMMER FILMING RUDE BOY, 1980 THIS PAGE, FROM TOP GRAFFITI COMMEMORATING JOE STRUMMER; LONDON CALLING ALBUM SLEEVE
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P.54 RAISE THE ROOF The best rooftop bars and outdoor terraces in the capital
P.58 VEG OUT Shoreditch’s Galvin La Chapelle launches a vegetarian menu
Bob Bob Ricard’s founder Leonid Shutv opens his second venture in The Leadenhall Building (p.60)
LONDON’S BEST NEW TERRACES A S T H E C A P I TA L P U S H E S I N TO G R E AT B R I T I S H S U M M E R T I M E , LO N D O N E R S F LO C K T O T H E C I T Y ’ S O U T D O O R P O I N T S T O R E V E L I N S U N S H I N E A N D V I E W S . L U C K I LY F O R T H E M , T H E R E H AV E B E E N M A N Y E X C E P T I O N A L N E W L A U N C H E S I N 2 0 1 9
Words: Nick Savage
BLAKES Unbeknownst to many, Blakes Hotel boasts one of Chelsea’s prettiest garden terraces. This summer sees the boutique hotel festooning its Courtyard with evergreen shrubbery and installing beehives on the top of the building to create a lavender and honey themed terrace in partnership with Monkey 47. Complete with palms, ferns, topiaries, Moorish tiling and a gorgeous gilt conservatory, it’s a lovely place to kick back and enjoy the heat. 33 Roland Gardens, SW7, blakeshotels.com
PARRILLAN
JUREMA AT THE MANDRAKE
The newest spot from the Barrafina boys, Parrillan draws inspiration from executive chef Angel Zapata Martin’s favourite restaurant on the White Isle: C’an Pilot. It’s situated on the viaduct level of Coal Drops Yard next to Barrafina King’s Cross, Casa Pastor and Plaza Pastor (which features an equally worthy terrace). Grilling, as Spanish speakers may suspect, is central to this operation. Diners will be served an array of impeccably seasoned vegetables, meat and seafood alongside white-hot coals from the charcoal oven, finessing produce to perfection at the table. Not a bad way to enjoy a sunny day. King’s Cross, N1C, coaldropsyard.com
The Mandrake Hotel in Fitzrovia boasts one of central London’s best courtyards and this is getting a relaunch this summer with Jurema. Settle in amongst exposed brickwork and hanging jasmine gardens to enjoy a range of Amazonian-inspired refreshments running the gamut from tacos and ceviche to goat’s milk ice cream sandwiches. And, as always, the cocktails are on point. 20-21 Newman Street, W1T, themandrake.com
CHUCS SERPENTINE There’s arguably no place more bucolic in the capital than its celebrated parks, and Chucs has recently opened a magnificent terrace at the Zaha Hadiddesigned annexe to the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park. The fourth London location of the ever-popular Chucs invites guests to drink in balmy weather, enjoying classic Italian cocktails and authentic dishes such as chicken paillard and bigoli cacio e pepe. West Carriage Drive, W2, chucsrestaurants.com
RADIO ROOFTOP SPIRIT OF SUMMER Perched atop the 10th floor of the ME Hotel in the centre of Covent Garden’s Aldwych Circle, Radio has attracted droves of sun-seeking Londoners since its initial launch. For summer 2019, the rooftop bar has partnered with Patrón Tequila and Bombay Sapphire to launch the Spirit of Summer. Each side of the venue has been transformed – one to a Mexican hacienda and
the other a botanical garden – with an impressive new design alongside innovative food and drink offerings. 336-337 Strand, WC2R, melondonhotel.com
12TH KNOT AT SEA CONTAINERS Formerly known as the Rumpus Room, 12th Knot occupies prime position atop the 12th floor of Sea Containers London, offering peerless views up and down the Thames and into the heart of the capital. As well as incredible vistas, 12th Knot offers a stylish, sumptuous setting in which to enjoy oneself, with a regular calendar of DJs and live music. 20 Upper Ground, South Bank, SE1, seacontainerslondon.com
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HANAMI TERRACE AT NOBU SHOREDITCH Tucked away on Willow Street among the wall art that Shoreditch is so well-known for, Nobu Hotel boasts a little pocket of pink prettiness amongst its urban environs. The property partnered with House of Suntory this spring to launch its Hanami terrace, showcasing Japanese craftsmanship and the annual bloom of the Japanese Cherry Blossom. Guests have the opportunity to enjoy a new range of cocktails and Nobustyle afternoon tea underneath a swath of pink foliage. Until 30 June, 10-50 Willow Street, EC2A, nobuhotelshoreditch.com
NYETIMBER SECRET GARDEN AT ROSEWOOD LONDON
AQUA NUEVA
Rosewood London’s extensive interior courtyard is always packed when the sun is out and the mercury is up. This summer will be no exception, as the hotel has partnered with Nyetimber to create an immersive secret garden, complete with floral archways, eye-popping wisteria, lush green foliage and delicate lighting. It’s the perfect setting to enjoy a crisp glass of English sparkling wine. Open from 31 May, 252 High Holborn, WC1V, rosewoodhotels.com
This perennially popular Soho hotspot has been given a shot in the arm with its Summer of Art terrace. Following the Spanish restaurant’s partnership with The National Gallery, Aqua Nueva will be offering a series of watercolour art classes held on the terrace. There aren’t many better venues to drink sangria and paint the skyline. 5th Floor, 240 Regent Street, W1B, aquanueva.co.uk
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Man-about-town, Innerplace’s Nick Savage, gives you the insider lowdown on London’s most hedonistic haunts Innerplace is London’s personal lifestyle concierge. Membership provides complimentary access to the finest nightclubs, the best restaurants and top private members’ clubs. Innerplace also offers priority bookings, updates on the latest openings and hosts its own regular parties. Membership starts from £75 a month, innerplace.co.uk
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G A LV I N L A CHAPELLE L U X U R Y L O N D O N P U T S M E AT- F R E E F I N E D I N I N G T O T H E T E S T W I T H T H E M I C H E L I N - S TA R R E D R E S TA U R A N T ’ S G O U R M E T V E G E TA R I A N M E N U
Words: Katrina Harper-Lewis
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earing the words ‘fine French food’ and ‘vegetarian’ in the same sentence may jar in the ears of Gallic gastronomic purists (and any vegetarian who has crossed the Channel will know that finding a meatfree dish on a French menu is nigh on impossible), so when I discovered that the lauded Michelinstarred French restaurant Galvin La Chapelle had launched a vegetarian tasting menu, I jumped at the chance to try it. Stumbling out of Shoreditch High Street station into the bustling urban east London landscape, it was hard to imagine the refined experience that we were about to enjoy. Swiftly hooking a left off Bishopsgate onto Spital Square, there was the Galvin ‘G’, like a beacon beckoning us in through the imposing entrance. Inside, the expansive space offered a reprieve from frenetic city life. The lofty vaulted ceilings, original rafters, ornate granite pillars and stone mullion windows pay homage to the building’s heritage, while sensitive refurbishment, overseen by brothers Chris and Jeff Galvin, has brought slick contemporary
Galvin La Chapelle is named after a chapel overlooking the Hermitage wine appellation in the northern Rhône region of France The restaurant is one of only a handful in London offering a vertical list of Hermitage La Chapelle wines. Galvin La Chapelle was awarded its first Michelin star in 2011
touches, such as the ‘floating’ glass mezzanine and industrial-style chandeliers, clearly designed to draw a discerning city crowd. As meaty dishes, en route to our neighbouring diners, were carried past us, my carnivorous husband ogled them longingly, regretting his decision to join me on the vegetarian tasting experience. Little did he know what we were in for. Two elegant palatecleansing dishes featuring peppery fennel, tart grapefruit and smooth avocado purée, followed by a Charentais melon velouté with fresh creamy almonds, tantalised the taste buds and set the tone for the evening. By the time the heritage tomato salad with burrata and a black olive tapenade arrived, my husband was eating his words, proclaiming with each mouthful that he didn’t want the dish to end. A soft herb salsa invigorated the full-flavoured vegetable risotto that came next, set off by the dense saltiness of crumbled feta. After a brief interlude the summer vegetable tagine arrived – baby carrots, ribbons of courgette and earthy mushrooms artistically arranged on a bed of cous cous, with creamed aubergine and a soft quail’s egg, were livened up with zingy confit lemon, umami-packed confit garlic and a piquant, yet fragrant and full-flavoured harissa, made with more than 50 ingredients. To finish, two orbs of sorbet – one pineapple, one blackcurrant – packed an intense punch and preluded a caramel, melt-in-themouth apple tarte tatin topped with an indulgent dollop of Normandy crème fraiche. So, can French restaurants do vegetarian? Oui – et c’est bon. Seven-course vegetarian or vegan tasting menu, both £55, Galvin La Chapelle, 35 Spital Square, E1 galvinrestaurants.com
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Words: Ellen Millard
ABOVE LEONID SHUTOV OPPOSITE PAGE BOB BOB CITÉ
WHAT’S IN A NAME? To Leonid Shutov, not a lot. “A name is only as good as the restaurant itself,” he says, when I ask about how he came to christen his own eatery. It’s hard to disagree – London’s culinary landscape is awash with peculiar pop-ups where the names can be far more exciting than the food itself. Soho’s now-closed Flavour Bastard may have garnered much attention when it opened, but it didn’t even reach its first anniversary. Even Sexy Fish wouldn’t have survived at the top of the pecking order on epithet alone. However, it is all a bit rich coming from a man who dubbed his own eatery Bob Bob Ricard. The name, the Russian restaurateur tells me, was a joke between him and his then-business partner Richard Howarth, who fondly referred to Shutov as Bob. “The story that we made up was about a restaurant owned by a Russian and an Englishman. The Russian, called Bob, owns two thirds
and therefore demands his name appears twice,” he laughs. “But the whole point was that the name is irrelevant; it’s about the delivery. We just wanted something that would clearly never be done by anyone with any financial ambitions and simply by people who want to have an eccentric, personable restaurant.” And so Bob Bob Ricard was born. If you’re yet to visit the Soho eatery, or if you’ve been living under a rock and have never heard of it, you’ll at very least have seen its ‘press for champagne’ button splashed on your Instagram feed. One push and a waiter will appear to fill your glass with a fizz of your choice. It’s the tech-age answer to clicking your finger at the maître d’, and it’s worked a charm. The sommelier, Shutov tells me, uncorks 2,000 bottles of bubbly a month. Modelled on the Orient Express, the Upper St James Street restaurant is renowned for its OTT design, with
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“Staying true to what we do is what has given Bob Bob Ricard its longevity” gilded dining rooms, marble tables and booths clad in royal blue leather. The menu offers English comfort food, or as Shutov puts it, “dishes that you want to eat until the last bite,” and an impressive variety of bubbly. It’s not to everyone’s taste – The Spectator recently dubbed it a restaurant for “affluent halfwits” – but it seems Shutov is having the last laugh. Bob Bob Ricard marked its 10th anniversary last year, meaning it has happily outlived London’s notorious restaurant sell-by date of five years – twice. “Staying true to what we do is what has given Bob Bob Ricard longevity,” Shutov says. “I’ve had so many conversations about champagne and how nobody wants to drink it because it is too expensive or because everybody wants prosecco, but we don’t follow trends. Champagne is in? We do champagne. Champagne is out? We still do champagne.” Now, more than a decade after his first restaurant opened, Shutov has lifted the veil on his second venture. Located on the eighth floor of the Leadenhall Building (also known as the Cheesegrater), Bob Bob Cité opened this May and, as the name suggests, brings the best of Bob Bob Ricard to the Square Mile, with a contemporary design befitting its City location and a menu of classic French comfort dishes cooked up by Michelin-starred chef Éric Chavot. Behind the bar, there is, naturally, a vast champagne offer in magnum, jeroboam and methuselah sizes, as well as Bob Bob Cité’s own take on the bubbly button: presser pour champagne. Not a fizz fan? Not a problem. The restaurant is the proud owner of one of the largest collections of Armagnac brandy, with more than
100 vintages starting from 1888, and an impressive selection of Chateau d’Yquem sweet wine. The project has been a long time in the making, opening 14 months later than planned – but Shutov isn’t worried about making up for lost time. One concierge service claimed it had received more than 5,000 reservation requests for Bob Bob Cité since its original opening date of early 2018 was publicised – such is the reputation of Bob Bob Ricard. Shutov is quick to point out, however, that this is not a franchise, and those expecting a rehashed version of the Soho outpost will be disappointed. “It’s an entirely different restaurant, but will it have similarities?” He muses. “Well, just think, if you take an English train from the early 20th century and then take a bullet train from Japan in the 21st century, do they have something in common? Of course they do. They have the same function, they are both trains and they are both luxurious – but they achieve it in very different ways. “Yes, Bob Bob Cité will be similar in the sense that it is very rich in detail, but it is not Bob Bob Ricard squeezed into a modern shell. It’s a completely new thing, reinvented for the 21st century, and will hopefully define a new style: the luxury brasserie of tomorrow.” The similarities will be evident in the new restaurant’s atmosphere and first-class food – as well as in its eclectic design that could only have been borne out of the mind of Bob Bob Ricard’s founder. Its location in the Leadenhall Building was important, Shutov explains. “We wanted something that would be truly individual, and the City is where the architecture of the future
