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Fall Winter 2022 Giant Pumpkin No. 6, 2022, by Anthea Hamilton Photographed by David Sims CASA LOEWE London 41 – 42 New Bond loewe.comstreet

© LOEWEtothanksspecialGallery. WithDaneThomasandartisttheCourtesyHamilton. Anthea

4 SEPTEMBER 2022 17 EDITOR’S LETTER 8 CONTRIBUTORS Meet some of the writers and photographers in this issue 22 THE LITTERATI Sweep the London streets with Ariadne Fletcher and David Lipton – they’ve found distinctive dustbins for your detritus 19 ANTENNAE NEWS What’s new in style, decoration and design, by Ariadne Fletcher and David Lipton 28 SQUALLPAPERS Explore new worlds on your walls with designs that will fire the far shores of your mind. Miranda Sinclair sets sail 20 ANTENNAE ROUNDUP The best supporting actors of the publishing industry? David Lipton brings you book ends 36 CHOP AND CHANGE Low-tech recycling is central to Hugo Worsley’s cutting-edge knives. Ariadne Fletcher likes his hone improvements 45 BOOKS Reading on art and architecture, design and decoration 38 TABLE: TOMATOES Some heirlooms are not meant to last… Be they cherry, plum or beef varieties, Daisy Garnett presents the finest of the vine COVER BERARDCHRISTIANBOTTOM:MCDONALD;JAMESTOP:4,COLUMNCHEVALLIER;PASCAL3:COLUMNSALVAING;MATTHIEU2COLUMNOPPOSITE,TRAEGER.TESSA4:COLUMNLEVERNE;KENSINGTON3:COLUMNPAGE,THIS contents 42 TABLE: CHOPPING BOARDS The chunky surfaces that any gay blade would wish to contact, according to David Lipton Hearth invader – light sabres at the ready in Nicolas Ghesquière’s town house in the Marais! Come with us on an odyssey in the fashion designer’s space, starting on page 60. Photograph: Matthieu Salvaing Periodicals postage paid at Rahway, NJ. Postmaster: Send address corrections to ‘The World of Interiors’ c/o Mercury Airfreight International Ltd Inc, 2323 Randolph Avenue, Avenel NJ 07001, ‘The World of Interiors’ (ISSN 0264083X) is published monthly. Vol 42 no 9, total 480 SUBSCRIPTIONS AND BACK ISSUES Receive 12 issues delivered direct to your home address. Call 01858 438815 or fax 01858 461739. Alternatively, you can visit us at www.worldofinteriors.com

THE FLORAL HIGH GROUND Amid Piedmont’s peaks lies the ancestral estate of Paolo Pejrone. The octogenarian gardener tells Marella Caracciolo Chia about his horticultural heroes and the furrow he’s hoed

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116 BEDTIME FOR BEBE Decorator Christian ‘Bébé’ Bérard was a creature of Paris’s crepuscular demi-monde. Indeed, as a new show attests, a dark whimsy shades all his work. Amy Sherlock beds herself in

Lennox, Duncan’s hunks, plus Amy Sherlock’s listings 54 NETWORK Merchandise and events from round the world 52 SERIOUS PURSUITS Auctions, antique fairs and diverting activities

5 49 AESTHETE’S LIBRARY In the waspish memoir Billy Baldwin Remembers (1974), a few ghastly clients receive payback 122 INSPIRATION How to recreate some of the design effects in this issue, by Gareth Wyn Davies and Ariadne Fletcher 144 OBJECT LESSON Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s layered portrait captures a child’s inner life, says Hilton Als 98 POSTE MODERN While ‘snail mail’ may now feel like a thing of the past, Palermo’s 1930s post office, streaked with marble and go-faster murals, offered a jolt of Futurism. Michael Webb reads its zip code 86 DEEDA-LICIOUS, DEEDALECTABLE Whether conjuring the Petit Trianon or Gustav III’s pavilion, Deeda Blair creates mises-en-scène for meals. Mitchell Owen visits the taste maven in her Manhattan haven interiors 59 VISITORS’ BOOK The main stories in this issue 60 MAISON ACCOMPLISHED In fashion designer Nicolas Ghesquière’s Paris house, sci-fi masks and Memphis Group furniture meet parquet and damask walls. Hamish Bowles enjoys the thrill of time travel 74

PIED A TERRACOTTA Alice Gavalet’s home might as well be made of gingerbread, what with its bold, toothsome décor and her playful, fairy-tale ceramics. It’s eye candy, but it nourishes Jean Louis Gaillemin

108 GETTY FABULOUS At her side-by-side California mansions, Ann Getty deployed a curator’s erudition and bottomless pockets to create a home of nonpareil richesse, as connoisseurs tell Mitchell Owens Lord

124 EXHIBITION DIARY Armitage: thanks, Clendinning’s innings, the lens of

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For writer and theatre critic Hilton, life with four older sisters meant ‘writing was a way for me to get a word in edgewise’. A professor at UC Berkeley and Columbia, Hilton is currently also curating an exhibition about Njideka Akunyili Crosby. For this issue’s Object Lesson (page 144), he captures the artist’s ‘sheer energy and invention’.

contributors

SMITHALIPORTRAIT:ALSHILTON

‘It was perhaps inevitable that I would pursue this as a career,’ says photographer Oskar, who always went with his mother –an art director – on shoots. An admirer of former WoI stylist Miranda Sinclair, Oskar teamed up with her for this month’s Swatch feature (page 28), inspired by ‘the light in some small JMW Turner oil paintings’.

HILTON ALS

OSKAR PROCTOR

DAISY GARNETT Daisy claims it was ‘nosiness’ that first drew her to write, a curiosity that has since taken her far and wide, including to Syria for a pilgrimage story inspired by Lady Jane Digby. Once again pulling up a chair alongside photographer Tessa Traeger for the monthly Table segment (page 38), Daisy –a keen gardener herself –celebrates the humble tomato.

FLORIAN DAGUET-BRESSON Art dealer and curator Florian spent hours as a child ‘observing the feathers of birds’ and is inspired by ‘unusualness and sophistication’. He now adds another feather to his cap as he joins WoI as contributing editor. Florian presents the home of artist Alice Gavalet for this issue (page 92) and ‘would suggest everyone have a piece of her in their house. It’s full of joy.’

OBERTO AND J. ATTI GILI For Oberto and J. Atti, photography allows ‘invaluable insight to be gathered that words might not express or allow to be discovered’. For this issue, they reveal the home of their longtime friend Paolo Pejrone (page 74), a place replete with things that they feel serve as a reminder that ‘life is full and pleasurable’.

MARELLA CARACCIOLO CHIA Marella Caracciolo Chia began writing for WoI under founding editor Min Hogg and has been ‘uncovering interesting stories in unexpected places’ ever since. For this issue, she took a quick break from working on her new book to visit the home of her friend Paolo Pejrone (page 74), a place she has been watching evolve over the years. ‘An inspiring experience,’ she says.

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www.ipso.co.uk SUBSCRIPTION Patrick Foilleret (Subscriptions Director), Anthea Denning (Creative Design Manager), Lucy Rogers-Coltman, Emma Murphy (Subscriptions Marketing Managers), Claudia Long (Assistant Promotions and Marketing Manager) US SUBSCRIPTION SALES The World of Interiors, Freepost PO Box 37861, Boone, Iowa 50037-2861. Tel: 888-737-9456, Email: theworldofinteriors@subscription.co.uk CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Cosmo Brockway, Miranda Brooks, Laura Burlington, Florian Daguet-Bresson, Amy Fine Collins (New York), Ruth Guilding, Allegra Hicks, Carolina Irving, Priyanka Khanna, Augusta Pownall, Rodman Primack (Latin America), Tree Sherriff, Plum Sykes FOUNDING EDITOR Min Hogg EDITORIAL ASSOCIATE Ariadne Fletcher SUB-EDITOR Gareth Wyn Davies ART EDITOR Simon Witham DECORATION ASSOCIATE David Lipton EDITORCONTRIBUTINGATLARGE Patrick Kinmonth CONTRIBUTINGGARDENSEDITOR, Tania Compton CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, ITALY Marella Caracciolo CONTRIBUTINGARCHITECTUREEDITOR, Jane Withers ASSOCIATE EDITOR, PARIS Marie-France Boyer CHIEF SUB-EDITOR Damian Thompson AMERICAN EDITOR Mitchell Owens FEATURES EDITOR Amy Sherlock ACTING VISUALS EDITOR Ivan Shaw STYLE DIRECTOR Gianluca Longo DEPUTY EDITOR Emily Tobin MANAGING EDITOR Tom Reynolds DIGITAL DIRECTOR Elly Parsons CLASSIFIED Shelagh Crofts (Director) Lucy Hrynkiewicz-Sudnik (Senior Advertisement Manager) Rebecca Sirs (Sales Executive) Alva Muris (Sales Executive) RESEARCH AND INSIGHTS Lauren Hays-Wheeler (Insights Manager) Holly Harland (Research Executive) ITALIAN OFFICE Christopher Daunt – interiors Tel: +44 7595 567573 Email:Email:christopher.daunt@condenast.co.ukValentinaDonini–fashionTel:+39028051422valentina.donini@miasrl.it US ADVERTISING Nichole Mika Tel: 011 4420 7152 3838 Email: nichole.mika@condenast.co.uk DIRECTORFINANCE Daisy Tam PEOPLELONDONDIRECTOR, Rosamund Bradley DEPUTY DIRECTOR,MANAGINGEUROPE Albert Read MANAGINGEUROPEDIRECTOR, Natalia Gamero FINANCE,VICE-PRESIDENT,EUROPE Juan Manuel Martin-Moreno PA TO PUBLISHING DIRECTOR Sophia Warner Tel: 020 7152 3117 LEAD DIRECTORCOMMERCIAL(DECORATION) Sophie Catto DIRECTORCOMMERCIAL(TRADE PUBLISHER,DESIGN)/ASSOCIATEANDEUROPE Christopher Daunt COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR (HOME AND PARTNERSHIPS) Melinda Chandler COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR (HOME AND RETAIL) Sayna Blackshaw SYNDICATIONENQUIRIES syndication@condenast.co.uk BUSINESSEDITORIALMANAGER David Foster THE INTERIORS INDEX/ EXECUTIVE EDITOR Busola Evans THE INTERIORS INDEX/ ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE Isabella Fish DIGITALDIRECTORCOMMERCIAL Malcolm Attwells ACCOUNT MANAGER Olivia Barnes ACCOUNT DIRECTORS Nichole Mika Olivia OliviaMcHughCapaldi SENIOR DIRECTOR/ASSOCIATEACCOUNTPUBLISHER,EUROPE Alexandra Bernard Tel: +33 680 87 36 83 SENIOR ACCOUNT DIRECTORS Marina GeorginaConnollyHutton PUBLISHING DIRECTOR / CHIEF BUSINESS OFFICER HOME Emma EDITORRedmayneINCHIEFHamishBowles PRODUCTIONCOMMERCIALMANAGER Xenia Dilnot SENIORCONTROLLERPRODUCTION Helen Crouch SENIOR PRODUCTIONCO-ORDINATOR/DIGITALPRODUCTIONCONTROLLER Lucy Zini COMMERCIAL, PAPER AND DISPLAYCONTROLLERPRODUCTION Martin MacMillan CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Richard Kingerlee MARKETINGNEWSTRADEMANAGER Olivia Streatfield PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Sarah Jenson

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THE WORLD OF INTERIORS (ISSN 0264-083X) is published monthly by The Condé Nast Publications Ltd, Vogue House, 1 Hanover Square, London W1S 1JU. Telephone 020 7499 9080. © 2022. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited. Printed in the UK by Walstead Roche. Colour origination by Rhapsody. Distributed by Frontline, Midgate House, Peterborough, Cambs PE1 1TN, United Kingdom (tel: 01733 555161). ‘The World of Interiors’ is a registered trademark belonging to The Condé Nast Publications Ltd. Subscription rates include delivery and digital editions. Full rates are £59.88 for one year in the UK, £119 for the rest of the world. To place your order call +44 (0)1858 438819. Special offers and exclusive promotions are published in this issue or online at worldofinteriors.co.uk. To manage your subscription log onto www.magazineboutique.co.uk/solo. For enquiries, email worldofinteriors@subscription.co.uk. US DISTRIBUTION: The World of Interiors, ISSN 0264-083X (USPS 104) is published monthly by Condé Nast, Vogue House, Hanover Square, London WIS 1JU, UK. US distribution: The US annual subscription price is $137. Airfreight and mailing in the USA by agent named World Container Inc, 156-15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, NY 11434, USA. Periodicals postage paid at Brooklyn, NY 11256. US POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The World of Interiors, World Container Inc, 156-15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, NY 11434, USA. Subscription records are maintained at Condé Nast Britain, Subscriptions Department, Tower House, Sovereign Park, Market Harborough, LE16 9EF, UK. The paper used for this publication is based on renewable wood fibre. The wood these fibres are derived from is sourced from sustainably managed forests and controlled sources. The producing mills are EMAS registered and operate according to highest environmental and health and safety standards. This magazine is fully recyclable – please log on to www.recyclenow.com for your local recycling options for paper and board.

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I would like to think that every month The World of Interiors is in one way or another a Style Issue, but I must say that, as this one came together, it seemed we had curated a particularly inspirational gathering, the force of whose influential taste has the power to touch us all. At the tender age of 25, circumstances placed Nicolas Ghesquière at the helm of the then decidedly dusty house of Balenciaga (where he had been designing a line of golf clothes for a dismal Japanese licensee). I was present at his first collections, and it was clear that his was a singular voice – one of those rare designers whose work moved the compass each season. Nicolas, who joined Louis Vuitton in 2017, has continued to push boundaries and propel fashion ever since. As I discovered when I went to call with photographer Matthieu Salvaing, his new Paris apartment (page 60) is a shrine to the masters of design, from Jacob to Kuramata. The greatest excitement, however, is a Narnia-like door that leads upstairs, where architect Valerio Olgiati has staged a breathtaking intervention out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Style arbiters Deeda Blair and Ann Getty were figures of fascination to me as an impressionable young man when I first attended the Paris couture shows in the mid-1980s. Deeda has since become a cherished friend. Every detail in her exquisite eyrie high above Manhattan (page 86) is perfection, from the vellum-coloured scrapbooks she has painstakingly made for decades (there is even an index volume) to the food she serves (inset). Now she has brought her rarefied world to the printed page with a new book that, like her legendary meals, I cannot wait to devour. The late Ann Getty and her husband, Gordon, were also fabled hosts. Guests would be summoned to their house on Russian Hill for musicals where artists of the calibre of Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti were likely to perform. I was lucky enough to stay in the San Francisco Wunderkammer and delighted to discover that my bathroom was paved with works by the great scenic and costume artists of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Heading back to the house for Ann’s granddaughter Ivy’s wedding last year, I was touched to see these rooms come to raucous life in a way the châtelaine would have applauded as the jeunesse dorée sprawled on damask sofas beneath Blanche’s portrait of Nijinsky and works by Vuillard, Bonnard, Matisse and Cassatt. James McDonald recorded these magic spaces for us before Ann’s treasures fall to Christie’s gavel this month, while Mitchell Owens spoke to her friends, colleagues and family to evoke her creative spirit – and sense of fun (page 108). I have revered Christian Bérard since I wrote about him for a Vogue talent contest at the age of 16. Bébé to his intimates –who included the gratin of Paris society and French culturati in the frenzied years before World War II – Bérard was an opium-addicted artist whose passion for that fashionable world and for fashion contrived to render him a subsidiary figure then and now. A new exhibition in Monaco seeks to reappraise his protean talents, as Amy Sherlock reports. In our story (page 116) we look at his décors – from the flat he shared with Boris Kochno to his designs for Guerlain’s luxe salons on the ChampsElysées. While Bérard was flying the flag for delicate Neo-Romanticism in Paris, architect Angiolo Mazzoni was proposing dictatorial Neoclassicism in Mussolini’s Italy. Photographer Simon Watson and writer Michael Webb went to Palermo to document his astonishingly ballsy post office with murals by Benedetta Cappa and Paolo Bevilacqua (page 98). Alice Gavalet’s playful ceramics share something of Bérard’s whimsy and remind me of the joy of childhood creation – of Plasticine and clay and paint. We had intended a more straightforward maker profile of her but when Pascal Chevallier’s pictures came in I saw that her home was as uplifting as her work and we decided to celebrate that too (page 92). As Marella Caracciolo Chia and photographers Oberto and J. Atti Gili discovered when they went to call on Paolo Pejrone at home in Piedmont (page 74), the legendary garden designer brings his talent for atmosphere to his enchanting interiors as well – spaces that he shares with dogs and chickens but never, ever, with cut flowers. May the force of these tastemakers be with you!

EDITOR’ LETTER SEPTEMBER 2022 17 BOWLESHAMISHPHOTOGRAPH:

$ BOWLES, EDITOR IN CHIEF

HAMISH

voutsa.comLA – NYC

Revered as one of the leading lights in the Danish Modernist movement, the architect Vilhelm Lauritzen created purpose-built furniture for every space he designed. None has ever been available for purchase – until now, that is. To mark its centennial, Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects has teamed up with Carl Hansen to issue some of his seminal pieces. The functional ‘Vega’ chair was originally created for the Folkets Hus in 1956, which Lauritzen –a perfectionist to the core –conceived as a universal meeting space for the labour movement and, like his other projects, as a Gesamtkunstwerk, with every single detail, from staircases to sockets, overseen by him. In 1996 the building was transformed into what is now the Vega concert hall in Copenhagen and has become one of the youngest buildings in Denmark to receive protected status. Available in steel, wood and textile or leather; £445. Visit carlhansen.com [AF]

Portable and rechargeable, wireless and water-resistant: Paola Petrobelli’s Murano-glass lamps for Green Wolf Studio are as innovative as they are vibrant. Using colour and light – twin pillars of the arts of her native Venice – she reprises age-old blowing techniques, used to create glass on the lagoon since the 13th century, to glowing futuristic ends. Shown: ‘Ametista II’, £360. Visit greenwolf.co.uk [DL]

What’s in the air this month, by Ariadne Fletcher and David Lipton

antennae news

For its first-ever homeware collection, the cordwainer Ancient Greek Sandals fuses the hallmarks of its mainline collection with the evocative abundance of Greek hospitality. Naturally dyed vachetta leather, made with vegetable tannins, encases all manner of baskets and bottles to bring a Dionysian turn to the table. Shown: medium demijohn, £405. Visit ancient-greek-sandals.com [DL] $

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The for the best supporting role to… for

goes

award

these book ends. David Lipton lines the winners up

1 ‘S259124BP’, by Alexandra, £128 approx for a pair, Sophia Enjoy Thinking. 2 Concrete bookends, £38 for a pair, Smith & Goat. 3 ‘Prato’, £160 for a pair, Soho Home. 4 ‘Lombardy’, by L’Afshar, £235 for a pair, Selfridges. 5 ‘Solid’, by Jörg Höltje, from £47 approx for a pair, Studio Hausen. 6 ‘Alexan’, £920 for a pair, Hermès. 7 ‘1504048’, by Jermaine Gallacher, £250, Matches Fashion. 8 ‘Langley’, £950, Henry Wilson. 9 ‘Dome Crystal’, £125 approx, Fenton & Fenton. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book $ antennae roundup 1 4 5 6 7 8 9 2 3

Where some wastepaper bins are, dare we say, a little bit throwaway, others qualify as uncontested keepers. Streets ahead in style, whether leather, lacquer, trompe l’oeil or trellis, they’re worth anyone’s disposable money – and almost too good for anything as pedestrian as rubbish. Ariadne Fletcher and David Lipton head for the Waste End with the most eminently respectable of these receptacles. Photography: Kensington Leverne

THE LITTERATI

shortlist

Opposite, from left: woven wastepaper basket, £50, Birdie Fortescue. ‘Gomi’, £29, Oyoy Living Design. ‘Saddle Hailey’, £595, Ralph Lauren Home. Seagrass bin, £25, John Lewis. This page, from left: ‘Mani’, by Fornasetti, £1,000, Selfridges. Bin with lion handles, £200, Vaughan. ‘Neoclassical’, £105, Must Have Bins. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r

This page, from left: chevron bin, £22, Olivine Design. ‘Double Shadowed Meander’, by Bridie Hall, £95, Pentreath & Hall. ‘Bud Trellis’, by Fine Cell Work, £85, Nina Campbell. Opposite, from left: hexagonal bin, by Veere Grenney, £545, The Lacquer Company. ‘SKU-BIN005’, by Sarah and David Ross, £145, Liberty. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book +

shortlist

From the Manor Borne

FROM GRAND National Trust properties to eccentric artists’ residences, nothing ignites the imagination quite like an English country house. Many brands have attempted to capture the distinctive, dramatic aesthetics that so inspired writers such as Austen and Waugh, but perhaps none has done so quite as successfully as Zoffany. With its creative approach to genteel aristocratic aesthetics, the brand stands apart for its emphasis on artistry and its undying respect for superb production and stylistic heritage.

DRAWING ON THE ROMANCE OF ENGLISH COUNTRY-HOUSE DECOR, ZOFFANY DELVES INTO ITS ILLUSTRIOUS ARCHIVE TO REDISCOVER AN ECCENTRIC EXPLOSION OF PATTERN AND COLOUR

Zoffany’s effortlessly eclectic designs have graced the walls of stately homes and residences up and down the country, and the new ‘Cotswolds Manor’ spring/summer 2022 collection sees the British brand reintroduce some of its best-loved patterns. Comprising ten wallcoverings, eight prints, two embroideries and two weaves, ‘Cotswolds Manor’ delves into the brand’s extensive archives of documents to create both a new standard and a lasting legacy for designers everywhere. The result is a collection that charts the waves of change that have shaped British heritage design. The 19thcentury ‘Storks and Thrushes’ returns for the first time since its launch – it’s a modern update on the muted watercolour hues found hidden beneath ancient oak panelling in a Leeds stately home; the gloriously large-scale ‘Chintz Lustre’, which featured in Zoffany’s first ever collection, uses digital printing techniques to create an almost pearlescent effect that calls to mind an antique églomisé mirror; the fluid damask of ‘Sezincote’ draws from the theatrical Eastern influences of its namesake Cotswolds address; and the graphic pomegranate embroidery of ‘Anar Trellis’ fabric is a daring reinterpretation of Ottoman motifs. Alongside the ‘Cotswolds Manor’ collection sits the playful ‘Domino Weave’ – a selection of jacquards inspired by 18th-century game pieces. Even when paying homage to the time-honoured, however, Zoffany’s forward-thinking ethos remains strong. As well as fabric and wallpaper, a paint collection of cleverly rendered ‘True Matt’ shades provides a sophisticated base layer with a focus on sustainability and longevity. Zoffany also looks to form the masterpieces of the future, with designs created alongside alumni of the Royal College of Art, including illustrator Ruth Blanke and artist Sam Wilde. As befits bastions of British design, Zoffany dreams up and manufactures all wallcoverings in the UK. No finishing touch is too elaborate in the quest to refine (and, indeed, redefine) countryhouse aesthetics – hand-embroidered fabrics, decadently textured wallpaper and rich colourways are all utilised to great effect. From the elegantly understated to the strikingly audacious, Zoffany’s designs embody all that is bold and brilliant about British style $ For more information, visit zoffany.sandersondesigngroup.com

Opposite: the ‘Chintz’ and ‘Grand Paisley’ designs. This page, clockwise from top: ‘Avalonis’ fabric and wallpaper; ‘Avalonis’ and ‘Anar Trellis’; vine black/gold ‘Avalonis’; ‘Verdure’ – all from the ‘Cotswolds Manor’ collection THE WORLD OF INTERIORS  ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE

If scenic wallcoverings float your boat, you will find no end of swell options on the horizon. But all at sea over which exactly to navigate towards? Fret not. Miranda Sinclair is here to help you find your fleet with a pick of panoramas, from Ottoman to very shipshape chinoiserie, guaranteed to go down a storm. All hands on decorating tables! Photography: Oskar Proctor

SQUALLPAPERS

swatch From left: ‘Bursa FP625001’, £183 per m, Pierre Frey. Paprika ‘Bengale’, by Manuel Canovas, £82 per 10m roll, Colefax & Fowler. Prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r

From left: ‘Forbidden Fruit’, by Jennifer Shorto, £584 per 3m panel, The Fabric Collective. Cream/nettle ‘Pamir Garden’, £72 per 10m roll, Sanderson ‘Letaba March 119-11046’, £375 per 10m roll, Cole & Son. Prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book r

swatch

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‘Wedding Parade N9021021-001’, by No. 9 Thompson, £76 per m, Fox Linton. Price includes VAT. For supplier’s details see Address Book r swatch

swatch Hand-painted ‘Coutts’, from £1,064 per panel, De Gournay. Scenery painting throughout: Annie Millar. Price includes VAT. For supplier’s details see Address Book $

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CHOP AND CHANGE

For kitchen chef turned knife-maker Hugo Worsley, the pandemic provided an opportunity to hone his craft and chip away at the world’s plastic problem. Melted at first in a modest toastie maker, the marbled handles of these carvers are anything but cheesy. Ariadne Fletcher gets to the point. Photography: Crista Leonard

antennae Opposite: Hugo and his dog Pickle in the studio. Behind, prototypes and finished products hang from homemade racks. Top left: old bottle tops are shredded for melting. Seen from left are handles from Hugo’s batches in order of release. Top right: knives at various stages of manufacture by a forge in Japan; earlier this year, however, Hugo brought production to Sheffield, former centre of the British steel industry, in an effort to make manufacture as sustainable as possible. Not content with breathing new life into waste plastic, Hugo is now trying to help revive what was once a booming local cutlery industry: in 1920 there were over 300 knife-makers in Sheffield but now only five remain. One of these is the fourth-generation cutler who makes the Allday blades. To date, Hugo has sold his knives in drops, which sell out almost as soon as they go live. Each drop is announced through Instagram, and tells the story of the batch’s making. His first featured santoku blades made from old plant pots destined for landfill, rescued from local allotments. The second, another santoku blade, had an alluring blue-marbled handle made out of milk cartons from Abel & Cole, a dairy farm in Wiltshire. Then there were paring knives with handles made with fishing nets gathered from beaches in northern Scotland, resulting in such a rich harvest of waste that he was able to produce three different colour variations. Rather poetically, there has also been a batch of bread knives that repurposed refuse from the east London bakery Dusty Knuckle.

THE PANDEMIC lockdowns of recent years might have driven many of us to cooking to battle the boredom but, in his parents’ shed in rural Norfolk, Hugo Worsley was putting a humble toasted-sandwich maker to different ends.

The chef and former restaurant owner was making magic out of milk bottle tops, developing a method of producing knife handles out of upcycled kitchen plastic waste. Knives have been the tool of Hugo’s trade since he was 19, when he started work as a chef in a hotel kitchen in central London. Despite the intensity of the work – which he describes as ‘a pretty back-breaking experience, I actually vowed never to work in a kitchen again!’ – something about the creativity involved in the catering trade kept him hooked. In 2017, he and Jake Cooper launched their own restaurant, Canard, in south London’s Peckham. Only then was he really struck by the amount of rubbish endemic in the industry: ‘It was crazy the amount of waste coming out of our tiny kitchen!’ Globally, plastic waste is a problem on a monumental scale. The world produces nearly 400 million tonnes of plastic every year, much of which is used in the food sector. It’s estimated that around a third of all plastic packaging is lost from collection systems and ends up polluting the environment; more than 11 million tonnes of it flow into the oceans each year. Hugo was already thinking about how to use the food industry’s plastic when Canard closed, just before Covid-19 devastated the hospitality sector. However, it wasn’t until friends and family started messaging him for advice on where to buy affordable quality kitchen tools that it clicked: ‘The knife just fell into place.’ After his initial experiments with melting bottle tops in his toastie maker, Hugo turned to the internet to find a prototype of a machine to shred and melt plastic. The device he built has travelled with him to the bright, roof-top east London studio where Allday – so called for the everyday, accessible aspirations of the product – has scaled up its operation. Each handle is individually hand-formed and finished here. At first, the blades were made

profile

Hugo’s latest drop, headed for his Kickstarter supporters, will divert 43.2kg of plastic waste from landfill. As he puts it: ‘Taking something from the kitchen and putting it back into a product that you use in the kitchen: there is circularity in that movement. And, on top of that, the knives look great.’ Good enough, indeed, to have enticed Sir Paul Smith – someone he regards as ‘the epitome of British design’ – with whom Hugo is now working on a limited edition of steak knives. The handles will upcycle material from Paul Smith’s retail operation. With many projects in the pipeline, the old toastie machine may have been honourably retired, but the magic is only just getting started $ Prices from £80. For more information, visit alldaygoods.co.uk or Instagram @alldaygoods_

A VINE ROMANCE

This page: ‘Indigo Rose’ is a blue/black tomato. Opposite: harvested at the end of season just before the first frosts, these different varieties were all grown from seed by Tessa Traeger in Devon, some in her greenhouse, some outdoors. The green ones will be kept in the dark to ripen

I DIDN’T EAT tomatoes for years, but then the tomatoes on offer in 1970s and ’80s England were pretty inedible. That texture: slimy and crunchy both; the fact that they were never ripe, always cold, too watery, tasteless. But when I was in my early twenties I went to Argentina to stay with friends who’d built a ranch in Patagonia and were living off the land. For lunch, Kyle would go to the greenhouse and pick one or two tomatoes, slice them open and dress them with salt and olive oil. For her, it was an invitation: help yourself, eat this with bread or cheese and let’s get back out to the river or the hills. To me, it was a revelation. I really mean that. It was a pivotal moment in terms of my relationship with food and understanding of ingredients.

I’d eaten plenty of fruit straight from trees and bushes, but a tomato, still warm and perfectly ripe, was new. These were heirloom varieties that came in an array of colours: deep red, chocolate, dusty pink and rose, golden yellow, bright orange, deep violet, acid green, black. Some had stripes, others might have been tie­dyed; one looked like it had been dipped into a Florentine marbling tray full of swirling inks. Kyle grew tomatoes bigger than grapefruits, others the size of grapes. They came in odd shapes too, with built­in creases and folds, bulges and wrinkles. Many were almost seedless, lots had cores that reached right to their skins. They tasted sensational. Of course. Sweet and tart, both, but more than this, it was the act of eating them and how that made

A handful of perfectly ripe heirloom tomatoes fresh from the greenhouse, a smidgen of salt and oil… For a young Daisy Garnett, visiting South America, it was love at first bite. Years later, she remains as smitten as ever with this most summery of fruits. So what’s the juice? Photography: Tessa Traeger

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But ‘Costoluto Fiorentino’ is a must. It’s the tomato that Rose Gray always made sure was growing in the River Café garden. It was she who first introduced me to bruschetta. She used Tuscan bread, a saltless and chewy sourdough, which she grilled rather than toasted. That was drizzled with good olive oil, then rubbed with a garlic clove, bashed enough to persuade it to give up its juice. She’d halve an overripe, delectable, big and beautiful heirloom tomato and rub the grilled bread with it, pressing the flesh into it to just the right degree. A shower of Maldon salt followed; a grind of pepper was optional; more olive oil was recommended. The first time I ate that, standing over a kitchen counter, the bruschetta served on a wooden board, I thought: well, nothing will ever ever beat this. And nothing ever has $ you feel all over your body that was so transformative and memorable: they were juicy and fleshy and sexy to eat. They made you feel powered up and alive. We ate them standing up, leaning over the wooden kitchen counter, and I still like to serve them on wood, using a chopping board as a plate, their salt and oil and juice about to escape and demanding mopping up. This is how summer tomatoes are eaten best: elementally. Raw. Sliced or squished, with salt and oil and garlic on bread. This is how they are served all over Spain (pan con tomate) and Italy (bruschetta). Nothing beats that. Raw toms with cheese comes close – mozzarella or burrata plus basil, of course, or to balance out a hard sheep or goat’s cheese, or season and sharpen up a slice of cheddar. They are great as a salad with avocado and basil, or finely diced onion and loads of parsley. When I have a glut I cook with them, making raw tomato sauce to eat with pasta or adding them to arborio rice to make a tomato risotto. Marcella Hazan is the go-to for this recipe and I urge you to make it all summer long. Then, when the season is closing and you can pick up tomatoes, overripe and cheap as chips, it’s worth buying a couple of boxes of ‘San Marzanos’ and cooking them down into sauce or purée to store, bottled or frozen, for the months to come.