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is being created,” he says – though the restaurant is not being designed for City slickers. “We’re not looking to provide something for the people who happen to be around here and would like another option for lunch. We’re creating a destination restaurant that is special enough to make it worth visiting from other parts of town,” he explains. “We love the idea of the City having lots of people, but we’re only interested in those people when they’re looking for a meaningful dining experience. We’re not creating a convenience.” When he opened Bob Bob Ricard, Shutov was a restaurant novice: “I wanted to start small,” he jokes. Now, with more than a decade’s worth of experience under his belt and a notable restaurant to boot, he’s hoping his expertise will afford him the opportunity to deliver something even more ambitious than his inaugural eatery. Plus, he says, there is far more competition today. “When we opened Bob Bob Ricard, there was virtually no choice in London,” he recalls. “There was The Ivy, Le Caprice and J. Sheekey. Scott’s didn’t exist, Nobu had just opened and then Hakkasan and Zuma appeared, and they were revelations. You would travel from another country to experience them.” Today, when he’s not crafting his own culinary powerhouses, he enjoys eating at Ikeda, a family-owned “little gem” in Mayfair, The Ledbury and Flat White in Soho, where he “probably spends more time than I do my own house”. When he is at home, he says he is “fortunate to eat in a way that is as good as one could ever hope to eat in restaurants” thanks to his wife, who is
a culinary mastermind. To Shutov, London is “the greatest city on earth” – and its restaurant scene only serves to prove it. “The variety, the diversity, the architectural styles and the mix of cultures in London is phenomenal, as is the opportunity and access to talent,” he enthuses. “It’s a luxury when you can start a project such as Bob Bob Cité and end up working with some of the most remarkable people in the world, all of whom are within your reach. “London really has blossomed in terms of quality, variety and diversity, in both its food offer and experience offer. It makes it one of the most remarkable places in the world for dining.” 122 Leadenhall Street, EC3V, bobbobcite.com
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PROMOTION
JOIN THE CLUB THE FORMER HOME AND STUDIO OF FRANCIS BACON NOW SERVES AS A CHIC MEMBERS’ CLUB FOUNDED TO PROMOTE
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he Georgian townhouse in which the South Kensington Club is based has a history of impressive residents. It was here that figurative artist Francis Bacon lived and had his studio. It was also once home to Pineapple Dance Studios, and later Ronnie Wood’s notorious Harrington Club, which was frequented by the likes of Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan and Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. Today, a flurry of international visitors, politicians, celebrities and ambitious millennials stroll through the doors to call on what is now South Kensington Club, a private members’ space that opened in 2015. Based on four key elements which the founders believe contribute to a successful lifestyle – health, business, community and culture – the club has been built as a stylish, health-conscious haven for London’s cosmopolitan crowd. Inside, a colonial-inspired interior, envisioned by interior consultant and art director Sussy Cazalet, sets it apart from the Sloane-style typical of the area, with midcentury Brazilian Percival Lafer chairs and lifestyle photography by Slim Aarons. The in-house restaurant serves simple, well-executed Mediterranean dishes, made from organic ingredients and with gluten-free options available, while drinks can be ordered at the Lounge Bar or Parisian parlour-style Tea Library. The immense Bathhouse offers techniques and treatments from across the globe – think Turkish hammam, Russian Banya and a Watsu pool. For gym bunnies, there is a state-of-the-
art fitness room, as well as a schedule of more than 420 classes, including hot yoga, boxing and Pilates. In keeping with its members’ love of culture, the South Kensington Club’s Entrepreneurs programme hosts monthly networking evenings by renowned self-starters, brand creators, designers, transformational speakers and avid travellers. There are also many opportunities to attend a large number of social events, such as the annual Summer party hosted for those looking to mingle among like-minded successful professionals, residing in the area or not. Membership starts from £2,200 a year; day passes from £50. For more information, email home@southkensingtonclub.com, 38-42 Harrington Road, SW7, southkensingtonclub.com
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WINEGROWER / CREATOR / COGNAC VISIT LA MAISON RÉMY MARTIN RESIDENCY AT CLAUDE BOSI. 81 Fulham Rd, Chelsea, London SW3 6RD Please drink responsibly
To apply for membership and receive access to exclusive events, visit lamaison.remymartin.com or scan this QR code
DISCOVER THE
BEAUTY
HEALTHCARE . PHARMACY . SKINCARE . WELLBEING
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HAUTE HOROLOGY
ANIMAL CHARM Bejewelled beasts from fine jewellery’s master craftsmen
P.82 JESSICA MCCORMACK Inside the diamond designer’s Mayfair townhouse
P.86 PETAL PUSHERS The history behind Harry Winston’s golden rosette
P.90 SHOW TIME The standout pieces unveiled at Baselworld 2019
P.98 ON THE WATCH How Roger W. Smith became Britain’s most
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ARNALDO ANAYA LUCA
skilled horologist
Bulgari’s Octo Finissimo has broken its fifth world record – at 3.3mm, it’s the thinnest ever mechanical chronograph in watchmaking history
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A MAGNIFICENT MENAGERIE OF SCUTTLING BEETLES, BEJEWELLED B I R D S A N D T I G E R T I M E P I E C E S C E L E B R AT E S T H E M A S T E R C R A F T S M A N S H I P OF THE HIGH JEWELLERY AND HOROLOGY WORLDS
Words: Ellen Millard
SOUS SON AILE CLIP VAN CLEEF & ARPELS In a dazzling tribute to Van Cleef & Arpels, this Sous Son Aile clip combines the jeweller’s signature Lovebird motif with its Mystery Set ruby poppies, first introduced by the Maison in 1933. A mechanism to open the wing – integrated into the piece – reveals a charming baby bird nestled against its mother, in a delicate embrace of pink sapphires, coral and diamonds. POA, vancleefarpels.com
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PANTHÈRE DE CARTIER NECKLACE
MYTHOLOGY 18KT ROSE GOLD BEETLE CHARM
CARTIER
ANNOUSHKA
When Cartier’s director of jewellery in the 1930s, Jeanne Toussaint, spotted a panther while on safari, she is said to have proclaimed: “Emeralds, onyx, diamonds, a brooch!” By then, the captivating creature had leapt into the house’s collections and it has ruled the high jewellery jungle ever since. Here, it lounges on a string of emerald beads, resplendent with a body of baguette- and brilliantcut diamonds, emerald eyes and onyx spots.
Designed as modern talismans to symbolise regeneration, perseverence and insight, Annoushka’s bejewelled beetle charms, which clip onto the designer’s Mythology necklace, are handcrafted in 18kt rose gold and blue topaz, rose quartz, amethyst and citrine stones. “There’s nothing more perfect than nature,” Annoushka says. “Being able to make it perfectly in gold and stones and keep forever – there’s something rather magical about that.” £2,900 each, annoushka.com
POA, cartier.co.uk
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GOLDEN ELLIPSE WATCH REF. 5738/50
MASCOTE RING DE GRISOGONO
PATEK PHILIPPE Patek Philippe’s Contemporary Collection of limited edition wristwatches, pocket watches and dome table clocks honours the skills involved in the decoration of timepieces. This is one of four Japanese Print watches, each of which has an exquisite dial of cloisonné enamel.
Each of De Grisogono’s Mascote rings – part of the brand’s Crazymals collection – is carved with consummate skill from a single block of hard stone, set with gems and fashioned into a quirky animal motif. This green alabastrite snake is finished with pink gold and peppered with gleaming rubies and emeralds.
POA, patek.com
POA, degrisogono.com
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REINE DES ABEILLES NO.10
HUMMINGBIRD NECKLACE
DIOR
CHOPARD
The wings of this Queen Bee flutter to show off its resplendent gems from all angles. A body of white, yellow and rose gold, topped with tsavorite garnets and pink, yellow and orange sapphires, rules over a hive of white gold and pavĂŠ diamonds. The timepiece is fitted with a quartz movement and an adjustment corrector.
Envisioned by artistic director Caroline Scheufele, Chopard’s Animal World collection captures a colourful menagerie in an extraordinary display of craftsmanship. This diamond and sapphire hummingbird necklace, which features a dainty gem-set lotus flower and emerald leaves, is just one of 150 exquisite pieces.
POA, dior.com
POA, chopard.com
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ESPIÈGLERIES BROOCH
TEARS OF AFRICAN ELEPHANT 4047
CHAUMET
BACKES & STRAUSS
Kenyan artist Evans Mbugua designed six brooches for Chaumet’s Trésors d’Afrique collection in a high jewellery ode to his continent. Playful and precious in equal measure, the most striking of all the bejewelled beasts is this white and yellow gold lion, set with pear-shaped diamonds and round yellow, blue and pink sapphires.
Created in partnership with Tears of the African Elephant, a charity committed to reducing the demand for ivory, this Backes & Strauss 18kt white gold watch is decorated with iconographic leaves and a central elephant motif. Ideal cut diamonds make this great creature sparkle, and complement its enamelled tusk and teardrop made of gold.
POA, chaumet.com
POA, backesandstrauss.com
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SERPENTI NECKLACE BULGARI
LES MÉCANIQUE SAUVAGES VACHERON CONSTANTIN
Bulgari’s Serpenti strikes again. First introduced in the 1940s as a bejewelled timepiece, the slithering emblem, which represents wisdom, vitality and seduction, has been coiled around bracelets, necklaces and rings ever since. Prepare to be charmed by this reptilian necklace, which has scales of pavé diamond and dark snakewood.
Vacheron Constantin’s Les Mecanique Sauvages collection of one-of-a-kind timekeepers champions bas relief engraving and wood marquetry. Not just a pretty face, the Imperial Tiger ticker has four innovative apertures arranged around the dial circumference, which display the hours, minutes, days and dates.
POA, bulgari.com
POA, vacheron-constantin.com
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LUXURY LONDON
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PEARLS O F
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TA S A K I , R E N O W N E D I N T H E W O R L D O F PEARLS, OPENS ITS FIRST EUROPEAN FLAGSHIP ON NEW BOND STREET
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he status of the diamond as a girl’s best friend is coming under threat – from the increasingly popular pearl. Having shaken off its old-fashioned image, the oceanic gem has been reimagined and re-worked into contemporary jewellery collections. Founded in 1954, Japanese jeweller Tasaki has long been the insider’s go-to for impeccable pearl jewellery. “The attention to detail that Tasaki puts into designing each piece is such a celebration of craftsmanship – it is a couture process,” explains creative director Prabal Gurung. In an industry where sustainability is now an overarching buzzword, Tasaki is known for its ethical production methods and materials. It is the only jeweller to lay claim to its own pearl farms in Japan and Myanmar, where it produces rare Akoya and golden South Sea pearls. Designs run from elegant, minimalist creations to sculptural, high-drama showpieces. Gurung’s conceptual, contemporary collections incorporate mixed metals, undulating curves and graphic lines, playing with weight and proportion. “Pearls have such a strong heritage and because of that, they are often embedded in tradition and convention. While I respect the integrity of pearls, it is important to me not only to modernise the way in which they can be styled, but also to redefine who can wear them.” The Japanese jeweller has opened a seven-storey pearl palace on New Bond Street, imbued with a distinctly calm Japanese aesthetic. The new Brilliance Grace High Jewellery collection is on display, featuring eight one-of-a-kind pieces inspired by the dynamic allure and mercurial nature of the ocean. “London is one of my absolute favourite cities,” says Gurung. “I find the juxtaposition of traditional heritage with the city’s modern artists and provocative, experimental culture to be so inspiring.”