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mer now, even though you can now buy fantastic heirloom varieties at farmer’s markets and greengrocers. But I love the whole process of cultivating them, from seed to stake – in fact sourcing the seeds is almost my favourite bit. I acquire varieties from Ukraine and Bulgaria, Amish country in the USA or the Black Mountains. I beg American friends to order the Baker Creek catalogue every year (check out the website) and forward it to me, though it often gets stuck, I’ve noticed, with my middleman.

Kyle sent me back to England with brown envelopes of seeds, but I didn’t sow them then. I didn’t have my own garden and didn’t know how to grow anything. But I plant toms every sum-

Top right: the display here – a croquembouche of ‘Gardener’s Delight’ and ‘Goldwin’ tomatoes, if you will – was shown in the Great Pavilion at Chelsea by Medwyns of Anglesey, a 12 times gold medal winner

Italy, of course, is the land of the tomato, but in terms of seeds, you want less than you’d think because many of its varieties are less suited to our climate (though that, as we know, is changing).

Top left: this salad shows almost the full spectrum of heirloom varieties.

1 5 6 7 8 9 2 3 4 1 Small cutting board, $32, Fredericks & Mae. 2 ‘Lai’ walnut set, by Marie-Rose Kahane, £420 approx, Yali. 3 Long oak board, by Forge Creative, £59, Toast. 4 ‘Adam’ marble board, £37, Broste. 5 ‘Stone’ marble board, £110, Tom Dixon. 6 Cutting board, by Thomas Lissert, £84 approx, Kiosk 48th. 7 ‘American’ end-grain chopping board, £195, The Wooden Chopping Board Company. 8 Olive-wood board, by Naturally Med, £25, John Lewis. 9 Recycled-plastic chopping board, £117, Otra-Vida. All prices include VAT. For suppliers’ details see Address Book $ Which chopping boards are the best things since sliced bread? David Lipton cuts to the chase table

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The images conjured in fabric historian Sylvia Houghteling’s beautiful book evoke the atmospheric opening scenes of a Bollywood period drama. The textiles are the leading actors, each with their own role to play in the grand spectacle of Mughal court life. Since most new volumes on Indian textiles have tended to be the catalogues of individual collections or exhibitions, The Art of Cloth in Mughal India offers readers something altogether more compelling. Drawing on a superb range of material, including unpublished court inventories and contemporary texts, Houghteling weaves a lively and comprehensive tale of the production, circulation and sensory experience of textiles during the age of the Great Mughals (1550-1700).

Indian stunners, tales from the riverbank books

In the final chapters, the author travels beyond Mughal borders to the textile workshops of Machilipatnam on the southeastern coast, the main port of the sultanate of Golconda. Every year, the emperor sent a trusted agent there to handle his special commission to supply painted-cotton tent linings. The journey ends somewhat unexpectedly in Britain, where Houghteling discovers the same chint cloth –which entered the English language as ‘chintz’ – in grand houses, transformed into bedroom hangings. The book draws to a close with a reflection on the strong impact of South Asian textiles on British visual culture. This stunning publication is marred only by the poor quality of some of the photographs taken by the author in the Government Museum of Bikaner, but her first-hand experience of the fabrics and the spaces they inhabited is delightfully apparent. A remarkable aesthetic sensitivity permeates her erudite research in this superb account of the lives and meanings of Mughal textiles

$ EMILY HANNAM is curator of South Asia at the British Museum and author of ‘Splendours of the Subcontinent: Four Centuries of Paintings and Manuscripts from the Indian Subcontinent’ (Royal Collection Trust) r From top left: a hand-painted cotton floor-spread fragment, 17th-century; Prince with a Falcon, c1600, watercolour, ink and gold on paper; a silk-and-lampas woven panel depicting Safavid courtiers leading Georgian captives, mid-16th-century

The textile industry formed the second largest sector of the Mughal economy after agriculture; thanks to the relative stability of the political landscape, fabrics travelled quickly and easily throughout the empire and across its borders. The vast geographical span and diversity of Mughal cloth, as well as its wide-ranging uses, may explain why this important book has not been written before. It is a complex task, but one the author accomplishes with a clever, largely chronological structure that begins at the centre of empire and, chapter by chapter, moves to its farthest-flung reaches. Houghteling opens by describing in intimate detail the garments worn by members of the imperial family: from semi-translucent jamas of the finest Bengal cotton, cinched at the waist with silk sashes from Gujarat, to pashmina shawls of the softest Kashmiri goat’s hair. We encounter robes of honour sent to high-ranking officials in far-off provinces, including what is thought to be the earliest extant example: a coat of dense Safavid silk sent to the raja of Bikaner with an irate letter demanding his immediate return to court. Houghteling explores elaborate palace furnishings, as well as the ‘textile architecture’ of mobile camp cities. She describes how deep-pile carpets from Lahore created floral meadows underfoot and how the metal-wrapped threads of velvet wall-hangings glimmered in dimly lit, sultry interiors.

THE ART OF CLOTH IN MUGHAL INDIA (by Sylvia Houghteling; Princeton University Press, rrp £50)

The Doves affair, one of the many ‘hidden histories’ recounted in this stunningly illustrated book, is a relatively recent episode in the Thames’s millennia-long history as a vessel for the cast-off possessions of everyday Londoners. Once the domain of ragged Victorian waifs scrabbling for pennies and coal in the mire, each low tide now brings a more leisurely breed of ‘mudlarks’ in wellingtons and kneepads, who methodically scour the foreshore for objects as distant in time as neolithic flint tools and Georgian wig curlers.

Mudlarking is not the precise archeology of gridlines and trenches, but a rather more accidental science in which the river decides what to reveal to those who care to look, washing back with each passing tide the anaerobic sludge that has held a brass thimble or Tudor shoe in its dark embrace. As the author observes, it ‘can therefore become a redemptive act, aiding the creation of a people’s history, the river’s waters helping to fill the gaps in the stories we tell ourselves about the past’. Such stories can be found in items as humble as a bone hairpin last held by a captive Roman ornatrice as she saw to her mistress’s coiffure. The leering face imprinted on the neck of a Bartmann stoneware jug assumes a more sinister air upon learning that in the 16th and 17th centuries such receptacles were sometimes filled with urine, pins, hair and herbs to ward off the effects of witchcraft. A worn paisa coin, meanwhile, evokes the poignant history of the lascars, or sailors, who were brought over on East India Company ships and often turned out on to the harsh streets of London, never to return home. My own best mudlarking find is a Medieval badge from the shrine of Saint Alban, a rare and precious connection to a stranger who inhabited this city some 600 years before me. What other stories the river has still to tell, only time and tide will reveal $ ALIETTE BOSHIER is a mudlark and writer books

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From left: a halfpenny stamped ‘Votes for Women’ to raise awareness for the Suffragette cause, c1910; an oil lamp, AD70-140

MUDLARK’D: HIDDEN HISTORIES FROM THE RIVER THAMES (by Malcolm Russell; Thames & Hudson, rrp £25) In 1911, the bookbinder Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, locked in an interminable feud with his former business partner, resolved to tip the whole of their celebrated Doves printing type over the side of Hammersmith Bridge, declaring in his journal, ‘May the river in its tides and flow pass over them to and from the great sea for ever… untouched of other use.’ By January 1917, he’d consigned it all to the Thames. A century or so later, the designer Robert Green succeeded in salvaging enough of these minute metal slivers from the riverbed to recreate in digital format what had once been thought lost to the water for good.

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AESTHETE’S LIBRARY books

CLIENT

BILLY BALDWIN was the very model of a modern master decorator. A brilliant tastemaker faultlessly attired in elephant-grey flannel suits, he also never forgot any morsel of praise and never forgave any slight. Who else but that touchy Baltimore native, influential to America’s elite over the three decades following World War II, would have devoted a chapter of a decorating memoir to clients he referred to as ‘thorns in my crown’? The trying individuals included what is surely movie star Henry Fonda’s Venetian fourth wife – her identity so thinly veiled that one is amazed she didn’t sue for libel – who called on Baldwin to redecorate her newlyweds abode and then admitted, with pride, that she took his meticulously calculated MY HELL

Unlike the anodyne blather of many contemporary decorators’ coffee-table books, Billy Baldwin Remembers (1974) hums with candid anecdotes and a settling of scores with boorish patrons. But, writes Mitchell Owens, his eye – honed by decades as tastemaker to America’s elite – was just as sharp as his tongue specifications to a shopkeeper who realised them on the cheap. ‘At least she’s honest,’ Baldwin remembers thinking. Many decorating books today tend to be vanity publications devised largely as marketing vehicles, and so, anodyne to read. Baldwin’s volumes have a sharper edge. As his mentor and long-term boss Ruby Ross Wood, no slouch in the zinger department herself, once observed: ‘Billy is small, but his stinger is deep.’ The Fonda story can be found in Billy Baldwin Remembers (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), a memoir of a life aesthetic that is a minor work of art itself, incorporating a jazzily designed cover, interiors photography by Horst P. Horst, chapter openers the colour of Easter eggs, and endpapers made of the Matisse-inspired tree print that Baldwin

Top: Baldwin altered the scheme of one of his Manhattan apartments every few years. Here a magnolia-green moment in the 1940s enhances the chinoiserie lacquer screen. Above: the cover of Billy Baldwin Remembers echoed the Art Deco revival of the era, from its silver ground to the title’s font

(1903-1983) developed with his one-time lover, wallpaper guru Woodson Taulbee. It is a chronological tale that takes our hero from 1920s Baltimore, where the Princeton University drop-out was a deb’s delight, to 1970s Manhattan, by which time he had become anointed ‘dean of American interior decorators’.

In the 1950s, Baldwin dressed the Manhattan living room of (then) Harper’s Bazaar fashion editor Diana Vreeland as a ‘garden in hell’, deploying a fiery Persian-style floral design found at Colefax & Fowler

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Other chapters record Baldwin’s lively experiences as a young man making his way in the world and in various projects, such as a sugar plantation near Havana for a woman of ‘celebrated ill repute’ and a campy escape in Jamaica for snowbird Americans. He recalls participating in the London stage production of The Reluctant Debutante, when the producer’s wife, the reliably dyspeptic but paralysingly chic Kitty Miller, told him to stop counting pennies and ‘go and buy the prettiest real nineteenth-century Regency stool you can find, and to hell with the actors’. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis makes notable appearances, as does Greta Garbo. The actress quixotically asked Baldwin to paint her bedroom the colour of candlelight glowing through a tiny purple silk lampshade. It was, he writes, ‘a feat for which we deserved a Nobel prize’. Billy Baldwin Remembers cannot aspire to that honour – it is a book about decorating, after all – but does deliver lasting pleasures. It also offers a satisfying template for what more design books should aspire to be: varied in subject matter, individual in art direction and, ultimately, blessed with engaging narrative, stories fully told and with candour. A room is more than its furnishings, and Baldwin keeps that at the forefront: ‘The human element counts most of all’ $

Baldwin’s life had begun to unravel by then, due to incometax irregularities, so other streams of revenue were being explored, from a furniture range of classic good looks but middling success to books. In this one, his second, he takes the measure of a decorating world that was smaller and more intimate, before design centres or name-branded collections of home wares existed. It is more meandering album than DIY guide, though ideas are rampant. Here one can read a lecture that he delivered at the Parsons School of Design in 1950, an examination, with sketches and floor plans and detailed schemes, of a living room that he created inside a converted stable.

UNTIL 10 SEPT BLUE MOUNTAIN SCHOOL, CHANCE ST, LONDON E2 THE AGE OF THE BEAKER. This simple container has existed for as long as humans have been using tools – for food, water and even as funeral urns. Over the past two years, Steve Harrison has been exploring its humble form and evolution. Filmmaker Jack McGoldrick put the potter in conversation with food writer Nigel Slater, who dreamed up recipes in response to the forms and glazes of Harrison’s vessels. Showcasing the ceramicist’s work, the exhibition has plenty to pore over. Details: bluemountain.school $

1 Michael A. Cummings, Josephine Baker & Trio, 2000; 2 Mary Maxtion, Log Cabin variation, c1944; both Festival of Quilts, the NEC, 18-21 Aug.

1 3 2 BE INSPIRED BY LIGHT 40 YEARS OF LIGHTING HOUSES

Auctions, antique fairs and diverting activities, chosen by Ariadne Fletcher

18-21 AUG THE NEC, NORTH AVE, MARSTON GREEN, BIRMINGHAM FESTIVAL OF QUILTS. Acclaimed quilter Michael A. Cummings is well known for bright works that explore African-American culture and history. To this annual event, he’ll be bringing ‘Translations: Trans-Atlantic and Other Journeys’, a series depicting a range of important Black historical figures, from James Baldwin to Josephine Baker. Plus, with workshops, talks, lectures and more than 200 specialist craft retailers on offer, there’ll be much to satisfy your other quilty pleasures. Details: thefestivalofquilts.co.uk.

3 Steve Harrison, ‘Evolution Beaker No. 4’, Blue Mountain School, until 10 Sept

SERIOUS pursuits

19 AUG-14 SEPT VARIOUS LOCATIONS HOSPITAL ROOMS. Art gallery Hauser & Wirth is set to host a major exhibition and auction to raise money and awareness for this arts and mental-health charity. Featuring new installations by artists such as Mark Titchner and Michelle Williams Gamaker, the exhibition will result in an online and inperson auction on 14 SEPTEMBER. Lots include artwork and immersive experiences. Details: hospital-rooms.com.

The Greek island of Hydra has many faces: not just rich in rugged Aegean beauty, it has also captivated dozens of creative types, from Patrick Leigh Fermor to Leonard Cohen. To trace the history of this glamorous island, Josh Hickey and Applied Research have created a site-specific bookstore in the Historical Archives Museum of Hydra, where Hickey will be hosting literary ‘happenings’ in the bookstore every Friday in SEPTEMBER and OCTOBER. These will include appearances by contemporary writers such as Polly Samson, readings, guest art-book curation and the launch of the literary journal Bibliotech. Details: instagram @hydrabookclub.

26-28 AUG JUPITER ARTLAND, BONNINGTON HOUSE STEADINGS, WILKIESTON, EDINBURGH JUPITER RISING. Springing from a partnership between the Scottish contemporary-art mecca and the Edinburgh Art Festival, this event is preparing for take-off just outside the capital. Over the weekend, you’ll have the chance to camp within the gorgeous grounds of the sculpture park itself. With live music, film, talks, workshops, feasting and wild swimming, this cultural extravaganza promises to be out of this world. Details: jupiterrising.art.

In addition to the ‘in’ event at the Exhibition Centre, Maison&Objet Paris will also host ‘off’ events across various showrooms during Paris Design Week, as well as virtual ‘on’ events, accessible online via the MOM digital platform and the Maison&Objet Academy.

Clockwise from left: the ‘Lustre Too Funky’ lamp, designed by Maison Pouenat; the ‘Visual Stairwell’ by Cécile Mathieu frames the ‘Nine Ijff’ table by Polspotten; this array of tactile sculptures includes the cerulean Polspotten ‘Pixel Pillar’; the blue coffee table is by Pulpo

Let’s be Sensible

Once again this year, Maison&Objet Paris is sure to provide so much more than a trade fair: it’s set to be a design mecca that realises the promise of ‘Meta Sensible’, encouraging guests to explore unique sensory experiences and tap into tomorrow’s trends.

As well as proffering a feast for the eyes and hands, with provocative artisan pieces and a miscellany of tactile materials, there’s certain to be much food for thought, with a range of different events come September.

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TWO YEARS encased within four walls is more than enough to dull the senses. For its September 2022 edition, Maison&Objet Paris invites visitors to step into a world between the sensible and the simulated – a world that seeks to explore how interiors can strike at the heart of how we use our physical faculties to make connections and build meaning. It’s a fact: the times in which we’re living have sparked both a yearning for a secure tether to the material world, and an insatiable appetite for digital living, free from all physical ties. Maison&Objet Paris answers this call for compromise with the mantra of its new edition: ‘Meta Sensible’. Coined by Vincent Grégoire from the Nelly Rodi agency, this theme paints a picture of a physical world that is no longer in opposition with its digital counterpart – instead, richly intertwining, even merging, to create an exciting new design landscape.

Hybridisation is here to stay, so whether you’re logging on or turning up, don’t miss this chance to transform the way you feel at home $ For more information, visit maison-objet.com

MAISON&OBJET’S SYNAESTHETIC NEW EDITION, THEMED AROUND THE WORLD’S REBOOTED RELATIONSHIP WITH STIMULUS AND CYBERSPACE, PROMISES TO BRING YOU TO YOUR SENSES

The ‘Car Park’ collection, a captivating curation of hand-knotted rugs by Dutch-based studio Odd Matter, is inspired by the unexpected patterns left behind in the sand by vehicle tyres. Made of 90 per cent wool and 10 per cent silk, it is customisable in size and colour. CC-Tapis, 10 Piazza Santo Stefano, 20122 Milan (00 39 02 8909 3884; cc-tapis.com).

Busola Evans chooses the best merchandise and events worldwide

Wallcovering specialist Phillip Jeffries’s new collection, ‘Japonaise’, takes its cue from Japanese form and function. ‘Gilded Garden’, one of ten new designs, is a homage to the country’s rich landscape, featuring metallic detailing and artfully composed leaves. Phillip Jeffries, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7351 3333; phillipjeffries.com) $

What the ‘Stellage 52’ armchair by Ceccotti Collezioni may lack in size, it certainly makes up for in design stealth. Back after 70 years, the new version respectfully upgrades the original, with metal brackets remodelled to stabilise the leather upholstery. Ceccotti Collezioni, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 8067 2123; ceccotticollezioni.it).

The new nomadic lamps from Atelier Alain Ellouz’s ‘Edition’ collection explore the richness and versatility of alabaster. In ‘Gama’, ‘Lyra’, ‘Mona’ and ‘Athena’, light traverses the material’s deeply ingrained patterns, with brilliantly tempestuous results. Atelier Alain Ellouz, 17 Rue des Jonnières, 91570 Bièvres, France (00 33 1 73 95 03 20; atelier-alain-ellouz.fr).

Luxury brassware maker Armac Martin has been recognised for its success overseas with a Queen’s Award for Enterprise in International Trade. This fourth-generation family business has produced over 41 hardware collections, each available in 23 finishes. Armac Martin, 160 Dollman St, Birmingham B7 4RS (0121 359 4821; armacmartin.co.uk).

network

Landmark Industrial Kitchen Mixer in Urban Brass samuel-heath.com @samuelheathofficial Showroom at Design Centre Chelsea Harbour Handmade in England

ADDRESS book

Annie Millar. Ring 07836 527804, or visit anniemillar.co.uk. Birdie Fortescue, 4 Clipbush Business Park, Hawthorn Way, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8SX (01328 851651; birdiefortescue.co.uk). Broste. Ring 00 45 36 390 300, or visit brostecopenhagen.com. Cole & Son, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7376 4628; cole-and-son.com). Colefax & Fowler, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7351 0666; colefax. com). De Gournay, 112 Church St, London SW3 (020 7352 9988; degournay. com). The Fabric Collective, 9 Langton St, London SW10 (020 7384 2975; thefabriccollective.com). Fenton & Fenton. Visit fentonandfenton.com. au. Fox Linton. Ring 020 7368 7700, or visit foxlinton.com. Fredericks & Mae. Visit fredericksandmae.com. Henry Wilson. Ring 00 61 2 9159 3963, or visit studiohenrywilson.com. Hermès, 155 New Bond St, London W1 (020 7499 8856; hermes.com). John Lewis. Ring 0345 610 0336, or visit johnlewis.com. Kiosk 48th. Visit kiosk48th.com. The Lacquer Company. Ring 020 7460 9599, or visit thelacquercompany.com. Liberty, Regent St, London W1 (020 3893 3062; libertylondon.com). Matches Fashion, 5 Carlos Place, London W1 (020 3907 8590; matchesfashion.com). Must Have Bins. Ring 020 3744 2384, or visit musthavebins.co.uk. Nina Campbell, 9 Walton St, London SW3 (020 7225 1011; ninacampbell.com). Olivine Design. Ring 020 3409 0600, or visit olivinedesign.com. Otra-Vida. Visit otra-vida.co. uk. Oyoy Living Design. Visit oyoylivingdesign.co.uk. Pentreath & Hall, 17 Rugby St, London WC1 (020 7430 2526; pentreath-hall.com). Pierre Frey, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 7376 5599; pierrefrey. com). Ralph Lauren Home, 1 New Bond St, London W1 (020 7535 4600; ralphlauren.co.uk). Sanderson. Visit sanderson.sandersondesigngroup. com. Schumacher, Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, London SW10 (020 4532 0960; fschumacher.co.uk). Selfridges, 400 Oxford St, London W1 (0800 123400; selfridges.com). Smith & Goat. Ring 07385 184835, or visit smithandgoat.co.uk. Soho Home. Ring 020 3819 8199, or visit sohohome. com. Sophia Enjoy Thinking. Ring 00 30 21 0360 6930, or visit sophia.com.gr. Studio Hausen. Ring 00 49 40 9825 9407, or visit studiohausen.com. Toast. Ring 0333 400 5200, or visit toa.st. Tom Dixon, 4-10 Bagley Walk Arches, Coal Drops Yard, London N1 (020 3848 6199; tomdixon.net). Vaughan. Ring 020 7349 4600, or visit vaughandesigns.com. The Wooden Chopping Board Company. Ring 0330 001 0318, or visit woodenchoppingboards.co.uk. Yali. Ring 00 39 041 296 0190, or visit yaliglass.com $ Soft grey ‘Chinoiserie Moderne’ wallpaper, £245 per m, Schumacher. Price includes VAT. For the full story, see page 28

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THE INTERIORS INDEX The Interiors Index is The World of Interiors’ definitive online directory of shops, galleries and services. Find specialists whose ethos of quality and style mirrors that of the magazine itself. worldofinteriors.co.uk/interiors-index

We imagine the very thought of Manhattan – that throbbing metropolis and the next stop on our itinerary – must jangle Pejrone’s nerves rather. And yet we dare say he’d feel right at home in the philanthropist Deeda Blair’s eyrie overlooking the East River, where the lunches are legendary and the flower displays never less than luxuriant. Over in Paris, or rather its peripheries, ceramicist Alice Gavalet shows a charmingly child-like appreciation of primitive form and primary colour in her work and billet. No silk tablecloths hand-painted to mimic 18th-century papier peint here! Nor indeed in Palermo’s Palazzo delle Poste, a temple to Futurism. Where that was characterised by geometric rigour and rationalism, the late Ann Getty’s Russian Hill house was pure, unadulterated, exhilarating opulence. Christian Bérard – sybaritic subject of our last visit – would surely have relished painting it with his gouaches.

This month, more than any other, each of the people we drop in on possesses – or possessed – quite singular vision. Which is, of course, exactly as it should be in this, a Style Issue. But oh how thrillingly different those visions are, or were. Take first that great avant-gardiste Nicolas Ghesquière, whose home in a wing of a hôtel particulier in the Marais bows to both Jacob, the master menuisier, and Stanley Kubrick. Where else, we ask, might you find a Stormtrooper’s helmet flanked by a pair of Neoclassical gilt candlesticks? Not in the esteemed gardener Paolo Pejrone’s lovingly restored ancestral home in Piedmont, that’s for certain. As you’d expect, it is a much more poetic proposition, a place where outdoor lighting is banned, so that night-time visitors must navigate their way by moonlight.

VI ITOR ’ BOOK

When the designer Nicolas Ghesquière buys a wing of an 18th-century Paris hôtel particulier you know not to expect anything in the least conventional. True to form, having charmed architect Valerio Olgiati into joining his mission, fashion’s great adventurer embarked on reminagining it with marble, museum-worthy pieces by the Memphis Group and a soupçon of Stanley Kubrick. The result, writes Hamish Bowles, is a sleek shrine to design – and, with its sci-fi touches, an exploration of space in more ways than one. Photography: Matthieu Salvaing

MAISON ACCOMPLISHED

Opposite: in the entrance hall of Nicolas Ghesquière’s Paris flat, a Shohei Mihara lamp hangs above a Peter Sorel photograph and a chair by Ettore Sottsass. This page: atop Eileen Gray tables in the first salon are flowers by Louis-Géraud Castor, leading the eye outside. Sittings editor: Hamish Bowles

Above: Robert Mapplethorpe’s Snakeman hangs above a helmet that Ghesquière found in Hollywood. Of the masks throughout his flat, the designer observes that ‘they are like totems of our time, in a way. They don’t carry any ethnicity; they carry stories of movies.’ Right: in the study, a wall light by Kazuhide Takahama hangs over a cabinet by Pascal Mourgue. The photograph is by Collier Schorr, while the fruitbearing hostess trolley in the kitchen beyond is by Shiro Kuramata

Through a friend, Ghesquière discovered a two-storey wing hidden away at the back of one of those mansions’ courtyards. With its elegant rooms opening on to a secret garden shaded from neighbours’ views by a dense Douanier Rousseau planting of palm trees and ferns, the place had more of the atmosphere of a grand provincial gentleman’s residence than a Parisian flat. One of the building’s former incumbents, the designer Paloma Picasso, had installed some high-style touches of her own, notably an extraordinary antique canvas painted with a gutsy damask design that she hung in the first of two drawing rooms. ‘What’s beautiful in these places,’ notes Ghesquière, ‘are the memories of someone that was there before. You feel their story and their taste or their personal point of view – and wow, that tapestry made me crazy!’

Top left: a piece of Japanese pottery rests on a table by Ineke Hans in the garden. Top right: in the kitchen, a pair of chairs designed by Masaki Morita sit either side of a Philippe Starck table, with a Gino Sarfatti pendant lamp overhead. Glimpsed on the gilded countertop is an Ettore Sottsass vase

Ghesquière installed a miscellany of treasured furniture that has followed him hither and yon, from a brace of ciselé-velvet Knole sofas to masterworks by the titans of the Memphis movement.Prized photographs by Irving Penn,RichardAvedon,Robert Mapplethorpe and Jean-Paul Goude survey the scene. He lived in the house for a year before he decided, on the cusp of the pandemic, to reimagine the upper floor, then configured as two bedrooms and a small sitting room.‘They were very charming,’he concedes,‘but then I started thinking of how it could be interesting to start this project – to put the 2020 touch to this place.And it’s where the good trouble started!’

FOR LOUIS VUITTON’S spring 2018 collection, Nicolas Ghesquière, the brand’s artistic director since 2013, married late 18th-century courtly frock coats with state-of-the-art trainers for a characteristically fast-paced presentation in the Pavillon de l’Horloge at the Louvre. ‘I thought anachronism was interesting,’ he told Vogue at the time. This collision of eras has defined Ghesquière’s work since he first emerged as the wunderkind at the design helm of Balenciaga in 1997. Grafting the sculptural midcentury shapes of that house’s founder, Cristóbal Balenciaga, on to his own futuristic and zeitgeist-facing ideas, he reshaped the fashion world. ‘I love to refer to history,’ he explains, ‘to try to mimic the grandeur of beautiful costumes and elements but at the same time I also adore to move, to look forward. It’s like a retro future vision – a new generation and new elements of culture coming together.’ As his new Parisian house manifests, for Ghesquière the thrill of time travel extends to his living environments too. ‘I like when places are surprising,’ he says, ‘a home that has a patchwork of sensations when you go from one room to another.’ Before the pandemic, the protean designer was living in the comfortably bourgeois eighth arrondissement. ‘It was a moment in my life where I wanted to feel almost like a visitor in Paris,’ he explains. But that moment passed, and Ghesquière felt, like so many, that it was instead ‘time to look for a sanctuary’. Twenty years ago, he had lived in Paris’s storied Marais; now, he wanted to return. Its warren of Medieval streets and stately 17th- and 18th-century squares and city mansions had miraculously been spared Baron Haussmann’s wrecking ball in the late 19th century, conserving myriad remarkable refuges.

Ghesquière’s study in particular is a temple to design with chairs and a cabinet by Shiro Kuramata, a Carlo Scarpa centre table and, on that, a Jean-Michel Wilmotte lamp. A ‘Rocketeer’ mask keeps a close watch on an ‘E1027’ table by Eileen Gray and on the Bruce Nauman artworks on the facing wall

Over lunch with Olgiati and Tamara, his wife and fellow architect, Ghesquière explained the project. At first, Olgiati balked at the idea of working on an existing structure and adding to its history. But Ghesquière was persuasive, explaining his own practice with its ‘layers of inspiration. There is a collage,’ he explained, ‘in my creative world.’ A site visit to Paris followed and the architect was intrigued enough to accept the commission. A delighted Ghesquière would consign his building’s entire upper floor to his intervention. His brief was to have room for his clothes, a bath and a shower. The rest was carte blanche, although he admits that he did discuss the futuristic bedroom in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with its ‘white lab light floors and the mix of 18thcentury furniture. At some point there’s going to be a science fiction reference,’ he adds playfully. Witness the Star Wars helmets he cherishes (a detail that baffled his grandmother when she first came to visit. ‘What is going on with you?’ she asked him. ‘Why have you put a vacuum cleaner on the mantelpiece?’). In turn, Olgiati asked Ghesquière a few pertinent questions. ‘Do you like to sleep in the dark?’ was one of them. It took a year to develop the concept and source the materials. While the building’s exterior remains untouched, a door in the salon opens to veined-grey-marble stairs, a clue to the transformed enfilade of spaces upstairs entirely panelled in more of that same Portuguese stone. Some panels are arranged like hinged window shutters and, when these are closed, the room takes on the quality of a sarcophagus. It is just as well that Ghesquière does indeed like to sleep in the dark. Now, he enjoys the serenity of the space. ‘I jump from one collection to another,’ he explains. ‘I need this kind of sanctuary, a place that’s really pure – to make sure your ideas can develop without having too many influences.’ In a world where the designer is called upon to make thousands of decisions as he shapes each collection, he also relished ceding the creative process to someone else. ‘It’s very good to let go,’ he says. ‘There was a pact and a trust that was unconditional’ $

The innovative work of the Swiss architect Valerio Olgiati had long drawn Ghesquière’s eye, but he also knew that the former never accepted a residential commission beyond his own dramatic home. Friends, however, suggested to him that a grand architect might be intrigued to work on a smaller and more personal project and that, if he really believed in it, the designer should approach him. As a result, Ghesquière soon found himself in Portugal at Olgiati’s astonishing Villa Allém, a structure that sits in a remote cork-tree grove like a Brobdingnagian cardboard box fashioned from concrete. When he arrived, Ghesquière was awed by the human quality of the Brutalist architecture. ‘It’s like a sanctuary in the middle of nature,’ he observes. ‘There is a wildness about this minimalism. And his house is very, very functional. Olgiati creates those places that are very spiritual in the way that they leave room for imagination, for creativity, for thinking.’