“We aim to provoke dialogue, challenge norms and, above all, create special pieces of jewellery that enable the wearer to feel empowered”
170 New Bond St, tasaki-global.com
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QUEEN OF DIAMONDS
T H E I N F L U E N T I A L TA S T E M A K E R J E S S I C A M C C O R M AC K O N C R A F T I N G C O N T E M P O R A R Y D I A M O N D J E W E L L E R Y, U S I N G T I M E - H O N O U R E D T E C H N I Q U E S A N D T H E I M P O R TA N C E O F S TO R Y T E L L I N G
Words: Mhairi Graham
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OPPOSITE PAGE JESSICA MCCORMACK; THIS PAGE JESSICA MCCORMACK’S MAYFAIR TOWNHOUSE
essica McCormack has always preferred a home to a homepage. Her five-storey Georgian townhouse on Carlos Place in Mayfair is the embodiment of her eponymous jewellery brand, reflecting her vast array of inspiration and impeccable taste with a rotating contemporary art collection, exuberant textiles, curious ephemera and a library of books. Paintings by Frank Bowling and Basil Beattie currently adorn the walls, while a cloud of pampas grass hangs from the ceiling and anemones are arranged in antique marmalade jars. Upstairs, a self-playing piano tinkles by a large bay window. “Everyone says that retail is dead but it definitely is not,” she asserts. “You just need to work a little harder to entice customers.” Designed entirely by McCormack, the boutique demonstrates her unique knack for effortlessly fusing antique and contemporary aesthetics. She is London’s reigning queen of modern, wearable diamonds, presented in pieces created using time-honoured techniques and packed full of personality and symbolism. McCormack grew up in Christchurch, New Zealand. Her father was an antiques dealer and she spent her childhood surrounded by unusual furniture and objets d’art. “He would take me to auctions and I would always buy the box of grandmother’s jewellery in a lot. I would take each piece apart and build it back together, but it was never anything precious.” McCormack moved to London aged 25 to take up an internship at Sotheby’s, after, in her own words, a year of pestering letters to the auction house’s head of jewellery. Sotheby’s ignited her appreciation and understanding of precious jewellery design. “Until then, I had never seen Russian crown jewels and vintage Cartier and Suzanne Belperron pieces. What I really noticed is that when you picked something up, it really felt like a piece of jewellery.” It was also at Sotheby’s that she met Michael Rosenfeld, a third-generation diamantaire who would become her business partner.
With Rosenfeld’s backing, she opened her appointment-only workshop in Clerkenwell in 2008. Rihanna was one of her first customers. “A girlfriend of mine in New York was wearing the Wings of Desire earring and Rihanna’s stylist loved it. Rihanna came to London and bought it – it’s hallmarked as the first commercial piece that I ever made.” Rachel Slack, a member of the South African Oppenheimer dynasty, joined as a partner in 2010, after McCormack remodelled a millennium diamond gifted by her father, Harry Oppenheimer. By then, McCormack’s client list included Madonna, Carine Roitfeld and a growing pocket of London’s high society.
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“We’ve had six-figure sales that have come through Instagram. People can relate to it because it’s real life”
ABOVE, FROM TOP ‘BALL N CHAIN’ NECKLACE, POA; ‘WINGS OF DESIRE’ SINGLE EARRING, £21,400; HERILOOM JEWELLERY BOX, FROM £20,000
The sweeping wing remains a bestselling motif of the house, alongside stars and swallows, the latter inspired by sailors’ tattoos. McCormack’s design signature is a Georgianstyle cut-down setting and blackened gold, which adds a subtle punk edge to feminine pieces. Jewellery is hand-drawn by McCormack and brought to life in the on-site workshop, using stones sourced by Rosenfeld. “There is a holistic approach to the whole thing. People often go to Hatton Garden and then come careering back.” Her ingenious Party Jacket ring is designed to wrap around another ring, be it an existing diamond solitaire or an outdated heirloom in need of a contemporary twist, thus allowing you to transform your jewellery into something entirely new. The idea was inspired by 18thcentury keeper rings, worn as a protective cover for a more valuable diamond. “My father taught me to look at things from a different perspective and place them in a new context, and that is what I do with diamonds. Even though some pieces are cooler, they are still pretty and feminine and romantic.” The newest addition is the Gypset Bloom collection of dainty diamond dandelions, seedpods and lily of the valley flowers, suspended from 18-karat yellow gold hoops, which can be worn as singles or pairs. It is a fresh play on the hugely popular Gypset earrings, worn by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, Victoria Beckham and Emma Watson. Much of McCormack’s business also comes through her self-run Instagram account, where she styles finger stacks of diamonds with jeans, white T-shirts and oversized tailoring. “We’ve had six-figure sales that have come through Instagram. People can relate to it because it’s real life, not red carpet.” The convention-flouting McCormack has helped redefine how women wear fine jewellery, creating pieces that fit the contemporary customer’s modern wardrobe and lifestyle.
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“I take the craftsmanship and the design of my jewellery very ABOVE, FROM TOP ‘DAISY’ seriously, but I also have fun with GYPSET BLOOM EARRINGS, £16,000; it. You should be able to go for ‘DANDELION’ GYPSET BLOOM breakfast; to a board meeting; EARRINGS, £9,000 out for dinner and dancing on tables, and still be wearing the same jewellery.” For those wondering where to keep their precious pieces, McCormack offers beautifully crafted jewellery boxes, made from repurposed apothecary cabinets and 19th-century coffers, lined with faux suede. Each one is stitched with motifs and messages by Hand & Lock, the Queen’s embroidery house of choice, which was recently issued with a Royal Warrant. The boxes start from £20,000 and there is currently a sixmonth waiting list. She made the first box for her daughter, Estelle, creating compartments with personal messages intended for different times in her life. “I always encourage my clients to write notes about each piece that they buy, because you don’t want to lose your stories. It’s not a monetary thing, it’s about capturing the romance and emotion of the moment.”
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R O S E S T H E M U LT I - P E TA L L E D R O S E H A S A S S U M E D S Y M B O L I C M E A N I N G T O C U LT U R E S ACROSS CENTURIES AND CONTINENTS, FROM THE SARCOPHAGI OF BABYLONIAN K I N G S T O T H E G R E AT C AT H E D R A L S O F M E D I E VA L E U R O P E – A N D I N TO T H E L AT E S T J E W E L L E R Y C O L L E C T I O N F R O M H A R R Y W I N S TO N
Words: Richard Brown
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hy are you so enamoured of my face that you do not turn your gaze to the beautiful garden which blossoms under the radiance of Christ? There is the Rose in which the Divine Word became flesh; here are the lilies whose perfume guides you in the right ways.’ Even before 1320, when Dante reached for the rose and the lily as symbols of beauty and renewal in the third volume of The Divine Comedy, multipetalled floral motifs were well-established in historic iconography. Citizens of Mesopotamia, that ancient region east of the Mediterranean – heyday circa 3400BC – had settled on the eight-leaf rosette as the emblem of the fertility goddess Ishtar five millennia earlier. Images from ancient Egypt depict Ra, the sun god, being born from a lotus – a water lily that grows on the banks of the River Nile. In India, too, various religious figures, most notably Gautama Buddha, are connected to the eight-petalled lotus. Fast forward several centuries to Greco-Roman culture and the rose had come to represent worldly beauty as well as life after death – rosettes appearing in both elaborate jewellery and etched on stone funeral slabs. By the time Dante was navigating his passage from purgatory to paradise, the rose had become a more general metaphor, symbolising virtue and light – an icon adopted by architecture in the form of the rose window. While the term ‘rose window’ may not have been documented until the 17th century, stonemasons had been carving circular windows featuring flower motifs for a thousand years. The external wall of the Khirbat al-Mafjar palace, built in Jordan between 740 and 750AD, featured a window consisting of six circular arcs in the form of a flower. The theory follows that from the 11th century onwards, Catholic crusaders introduced the design to Christian churches across the whole of Europe. Notable rosettes can be found in the grand façades of Worms Cathedral in Germany (1130 – 1181), the Basilica of St Procopius in the Czech Republic (1240–1280) and on Italy’s Basilica of San Michele Maggiore (completed in 1115). Last month, the focus of the world turned to perhaps the most famous rose windows of all, when fire ripped through Notre-Dame in Paris. The cathedral’s trio of enormous stained-glass windows, each one standing over a major entry point, date back to the 13th century. Miraculously, all were spared.
Manhattan, 1932. At the corner of Fifth Avenue and West 56th Street, a 36-year-old secondgeneration Ukrainian-American jeweller is contemplating designs for the façade of his first flagship store. Searching for a symbol of optimism and opportunity, he decides to adorn the gilded front gates of his Neoclassical travertine townhouse with gold rosettes and invites the public to behold the sort of rare and valuable jewels that up until then would have been locked away within a vault. Today, gold rosettes adorn the front gates of all Harry Winston boutiques – inspiring the jeweller’s brand new Winston Gates collection. A selection of earrings, pendants, rings and bracelets modelled on the rosette, the collection features a sculpted 10-petalled flower rendered in platinum, 18-carat yellow or rose gold and set with a round brilliant diamond centre stone. Framed by a circular array of pavé diamonds, each stone is hand-selected for its flawless quality. The Winston Gates collection will be available from June. ‘Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else even cared.’ Nope, not Dante, but another deepphilosophising, latterday lyricist – Mr Tupac Shakur. harrywinston.com
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BEST OF B A S E LWO R L D 2019
T H E W O R L D ’ S L A R G E S T W A T C H S H O W WA S A S O M E W H AT S M A L L E R A F F A I R T H I S Y E A R , F O L L O W I N G T H E D E C I S I O N B Y S WAT C H G R O U P – P A R E N T C O M P A N Y T O O M E G A , B L A N C P A I N , B R E G U E T A N D L O N G I N E S – N OT TO AT T E N D T H E B AS E L- B AS E D FA I R . W H I L E P R E - S H OW TA L K C E N T R E D A R O U N D A B S E N T E E S , T H E B R A N D S T H AT W E R E P R E S E N T P R OV E D T H AT T H E M E C H A N I C A L WATC H I N D U ST RY R E M A I N S I N R U D E H E A LT H . T H E S E W E R E T H E STA N D O U T T I M E P I E C E S F R O M A N U P B E AT S H OW…
Words: James Buttery
B R E I T L I N G P R E M I E R 0 1 N O R TO N , £6,700 Breitling’s partnership with the legendary British motorcycle marque feels so natural that it wouldn’t be surprising to discover it were celebrating its 10th anniversary rather than its first – both brands bringing with them a sense of the adventurous, an authentic heritage and their own diehard fanbases. Breitling, under the leadership of CEO Georges Kern, is looking to diversify its offering and its customer base, with associations other than fast jets and slide-rule bezels. Norton represents at least part of its effort to establish a new front on land and, if the limited-edition Premier 01 Norton is anything to go by, Kern has every chance of pulling off a strategic masterstroke. Housing an in-house, COSCcertified B01 automatic chronograph movement with a 70-hour power reserve inside its 42mm stainless steel case, the Premier 01 Norton opts for a reverse panda dial configuration with a white chapter ring and gold Arabic numerals. breitling.com
B U LG A R I O C TO F I N I S S I M O C H R O N O G R A P H G M T, P OA It’s difficult to know how much longer Bulgari can pursue its strategy of breaking records for thin movements and models before its watches become a physical impossibility. The Roman brand stole the slim mantle from under the nose of Piaget (which was traditionally the brand you went to if you wanted an ‘Extra Plat’ timepiece) and instigated an ongoing competition for the slenderest silhouettes between the two labels. Bulgari is back this year with the world’s thinnest automatic chronograph movement (3.3mm) which, thanks to the extraordinarily svelte sandblasted titanium Octo case, also becomes the world’s thinnest mechanical chronograph. If that weren’t enough, Bulgari has also added a GMT complication for good measure. The BVL 318 peripheral rotor movement is not some underpowered compromise – it boasts a healthy power reserve of 55 hours and features a pusher at the nine o’clock position to adjust the local time in one-hour jumps. bulgari.com
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CARL F. BUCHERER HERITAGE BICOMPAX ANNUAL CALENDAR BIG DATE, FROM £5,500 The current popularity of vintage watches and heritageinspired designs has clearly not escaped Carl F. Bucherer – the watch brand owned by the same family behind Swiss watch and jewellery retailer Bucherer. Prompted by a visit to its own archive, the brand’s latest watch offers a fairly unique proposition on the current market, pairing not only a chronograph and annual calendar (which would be rare enough) but also a Grand Date display. Rather than using its own in-house movements, it has opted instead to call on the expertise of Sellita for its movement and Dubois Dépraz for a module containing an annual calendar and chronograph. The result is a comparative industry bargain – £5,500 for stainless steel and £8,000 for bimetal. carl-f-bucherer.com
C H O PA R D L U C C H R O N O O N E F LY B AC K , £23,500 Chopard is a maison better known for producing highly inventive, finely decorated watches so this confident entry to the current trend for rugged, adventurous watches comes as something of a surprise. Unlike previous versions of the Chrono One series, this 42mm 100-piece limited-edition Flyback eschews precious metal in favour of Titalyt – a titanium hardened through ‘electro-plasma oxidation’ – for a dark-grey matte finish that shouldn’t scratch. The finish works well when paired with its olive green dial and distressed brown leather strap. If you’re unable to get your hands on the Titalyt model, there’s also a 250-piece stainless steel version with a slate-grey dial. Powering the watch is a movement that started life as the LUC 10CF when the Chrono One first appeared in 2006, before eventually evolving into the 03.03-L, a COSC-certified movement with 60 hours of power reserve. chopard.com
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PAT E K P H I L I P P E 5 2 1 2 A , £25,610 While the watch world seems to be losing its collective mind over the Nautilus and Aquanaut, here’s a welcome distraction: a quirky stainless steel Calatrava with weekly calendar pointer complication, blackened white-gold indices and hands, and a handwritten-style font on a dial positively loaded with data. It’s a dial design that doesn’t shy away from presenting a plethora of information, but rather embraces it and that’s precisely why it works so well. Patek’s new weekly calendar isn’t just a triumph of design, it illustrates the history of the brand’s exploratory watchmaking, something often overshadowed by talk of decoration and handcrafts. patek.com