In the salon, chairs designed by Maurizio Peregalli face each other across a Zanotta table. The various vessels between them are desgned by Angelo Mangiarotti. The designer Paloma Picasso, a former owner of the flat, was responsible for installing the antique damask wall covering, painted on canvas

A pair of ‘Apple’ chairs by Shiro Kuramata flank a ‘Demistella’ console table by Ettore Sottsass. Seen guarding a Pompadour fireplace in the adjoining room is the Stormtrooper helmet that Ghesquière’s grandmother mistook for a vacuum cleaner

Above: this salon’s two Knole sofas and floral carpet have followed Ghesquière here from several previous homes. The coffee tables in the centre are from Knoll. Seen through the left-hand door is another Kuramata piece – a ‘Pyramid’ chest of drawers, designed for Cappellini in 1968. The standard lamps reflected in one of the infinity mirrors are by Hans Hollein, while the vase is an Olivier Gagnère number. Opposite: a door in this salon opens to grey Portuguese marble stairs, the first indication of architect Valerio Olgiati’s intervention. The material, as Ghesquière puts it, ‘feels very alive’

This page, clockwise from top left: the windows can be sealed with panels of the same marble, tested thousands of times at the maker’s for safety before they were installed; two Louis Vuitton first-aid trunks appear to peer out from a ledge in the adjacent shower room; the view from the bathroom to the bedroom area. The mirrored screen is by Pierre Charpin, the 1970s ‘Oba Q’ floor light is by Kuramata and the bedside table lamp is by Muuto; Ghesquière conceived the aquarium-style closet, which was executed by Rimadesio. The ladder-back chair is a re-edition of one of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s designs for Hill House. Opposite: a Donald Judd chair sits alongside a bath of the same marble as the walls and inset floor

The bedroom in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey inspired Ghesquière to team a pair of Louis XVI chairs – signed Georges Jacob –with a mohair velvet-covered marble bench, a Martinelli floor lamp and yet another highly collectible piece by Shiro Kuramata, this time a cabinet

THE FLORAL HIGH GROUND

On a mountainside in Piedmont, esteemed gardener Paolo Pejrone has created his own slice of paradise, one that eschews all pesticides. Comprising olive groves, a vegetable plot and swathes of rare plants, the land – heavily influenced by the owner’s horticultural heroes – is attached to the family’s ancestral farmhouse, lovingly restored by him in the 1990s. Here the octogenarian, surrounded by animals, lives in splendid isolation. Text: Marella Caracciolo Chia. Photography: Oberto and J. Atti Gili

Opposite: a view of the vegetable garden as seen from a large 150-year-old oak tree. To the right is a large stone cistern of water nourished by a source that runs its course into smaller rivulets and tanks inhabited by red fish, toads and frogs. This page: the main feature of the so-called ‘red living room’ is a collection of etchings, c1830, of large trees by HW Burgess. The rug is Turkish Ushak. Sittings editor: Marella Caracciolo Chia

Il Bramafam owes its name to a 15th-century military outpost whose foundations are still visible at the far side of the garden. There lie the olive groves that produce the estate’s celebrated oil. ‘As a child,’ he muses, ‘this place was my refuge.’ Unlike the gloomy old family palazzo in the small town of Revello, a short walk down the mountain, Il Bramafam teemed with life, animals and rural activities. By the time Pejrone inherited it in the early 1990s, however, the setting had lost most of its rustic charm: the building’s vaulted rooms had become crammed with rusty

PAOLO PEJRONE has a habit of stepping out into his garden at Il Bramafam, a rural estate perched on a mountainside overlooking the Po Valley, for late-night strolls. Outdoor lighting is banned because, as he tells occasional visitors who stumble behind him along the intersecting paths carved into the coast of the peak, darkness trains the eye for structure. ‘Besides, moon rays and fireflies are more than enough!’

Pejrone’s life as a gardener began one snowy day in January of 1970. A restless, dissatisfied 30-year-old architect with a secret passion for plants, he had heard Russell Page was in town planning the Agnellis’ garden down the road from his parents’ home in Turin. He landed himself an invitation to pass by and meet the master gardener in person. But Page, who was 65 and at the height of his career, had no time for him: he was too immersed in studying the grounds. ‘A sudden snowstorm finally forced him indoors,’ Pejrone recalls, ‘so I gathered all my courage and introduced myself.’ During that first conversation Pejrone opened his heart to the enigmatic, reserved, monumental Page and told him about his secret longing to become a gardener, a career that was frowned on by his family as eccentric. ‘Russell’s words that afternoon and his generous wisdom,’ Pejrone recalls, ‘changed my destiny.’ A few weeks later, having left his job at an architectural studio in Turin, he flew to London where Page whisked him into the UK’s horticultural scene, taking him to the Chelsea Flower Show, introducing him to French botanist Roger de Vilmorin as well as grand British garden owners and allowing him the rare privilege of working as an apprentice in his studio. That stint proved to be brief but seminal.

On one recent late spring visit, however, the 82-year-old Pejrone, surrounded by a motley crew of dogs, hens and roosters, was inspecting the garden’s blooms in broad daylight. ‘Look,’ he said with a squeal of joy, pointing to a camellia so rare it has never been named, ‘it is drenched in flowers!’ Whether in moonbeams or sunlight, Pejrone’s horticultural creation in Piedmont mixes the primitive energy of an oasis with a minute discernment and a rare talent to create, through colours, textures and scents, a personal narrative: ‘This garden is my life,’ he says. ‘Every plant holds the memory of a voyage or a deep friendship.’

Page’s intellectual complexity and spiritual curiosity, coupled with a love for even the humblest of plants, lie at the core of Pejrone’s own gardening ethos. But unlike his mentor, who famously never owned a garden (‘in his backyard in Springfield Road he grew a parterre of violets – and that was it!’), Pejrone has dedicated much of his life to transforming Il Bramafam’s steep, rocky, barren soil – and the crumbling farmhouse that came with it – into a personal odyssey.

Opposite: in the main living room a cast-iron Danish wood-burning stove towers above a cotto likeness of Ratafià, one of Paolo Pejrone’s many dogs. The marble mastiff to the right is 19th-century Neapolitan. This page: in the studio, behind an armchair whose striped fabric came from Portobello market, a pressed and dried hellebore from Stuart Thornton Botanicals hangs alongside a Baroque Piedmontese door

In the library, the bookcases – 19th-century office furniture from the region – are filled with volumes about gardens and natural history. The owner added the fabric frills as an anti-dust measure. The old piston clock is a family heirloom

Opposite, top: when Il Bramafam was still a farm, this hallway had pressed-earth floors and was used to store carriages. The ceramic rhino, based on Dürer’s, was made by Recuperando in Forte dei Marmi. Bottom: a gigantic cut-out of Umberto II of Savoy, the last king of Italy, reigns over the dining room. This page: copies of 1920s Cecil Pinsent iron chairs sit in the front garden, with a flowering quince prominent

Opposite: looming above euphorbias in the foreground, topiary yew plants pay homage to those Russell Page created as a border for the entrance allée at Villar Perosa, the Agnelli family home in the mountains north of Turin. This page: the walls of this small studio are filled with a collection of mushroom prints. The Piedmontese showcase is filled with curiosities from the natural world: stones, bones, fossils

‘This was my chance to create for myself what I had spent years doing for other people: a natural garden.’ The first step was to transform the decrepit old farmhouse into a home. Despite its size, some 20 rooms on three large floors, the house feels anything but unlived in, even though Pejrone lives here in splendid solitude – except for his dogs, hens, roosters, turtles and a couple of canaries. Every room is filled to the brim with early 19th-century Piedmontese furniture, a style of solemn sobriety, offset by plenty of comfortable sofas and armchairs. Sculptures, paintings and banners bear testimony to the history of the House of Savoy. And if cut flowers from the garden are banned from these interiors (‘They are like children to me – why would I kill them before their time?’ he protests), the floral theme in these rooms is rampant thanks to his collections of botanical drawings and prints.

geas, osmanthus, violets and snowdrops bordering the pathways, is the legacy from the year (1971) he spent in Rio de Janeiro working for Roberto Burle Marx (WoI July 2022).

Il Bramafam is pervaded by the presence of other great gardeners to whom Pejrone was close. The forest of oak trees at the far end of the garden, for example, was a present by Marchesa Lavinia Taverna, the late owner of La Landriana, one of a handful of surviving Russell Page gardens in Italy; some of the rarer clematis in his collection came from Kerdalo, artist and botanist Pierre Wolkonsky’s botanic Shangri-la in Brittany; while the flowering quinces were a gift from Jelena de Belder, the Slovenian/Belgian horticulturist and one of Russell Page’s closest friends and patrons. Memories of the great architects he made gardens for resurface during his wanderings: Tadao Ando, Gae Aulenti, Renzo Piano, to name but a few. These recollections, together with Pejrone’s practical tips, have filled dozens of books that have made him one of Italy’s most beloved garden writers. ‘I am a sentimental gardener,’ he exclaims. Yes, he is, but he’s also a practical one. Which is why the heart of Il Bramafam is the vegetable garden on a terraced area just below the house. He never uses a single gram of pesticide or fertilisers here or anywhere, believing that a beautiful garden is a healthy one. ‘Do you know what I consider the greatest success of my life?’ he asks suddenly as we make our way back home at dusk. ‘The sound of birds, frogs and other wild animals who have made their home here. To welcome nature back in its full splendour: this is what gardening, and life, are really all about, aren’t they?’ $ agricultural machines and the soil was damaged by pesticides.

This eclecticism is echoed outdoors: in the court at the entrance of the property, with its monumental white oleanders and cascades of jasmine and Osmanthus fragrans against the façade; in the grove of Chinese handkerchief trees whose white flowers rustle in the wind; in the clearing for the potted cuttings from Pejrone’s excursions to Europe’s great gardens; and in the romantic seating area beneath an immense 150-year-old oak tree.

If Page’s influence is clear in Pejrone’s no-nonsense approach to space and structure – straight paths, well-defined walls and staircases, geometric water basins, sculpted yew and box topiaries – the taste for what he describes as ‘healthy chaos’, the controlled jumble of Mediterranean aromatics, ferns, hydran-

Opposite: the ‘red bedroom’, for guests, overlooks the main garden. Chunky late 19th- century French beds in walnut are draped in fabrics from Jack Emerson, a company offering ‘the English style in Turin’. Opposite: in the main bathroom, with its laundered pile of Paolo’s gardening clothes, lithographs of early steamships float above a panel of utilitarian tiles and a French clawfoot bath

Anyone invited for a meal chez Deeda Blair might be forgiven for imagining themselves far, far from Manhattan. With her arsenal of classic recipes and magical mises-en-scènes, the philanthropist and socialite turns every lunch, every supper into an excursion, as her new book reveals. Le Petit Trianon? The court of Gustav III? Wherever her fancy ventures, you can be sure she has the right hand-painted silk tablecloth for it. Mitchell Owens savours the unimpeachable taste. Photography: Ngoc Minh Ngo Top: Deeda Blair is framed by an arch in Split in 1966, during a trip to the Dalmatian coast hosted by Charles and Jayne Wrightsman. Opposite: for a Petit Trianon-inspired dinner Blair draped a table in a cloth painted to mimic an 18th-century papier peint. Flowers by Emily Thompson

DEEDA-LICIOUS DEEDA-LECTABLE

DEEDA BLAIR’S life is a carefully examined one. Scientific advances (she has been a mover and shaker in biomedical circles for decades) are parsed. The political scene (her late husband was America’s ambassador to Denmark and the Philippines) is scrutinised. Books (she is a voracious late-night reader of histories and biographies) are appraised. Garments (she was named in the International Best Dressed List in 1965 and elevated to its Hall of Fame in 1970) are refined. Surprisingly, perhaps, one of her hobbies is scrapbooking, though the meticulous elegance of the craftsmanship follows temperamental suit, each one bound in creamy materials with touches of gouache green. ‘They’re largely visual, a painting I’d seen in an exhibition, that kind of thing,’ Blair says. ‘I always like to have something to look at in my hands. During the Covid-19 pandemic, I was glued to MSNBC but mercifully there are long commercials, and I had lots of magazines and catalogues around me for cutting up. I think I bought more Post-Its in those days than ever.’ She adds, thoughtfully: ‘Some people think I don’t take anything as it is, and perhaps they’re right. There is so much sameness in the world.’ Avoiding banality extends into the kitchen as well, though she readily admits she doesn’t cook much herself. A soupçon of cookery courses has flavoured the Chicago native’s domestic CV. The first took place in the 1950s at a Palm Beach kitchen shop called Au Bon Goût, ‘for the most part designed for women who wanted to learn a menu for Thursday or Sunday evenings, their staff’s night out’. A few years later, as a young divorcée sojourning abroad, she took another class. ‘I learned some techniques,’ she explains with a seraphic smile, ‘but I only went five or six times because I was having too much fun doing other things.’

Some 20 of Blair’s favourite dishes appear in Deeda Blair: Food, Flowers and Fantasy, which will be released by Rizzoli in October.

Part memoir and part reverie – ‘It’s meant to be about everything: food, entertaining, travel, life’ – the soigné publication reproduces spreads from Blair’s myriad scrapbooks, beloved botanical illustrations and the tiny geometric patterns that are her signature and made for her use into everything from endpapers to table linens to wallpapers. The book is subdivided into Louis XVI armchairs covered in a Mitchell Denburg linen made in Guatemala flank a vintage ‘Table Royale’ by Maison Jansen in the library of the Manhattan apartment. It is set for a menu sparked by Blair’s friendship with aesthete Rory Cameron and bears a flower display by ZeZé

A repertoire of signature recipes has nonetheless developed over the decades, the result of inspired experimentation, a devotion to standards such as Au Bon Goût’s pounded lamb with Cumberland sauce, childhood memories of ‘growing up in a family that was not indifferent to food’ and working with culinary sidekicks, ranging from intrepid personal cooks to stodgy embassy chefs. ‘I didn’t put on an apron until Bill and I moved to New York from Washington in 2005,’ Blair cheerfully admits, referring to her husband, who died seven years ago. Her latest collaborator is Cristina Rascon, a softly spoken New Yorker who knew little about food when she was hired but who now turns out, among other delights, a faultless asparagus soufflé, in part thanks to eagle-eyed study of Youtube videos.

Upholstered in a Le Manach stripe, 18th-century chairs stamped Gautier surround a table that is swathed in a tablecloth made of sprigged silk and topped with a flower arrangement by Cathy Graham. The setting’s menu honours the late couturier Hubert de Givenchy, Blair’s longtime friend

‘Most women in New York go out and grab a sandwich. Bill and I would try things. That was a benefaction’ $

lilting essays that are linked to menus conjured around various themes, among them a luncheon devised in memory of Hubert de Givenchy, the fashion designer and a close friend, and a dinner sparked by a visit to an Egyptian antiquities exhibition. From iced cauliflower soup to Blair’s adaptation of aesthete Rory Cameron’s version of coronation chicken salad. ‘It is my version of American food, which is largely French, but not French-French.’ That being said, Antonin Carême would have adored the shimmering moulded dessert of green grapes set in white-wine aspic, one of her grandmother’s specialities.

Like many literary projects that had their production challenged by the pandemic, Deeda Blair: Food, Flowers and Fantasy may roam the world in terms of subject matter but photographer Ngoc Minh Ngo went no further afield than the author’s serene Manhattan flat, a jewel box overlooking the East River and decorated with interior designer Daniel Romualdez. Dressed in often fantastically pleated and ruffled skirts, round tables for two or four – the book’s culinary theme is entertaining for a few rather than a crowd – were staged in various spots of the sparsely furnished blue-grey living room, while a vintage Jansen oval ‘Table Royale’ was pressed into service in the nougat-colour library.

Among the many takeaways found in the pages of the book, individualism seems to be the most valuable. ‘We all have to eat three meals a day, so why not make them as interesting as you can?’ Blair says. ‘I think it’s important to keep discovering new things or remembering old things.’ Or, like a recipe she came across by a famous restaurateur, simplifying: ‘It had too many stupid spices.’ She has always liked ‘surprising food’, she says, but her husband issued an edict: never experiment on guests. So she did her tinkering à deux, when he came home for lunch.

‘I’ve never believed in dining rooms – long brown tables and sideboards and stiff brown chairs,’ says Blair, who wrestled with the same during her husband’s postings. In Copenhagen, as the youngest ambassador’s wife in the American diplomatic corps, ‘the chef wasn’t happy if I suggested anything new’. In Manila, Filipino society went in for elaborate buffets where a place card was considered merely a suggestion. ‘It’s just another mode of entertaining,’ she says. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that, but I just couldn’t adapt.’ When the couple moved to Washington, DC in the late 1960s, after Bill Blair was appointed the first general director of the Kennedy Center, they moved into a Billy Baldwindecorated house and largely relied on a single round dining table, shaded by potted ficus trees, around which stood a quartet of 18th-century French side chairs. ‘Here in New York, it’s the same chairs, and the same round table, placed at one end of the living room, and it is covered in one of nine or ten patterned tablecloths, heavily Scotchgard-ed, that hang in a closet,’ she says. ‘They make the room look different, at least to me.’