U R B A N J Ü R G E N S E N O N E 5 5 4 1 G M T, A P P R OX . £ 3 0 , 2 0 0 The sports luxe subgenre of watches, created when Gerald Genta designed the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak in 1972 and insisted that his steel creation was every bit as luxurious as anything made of gold, is in high demand at the moment. The Patek Philippe 5711A Nautilus is pure unobtainium, with waiting lists long closed, and demand for the Royal Oak is not far behind. While you could always pick up a Girard-Perregaux Laureato instead, a number of brands are about to enter the fray with their own interpretations of the steel sports watch. The first is Urban Jürgensen, a small maison with a traditional, slightly stuffy, image that it is trying to shed. The Jürgensen One is a bold entry, with its refined, highly polished case avoiding the mock utilitarian clichés of the category, saving its carefully plotted out use of geometry instead for its integrated bracelet, which was designed using intersecting circles – making it a genuine and credible alternative to the established heavyweights. urbanjurgensen.com
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DE BETHUNE DB28GS GRAND BLEU, A P P R OX . £ 7 1 , 7 5 0 De Bethune is a master of avant-garde horology, elevating wristwatches into an art form – so it might not be on your shortlist the next time you’re in the market for a practical dive watch, but it should be. The new Grand Bleu is nothing short of sensational, with all of the brand’s established touchpoints present – the floating lug case design, the heat-blued, meticulously-finished components and sci-fi inspiration – and here De Bethune also adds a dash of technology. A separate gear train and dynamo powered by the twin mainspring barrels feeds four lights at the compass points via a pusher at the six o’clock position, bathing the dial and movement in a crisp blue-white light. The watch also includes the kind of features you’d expect from a more pedestrian diver; namely a rotating bezel and 105m water resistance – though props to anyone taking this into the water. debethune.ch
H U B LOT C L A S S I C F U S I O N F E R R A R I G T, FROM £18,200 After decades of flitting between mismatched watch partners, Ferrari finally seems to have settled down, having found ‘the one’ in Hublot at a point where both of the brand’s design sensibilities had begun to move in close parallel. Now that relationship extends to Hublot allowing Ferrari’s style centre (or Centro Stilo) to design a watch for the luxury Swiss brand – the new Classic Fusion Ferrari GT. It’s immediately apparent that the watch, a chronograph housing the brand’s own UNICO automatic movement, owes its silhouette to the 2017 Hublot Ferrari Techframe, with its round central case suspended within an irregular exo-skeleton that houses the chronograph pushers and secures the watch body to its strap. But Hublot’s usual inorganic geometry is nowhere to be found, with the Ferrari GT presenting an undulating, curvaceous silhouette that sits well on the wrist. Our pick would be the titanium watch, but versions also exist in King Gold and carbon fibre. hublot.com
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TIMES F O L L O W I N G T H E L A U N C H O F A S WAT H E O F G R A N D C O M P L I C AT I O N S AT T H I S Y E A R ’ S B A S E LW O R L D WAT C H FA I R , PAT E K P H I L I P P E BRINGS ITS 2019 EXHIBITION COLLECTION TO WEMPE ON NEW BOND STREET
Words: Richard Brown
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t’s fair to say that among the world’s finest watchmakers Patek Philippe enjoys first among equals status. Anyone wondering as to why, exactly, might find it enlightening to visit Wempe’s New Bond Street store between 21 and 27 May, when the family-owned jeweller will be hosting the brand’s 2019 Exhibition Collection. Encompassing 84 of some of Patek Philippe’s most complicated timepieces, including 11 new watches released this spring, the exhibition allows visitors to view and try on watches, speak to in-house specialists and discover the history behind each design. Wempe was subject to a £1.5 million revamp last year and is one of only a few jewellers in the UK to offer an in-house master watchmaker to advise on watch repairs. The store’s Patek Philippe exhibition will be open to the public, free of charge, from 10am to 6pm Monday to Saturday and from 12pm to 5pm on Sunday. Luxury London was invited to explore the collection ahead of the event. Here are four particularly noteworthy highlights, each released this year... 21-27 May, 43–44 New Bond Street, W1S, wempe.com
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1 A N N UA L C A L E N DA R ( R E F. 5 9 0 5 R - 0 0 1 ) , £ 5 0 , 3 5 0
Baselworld 2019 saw Patek Philippe unveil 15 debut timepieces – 10 new watches for men, five for ladies. The brand’s Annual Calendar is now available in rose gold with a brown sunburst dial, which gradually grades into black at the periphery. The 42mm piece unites two complications; a flyback chronograph and a patented annual calendar – meaning that it can be used as a stopwatch while showing the day, date and month. There is also a day/night indicator.
2 L A D I E S A U T O M AT I C N A U T I L U S ( R E F. 7 1 1 8 / 1 2 0 0 A ) , £ 2 6 , 0 5 0
Patek Philippe’s athletic Ladies Automatic Nautilus has also been updated. The steel timepiece, which has a bezel set with 56 diamonds, has been enlarged to 35.2mm, upped from 33.6mm. Three new dial colours are available: blue opaline, silvery opaline and grey opaline grading to black. The steel bracelet comes with a fold-over clasp, endowed with a new adjustment system, providing the wearer with between 2mm and 4mm of extra bracelet length for increased comfort.
3 A N N UA L C A L E N DA R R E G U L AT O R ( R E F. 5 2 3 5 / 5 0 R ) , £ 3 9 , 6 8 0
When Patek Philippe’s first Annual Calendar Regulator arrived in 2012, it was the first time the brand had made a regulator-style wristwatch, with the hours, minutes and seconds displayed in three separate dials. Furthermore, the selfwinding movement inside comprised three new materials developed by the company’s Advanced Research department. The watch returns for 2019 in rose gold, with a twotone dial in graphite and ebony black with a vertical satin finish and white transferprinted indications.
4 D I A M O N D R I B B O N J OA I L L E R I E ( R E F. 4 9 7 8 /4 0 0 G - 0 0 1 ) , £ 5 6 , 4 3 0
Patek Philippe’s Diamond Ribbon Joaillerie has been reinterpreted in a new white gold design with a slightly larger diameter, increased from 33.3mm to 36.5mm. The timepiece is just 8.23mm thick, thanks to an ultra-thin self-winding movement that’s visible through a sapphirecrystal case-back. The watch sports 770 diamonds in total, 679 of which are found on the dial. Graduating in size, they are intended to mirror the twirling of a gymnast’s ribbons.
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ENGLISH ENGINEERING O N E O F T H E F E W P E O P L E T O H AV E MASTERED THE 32 SKILLS NECESSARY TO D E S I G N A N D C R E AT E A M E C H A N I C A L WATC H F R O M S TA R T TO F I N I S H , R O G E R W. S M I T H H A S E A R N E D H I S PLACE AMONG THE WORLD’S BEST WATC H M A K E R S – A N D A L L F R O M A C O N V E R T E D A G R I C U LT U R A L U N I T ON THE ISLE OF MAN
Words: Josh Sims
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t’s an awkward question, being asked what it feels like to be cited as the world’s best watchmaker. “I can feel myself turning red at the idea,” says Roger W. Smith. “It’s not a label I really think about – I just get up each day and try to make watches you can’t find anywhere else. I’m actually at the work bench 95 per cent of the time. Being a watchmaker is all I’ve ever done since I was 18 and that’s where I’m happiest. It’s where I can command my own little world.” Smith’s customers aren’t what he calls “fast money clients”. With his timepieces commanding six-figure sums and a probable wait of several years, his clientele are fascinated with watchmaking, and revel in the processes and in mechanisation. Smith was appointed an OBE in 2018 for services to watchmaking and jokingly claims that he “still can’t get a table at a restaurant”. He currently makes around 10 watches a year, though he plans to increase production numbers to the heady heights of 13. “I’m certainly proud to be one of the smallest makers in the world,” he laughs. “Companies tend to announce their annual increase in production
SERIES 5 OPEN DIAL Hours, minutes, seconds and up-down indicator
SERIES 3 Hours, minutes, seconds and retrograde date
as though it was a recognition of doing well, but if I made 20 watches a year I’d know something must have gone down in quality.” What is even more incredible is that Smith makes every single part of every single watch, having also mastered each of elite horology’s specialist decorative skills. Not a screw is imported, not a part farmed out, and this approach is unusual enough even among watch brand giants. This perhaps explains the prices – typically on application but, to give some context, when two early R.W. Smith watches came up for sale online in 2016, an almost unheard of event, they were priced at £150,000 and £235,000 respectively. It’s certainly impressive for someone who once worked part-time doing repairs for mass-market British jewellery brand H. Samuel. Smith did, he admits, have something of a useful education. He says he “could never see the point” of school and it was his father, an antiques collector, who suggested he look into watchmaking. Aiming high – very high – Smith decided he would make a pocket watch for the late George Daniels, often proclaimed as the greatest watchmaker of the 20th century and the inventor of the hallowed co-axial escapement.
T H E G R E AT B R I TA I N One-off piece with hours, minutes and seconds
SERIES 4 Hours, minutes, seconds, day, date, month and moon phase
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Smith decided he would make a pocket watch for the late George Daniels, often proclaimed as the greatest watchmaker of the 20th century making. Every solution he created was an original one and, in time, Smith would produce historic masterworks, including an improvement to Daniels’ own escapement. This involved radically lightening it and in turn increasing the service interval for a mechanical watch to more than 10 years, way ahead of the industry standard. He also developed a style of his own, characterised by a raised barrel bridge, jewels in gold chatons, silver dials and gold hands. Smith has just put the finishing touches to the design of his new Series 4 watch, which features what he believes is a watchmaking first. The instantaneous triple-calendar piece has a date indicator that travels around the outer edge of the dial, negating the need for a date-hand that oftenobstructs details on the face.
Some 18 months of midnight toil followed. Smith approached the god-like Daniels with his offering. The watchmaking supremo told him it was not a bad effort – or words to that effect – and to try again. Undaunted, Smith did just that and at the age of 19 found himself at Daniels’ workshop on the Isle of Man. He was the master’s one and only apprentice, the Luke Skywalker to Daniels’ Obi-Wan Kenobi. Smith still lives there today and has recently built a new workshop space in a converted agricultural unit. “I’ve got a bit of a commute now, about 200 yards,” he laughs. He’s taken on four of his own apprentices, each of whom have likewise moved. This remote spot meant Smith’s training was unpolluted by the received wisdom of Swiss watchmaking’s approach to case or movement
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“As I get older I realise that my level of interest in watchmaking when I was younger was unusual, but it’s always been normal to me,” says Smith, whose spare time, unsurprisingly, likewise leans towards all things mechanical, be that gauge one model railways or doing up his 1967 Mini Cooper. “My first memory was sitting in a high chair eating a rusk or something – when I was two maybe. I can still picture the 70s kitchen very vividly. I suppose I should say that I then looked up at the kitchen clock and the rest was history, but that didn’t happen. “As a small boy I did have this obsessive quest to make things perfect. My first model aircraft had glue everywhere, so I kept going until there was no glue visible,” he adds. “I think I found the right outlet in watchmaking. I’d probably be too nervous to approach George for the first time now if he was still around, but then I wanted to prove – to myself and to him – that I could do it. At that age I didn’t know what else to do. I’d always been impressed by George. He was very charismatic and doing something nobody else in the world was doing.” When Daniels died, he bequeathed all of his watchmaking tools to Smith. “And I can pick up those tools and still think what great watches were made with them,” he says. “They’re a reminder not to stray. Like George, I want to make watches that fit into the great watchmaking tradition. No, my watches won’t keep better time, and it’s true that a cog handmade is probably no better than one stamped out by a machine. But not using anything other than very traditional techniques means those watches will be around for centuries. And I wouldn’t be happy with anything less.”
It would be easy to ascribe to Smith the stereotype often employed with Swiss watchmaking. Despite most of the production being high-tech and industrial, we still think of the slightly hunched, vitamin D-deficient figure in a leather apron beavering away silently in an Alpine chalet. Smith, of course, works at another, more rarefied level, but he’s also not averse to exploring new ideas. Earlier this year he launched a research project into the use of nano-materials with Dr Samuel Rowley-Neale and Dr Michael Down of the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Manchester Metropolitan University. Mechanical watchmaking’s biggest problem is lubrication, as the many moving parts periodically have to be oiled. Giving these parts a permanent nano-coating could do away with that inconvenience and cost. “We’re still at the testing stage but the fascinating thing is how counter such a development is to the received wisdom of watchmaking. And solving the lubrication problem would be a really serious advance in mechanical watchmaking,” he says. “I’m sceptical of a lot of materials now used in watchmaking – the likes of carbon fibre – because they strike me as trendy and because they won’t necessarily be around in, say, 100 years. I like the idea of the watches I make having that lifespan and much more, in the same way that you can take a pocket watch that’s 300 years old and, with minimal work, it will keep as good time now as it did when it was made. Carbon fibre looks good, but it doesn’t improve time-keeping. And that’s what I get off on, so to speak.” Smith jokes that he’s one of those lucky people who can’t wait to get to the office each morning, and his raison d’être is to take a craft that’s been evolving for the best part of half a millennia and play his part in moving it a few notches forward. He concedes that, on one level, it’s a strange thing to do with a product that’s outmoded in the digital age. But, on another – regardless of one’s interest in watches – it’s about as perfect an expression of the poetic possibilities in the space between man and machine as one is likely to find in the 21st century. “George would say you have to be your own best critic. You have to be ready to throw away something you’ve been putting effort into for days or weeks,” says Smith. “When I was starting out that would mean a constant inner battle to accept something wasn’t right. And I still throw away several components every month and start over again. But now at least I can see the issue coming and react faster, and so limit the damage. It doesn’t feel as galling as you might expect.”
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DA D DY CO O L T H E R O YA L E X C H A N G E H A S T H E G I F T Y O U R D A D W I L L A C T U A L LY W A N T T H I S FAT H E R ’ S D AY – A N D N O , I T I S N ’ T A N O T H E R PA I R O F S O C K S
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FINE BONE CHINA ASHTRAY More than 65 years ago, Halcyon Days, once an antiques emporium in Mayfair, began reviving the art of enamalling, starting with its signature enamel box. Today, its initial craft is one of many that it is known for, along with exquisite handmade fine bone china pieces. Enter this gilded ashtray, which has been handmade in Stokeon-Trent and painted with a unique cigar design. For those who don’t smoke, it
makes for a charming tray on which to store your most treasured trinkets. £225, 27, Halcyon Days, The Royal Exchange
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ARCHER SUNGLASSES Tom Davies’ sunglasses range is inspired by his favourite customers – those who appreciate individuality, fine craftsmanship and quality materials. Enter the acetate Archer frames, available in a tortoiseshell mix, smokey black or crystal yellow style. £295, Tom Davies, 25 The Royal Exchange
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LEICA C-LUX MIDNIGHT BLUE Compact and convenient, the Leica C-Lux ticks all the boxes, with a 15x optical zoom, a touchscreen and a high-performance 20-megapixel sensor that shoots up to 10 frames per second. For budding directors, there’s the option of 4K video recording. Pick it up in midnight blue or champagne gold. £875, Leica, 18 The Royal Exchange
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COMPACT COIN PURSE No room in your wallet? Store your loose change in one of Sage Brown’s handcrafted compact coin purses. Made from fine grain calf leather and moulded into a dome shape to fit in the palm of your hand, the case is available in a rainbow of colours – take your pick. £55, Sage Brown, 31 The Royal Exchange
PATEK PHILIPPE REFERENCE 5205 ANNUAL CALENDAR Boodles has been the stockist of choice for Patek Philippe for 25 years. For the traditional Dad, the jewellery house’s gift of choice is the 5205 Annual Calendar. The watch’s dazzling ink blue sunburst dial is crowned by three apertures, which mark the day, month and year. Self-winding, this calendar timepiece requires adjustment just once a year. £36,720, Boodles, 3 Central Courtyard
6 BREMONT S300 WHITE A watch equipped for exploring both subterranean depths and vertiginous heights, the Bremont S300 White is the horologist’s latest 40mm Submarine timekeeper – and the watch of choice for mountaineer Nirmal ‘Nims’ Purja, who will attempt to scale 14 of the world’s highest peaks in a record-breaking seven months later this year. £2,995, Bremont, 12 The Royal Exchange
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GENTLEMAN’S HAMPER For foodie fathers, Fortnum & Mason presents the ultimate hamper. Snacks and sweet treats abound – from sticky garlic nuts to traditional shortbread fingers – best served with a cup of King’s blend coffee or, if you’re celebrating, a glass of Beaujolais. Chin chin! £100, Fortnum & Mason, 4-7 Central Courtyard
THE ROYAL EXCHANGE, EC3V THEROYALEXCHANGE.CO.UK
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IF THE SHOE FITS FOR MORE THAN 80 YEARS, ROGER VIVIER HAS BEEN CRAFTING EXQUISITE S H O E S F O R T H E WO R L D ’ S M O S T FA S H I O N A B L E WO M E N . B R I D G I N G T H E G A P B E T W E E N O L D A N D N E W, T H E L AT E S T C O L L E C T I O N C O M B I N E S T H E M A I S O N ’ S A R C H I V E S T Y L E S W I T H C O N T E M P O R A R Y, O N - T R E N D S H A P E S
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oger Vivier, the designer known as the ‘Fabergé of footwear’, founded his eponymous label in 1937. For more than eight decades, his design house has been creating shoes for the world’s most powerful, and fashionable, women – from Elizabeth Taylor to Her Majesty The Queen. Today, creative director Gherardo Felloni continues to evolve the Maison, championing the signature aesthetic of its founder while steering it in a contemporary direction – starting with a new boutique on New Bond Street, which opened at the tail end of last year. For the current season, Felloni has crafted a collection that perfectly marries the old with the new, combining archival characteristics with new season styles. Here are the top trends to watch for the coming season. 36 New Bond Street, W1S, rogervivier.com
BUCKLE UP
Buckles aren’t just for belts: statement hardware claims the accessory spotlight, providing the perfect homage to Monsieur Roger Vivier, who adorned his signature Belle Vivier pumps with buckles in the 1960s. For the new season, Gherardo Felloni has reimagined the original shoe in the form of Très Vivier, a sophisticated pump topped with a chunky buckle ornament – proving that the Maison’s signature accessory is as relevant as ever.
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FORM AND FUNCTION
A utilitarian aesthetic continues to thrive in sartorial circles, a style that is best replicated through the chunky, stylish and, best of all, comfortable trainer trend. Enter the Viv’ Run, a feminine trainer that contrasts form with function through its high-performance, sporty shape and precious crystal embellishment.
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT VIV’ RUN IN TECHNICAL MESH FABRIC, £750; GHERARDO FELLONI; FLOWER STRASS PUMPS IN SILK SATIN WITH A CRYSTAL BUCKLE, £1,350; TRÈS VIVIER PUMP IN SILVER WITH A SILVER METAL BUCKLE, £545; TRÈS VIVIER PUMP IN VELVET WITH A CRYSTAL BUCKLE, £1,150; ROGER VIVIER’S NEW BOND STREET BOUTIQUE
GLAMOUR GIRLS
Diamonds are forever – and for footwear. Jewellery brings a touch of glitz and glamour to the new season’s shoes, which are adorned with crystals and exquisite gems. These Flower Strass pumps are wrapped in silk satin and topped with a crystal jewel buckle, which is festooned with dainty floral motifs.
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Wild Coast Tented Lodge, Yala, Sri Lanka. Photo by Anna Lisa & Porter @recesscity_coll
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P.110 LOOK EAST Why Beirut is the Middle East’s most beguiling city
P.124 SEA CHANGE The Seychellois people pledging to protect the oceans
ESCAPE TO ST R I V E , TO S E E K , TO F I N D. . .
The newest Six Senses hotel on the 30-acre Krabey Island is the ultimate spot for serenity. Even the reception is a 15-minute boat ride away, so you can leave the admin at the door (p.116)
AGAINST ALL ODDS WHY BEIRUT IS, HANDS DOWN, THE MOST BEGUILING CITY IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Words: Rob Crossan
THE STREETS OF BEIRUT, IMAGE COURTESY OF RICHARD YOSHIDA / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
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ouad and Zouhair Sahyoun haven’t spoken to each other for well over a decade. Even though there’s just one thin, white tiled wall separating the two brothers from each other, the only thing that passes between them is the smell of chick peas and tahini. Damascus Street, located right on the old Green Line that once separated East and West Beirut, hasn’t seen serious conflict since the Lebanese civil war ended in 1990. Yet one battle does continue: a falafel war between the two brothers who, having once worked together under their father, have now split and set up identical stores with identical names, right next door to each other. Bethany Kehdy, the 37-year-old founder of the city’s first street-food walking tour company, Taste Lebanon, rolls her eyes as our group of native foodies and curious visitors to Beirut passes the two shop fronts, on a sun-dappled Saturday morning. The traffic is thick with battered old Mercedes taxis and gleaming new
4x4s. The city hums and sings with construction cranes, car horns and a sense of puppyish impatience to get on with the day ahead. “Do they really hate each other?” Kehdy asks, only semi-rhetorically. “Part of me thinks these brothers might both be PR geniuses. They love this ‘war’ because they both get to go home each night and count their money.” Phoney or not, the falafel war, with its murky origins, continues apace, to the point where Fouad’s newer store has signs on the front window claiming that his brother’s store is unhygienic and customers should only buy their falafels from him. Bethany, author of The Jewelled Table, a hugely successful cookbook on contemporary Lebanese dishes, decides to be diplomatic and let our group decide which falafel is superior. It’s a tough call. At both outlets, the deep-fried chickpea ball is impossibly crispy on the outside, and velvety soft on the inside. Wedged deep into the flat bread wrap are hunks of pepper, tomato, cucumber, flecks of onion, tahini and parsley. So often mushy, doughy and only of interest to the nocturnal drunk in other parts of the world,
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Lebanon is currently enjoying one of its longest spells of unbroken peace in modern times
OPPOSITE PAGE TRADITIONAL MEZE LUNCH IN LEBANON; THIS PAGE ROMAN RUINS, AL AMIN MOSQUE AND ST GEORGES MARONITE CHURCH IN BEIRUT OLD TOWN, IMAGE COURTESY OF SUN_SHINE/ SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
here, at source, each bite of a falafel sandwich is a revelation – robust and textured, all the ingredients work in harmony together and the result is zesty taste of sunshine. Lebanon is currently enjoying one of its longest spells of unbroken peace in modern times. With memories of the civil war that decimated the city in the 1970s and 80s fading and more than a decade having passed since the brief 2006 Lebanon war, also known as the July War, with Israel, Beirut is a city that almost physically twitches with life. Walking through its neighbourhoods with Kehdy is like watching jump cuts from completely unrelated films. One moment we’re at the edge of the sun-kissed Med, with the vanilla-yellow sands of Ramlet al-Baida beach backing onto a wide corniche full of skateboarding hipsters, teenagers awkwardly holding cigarettes and elderly Lebanese men gazing out over the tide.
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And yet the next we’re in a warren of back streets, elegiac apartment buildings looming up on either side, the balconies full of dusty rugs, sagging pot plants and sleeping cats. On street level, political Pop Art collages are unintentionally created as posters of rival politicians are defaced, torn down and pasted over again and again, the faces of a million besuited potentates bleached by the sun. And then, two swift corner turns takes us from this into a manicured boulevard lined with Dior and Chanel outlets alongside hotels like the peerless Le Gray. The grand dame of luxury boltholes in the city, it has a rooftop infinity pool and cocktail bar that perfectly re-creates the mid 20th-century era of decadent joie de vivre when this city really was the ‘Paris of the Middle East’. Maronite Christians, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Orthodox Greeks, Druze and Jews: all call Lebanon home. And all, as Kehdy shows us as we criss-cross freeways, underpasses and stairwells, have brought their cuisine to Beirut. Stopping at humble shopfronts, we’re served sticky slabs of knafeh, a Palestinian cake filled with akkawi cheese, and we tear at long, folded tubes of Armenian lahmajoun, a distant relation
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of pizza, filled with pomegranate sauce and pine seeds. And we salver at rose water and apricot ice cream from Mitri Hanna Moussa’s shop, Helwayat Al-Salam, where the oven still has shrapnel scars on it and Mitri himself, who is there scooping out the ice cream, claims he didn’t close for a single day during the 15-year war. This is Beirut’s ultimate gift to visitors. With Syria and Israel at its borders, Lebanon is, globally speaking, one of toughest of neighbourhoods. Yet Beirut is a city seemingly determined to try and put aside its differences in the name of peace, food and no small amount of hedonism. For the ultimate sense of the psychological state of the city right now, I head to a semi-ruined, yellow Ottoman-esque sandstone building on the former Green Line that separated Muslim and Christian militias during the conflict. Now known as Beit Beirut, the building isn’t easy to find and it isn’t often open. Your only option is to persevere, ask directions and hope you’re in luck that the huge front door is ajar. I was in luck. Stepping inside the skeleton of the building I’m faced with bullet holes, blackened ceilings, makeshift barricades and sniper slits gouged into the walls. All this has deliberately been preserved as the first memorial of its kind to the war, in a city where the story of the conflict hasn’t yet been narrated, authorised or even solidified into the rawest of knowns and unknowns. When the building was being slowly rehabilitated, a huge stash of photo negatives was found behind the rusted, rolling shutters of a long-closed studio on the ground floor called Photo Mario.