Opposite: Blair typically serves meals at one end of the living room, here staged for a luncheon channelling memories of Gustav III’s pavilion near Stockholm. A Bennison print was used for the cloth. This page: grapes in wine aspic – a speciality of the host – is served on an Aptware platter

The standard lamp in Alice Gavalet’s sitting room/office is one she made and topped with a shade fashioned from Indian garlands. Her daughter, Susie, coloured the crocodile that looks to be wending its way across the floor. Sittings editor: Florian Daguet-Bresson

PIED A TERRACOTTA

Home for Alice Gavalet is a workshop full of whimsy on the outskirts of Paris, which the ceramicist and her family share with a growing gaggle of kooky, anthropomorphic vessels. With cartoonish forms straight out of her daughter’s books, these feats of clay are a type of child’s play – and highly sought-after. Text: Jean Louis Gaillemin. Photography: Pascal Chevallier

‘I like to start from the idea of a classic vase, then deform it, play with the handles and the motifs to reappropriate it,’ she says. She cuts out her sketches on cardboard to make large templates, which are then turned into red clay slabs on the slab roller; these she later assembles. ‘When the structure begins to dry, I apply my coloured engobes [similar to a slip] and then, after the first firing, I add glazes, trying to play with superimpositions, mixtures of colours and materials, which are all subject to the

Top left: on the studio wall hang paper templates that Gavalet uses to cut out clay slabs, which she then assembles. Top right: a polystyrene plinth zhushed with sequins supports one of her vases. The mirror frame is made of fragments of the same ceramic mounted on metal

ALICE GAVALET has settled in a workshop on the outskirts of Paris, in a park on the banks of the Marne, with her partner, a children’s-book designer, and her daughter. On the walls and tables, drawings and patterns offer clues to her way of working. Having deliberately abandoned the traditional technique of the wheel, she favours drawing, with pencil or coloured pastels, which is the best way for her to unleash her enjoyment of creating.

It is on paper that she imagines the new relationships between the traditional parts of a piece – the foot, the belly, the handles and the neck – which take on their own autonomy, come to life and play with each other. The handles might wrap themselves lovingly around the body, melting into it or breaking away, sometimes even taking on the appearance of a veil draped around it. When reduced to two small circles around the neck, they become the eyes of a primitive idol. When more prominent, the vase almost disappears behind a mask. As for the neck and the foot, imagine them flipped over so that the vase takes on a delightfully clumsy look. Parodies, collages, reinterpretations, automatisms, childishness – Alice Gavalet revels in them all. She draws from the tenets of Surrealism and art brut to assert her creative freedom, far from the usual confines of decorative arts or design. If she uses traditional forms, it is to play with them, camouflage them or send them up.

Immediately above the kitchen’s internal window, an Elizabeth Garouste artwork keeps company with some mermaids drawn by Gavalet’s daughter and two David Rochline crabs. The floor-standing shelf unit, which supports an anthropomorphic vase, was sculpted from polystyrene

mysteries of the firing.’ Asymmetries, dislocations and undulations all have a part to play in accentuating the camouflage–anything to avoid the ‘perfect shape’ so dreaded by the artist. Ornamental motifs then intervene, orthogonal wefts that are sometimes borrowed from textiles such as tartan, or networks of rhombuses, which can exalt the forms but more often blur them. These are naive, primitive marks, sometimes childish, like those borrowed from her daughter’s notebooks. This casual whimsy reveals the anthropomorphic aspect of traditional forms. All it takes is for the belly to wiggle and the handles to follow for the vase to contort itself and sketch out a dance. Asymmetrical, the handles simulate arms, the feet are animated, and a ball on the neck is enough to mimic a head. Her works are ‘little costumed characters who converse with each other’, according to Gavalet, who likes to display them in her exhibitions as if they are participants in a fairground parade. In the studio, finished pieces or works in progress rub shoulders with improvised furniture, frames and lampshades made from cheap but sparkling and playful materials: raffia, Indian garlands made of plastic straws, coloured sequins stitched on polyester. In the entrance of the house, two wall lamps with such garlands surround a gilded-bronze mirror by the designer Elizabeth Garouste, with whom Alice has worked for a dozen years. The two share a creative complicity. The art dealer and curator Florian Daguet-Bresson selected pieces by Gavalet for the Ceramics Now event organised with Raphaëlla Riboud-Seydoux at the Galerie Italienne in June 2021. Their success prompted the gallery to offer her a solo exhibition last March, where these joyful variations on the traditional theme of the vase were presented $ Galerie Italienne, 15 Rue du Louvre, 75001 Paris (galerieitalienne.com; 00 33 9 84 43 87 34)

Top left: in the entrance hall, two metal sconces adorned with Indian plastic garlands orbit an Elizabeth Garouste mirror of gilded wrought iron. Top right: Doudou the rabbit rests on a bedside cabinet in Susie’s bedroom, the wall behind him papered with drawings by her classmates

Gavalet pictured preparing pastry-thin slabs of clay in her studio. Reminiscent of sewing patterns, the templates neatly arranged on the wall behind her offer clues to the primitive shapes that are currently occupying the artist

POSTE MODERN

Tasked with designing a new post office for Palermo, in 1934 Angiolo Mazzoni delivered a first-class example of civic architecture where Classical and contemporary cleverly correspond. While the whole package inspires awe, it’s the Futurist decorations in particular that seal the deal for Michael Webb. Photography: Simon Watson

Above: one of the grandest post offices built in Italy during the fascist era, the Palazzo delle Poste serves as a civic temple on the Sicilian capital’s main street. Opposite: behind the imposing colonnade is a shady portico formerly occupied by a memorial to the fallen soldiers of World War I, now ignominiously consigned to the parking garage

000 This page: the main public space is formed of a soaring cross vault bathed in natural light. Opposite: marble walls and benches confer dignity on every visit to buy stamps and send parcels. A century ago, post offices were symbols of speed and efficiency, and no expense was spared to impress the populace

PRODIGIES abound in Palermo as they do in every corner of Sicily. Decrepit façades conceal sumptuous interiors, Baroque churches contain a riot of colour and ornament, and the austere shell of the Norman Palace gives no hint of the golden mosaics that line the Palatine chapel. Nowhere is the disconnect between sobriety and exuberance greater than in the Palazzo delle Poste. The city’s central post office dominates the Via Roma with its columned portico rising from a broad flight of steps. Beyond the public spaces, a tightly coiled staircase leads up to the executive suite. There, Classicism yields to a vision of technology expressed in murals and inlaid wood. Inaugurated in 1934, this monumental fusion of art and architecture expresses the contradictions of the fascist regime, which embraced Modernism as a symbol of progress while striving to recapture the glory of the Roman Empire. Other dictatorships deferred to mass taste. Hitler and Stalin suppressed Modernism, spurring an exodus of their best talents. Most of the Western democracies marginalised progressive artists. Under Mussolini, radicals and reactionaries competed for public commissions; both factions enjoyed success, giving Italy a unique legacy of architecture and design from the 1930s. A key figure in the battle of styles was Angiolo Mazzoni. As chief engineer of the ministry of communications, he designed sleek post offices and railway stations, from Piedmont to Sicily, in collaboration with the most adventurous artists. The best of these state buildings are landmarks of Modernism, impeccably crafted and well maintained. Palermo and other cities demanded a traditional façade but, in the same year, Mazzoni completed a cylindrical post office in Agrigento and a beach resort in Tuscany for the children of postal and railway workers, both of which display his powers of invention to the full. Getting the trains to run on time was one of Mussolini’s few undisputed achievements, so it’s no mystery that stations were visible manifestations of speed and efficiency. The post office had some of the same prestige in the interwar years. It served as a community centre where people sent packages and telegrams, made telephone calls, paid taxes and deposited savings. A critic described it as the secular church of the fascist state and a symbol of how the regime was modernising a traditional society. That explains the lavish use of marble in Palermo – grey on the outside, and a richly patterned rose red for the staircase and conference room – along with other luxurious materials. Azure, ultramarine and lemon-yellow mosaic enriches the palette. Mazzoni designed the marble conference table as a miniature temple surrounded by throne-like chairs of copper and red morocco leather. A bronze figure of Diana the Huntress stands guard. Avant-garde artworks complement this stately ensemble. Five panels by Benedetta, a leading Futurist artist, dominate the room. Each is an abstraction of a mode of communication – by land, sea, air, radio, telegraph and telephone – and they celebrate what were then the latest technologies. Benedetta Cappa studied with Giacomo Balla and was encouraged by Filippo Marinetti, who published his Manifesto of Futurism in 1909 and founded the

This triptych by Benedetta in the Palazzo delle Poste’s executive suite depicts terrestrial, maritime and aerial communications. Along with her husband, Filippo Marinetti, she led the second phase of Futurism embracing technological progress, as well as the power and mystery of the universe

A waiting room heralds the opulence of the top-floor executive suite with its vibrant blue mosaic walls – and ceiling – sybaritic furnishings and luxurious building materials such as elaborately veined marble

A detail of Benedetta’s Terrestrial Communications, which illustrates the Futurist vision of bridges bestriding rivers like giant gymnasts. Opposite: throne-like copper and leather chairs surround a monolithic marble table – all designed by Angiolo Mazzoni

Opposite: frescoes by Paolo Bevilacqua in the director’s office depict the history of communications through the ages. This page, top left: a ribbon window illuminates the tightly coiled marble staircase that links the office floors. Top right: located off the main hall are 650 private mailboxes still in use

movement. Twenty years later she married him, challenging his strident denunciations of domesticity and femininity, and, in a gesture of independence, created artworks under her first name. Despite his misogyny it was a productive relationship and they had three children together. She quickly made her mark with the expressively titled Speed of a Motorboat and Light and Sounds of a Night Train. Her experiments with tactility have been compared to Maria Montessori’s research on child learning, and she designed stage sets for Marinetti’s three theatrical productions. In 1929 the couple gave Futurism a fresh start with aeropittura, an approach to painting that was shaped by their excitement in piloting planes into the heavens, leaving earthly subjects behind. That sense of otherworldliness achieves its apotheosis in the Palermo artworks. However, Benedetta was as rooted in the past as Mazzoni. The art historian Romy Golan notes that she employed the traditional media of tempera and encaustic, and asserts that ‘the chromatic range of translucent blues and pale aqua greens was deliberately intended to evoke the delicate palette of Pompeian frescoes’. That fusion of historical references and contemporary styles enhances the architectural promenade from street to counter, and from the stairs to the corridor that links the executive spaces. Art Deco lettering plays off a brilliant-blue mosaic wall. Overtly fascist symbols – including a trio of 30m tall fasces beside the building – are long gone. A statue commemorating a fallen soldier of World War I, once on display in the portico, now reposes in the garage. But Giovinezza, a painting by Tato (the nom de brosse of Guglielmo Sansoni), still occupies a wall of the conference room, recalling the fanaticism of the regime’s youthful supporters. In contrast, the director’s office has a quiet dignity. It was designed by a local celebrity, Paolo Bevilacqua, who headed the School of Industrial Art. His murals depict the history of communications over the ages. Faded and blackened by smoke, they survived a fire in 1989 along with Vittorio Ducrot’s rosewood furniture and inlaid cabinetry. The restoration team reinstalled other pieces that had been in storage, including a gilded umbrella stand that has a disturbing resemblance to a bomb. It reminds us that Marinetti, in his first militant outburst, was keen to destroy historical monuments and free Italians from their attachment to the past. Age mellowed him, as it has so many revolutionaries. Futurism ended with Marinetti’s death in 1944, a year after the demise of fascism, with which it was intertwined. That was also the end of Mazzoni’s career as an architect. In the postwar settling of scores he was denounced for ‘corruption, technical shortcomings, and designing in the megalomaniac mode of the times’ – unjustified charges that led him to accept an invitation to design public projects in Colombia. None of his designs there was realised, so he returned to Italy in 1967 and retired from practice. But he bequeathed a rich heritage to his ungrateful land and deserves to be remembered for what he achieved in his two productive decades $ Palazzo delle Poste, 320 Via Roma, 90133 Palermo

GETTY FABULOUS

Flame-haired farmer’s daughter turned decorating deity, the late Ann Getty staggered San Francisco for decades with the opulence of her side-by-side mansions, pictured here for the very last time. As thousands of her treasures are readied for auction, bedazzled insiders reminisce with Mitchell Owens. Photography: James McDonald

In Ann and Gordon Getty’s living room – a chinoiserie fantasy that she decorated with Craig Levitt and Stephen Weaver – coromandel screens were recycled into panelling. The back-to-back 1750s John Vardy chairs are upholstered in period textiles

ST: One room was panelled entirely in églomisé, so wonderfully decadent. You pressed a hidden button and an extraordinary Boulle commode slowly slid to the right and revealed the door to the music room that Ann created for her husband, Gordon.

JONATHAN RENDELL, CHRISTIE’S: The house was the most brilliant individualistic interior in America. The conversations between the objects are fascinating, as well as the ones between the objects and the location. One room had a series of Canaletto paintings of Venice, and then you turned and you were looking out a window at San Francisco, another city on the water. It was sortofmindblowing.EvenherbathroomswereWunderkammers.

JR: If designers could have done that in the 18th century, they would have gone batshit crazy. Once, when an engineer explained that something Mrs Getty wanted could not be done, she responded: ‘They do it at Disneyland.’

SUZANNE TUCKER, DESIGNER: Because of her last name, I don’t think Ann Getty was often taken seriously as a designer. But when you think about her work, Renzo Mongiardino comes to mind. She had the same layered approach – every time I visited the San Francisco house, there was something else I had never noticed before. Still, it wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Some people would say: ‘How ghastly!’ But those aren’t the sort of people who understand design.

ALEXIS TRAINA, CLIENT: She was such a maximalist… Her atelier was this anonymous barrack in the Presidio, filled with acres of antique textiles, books, furniture, everything on earth. There was a wall of passementerie and bolts of outrageous fabrics.

DIANE DORRANS SAEKS, DESIGN JOURNALIST: She ended up vying for what she wanted with museums. The English statelies were Ann’s guide. When she worked with the decorator Sister Parish, from whom she learned a great deal about furniture placement, the house was very tame. But when she started putting more of herself into that residence, it became a download of great British collections, such as the John Linnell chinoiserie chairs from Badminton. There was always a lot of the Oriental in her taste.

Three full­time seamstresses were located on one side of the room, working on God knows what, and artisans came in and out.

BW: When I was at Parish Hadley, I was the assistant at the Gettys’ house. Albert Hadley had designed laser­cut chinoiserie fretwork for the dining­room walls and dado, all of it painted in green lacquer, and the inside edges were gilded. Eventually Ann was able to find antique papers to greatly embellish the space. It was phenomenal to see how things changed over the years.

DENISE HALE, SOCIETY DOYENNE: Most of the time, it takes generations of people to collect like that.

BUNNY WILLIAMS, DESIGNER: Her rooms could be so densely furnished that you couldn’t see how great the furniture was. It’s hard for people to know where to stop, especially when they have a curiosity about everything. In the beginning Ann’s taste was more livable and less like Aladdin’s cave. Over time, as she became more comfortable with what she could do and what she could buy, the furniture quality went up and up and up.

Opposite: an English Rococo-style chimney piece climbs a living-room wall. In the foreground is a chinoiserie chair that John Linnell made for the fourth Duke of Beaufort. This page: one of the stars of the Gettys’ art collection was displayed here: Jacques-Emile Blanche’s winsome 1910 portrait of ballet star Vaslav Nijinsky in Michel Fokine’s Les Orientales

This page: 18th-century Syro-Turkish panelling wraps a bedroom, for which Getty commissioned a canopy bed inlaid with mother-of-pearl and decorated with cut-glass spheres. Qajar mirror paintings stud the headboard. Opposite: costume designs by Ballets Russes designer Léon Bakst filled the panels of the marble-paved Venetian-inspired bathroom in the Constantine guest suite. The walls are bordered with trompe-l’oeil gondola poles

AT: You had to be careful what you suggested, because she’d find a way to make it happen. Ann created a crazy room for us that is completely covered with the eyes of peacock feathers, sewed together by hand and then glued to the walls.