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Around 10,000 passport photos, baby photos, family portraits and postcards were found, commemorating special moments and cherished relationships against mid 20thcentury studio backdrops. As the sunlight flits across and pours into the carcass of the building, these Beirut faces from half a century ago or more stare back at me from their display cases. The faded sundresses, the wide lapels, the sideburns of the people photographed: how many of those people are still around? How many survived the years of destruction? Yet their memory lives on here. And amid the shrapnel and the bullet holes of this building, these are faces of hope, of expectation and of love. The sound of gunfire has long ceased in this city. But these 1970s smiles, taken in a time before war, still keep on beaming in the pale, morning sun. La Grey, from £223 per night, campbellgrayhotels.com; Taste Lebanon food tour, tastelebanon.co.uk; The Jewelled Table, £14, amazon.co.uk; YotelAir Paris Charles de Gaulle (for connecting flights to Beirut via Paris CDG airport), from £103, yotel.com
ARRIVE IN STYLE You’d expect the national airline of France to offer superior gourmet pleasures in the air. But nothing quite prepares you for what awaits in the businessclass cabin. Whether you’re served a plate of foie gras on rustic bread with raspberry coulis, a brunch dish of poached egg with vegetable piperade, finger of Poilâne bread and mimolette cheese, or simply a crisp glass of perfectly chilled Joseph Perrier cuvée royale brut, the altitude does nothing to dull the sensation of a meal that stands toe-to-toe with the finest eateries in Lyon or Paris. It’s not all about the food, of course. Comfortable flat beds and huge personal TV entertainment systems are a given, but the Air France experience also guarantees a chance to spend some quality time in the brand new lounge at Paris CDG airport. It opened last summer and features a Mathieu Lehanneur designed Le Balcon bar set against airport runways, an Instant Relaxation area, a detox bar and a Clarins spa where guests can indulge in facial treatments courtesy of expert Clarins beauticians. Air France flies from London Heathrow to Beirut via Paris with business class return fares from £1,075 return, airfrance.co.uk
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A COUNTRY OF COLOUR E X A C T LY 4 0 Y E A R S O N F R O M T H E F A L L OF THE KHMER ROUGE, CAMBODIA HAS EMERGED AS A VIBRANT COUNTRY D R I V E N BY A YO U N G , E N T R E P R E N E U R I A L P O P U L AT I O N . T H R E E N E W H OT E L O P E N I N G S IN THE SOUTH CONFIRM THE COUNTRY AS L U X U R Y T R AV E L ’ S L AT E S T F R O N T I E R
Words: Gerri Gallagher
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he places I dream of visiting are many, but Cambodia was never one of them. The total of what I knew about this small Asian country was drawn from the harrowing film The Killing Fields and vague schoolgirl memories of the Cambodian-Vietnamese war. So upon arrival at Siem Reap airport, I had no expectations, nor did I ever envision losing my heart to this captivating kingdom. Once considered a mere stopover, with travellers staying just long enough to see Angkor Wat, one of the world’s largest religious monuments, before moving onto the beaches of Thailand or jungles of Vietnam, Cambodia is now the destination rather than the sideshow. Forty years on from the end of the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror, this country is undergoing momentous change, driven by the vigour and energy of the younger generation – 65 per cent of the population is under 30. Cambodia’s greatest national treasure is not the temples of Angkor but its people, with their indomitable spirit and optimism. Though the advent of three new five-star resorts in the south has earned Cambodia its place on the lists of ‘Where to Go in 2019’, Angkor Wat and its surrounding glories must be seen, so I began my Cambodian adventure in Siem Reap. I stayed at Phum Baitang (the hotel that Angelina Jolie booked exclusively for three months while she was filming First They Killed My
Father) just a few miles – but worlds away – from the frenetic scramble of the city centre. Together, the 45 wooden, stilted, thatched-roofed villas, clustered over eight glorious acres of rice paddies, evoke a traditional countryside village. Inside, the design is understated and elegant, with neutral linens, dark wood and Asian antiques dotted all around. As if by magic, the grounds are manicured, the villas serviced, and the flowers and fruit refreshed by the unobtrusive, smiling staff. After my first day of damp and dusty sightseeing in claustrophobic heat, I took myself off to the Spa Temple – which features seven treatment rooms and is inspired by the carvings and columns of Angkor Wat – for a traditional Khmer massage. The therapist kneaded and pummelled out every kink and knot in my temple-fatigued body. After a swim in the rough-hewn 50m black stone infinity pool, with a ginger, basil and lemongrass martini in hand, I was temple-ready once again. Three days later, replete with Cambodian culture and history, I flew to Sihanoukville –a city of casinos, congestion and construction, and best avoided. Just a 20-minute drive from the airport is the jumping-off point for the Koh Rong archipelago, a chain of 15 tropical islands and also the mainland reception for Six Senses Krabey Island. With the check-in formalities sorted, I boarded a sleek speedboat and glided across the glistening Gulf of Thailand. From a distance, this tiny dot of an island looks uninhabited. However, as we got closer, I could see – woven into the tapestry of dense wilderness – the newest Six Senses property. A smiling welcome, complete with lemongrass-infused flannels and cold drinks, was followed by an electric buggy ride up to Villa 18, my home for the next three days. Most of the 40 grey stone, wood and glass residences (each with its own opalescent-tiled private pool and a green living roof) are set in the hillside,
Cambodia’s greatest national treasure is not the temples of Angkor, but its people
OPPOSITE PAGE ANGKOR WAT; THIS PAGE, FROM TOP SPRING ROLLS AT PHUM BAITANG; BAY PHSAR RESTAURANT AT PHUM BAITANG
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with a few opening onto the water. Inside there’s golden Tasmanian oak, a calming pastel palette and windows that overlook the the blue sea below. At every turn, Six Senses Krabey Island celebrates nature, be it in the public spaces, where the lanterns and ceiling installations are fashioned on Khmer fish traps, or in the villas, where the furniture legs are modelled on the Romdoul blossom, Cambodia’s national flower. Six Senses, long a front-runner in sustainability, has raised the bar to new heights on Krabey Island. There’s a reverse osmosis plant and crystal water refinery that produces drinking water without any nasty plastic bottles. Energy conservation initiatives such as solar power, low-chemical pool filtration and water recycling are in place. Most of the fruit and vegetables are grown on the organic farm located on the mainland, which is also home to chickens, goats and bees. Even the plastic straws have been replaced by stainless steel versions. Undertaking the 42m climb up to the summit of the 30-acre reserve the next morning left me breathless but dazzled. Perched at the top is the signature spa, which offers treatments ranging from a very serious wellness assessment, which uses biometric screening technology, to a prescriptive multi-day programme. For those who are dedicated sybarites, there’s an extensive menu of indulgent treats, such as the Wild Kashmir facial, which uses turmeric and lavender, or a Khmer Herb massage, the ingredients for which come straight from the spa garden. Just don’t leave the island without experiencing the thrill of a sunrise aerial yoga session at the rooftop shala. A five-minute speedboat ride away is Alila Villas Koh Russey (also known as Bamboo Island) – a very different destination. At first glance, I was wowed by the linearity of the resort. The 50 flat-
The resort’s star attraction is its two-mile-long stretch of coppercoloured beach – something no other resort in Cambodia can offer
OPPOSITE PAGE SIX SENSES KRABEY ISLAND OCEAN POOL VILLA; THIS PAGE ALILA VILLAS KOH RUSSEY
roofed, gunmetal-grey beachfront pavilions and 13 villas were designed by Singapore-based architect Chioh-Hui Goh who found inspiration in the krama, the patterned cloth widely used in Khmer life. Everywhere there are nods to Cambodia’s heritage, from the latticework of the teak canopy in the open-air reception to the geometric lines of the wooden headboards and cabanas. Even the design of the terraced communal pool is a contemporary interpretation of Angkor Wat temple. Set in 60 acres of verdant tropical vegetation, the resort’s overall footprint covers only 15 per cent of the island, which leaves lots to be explored. But the resort’s star attraction is its two-mile-long stretch of copper-coloured beach, backed by banyan and casuarina trees – something no other resort in Cambodia can offer. All the rooms face the ocean and my time here was spent walking the shoreline, kayaking, paddle boarding, snorkelling and swimming in the sapphire sea. At lunch, the freshest ceviche, served with icy-cold rosé at the Beach Shack, offset the steamy heat. On offer were all sorts of experiences, from pagoda blessings to sunset cruises to excursions to Kampot.
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My final stop was Shinta Mani Wild, located deep in the Cardamom Mountains, once a stronghold of the Khmer Rouge. An arduous three-hour car journey from Sihanoukville brought me to the entrance of the 865-acre camp, situated between Bokor National Park and Kirirom National Park. Parked inside the gate was a fleet of 1960s US jeeps (used during the Vietnam war). I climbed aboard one and was delivered to a 30m tower to zip-line into Headquarters, aka reception, (there’s a definite vibe of the US television hit MASH going on here, and even the ceiling is US Army surplus camouflage netting). After two zip-line rides – the first over jungle, and the second above the Tmor Rung river and its boisterous waterfall – I touched down in the Landing Zone Bar. A team of gentle-souled, smiling Cambodians manoeuvred me out of my corset-like harness, which was exchanged for a jasmine-scented flannel and a G&T. Ten years and millions of dollars in the making, this insanely wonderful, slightly bonkers creation is the work of American-born designer and hotelier Bill Bensley. Asked about the inspiration for the camp, he countered with two questions: “What if Jackie O had gone glamping in this wilderness with the King of Cambodia in the early 60s? What would it have been like?” Exactly like Shinta Mani Wild is the answer. Each of the 15 tents is massive, with a dark kokiwood floor, a four-poster bed, sofas inside and out, antique trunks, an open-air roll-top bath, a dining table and a cocktail bar with a cowhide-covered cold
box, filled with champagne, fine wine and local beer. I was given the Jackie O tent (Tent 1), which is pitched on boulders exhilaratingly close to a rushing river. Over the door hangs a photograph of Jackie taken on her 1967 visit to Cambodia. It’s with these details that Bensley has so brilliantly achieved his goal of marrying the glamour of royalty with the romance of colonial-style safari travel. For the intrepid guest, Shinta Mani Wild is nirvana. My adventure butler, Yi, organized an action-filled, adrenalin-fuelled few days, all detailed on a sheet of rolled parchment and illustrated with a watercolour rendering of the camp. My first morning was spent learning tenkara, the Japanese meditative art of fly-fishing, with Mongolian expert Tulga. With his help I became the first guest to catch a danio, a small freshwater fish. The next morning, I joined the Wildlife Alliance’s poacher patrol doing their rounds on motorbikes in this river valley. Their mission is to protect the wildlife and forests from animal poaching and illegal logging. There was also swimming, foraging with the chef, spotting gibbons, bird watching and camera trapping with the head botanist, and Yi turned out to be a dab hand in a kayak. Heading home after nearly three weeks, I felt blessed. I had seen the temples of Angkor, visited the hat-trick of new five-star properties and ziplined for the first time. But, most importantly, I had discovered the remarkable metamorphosis of a once war-torn country into a vibrant yet unspoiled destination. Cambodia more than deserves its billing at the top of all those ‘Where to Go in 2019’ lists.
THIS PAGE THE WATERFALL AT TMOR RUNG RIVER; INSIDE A TENT AT SHINTA MANI WILD OPPOSITE PAGE SHINTA MANI WILD
Bailey Robinson offers tailor-made itineraries to Cambodia. Three nights at Phum Baitang, three nights at Six Senses Krabey Island, three nights at Alila Villas Koh Russey (all bed and breakfast), and three nights at Shinta Mani Wild (all-inclusive), including international flights and transfers, from £6,400 per person, baileyrobinson.com
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SEA SHARP AS THE S EYCHELLES GOVERNMEN T MA KES A P L E D G E T O S AV E T H E I N D I A N O C E A N , ONE HOTEL GROUP IS STRIVING TO BE AS S U S TA I N A B L E A S P O S S I B L E – A N D O F F E R A H E D O N I S T I C E S C A P E AT T H E S A M E T I M E
Words: Sophie Halse
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rom 400 ft below the surface of the Indian Ocean, the Seychelles president Danny Faure spoke to the world. Joining a British-led expedition exploring the ocean’s depths in April this year, the president made a plea on a live broadcast for better protection of the world’s seas – or, as he called them, “the beating blue heart of our planet”.
Seychelles has much to lose from climate change. Already, the water surrounding the nation’s 115 islands is rising and its coral being bleached. Like other small island nations, it is in danger of sinking. Last year, Faure and his team protected 210,000 sq km of ocean in exchange for having some of the nation’s debt paid off, and they have since pledged to protect 30 per cent of its surrounding waters by 2020.
Once considered a five-star destination with three-star amenities, the Seychelles has since become a honeymoon hotspot with luxury hotels in abundance. On Mahé, the largest of all the islands and home to the capital Victoria – and around 90 per cent of Seychelles’ population – a familyrun bolthole bridges the gap between luxury and local, with a design that is distinctly Seychellois and sensitive to its surrounding area. Carana Beach Hotel, named after the picturesque beach it overlooks, was reopened by hoteliers Alan and Sam Mason in 2016, after it was closed nearly two decades previously. The secluded bay on which it sits dictates the character of the boutique hotel, which was designed with its location in mind – a Seychellois experience envisioned by Seychellois people. The hotel’s 40 chalets, 28 of which have ocean views and 12 of which have private plunge pools, have distinctive modern Creole architecture that blends in with the local buildings. Inside, neutral colours and natural fabrics allow the shades of the Seychelles to shine, with floor-to-ceiling glass doors that open out onto the beach. Located 11 miles north of the airport and five miles from the capital, Carana Beach Hotel is wellplaced for those looking for seclusion. But it’s not all cocktails and sun loungers – excursions such as hiking, diving and sunset picnics are on offer,
To look at the Seychelles, you would certainly think it worth saving. Reaping the best of what Mother Nature has to offer, this collection of islands looks like it’s been plucked from a screensaver, with the saturation bumped up to the max. Ribbons of white sand snake around the edge of the islands, which are peppered with palm trees and surrounded by waves of paintchart blues. Here, colour is cosmic.
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while the hotel’s bijou Sens spa, named after the Creole word for senses, offers a range of treatments using locally-sourced products. The all-day dining beach bar serves Creole tapas, fresh fish and local favourites such as grilled octopus, crab salad and chicken Creole empanadas. Breakfast and dinner are both served at the resident restaurant Lorizon, which overlooks the beach and provides à la carte meals with local infusions. The hotel’s food offering is supplied by an organic farm on Denis Private Island, another of the Mason family’s properties. It’s one of the many sustainable initiatives they have deployed across its three hotels, and its tour operator business Mason’s Travel. As one of the leading travel companies in the Seychelles, the team is keen to ensure its hotels are as sustainable as possible. In a recent interview, Alan Mason outlined the lengths he is going to in order to achieve this. In addition to home-grown food, Carana Beach has a recycled water system, as well as a rain water collection system. Elsewhere, at Mason’s Travel, the team is investing in hybrid vehicles. It’s a small price to pay to save one of the world’s most beautiful locations – or, as Alan aptly describes his home, a place of “genuine escapism”.
The all-day dining beach bar serves Creole tapas, fresh fish and local favourites such as grilled octopus and crab salad
From €424 per night for an Ocean View Villa, caranabeach.com
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PRIME MOVER BOLD & REEVES’ BILL SHIPTON ON HIS UNIQUE PROPERTY MANAGEMENT S E R V I C E T H AT ’ S TA K I N G LO N D O N ’ S S U P E R P R I M E M A R K E T B Y S TO R M
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“We think of a property like a car, a yacht or a plane, which all need proactively managing”
ere’s a 21st-century conundrum: the hydraulics break on your sinking swimming pool just as you’re about to take a dip. What do you do? It’s a problem that a number of Bill Shipton’s clients have faced – clients who, with busy lives and homes across the globe, don’t have the time to spare on such logistical nightmares. Their solution? Dial the number for their 24/7 property manager, who will hook them up with a sub-aquatrained hydraulics engineer to solve their swimming pool woes. This is the service that Shipton provides through his property asset management company Bold & Reeves, which he founded seven years ago after looking for a similar service for his clients, and coming up short. “I was running an office for a Middle Eastern family and I was looking for a solution to outsource the management of their very high-end properties in Mayfair, Chelsea and Kensington,” he explains. “I couldn’t find anybody who could provide what I was looking for. The more we looked at it, the more it seemed to me that there was an opportunity.” So, how does it work? Shipton and the team provide clients with a complete survey of their property, and record everything on an electronic logbook. This serves as a maintenance schedule for the building, with a register of every asset, when it needs to be serviced and how much it will cost. “We think of a property like a car, a yacht or a plane, which all need proactively managing and preventative maintenance,” Shipton says. “You wouldn’t buy a second-hand car without
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a full-service history and a logbook, and yet properties change hands for millions of pounds and there’s really very little knowledge about the history.” Each client is equipped with a personal property manager, who is on call 24/7 and has a black book of vetted contractors that they can deploy to help with any problems, from dwindling water pressure to broken air conditioning units to faulty car lifts. “Our service provides short-term peace of mind and convenience for our clients,” Shipton adds, “but also the long-term benefit that comes from demonstrable management will manifest itself in the enhancement of the property. Insurance companies love what we do, because we lower the risk of things going wrong.” Currently, Bold & Reeves manages 80 properties, which Shipton estimates to span around 600,000 sq ft of super prime central London and have a combined value of around £1.5bn. More recently, the company has begun working with a number of developers and is also managing six super prime apartment blocks. Sights are being set further afield. “We’re continuing to thrive in super prime central London, and there are some areas in the near home countries where there are pockets of high-value properties that we think would value from our service, such as Wentworth and St George’s Hill in Weybridge,” Shipton says. “But what we really want to do is educate the market, particularly homeowners, that these valuable assets need proactive management. That is our absolute key message.” boldandreeves.co.uk
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P R O P E R T Y T H E F I N E S T H O M E S I N T H E C A P I TA L
INSIDER KNOWLEDGE The latest property news from prime central London
P.140 STREETS AHEAD The best homes hitting the market this month
A newly built semi-detached house in Notting Hill is the ultimate turnkey property (p.140)
Connecting people & property, perfectly. Old Brompton Road, Chelsea SW10 This very rare house was formerly a nightclub which means it benefits from extraordinary living space.
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Impressive lateral space Designed by well known artist Contains an abundance of natural light Approximately 2,273 sq ft (211.16 sq m)
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Toto Lambert looks forward to helping you. toto.lambert@knightfrank.com
Offers in excess of £3,000,000 Leasehold: approximately 91 years remaining
020 3641 7308
Carlyle Mansions, Chelsea SW3 This apartment is situated on the preferred western side of this prestigious block with porter.
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An apartment with a rich heritage Rare three bedroom apartment Incredible river views Approximately 2,273 sq ft (211.16 sq m)
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Robert French looks forward to helping you. robert.french@knightfrank.com
Offers in excess of £3,500,000 Share of freehold
020 3641 7308
knightfrank.co.uk Connecting people & property, perfectly. All potential tenants should be advised that, as well as rent and the deposit, an administration fee of £288 and referencing fees of £48 per person will apply when renting a property (if not an AST). (All fees shown are inclusive of VAT.) If the landlord agrees to you having a pet, you may be required to pay a higher deposit (if not an AST) or higher weekly rent (if an AST). Please ask us for more information about other fees that will apply or visit www.knightfrank.co.uk/tenantfees.
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the north side of the Paddington Basin, the building will sit alongside a second, 21-storey tower, the planning for which has also been approved. Together, the two buildings will house 426 apartments, as well as shops, a twostorey sky bar and a cinema. While the scheme has been approved by Westminster Council, it still requires final endorsement by Major Sadiq Khan due to its scale. Rumour has it that the Greater London Authority has dismissed the offer of 16 per cent affordable homes, and is insisting there is at least 35 per cent.
THE ‘PADDINGTON CUCUMBER’ GETS THE GREEN LIGHT FROM WESTMINSTER COUNCIL
Plans for a 42-story skyscraper in Zone 1 have been approved by Westminster Council. The elliptical structure, conceived of by architectural firm Apt, has been dubbed the Blue Marrow thanks to its shape and inky exterior and, in a nod to The Gherkin, is also being fondly referred to as the Paddington Cucumber. Located between Harrow Road and
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C O R P O R AT E C O - L I V I N G
MIND THE GAP
NEW FLEXIBLE LEASE PROJECT SET TO
THE MOST EXPENSIVE RENTAL SPOTS ON THE LONDON UNDERGROUND REVEALED
OPEN ITS DOORS IN CANARY WHARF
The Collective is due to unveil its second co-living space in the capital this July. Located near Canary Wharf, within Crossharbour Plaza, the project will offer flexible leases from a single night up to 12 months. The 21-storey building has 705 studio apartments of varying size up for grabs, starting from £1,300 per month, and will offer a series of amenities to its residents, including a virtual reality golf stimulator, a cinema and what is said to be east London’s highest swimming pool, located on level 20. A rotating events programme will include live music, mental health workshops, cocktail-making classes and a series of wellness activities, ranging from sound baths to yoga. The Collective’s first co-living space opened in North Acton in 2016.
London estate agent Benham and Reeves has revealed the most expensive and inexpensive areas on the London Underground in which to buy and rent. Using data from PropertyData.co.uk, the agency collated information on the average cost of buying and renting in the immediate areas around London’s tube stations. The results show that properties near to DLR stations are the most affordable overall, with an average house price of £561,358, while those near to the Waterloo and City line are the most expensive with an average house price of £1.4m. When it came to specific stations, Gloucester Road and South Kensington took joint place as the most expensive stations, with an average house price of £1.9m and an average monthly rent of £4,207. At the other end of the scale, Barking and Upney offered the cheapest house prices, with an average of £309,366. In the rental market, Watford provided the cheapest option for tenants at £1,079 a month.
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Surround yourself with
AWA R D - W I N N I N G A PA R T M E N T S I N A N I C O N I C S E T T I N G F R O M ÂŁ 8 2 5 , 0 0 0 * AVA I L A B L E N O W. V I S I T O U R N E W S H OW A PA R T M E N T S
+44 (0)20 7205 2392 | gasholderslondon.co.uk | Gasholders, 1 Lewis Cubitt Square, London N1C 4BY
*Price correct at time of print
NEW YORK
Paris Forino Designed Sublime 5,444sf Full Floor Five Bedroom Masterpiece/ 66 Ninth Avenue Residence 6 - New York City After years of dreaming, designing and constructing, this breathtaking masterpiece has come to life and is simply stated, extraordinary. Sublime, contemporary, tailored beauty at every turn, residence six is a dream home in every detail, in every square inch and is the new definition of an ultra-luxurious, tailor-made private residence. Discover. Explore, adore. Acquire. 5,444 square feet full floor, 5 bedrooms, 6.5 baths, separate library and den, private terrace. $29,000,000
Jessica C. Campbell 1-917-621-7815 jessicac@nestseekers.com
Grand European Villa 13319 Mulholland Drive Beverly Hills Hidden behind gates & down the private cobblestone driveway is Villa Soigni with commanding views of the San Fernando Valley. On over 2/3 of an acre & apx. 7,900 sq. ft the home is distinguished by over sized rooms with abundant natural light and 30 ft. ceilings. Stunning marble floors, exquisite moldings & an 8 ft fireplace, pool and spa. Upstairs are 4 ensuite bedrooms, extremely large master suite with room like walk in closet, grand remodeled bathroom, fireplace & 2 terraces complete. Main floor includes guest suite and library. Three car garage & large motor court complete this wonderful private mini estate. $8,490,000
Marisa Zanuck 1-310-913-1741 Marisa@nestseekers.com
NEW YORK | HAMPTONS | GOLD COAST, LI | NEW JERSEY | MIAMI | SAN FRANCISCO | BEVERLY HILLS | LONDON | SEOUL Nest Seekers International is a Real Estate broker. All material presented herein is intended for informational purposes only and has been compiled from sources deemed reliable. Though information is believed to be correct, it is presented subject to errors, omissions, changes or withdrawal without notice.
Harrington Gardens, South Kensington Modern living in a classic London location. A bespoke, 2500 sqft, three bedroom triplex apartment in the heart of South Kensington, with cool design touches throughout. The space would suit those looking for a turn-key, one-off¬ place, just moments from world class amenities around South Ken, Chelsea and Knightsbridge. 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, 3 floors and terrace. Tenure: leasehold, 135 years. £5,250,000
Solly Strickland +44 7702 669 647 SollyS@NestSeekers.com | Daniel McPeake +44 7809 351 114 DanielMc@nestseekers.com
Burns Road, Battersea
The Observatory Penthouse, Fulham
A completely bespoke property which forms part of one of London’s finest loft developments, Southside Quarter, just moments from Battersea Park and only 1 mile from the new American Embassy. The ground floor features a wonderful reception room, with double height ceilings, vast period windows and beautiful stone floors. This 2036sqft property is perfect for those looking for a completely unique home with great security and off-street parking just across the river from Chelsea. Tenure: Freehold. £1,600,000
Iconic West London Penthouse. Located in the heart of Munster Village, the penthouse at Brandon House is the perfect marriage of post-industrial warehouse living with striking modern architecture, with over 3000 sqft of internal space. 3 bedrooms , 2 bathrooms, 60ft living room, glass observatory, huge roof terrace with panoramic London views, direct lift access, double garage. Tenure: leasehold, 978 years. £2,850,000
Solly Strickland +44 7702 669 647 SollyS@NestSeekers.com Daniel McPeake +44 7809 351 114 DanielMc@nestseekers.com
Solly Strickland +44 7702 669 647 SollyS@NestSeekers.com Daniel McPeake +44 7809 351 114 DanielMc@nestseekers.com
NestSeekers.com
An architectural masterpiece Pembridge Villas, W11 Notting Hill Gate Underground Station: 0.4 miles Indulgence perfected, open-plan kitchen/dining/living room, 2 bedrooms, 3 bath/shower rooms, home cinema, swimming pool, gym, private landscaped garden, EPC = B
Freehold | 2,770 sq ft | Guide ÂŁ5.95 million
Oliver Lurot Savills Notting Hill Residential Sales 020 7727 5750 olurot@savills.com
Newly built Finchatten townhouse Knighton Place, SW3 Knightsbridge Underground Station: 0.4 miles A rare built Knightsbridge townhouse designed and developed by Finchatton, 3 reception rooms, kitchen, dining room, 5 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, media room, spa suite, gym, lift, underground parking, professional concierge services, EPC = C
Leasehold approximately 997 years remaining | 5,880 sq ft | Guide ÂŁ19.5 million
Alex Christian Savills Sloane Street Residental Sales 020 7590 5054 achristian@savills.com
Stunning house in cobbled mews Coleherne Mews, SW10
West Brompton Underground/Overground Station: 0.2 miles
Recently refurbished, 2 reception room, kitchen/breakfast room, 3 bedrooms (2 en suite), further bedroom/study, private roof terrace, EPC=D
Freehold | 1,442 sq ft | Guide ÂŁ2.65 million
Charlie Bubear Savills Chelsea Residential Sales 020 7578 9005 cbubear@savills.com
Duplex Grade II listed apartment Hyde Park Gardens Lancaster Gate Underground Station: 0.3 miles Entrance hall, reception room, kitchen/dining room, master bedroom en suite with walk in wardrobe, 2 en suite bedrooms, guest W.C., terrace, balcony, communal gardens.