The Ann & Gordon Getty Collection will be on sale at Christie’s New York, Rockefeller Center, 20 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020, 20-23 Oct. For more information, ring 001 212 636 2000, or visit christies.com

JR: You don’t often get the collector with a ragbag mind, someone who goes down rabbit holes. Her rooms remind me of two great women collectors of the Georgian era: Queen Charlotte and Margaret, Duchess of Portland. Like Ann Getty, they were brilliant collectors, bluestockings, fonts of knowledge, and they wanted to explore $

MTT: Once when Ann, who could recite Wordsworth by heart, was travelling with a group of friends, she suggested: ‘Why don’t we all think of a poem we really like and recite it to us at dinner tomorrow?’ We had the day to prepare and memorise. I did one of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Ann belonged to a very social world, and I don’t think the people in that world imagined her life to be as deep as it was.

DDS: She was a voracious reader, a lifelong student of everything from archaeology (the Gettys funded Leakey expeditions) to Anglo-Indian history. One of the things that I remember most is her obsession with textiles, from fabrics that she commissioned from Bevilacqua in Venice to bizarre antique silks. She had drawers and cupboards full of fragments.

JR: Not many people would happily deconstruct an 18th-century textile to cover a chair, but that’s why she bought it, to give the chair and the fabric new life. That was part of her whole gestalt.

AT: Still, she could sit barefoot on the rarest carpet in the world, eating Oreos, and discuss childhood education, a subject that was hugely important to her. Just when you thought you understood her one way, she would reveal herself to be so intriguingly the opposite.

ST: Who buys 18th-century coromandel screens and cuts them up for panelling?

IVY GETTY, GRAND-DAUGHTER: I love maximalism and the organised mess that it evokes. It makes me feel protected. My grandma was really good at putting all kinds of different patterns together and making them work. I would shop with her all over – small markets in the middle of Morocco and places like that – and she would look at something and know exactly where it could go in the house. My favourite piece is the Mottram and Cox musical pagoda clock that stands in the gallery by the front door.

MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS, COMPOSER: It was an astonishing house that gave the impression of fin-de-siècle Paris, but Ann was also very intrigued by Arts and Crafts design, from the US variety to the Swedish to the English. She immersed herself in research until she became as knowledgeable as any scholar. Ann could tell you how the chair you were sitting on was made, why it was made that particular way and at that particular time.

Opposite, from left: the pool room is an IndoChinese reverie, with a gallery composed of jali screens and columns, and adorned with palm trees and stone pachyderms; Getty placed an Indian pavilion of white marble in the garden and flanked it with Chinese enamelled stools. This page: British impresario David Garrick owned a George III chair that stood in the atrium, a sunlit space often used for events – such as Gordon’s birthday, when it became a Mylardraped disco complete with go-go dancers

FORBEDTIMEBEBE

For one so prolific, Christian Bérard spent a lot of time lying down. A soul much given to reverie, the artist, fashion illustrator and set designer dreamed up rooms, real and imagined, in which the theatre of human life played out – frequently against the backdrop of a bergère headboard or plump divan. Now a new exhibition looks set to revive Bébé’s dormant reputation. You might call it an eye-opener, says Amy Sherlock Top: in a photograph by Robert Doisneau, Christian Bérard paints a set for the touring exhibition Le Théâtre de la Mode in 1945, which featured doll-sized mannequins wearing couture designs by the major Paris houses. Right: his folding screen The Virgin Mary and Her Two Pages makes a cameo appearance in a 1950 shoot for Life magazine in Elsa Schiaparelli’s Paris home

Top: Interior –Bérard’sChristianRoom , 1947, one of a series of watercolours by Alexander Serebriakov showing Bébé and Boris Kochno’s apartment at Rue Casimir Delavigne that they intended to turn into an album.

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Left: Bérard is seen recumbent in bed with his beloved dog Jacinthe in a shot by Surrealist GeorgettephotographerChadourne

Top: Bérard himself made several paintings of his Paris apartment. This one, from c1936, shows how central the bedroom – and the bed – were to his creative process.

Right: Kochno’s room, as depicted by Serebriakov, with a portrait of the dancer Tamara Toumanova by Bébé hanging above the bed and a drawing by Matisse above the mantelpiece

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THERE ARE many images of Christian Bérard in bed. In the last century or so of French culture, the set designer, fashion illustrator, artist and tastemaker avant la lettre is rivalled only by Matisse in his final, cut-out years, and Proust, in the art of recumbency. A snapshot from 1929 shows Bérard, halfeaten toast in hand, in a guest-room at the summer residence of Surrealist patrons Marie-Laure and Charles de Noailles. He was 27, with the plump cheeks and doe eyes that earned him the lifelong nickname of Bébé. In 1948, the year before Bérard’s untimely death, a young Lucian Freud sketched him swathed in a dressing gown and propped up, like a hospital patient, on the pillows of his bed at 2 Rue Casimir-Delavigne, the apartment that he shared with his partner, the ballet director Boris Kochno, on Paris’s Left Bank. Between 1929 and 1948, as the world was reshaped by war and its aftermath, Bébé had found fame (or notoriety). He created the immortal images of Beauty and the Beast in Jean Cocteau’s widely acclaimed 1946 film and a stage design for The Madwoman of Chaillot that was celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic. He designed the carpet for Nelson Rockefeller’s Fifth Avenue apartment, the last major project of the brilliant, tragic interwar designer Jean-Michel Frank. His paintings were acquired by MoMA. In 1947, he helped his great friend Christian Dior usher in the ‘new look’ that, along with the pared-back style of his other great friend, Coco Chanel, revolutionised how women dress. His illustrations graced numerous Vogue covers; his obituary in that publication would note ‘the important group of chic women who always chose their clothes with Bérard in attendance’.

In Freud’s portrait, Bérard’s eyes are glazed. He looks tired. But I like to think of him receiving the young artist imperiously at his bedside, after the fashion of French kings of yore. Proust, who rarely left his soundproofed apartment, opened In Search of Lost Time with the line ‘For a long time, I went to bed early.’ The same cannot be said of Bérard – unless, perhaps, it was under the influence of opium, a habit he shared with Cocteau, and from which neither of them could ultimately escape. Bérard was a nocturnal creature: a fixture of Parisian nightlife; a much in-demand decorator and costumier of masked balls; an ambulatory spectre in the city’s sleeping quartiers. He painted through the night by the light of an electric lamp, sometimes until dawn, a routine that doubtless contributed to his paint-spattered and famously raggedy mien. (‘A scraggle-bearded, sack-bodied man who

Bérard was a great imaginer of bedrooms. Many of the set designs that made his name feature beds –from the one that dominates his stark, strikingly minimal stage décor for Cocteau’s The Human Voice, to the eccentric layered draperies that sheath the resting place of the eponymous Madwoman of Chaillot, to the Belle Epoque luxe of the room in which Jean Genet’s The Maids play-act and eventually act upon their violent fantasies of murdering their employer. The inhabitants of these rooms are fantasists and fabulators: the bedroom is a place of dreaming, where imagination runs away from reality. Bérard’s keen sense of theatre spilled over into the actual rooms that he worked on, often commissioned by Frank. Restrained and solid, the latter’s schemes were the perfect foil for Bérard, a natural colourist with an appetite for whimsy. His breezy abstract designs for carpets, fabrics and furnishings – sometimes actualised with the help of the brilliant Margarita ClassenSmith, a couture leather embroiderer – bring a sense of movement and levity to Frank’s décor.

Opposite, from left: The Greeks, 1938, is a design for a tapestry that was made by Aubusson and used to upholster a set of Jean-Michel Frank chairs in Nelson A. Rockefeller’s New York apartment; one of Bérard’s many illustrated letters sent to Kochno. He signs off: ‘Take care of yourself, be brave, what a beautiful spring we will have’. This page: a gouache study of 1935 for an antechamber at the Institut Guerlain. The space – lined in yellow velvet with appliqué lines marking out doors and panelling – is still visible, though in bad repair wore his jackets soiled and kept up his trousers with string,’ as his Time obituary put it.)

In a three-part screen designed by Bérard for Frank’s showroom on the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, a figure wearing a laurel wreath stares out at us from behind an Alberto Giacometti plaster vase. (Giacometti was another Frank collaborator.) In the left-hand panel, a Pierrot looks off-stage; in the right, a figure in a yellow robe pulls back the red curtain that frames the scene. Room design, the fantasy of theatre and the painted canvas all come together in Bérard’s screens. Like stage curtains, they separate one world from another. They are surfaces for projection and enclosures for private dreaming. They also offer fabulous expanses for painting, across which he could play out his full repertoire of Renaissance influences. In a striking screen created for the designer Elsa Schiaparelli, for example, a red-sheathed take on the Virgin Mary leans over a marble ledge in a way that recalls Titian’s La Schiavona, or his Man with a Quilted Sleeve Cocteau called Bérard the ‘first survivor of “modernism”’, but he did not make it into the history of 20th-century art except as a footnote.A recently opened survey show in Monaco hopes to correct this. Rightly so: the world needs more dreamers $ ‘Christian Bérard: Eccentrique Bébé’ is at the Nouveau Musée Nationale de Monaco, Villa Paloma, 56 Boulevard du Jardin Exotique, Monaco (00 377 98 98 48 60; nmnm. mc), until 16 October

1 Nicolas Ghesquière scales new heights in drama in his Paris bathroom (page 70), thanks in no small part to that chair – a sought-after reissue of a Charles Rennie Mackintosh original, just like Bruce Hamilton’s‘Hill House Ladderback’ (from £1,100).Visit brucehamilton.co.uk.

3 May the faucet be with you: a quick plug for Waterworks’ sleek ‘.25’ floormounted tub spout (£1,470),which fans of the fashion designer’s tap (page 71) will no doubt gush hopelessly over.Ring 020 7384 4000, or visit waterworks.com.

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2 Did you marvel at all the marble in the designer’s divine salle de bain (page 70)? Lapicida can supply something in a similar vein – stormy cream, pink and grey veins at that – in the form of ‘Cippollino Ondulato’ (£495 per sq m). Ring 01423 400100, or visit lapicida.com.

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5 Not for Monsieur Ghesquière a nice boulle clock set firmly in the middle of his Pompadour mantelpiece. He’s reserved that spot for… a Stormtrooper’s helmet (page 66) not unlike the prop-maker Andrew Ainsworth’s authentic replicas (£265).Visit originalstormtrooper.com.

7 A word in your shell-like: take a look at Graham & Green’s‘Maxi’bedside table (£550) if you’re tempted to give mother-of-pearl a whirl after seeing all the inlay in that Syria-byway-of-San Fran bedroom (page 112). Visit grahamandgreen.co.uk. Some of the design effects in this issue, recreated by Gareth Wyn Davies and Ariadne Fletcher

4 Check out this console table from Ikon København (£1,785 approx), which is along similar criss-cross lines to the Zanotti number in the Paris pad (page 65).Visit ikonkobenhavn.com.

6 Nothing reflects Ann Getty’s gilt complex quite like her mirrored chimney piece in Russian Hill (page 110). While no shrinking violet, this George II looking-glass from Ronald Phillips might suit those of slightly more timid tastes. And deep pockets: it’s £200,000. Ring 020 7493 2341, or visit ronaldphillipsantiques.co.uk.

The esteemed gardener doesn’t exactly want for fungi illustrations (page 83),but we imagine he’d still find space for this (£15), foraged from Pimlico Prints.Visit pimlicoprints.co.uk.

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Or­inspiring: taken a shine to the gilded Elizabeth Garouste mirror in Alice Gavalet’s hall (page 96)? Get thyself to Ralph Pucci, where it’s £18,000.Visit ralphpucci.com.

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Only proper bamboo flatware cuts it for seasoned host Deeda Blair (page 87).If you have the stomach for something so dishwasher­unfriendly,Au Bain Marie’s version is £30 approx apiece. Ring 00 33 1 42 71 08 69, or visit aubainmarie.com.

Craving quelque chose by Christian Bérard now you’ve read our scintillating essay (page 116)? Condé Nast can help! The firm sells copies of his Vogue illustrations at £74 each.Visit condenaststore.com.

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Which is sweeter:Deeda Blair’s grapes in aspic or the Aptware on which it seductively quivers (page 91)? Join the queue if you think the latter:the French Tangerine imports it – but there’s a wait. Platter: $765.Visit shopthefrenchtangerine.com.

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14 Merchant and Found is the place to pick up vintage rattan chairs like those adding insouciant charm to Paolo Pejrone’s dining room (page 80). This 1960s French example is £185.Visit merchantandfound.com.

For natty dust­defying bookshelf pelmets like Paolo Pejrone’s (page 78), you could do far worse than Ian Mankin’s ‘Ticking Stripe 2’ in peony (£32.50 per m). Visit ianmkin.co.uk $

Back to the Futurists now and those artworks in the Palermo post office (page 98). For little more than a stamp you could buy a pair of your own – admittedly postcards – from the Estorick (£1.40). Visit estorickcollection.com.

Locker shocker: if a spirit­lifting red­metal cabinet like the French ceramicist’s is your thing (page 92), Mustard Made has ‘The Lowdown’ –in poppy – for £289.Visit mustardmade.com.

Armitage, whose early training was completed at the Slade School of Fine Art, had been searching for something that would immediately situate his work in an East African context. Having suspended the bark cloth from the wall in initial experiments, the artist realised he was drawing too much attention to it. As with the woven palm-leaf mats he had previously trialled, the fabric became a fetish, a crude gesture Armitage deemed ‘repulsive’. An epiphany arrived once the material was simply stretched across the frames of a canvas. Often dense with punctures and stitches (a result of the production process), Lubugo bark cloth replaced the standard cotton ground on to which Armitage had been painting. In the decade or so since, this unique textile has become a foundational component of the artist’s vast paintings, equal to their characters, colours and compositional elements. And there is a synergy between surface and image. The vivid scenes depicted by Armitage of life in Kenya – narratives of harmony, mythology, tradition and protest – are situated within a historically resonant material that is itself symbolic of distinct cultural shifts in the artist’s homeland (Armitage first encountered Lubugo bark cloth in the form of placemats that lined a tourist market).

The London exhibition presents a new series of paintings produced over the last three years, which continue to consider the liminal spaces between past and present. Sacrificed animals, whose bodies transmute into segments of solid colour (Amongst the Living, 2022), appear next to a sparse composition based on the decapitation of Koitalel Arap Samoei, a famed leader of the Nandi people (Head of Koitalel, 2021). Meanwhile, the dissonance of political rallies, richly evoked in Curfew (Likoni March 27, 2020) (2022), is counteracted by the dreamy hallucinations of teen boys, whose visions of flamingos take centre stage (Three Boys at Dawn, 2022).

The majority of these works were painted en plein air, a longstanding ambition that Armitage was finally able to realise after lockdown restrictions left him with extended stays in Nairobi. Reacting more directly to his surroundings, on this occasion, the artist found himself reflecting on the ways in which East Africa’s landscape has been depicted by others, both home and abroad, to varying effects. As the artist has remarked: ‘How much can a cliché inhabit what you’re looking at?’ The narratives explored by Armitage, emitted through the unexpected surfaces of his paintings, propose another world.

MICHAEL ARMITAGE runs 21 Sept-30 Oct, Tue-Sat 10-6, Sun 12-6 $ ALLIE BISWAS is co-editor of ‘The Soul of a Nation Reader: Writings by and about Black American Artists, 1960-1980’ diary

A fig tree led to a U-turn for Michael Armitage. In 2010, soon after his graduation from the Royal Academy Schools, London, the Kenyan artist chanced upon Lubugo bark cloth in his native Nairobi. Produced by the Baganda people of neighbouring Uganda, who for centuries have stripped the outer coating of a Ficus natalensis and pounded it into a pliable fabric, it’s been used to cultivate a cloth that kings wear at coronations and with which the dead are dressed in burial ceremonies.