Leasehold approximately 117 years remaining | 3,172 sq ft | Guide ÂŁ8.25 million Charles Lloyd Savills Mayfair & St James Residential Sales 020 7578 5111 clloyd@savills.com
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Alex Bourne Beauchamp Estates 020 7408 0007
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STREETS AHEAD DISTINCTIVE HOMES ON THE PROPERTY MARKET THIS MONTH
CHELSEA B A R R AC KS , SW 1
In May, Chelsea Barracks opened its doors for the first time in 150 years to unveil the first two of its garden squares: Mulberry Square and Bourne Walk. Opened in time for this year’s Chelsea
Flower Show, the two squares are the first of seven to be unveiled in the development, which will comprise apartments, penthouses and townhouses when it opens at the end of this year. From £5.25m for a twobedroom apartment, chelseabarracks.com
LUXURY LONDON
PROPERTY
WESTBOURNE PA R K R OA D, W 2
This newly-built semidetached house in the heart of Notting Hill is the ultimate turnkey property. Spread over four floors, the four-bedroom home is finished to a high standard and has a spacious patio garden and a secure parking space located to the rear of the building. £4.95m, 020 7727 5750 savills.com
H A N OV E R T E R R AC E , N W 1
Harold Pinter’s former London home near Regent’s Park has hit the market. The six-bedroom, Grade I listed building was
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designed by architect John Nash and built between 1822 and 1823. It is one of the largest properties in what is regarded as one of the finest Nash Regency terraces. Recently renovated, the
property now features a media room, gym and staff accomodation. A separate mews house is located at the bottom of the private garden. £16.95m, 020 7486 9665, beauchamp.com
Charles II Place, Chelsea SW3 £1,615 per week
Furnished
Wood Lane, Shepherd’s Bush W12 £850 per week
Unfurnished
A beautiful interior designed townhouse nestled in a private gated development in the heart of King’s Road.
A truly stunning two-bedroom apartment in the Television Centre the reinvention of a London landmark.
1,670 sq ft (155.1 sq m) Three bedrooms | Two reception rooms | Three bathrooms | Patio garden | Garage | Guest WC | EPC rating D
1,323 sq ft (121.95 sq m) 24 hour residents’ concierge | Residents health club by Soho House - gym, pool, classes and spa | Residents private cinema | EPC rating B
Chelsea 020 3504 5588 | chelsea.lettings@struttandparker.com
Notting Hill 020 3773 4114 | nottinghill@struttandparker.com
Holland Park Villas, Kensington W8 £3,950 per week
Broomhouse Lane, Fulham SW6 £12,500 per week Flexible furnishings
Furnished
An exceptional apartment set within this exclusive gated development, with extensive facilities.
A spectacular six-bedroom detached family house extending over three floors with amazing views overlooking Hurlingham Park.
1,336 sq ft (124.15 sq m) Reception room | Kitchen | Two double bedrooms | Two bathrooms | Cloakroom | Roof terrace | Lift | 24-hour concierge | Underground parking | Gym | Spa | Swimming pool | Cinema room | EPC rating B
9,577 sq ft (889.79 sq m) Kitchen | Reception room | Master bedroom with en suite | Five further bedrooms with en suites | Cinema | Swimming pool | Gym | Sauna | Steam room | Study | Utility room | Garden | EPC rating C
Kensington 020 3813 9477 | kensington@struttandparker.com
Fulham 020 8023 6671 | fulham@struttandparker.com
*After an offer is accepted by the Landlord, which is subject to contract and acceptable references, the following charges and fees will be payable before the commencement of the tenancy: Preparation of Tenancy Agreement £222 (Inc VAT),
/struttandparker
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60 Offices across England and Scotland, including prime Central London. SP_DPS 1_LHP.indd 1
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Royal Avenue, Chelsea SW3 £1,380 per week
Flexible Furnishings
A beautiful raised ground floor, two-bedroom apartment in a period building, with private entrance and significant reception space.
Cathcart Road, Chelsea SW10 £4,350 per week
Furnished
An opportunity to rent an exceptional and bespoke family home.
1,281 sq ft (119 sq m) Two bedrooms | Two reception rooms | Two bathrooms | Utility room | Terraced ground floor flat | Residents parking | EPC rating C
3,347 sq ft (310.94 sq m) Drawing room with bar | Open plan kitchen/dining room/media room | Master bedroom with en suite bathroom and dressing room | Four further bedrooms with en suite bath/shower rooms | Utility room | Cloakroom | Three terraces | South-facing garden | EPC rating C
Chelsea 020 3504 5588 | chelsea.lettings@struttandparker.com
Chelsea SW10 020 3813 9185 | chelseaSW10lettings@struttandparker.com
Dove Mews, South Kensington SW7 Unfurnished £825 per week
Lyall Mews, Belgravia SW1X £5,250 per week
A beautifully refurbished flat superbly located for the amenities of Old Brompton Road.
This outstanding house features a showpiece Boffi kitchen, great volume and the rare advantage of a lift.
784 sq ft (72.83 sq m) Reception/living room | Kitchen | Two bedrooms | Two bathrooms | EPC rating D
3,496 sq ft (324.8 sq m) Drawing room | Dining room | Sitting room | Kitchen | Utility room | Cloakroom | Master bedroom with en suite bathroom | Three further double bedrooms | Three further bathrooms | Lift | Garage | EPC rating C
South Kensington 020 3504 5901 | southken@struttandparker.com
Knightsbridge 020 3504 8796 | knightsbridgelettings@struttandparker.com
Furnished
References per Tenant £54 (Inc VAT), a deposit – usually between 6-10 weeks of the agreed rent. Any rent advertised is pure rent and does not include any additional services such as council tax, water or utility charges.
Strutt & Parker is a trading style of BNP Paribas Real Estate Advisory & Property Management UK Limited, which provides a full range of services across the residential, commercial and the rural property sectors.
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Cadogan Street, Chelsea SW3 £2,750,000
Freehold
St. Lukes Mews, Notting Hill W11 £2,250,000
Freehold
An attractive four-bedroom Georgian townhouse with comfortable accommodation, set in the heart of Chelsea.
An exceptional two-bedroom house with a south-facing garden situated in the heart of Notting Hill.
1,452 sq ft (134.9 sq m) Four bedrooms | Two reception rooms | Two bathrooms | Study | Storage room | Patio garden | Balcony | Terraced house | Residents parking | EPC rating E
1,183 sq ft (110 sq m) Entrance hall | Two reception rooms | Kitchen | Study | Two bedrooms | Bathroom | Shower room | Cloakroom | Garden | EPC rating D
Chelsea 020 3504 5588 | chelsea@struttandparker.com
Notting Hill 020 3773 4114 | nottinghill@struttandparker.com
Hollandgreen Place, Kensington W8 £6,950,000
Leasehold
Pont Street, Knightsbridge SW1X £5,250,000
Leasehold
An exceptional lateral apartment on the third floor in this prestigious development on the southern edge of Holland Park.
An immaculately restructured and rebuilt first floor lateral apartment.
2,285 sq ft (212 sq m) Entrance hall | Reception room | Kitchen | Master bedroom suite | Two further bedrooms with en suite shower rooms | Utility room | Balcony | EPC rating B
1,403 sq ft (130.3 sq m) Entrance hall | Reception room | Kitchen | Master bedroom suite | Second double bedroom | Shower room | Lift | Two balconies | Porter | EPC rating C
Kensington 020 3813 9477 | kensington@struttandparker.com
Knightsbridge 020 3504 8796 | Knightsbridge@struttandparker.com
/struttandparker
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struttandparker.com
60 Offices across England and Scotland, including prime Central London. SP_DPS2_LHP.indd 1
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Edenhurst Avenue, Fulham SW6 £3,850,000
Freehold
Halsey Street, Chelsea SW3 £4,650,000
Freehold
An immaculate seven-bedroom, semi-detached house benefitting from off-street parking and a 40 ft west-facing garden.
A superb five-bedroom Grade II Listed family house, leading onto a pretty landscaped paved garden.
3,770 sq ft (350.23 sq m) Kitchen/dining room | Reception room | Master bedroom with dressing room | Five further bedrooms | Three bathrooms | Cinema room | Utility room | Two cloakrooms | Garden
2,314 sq ft (215 sq m) Master bedroom with en suite bathroom | Four further bedrooms | Three reception rooms | Two further bathrooms | Guest WC | Study | Garden | Balcony | Terrace | Residents parking
Fulham 020 8023 6671 | fulham@struttandparker.com
Chelsea 020 3504 5588 | chelsea@struttandparker.com
Onslow Gardens, South Kensington SW7 £7,500,000 Freehold
Cathcart Road, Chelsea SW10 £1,050,000
A rare opportunity to acquire a special five-bedroom house in Onslow Gardens, South Kensington.
A bright and beautifully elegant top floor apartment that has been meticulously restored and renovated.
3,366 sq ft (305 sq m) (including Vaults) Drawing room | Dining room | Family room | Five bedrooms | Four bathrooms | Study | Utility room | Conservatory | Garden | EPC rating F
705 sq ft (66 sq m) Reception room | Dining area | Kitchen | Bedroom | Bathroom | Utility room | EPC rating D
South Kensington 020 3504 5901 | southken@struttandparker.com
Chelsea SW10 020 3813 9185 | chelseaSW10@struttandparker.com
Leasehold
Strutt & Parker is a trading style of BNP Paribas Real Estate Advisory & Property Management UK Limited, which provides a full range of services across the residential, commercial and the rural property sectors.
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Abingdon Road, Kensington W8
ÂŁ10,500,000 Freehold
A spectacularly designed, new build, five-bedroom family house with the advantage of having a garden, a gym, a swimming pool, a lift and a garage. 6,321 sq ft (587.2 sq m) Reception room | Large open plan kitchen/dining room | Media room | Family room | Gym | Swimming pool with steam room | Jacuzzi and entertaining area | Master bedroom with dressing room and en suite bathroom | Four further bedrooms | Four shower rooms | Cloakroom | Utility room | Plant room | Lift | Garden | Garage | EPC rating B Kensington 020 3813 9477 | kensington@struttandparker.com *After an offer is accepted by the Landlord, which is subject to contract and acceptable references, the following charges and fees will be payable before the commencement of the tenancy: Preparation of Tenancy Agreement ÂŁ222 (Inc VAT),
/struttandparker
@struttandparker
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60 Offices across England and Scotland, including prime Central London. SP_IBC_DPS_LHP.indd 1
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Newton Road, Notting Hill W2
£5,250 per week Furnished/Unfurnished
A stunning family home situated in the heart of Notting Hill. The property offers fantastic living space which has been finished to the highest of standards. 3,674 sq ft (341.3 sq m) Entrance hall | Kitchen/reception room | Drawing room | Office | Six bedrooms | Three bathrooms | Roof terrace | Balcony | Separate annexe | South-facing garden | EPC rating C
Notting Hill 020 3773 4114 | nottinghill@struttandparker.com References per Tenant £54 (Inc VAT), a deposit – usually between 6-10 weeks of the agreed rent. Any rent advertised is pure rent and does not include any additional services such as council tax, water or utility charges.
Strutt & Parker is a trading style of BNP Paribas Real Estate Advisory & Property Management UK Limited, which provides a full range of services across the residential, commercial and the rural property sectors.
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