Material concerns, the Max Clendinning factor, late developer, full-on Grant, plus Amy Sherlock’s listings

Michael Armitage

WHITE CUBE 144-152 Bermondsey St, London SE1 Witness, 2022, oil on Lubugo bark cloth, 1.7 × 2.2m

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SADIE COLES HQ Davies St, London W1 Plywood, painted aluminium, rubber and glass, for Race Furniture; Ralph Adron, curtain for his and Max Clendinning’s own home, dyed rayon panels, 1966-67 decades he created such a richly layered palimpsest of buildings, interiors and objects that his cultural legacy has, as yet, only partially been fulfilled. While many contemporaries, including David Mellor, Terence Conran or even Ettore Sottsass, evolved into successful brands, the protean nature of Clendinning’s pursuits kept commercial celebrity at bay. Except for a limited series of innovative furniture made for retail in the 1960s, most pieces were one­offs or prototypes. A small, fervent fanbase now harbours the rare few that come to market. And, despite conservation

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Schooled in Italian Classicism, cutting his teeth on postwar British Modernism and swinging through 1960s London with presciently Postmodernist aplomb, architect and designer Max Clendinning rode the crest of many architectural waves. His ability to harness the power and perspective of each made for an idiosyncratic aesthetic that, to this day, defies categorisation. Pop? PoMo? Minimalist? Each has been proposed, yet none truly settled. Born in Northern Ireland, Clendinning originally trained as a painter before qualifying as an architect in 1953. Over seven Max Clendinning: Interior Eulogies

Lord Henry Gordon Lennox: An Aristocratic Amateur GOODWOOD HOUSE Kennel Hill, Chichester

Curated by design consultant Simon Andrews, this exhibition assembles previously unseen furniture and sculpture in an immersive environment of original mural designs. With loans from private collections, including Ralph Adron’s own, Andrews hopes to assert Clendinning’s currency by sharing an impression of his rigour and determination.

‘Clendinning was trained in Modernism, but not restrained by it. He followed his own means of expression, not pandering to contemporary precepts of good taste. His was an unbridled eccentricity; it is extremely liberating.’ Andrews has long supported Clendinning’s work, chancing on it as a teenager. A feature on the north London home he and Adron shared revealed an unprecedented yet skilful mix of their space-age furniture and psychedelic murals integrated into a Georgian framework. In a restless pursuit of renewal, the couple employed their place as a platform for wild, experimental ideas. The ever-evolving tableaux had photographers including Norman Parkinson hiring the house as a shoot location, ensuring the space was one of the most consistently published interiors of its era. A 1984 WoI article on the house and Clendinning’s (then) 30 years of work suggested that, were he ‘grander and older, he would be the grand old man of design’. Even now, labels like ‘grand’ and ‘old’ belie the practitioner’s radical yet resolved merger of popular culture with contemporary architecture and progressive interiors.

Left: Clendinning in the first-floor studio of his home in Canonbury, north London, shot by Ken Kirkwood for WoI, November 1984. Top: Lord Henry Gordon Lennox, untitled photograph of two unidentified gentlemen at Gordon Castle

What more do we know? He served under his patron, Prime Minister Disraeli, as First Secretary of the Admiralty and was his ‘spy’ there when Disraeli was chancellor. Whether he kept up his love of photography remains to be discovered.

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As we now know, his artistic inclinations veered towards the pictorial rather than the literary. The two large albums on display at Goodwood House reveal a photographer of rare sensitivity, striving for informality at a time when sitting for long exposure times was disagreeable. Further, to take up this new art was timeconsuming, costly and, unless an expert chemist, hit-and-miss. His subject matter is what might be expected of a member of the Victorian leisured classes: estate workers with the tools of their trade; gamekeepers and their catch; nannies leading charges in homespun carts. One en plein air image is strikingly avant-garde, at least for the times: five figures arranged upon and beside a bench, managing to look in different directions all at once. A group shot certainly, but its constituents are transformed into five quite separate and serious people being entirely themselves and something else as well. Perhaps only a great photographer could achieve this.

Lord Henry Gordon Lennox, third of the fifth Duke of Richmond’s five sons, was not taken altogether seriously. His proficiency as a ‘camera artist’ in the 1850s, photography’s early years, has never been recognised until now and he remains one of those enthusiastic gentleman amateurs making pictures purely for themselves, never regretting (or expecting) a wider audience. Admittedly, his father was a hard act to follow. On Wellington’s staff in the Peninsular War, he took a musket ball in the chest at Orthez. Later, he was an aide-de-camp to the Iron Duke during Waterloo. Lord Henry aimed his sights lower, becoming Honourable Member for Chichester. Vanity Fair damned him with faint praise: ‘Whenever he has found an opportunity of doing statesman’s work in the public eye, he has acquitted himself well.’ Then it simply damned him: ‘[He is] favoured by Nature with a graceful figure and presence, and a feminine gentleness of manner, known for amiability of intercourse, and suspected of literary ability.’ Vanity Fair showed him with a well-maintained head of hair and distinguished, perhaps waxed, moustaches. His unmarried status (he was 61 before he wed) and a close friendship with Benjamin Disraeli, 17 years his senior, raised eyebrows. From their correspondence, ‘Dizzy’ appears besotted. The journal’s catty observation gave readers a clue to his extracurricular activities.

LORD HENRY GORDON LENNOX: AN ARISTOCRATIC AMATEUR runs until 31 Oct on Goodwood House open days $ ROBIN MUIR is a curator and writer on photography campaigns, only a few of his buildings survive, notably his timbershell Oxford Road station in Manchester (1960), now Grade IIlisted, and his 1982 façade for Christina Smith’s The Tea House in London. Nonetheless, Clendinning, with his lifelong partner, set designer Ralph Adron, bequeathed a world of well-documented interior concepts and environments that, even if only extant on paper, may now become fertile territories of rediscovery.

MAX CLENDINNING: INTERIOR EULOGIES runs 13 Sept-1 Oct, Tue-Sat 11-6 $ LIBBY SELLERS is a London-based design historian, curator and writer

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Of course, in the Britain of 1959, sex between men was still a criminal act. Through his lifetime, the homoerotic charge of Grant’s art saw his public commissions criticised and censored. His muscular, neo-Byzantine 1911 Bathing was lambasted as morally corrupting, while the tender, rousing murals in Lincoln Cathedral (featuring a lover, Paul Roche, as the risen Christ) were locked away after their completion in 1958, only reopened to view in 1990.

In 1916, the artist Duncan Grant moved with fellow artist, sometime lover and lifelong collaborator Vanessa Bell and her family to Charleston, East Sussex. Together, they lavished the 17thcentury farmhouse with a complete and original scheme that incorporated murals, ceramics and painted furniture. The influence of the look on interiors can be felt today: see Lyndon Harrison’s domestic murals, or Luke Edward Hall’s ‘Matisse in the Home Counties’ aesthetic (WoI May 2022). But what about the art?

If Adrian Searle’s 1999 Guardian headline calling the art of Bloomsbury ‘A Warning from History’ feels a tad overdone, it’s hard to argue with his assessment that much of Grant’s painting mostly just ‘domesticated’ the vision of more significant artists (Cézanne, Bonnard, Picasso) ‘for home consumption’. That said, a new exhibition at Charleston offers a fresh perspective on Grant’s Very Private?

Top left: Duncan Grant, Untitled Drawing, c1946-1959. Top right: Linder, Untitled legacy through a rarely seen aspect of the oeuvre: his erotic works on paper. With a title taken from a note Grant scrawled on the envelope in which he entrusted these sketches to artist and collector Edward Le Bas in 1959, Very Private? includes a selection of 40 drawings of male nudes by him from the 1940s and 50s. At one point assumed destroyed by Le Bas’s sister to protect her brother’s reputation, the works will be exhibited in public for the first time, after their donation to the Charleston Trust in 2020.

CHARLESTON Firle, E. Sussex

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Grant’s art soars precisely when it channels his private passions: when sexual desire is (almost) out in the open. In a selection of his erotica published by Gay Men’s Press in 1994, he achieves a rare fluidity of line and a sense of the body’s weight. Grant was a fan of ballet, and his best erotic drawings have a dancer’s vigour and grace. They also betray a fixation on interracial love: half the works in the book feature Black bodies and men of colour: active, equalopportunity playthings, sometimes, unsettlingly, as cartoon studs. He had several Black lovers, and his 1960s portrait of the Jamaican Pat Nelson, say, has an easy dignity. But his erotic attachment to dark skin as a kind of ‘forbidden fruit’, to quote Grant’s biographer Frances Spalding, is sometimes hard to swallow. This exhibition will, I hope, engage these knotty dynamics, with Grant’s work alongside contemporary responses by Somaya Critchlow, Harold Offeh and new works by Ajamu X, who has for decades probed the imagery of Black queer masculinity. A grave consideration of identity, gender and otherness might feel at odds with Grant’s airy masques; then again, what is ‘very private’ is often inseparable from matters of pressing, all-too-public interest.

VERY PRIVATE? runs 17 Sept-12 March, Wed-Sun 10-5 $ MATTHEW MCLEAN is a writer and editor based in London

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PIRANESI AND THE MODERN AGE NASJONALMUSEET, OSLO 9 Sept-8 Jan When Norway’s vast new National Museum opened in June after lengthy delays in construction, critics wondered if the building dubbed the‘big grey box’was worth its £500 million price tag. One can only imagine what Piranesi would have made of the building’s squat slate­clad form. The prolific 18th­century architect and printmaker’s taste was altogether more baroque – from the crumbling ruins that dominate his poetically licentious ‘Views of Rome’ to the mechanistic gothica of his‘Imaginary Prisons’. It’s the latter that form the cornerstone of this intriguing show, which reclaims Piranesi as a proto­Modernist, showing his etchings alongside works by Picasso, Le Corbusier, Alvin Coburn and Julie Mehretu, among many others. Details: nasjonalmuseet.no.

HARD CELL (above left): BattistaGiovanniPiranesi, The Man on the Rack, 1761, in Oslo. STUFFROUSING (above right): Wolfgang Tillmans, Wake, 2001, in New York. NEMES BADGE Sainsburybrooch,EgyptianGustave(inset):Baugrand,Revivalc1867,atCentre.

VISIONS OF ANCIENT EGYPT SAINSBURY CENTRE, NORWICH 3 Sept-1 Jan On the centenary of Howard Carter’s entry into the tomb of Tutankhamun, Sainsbury Centre explores the endurance of ancient Egypt as fact and fantasy, artistic inspiration and lived cultural heritage. The exhibition amasses a collection of nearly 200 ‘wonderful things’ –to quote Carter’s immortal words as he peered into the gloom – from artworks to items of furniture, jewellery and archaeological fragments. Works such as Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of Kitty Fisher as Cleopatra (1759) and Joshua Wedgwood’s Canopic Jar (1790) show how Egypt was colonised by Europeans not only geographically but imaginatively, as origin story – a narrative belatedly and partially corrected by the inclusion of works by contemporary Egyptian artists such as Sara Sallam and Chant Avedissian. Details: sainsburycentre.ac.uk.

A VISION IN PINK (below): Forrest Bess, Untitled (No 6), 1957, at Camden Art Centre

FORREST BESS CAMDEN ART CENTRE, LONDON 30 Sept-23 Dec At the age of four, Forrest Bess had his first vision.As an adult, he painted the colours and forms that appeared when he closed his eyes at night. A student of myth, anthropology and the writings of Jung, Bess developed a rich and highly personal symbolic language expressed in the small­scale oil paintings that he made at night, while his days were spent working as a bait fisherman along the Texas coast. Over 40 works are on display here, ranging from the mystically diagrammatic to gorgeous, woozily polychromatic takes on landscape and sunset. On show, too, is archival material relating to Bess’s experimental genital self­surgery, intended to attain an immortal hermaphrodite state by merging masculine and feminine energies. Bess’s gallerist, AbEx doyenne Betty Parsons,who gave him six NewYork shows in the 1950s and 60s, politely declined his suggestion to include his psychosexual theories in her exhibitions; in the context of contemporary discussions around sexual identity, they are impossible to ignore. Details: camdenartcentre.org $

WOLFGANG TILLMANS: TO LOOK WITHOUT FEAR MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK 12 Sept-1 Jan Photographer Wolfgang Tillmans is something like a patron saint of the visual age of Instagram. His extraordinary eye for pulling a moment from the morass of everyday life, his own everyday life – a kiss in a nightclub, an incidental window­ledge still life, a plane passing overhead – has influenced a whole genre of snapshot image­making, whether consciously or not. It is always a moving experience to be physically confronted with these images, installed in Tillmans’s signature precise but unfussy style of pinning prints of various types and sizes directly on to the gallery walls in associative constellations.We watch (celebrate, mourn) the passage of moments and, perhaps, yearn for the tenderness of the communities that Tillmans captures, which shimmers just beyond the pictures’ edge. The more than 350 works included at Moma are arranged to highlight the political commitments – from Aids activism to proEuropeanism to voting rights – that have long underpinned Tillmans’s artistic work, and to which he dedicates his own Instagram account. Details: moma.org.

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Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Series #1c, pencilandacrylic,2014,transferscolouredonpaper

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s coming-of-age portrait is enriched by its layers, as Hilton Als reveals

The girl seen in Series #1c is part of Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s ongoing series ‘The Beautyful Ones’ and was composed in 2014. Taking as her subject children the artist came across in family albums, or observed and photographed on one of her frequent trips to her native Nigeria, the paintings are framed by vulnerability, hope and a certain self-awareness. Inspired by the Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah’s classic 1968 novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, which centres on political and personal idealism and corruption, Crosby’s vibrant canvases are alive with her understanding of the layers, complexities and vulnerabilities of her various subjects. Using acrylic paint, pastel, coloured pencils and Xerox transfers to achieve her effects, she presents a world that is literally layered, and is profoudly committed to the depth to be found on the surfaces that make up intimate and private spaces, including the body. The artist’s figures ask: How am I being read? How would you like to read me? Am I part of this world, or am I aspiring to the next? In short, how does a child come to be on this ‘new’ continent?

The child in Series #1c is a solitary figure who, like many of Crosby’s other subjects, looks directly at the viewer, less as an act of defiance than as a declaration of being. The subject is on the cusp of adolescence; her shoes are those of a girl who is too young for heels but too old for flats. The transition to womanhood is echoed in the images that make up her clothing. Look at the photograph on her sleeve: a girl standing awkwardly in a communion dress. Another, like herself, on the brink of becoming, and in a faith not native to Africa. Again, Crosby sheathes a female character in images taken from African popular culture, mixing them with pictures that inspire her own work. Despite what we think, or would like to think, we carry popular culture with us everywhere – especially in and on our bodies, where it does the most damage and creates the most magic. Series #1c isn’t so much about lost innocence (a familiar enough theme for an artist) as it is about what we don’t see when we’re not looking. Children grow right before our eyes – and continue to do so, as we turn away to attend to something else, or someone else. And when we turn from them, leaving them to their rooms, their private thoughts and fantasies – about women, about beauty, about health and happiness and picture-perfect completeness –step in and maybe love them as much as family $ Hilton Als is curating ‘The Hilton Als Series: Njideka Akunyili Crosby’, which runs at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, CT 06510 (00 1203 432 2800; britishart.yale.edu), 22 Sept 2022–22 Jan 2023

Crosby, a poet of place, was born in Enugu, Nigeria. In 1999, at the age of 16, she emigrated to the United States. As an undergraduate, she attended Swarthmore College, where she studied for a degree in biology and art. Eventually, she decided to dedicate herself to art and she received her master of fine arts from Yale University in 2011 before being selected for the Studio Museum of Harlem’s Artist in Residence programme. A 2017 MacArthur fellow, the artist now lives in Los Angeles. Throughout her career, she has continued to delve into the diasporic experience to communicate various ideas about being an outsider, and to explore questions of belonging.

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