Celestial Ceilings

Much of my time is still spent thinking about our ceilings.  These are the ones that Edith Wharton (who else?) claimed are 'the three perfect ceilings of the world'.

Mantegna's frescos in the ducal palace of Mantua:

Perugino in the Sala del Cambio at Perugia:

Araldi in the Convent of St. Paul at Parma:

I'm aware that these are not exactly in keeping with our 1960s Brutalist ex-local authority flat.  But one day.  One day . . .

The Way We Were

According to NME, New Order's Blue Monday is the greatest song of the 80s.  Now, I'd possibly agree.  But then, as far as I was concerned, musical nirvana came in the form of Andrew Lloyd-Webber,  more specifically the soundtracks to Cats and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dream Coat.

My mother actually took us to see Joseph, in real life; it was literally one of the most memorable treats of the entire decade, and we only just made it due to there being a bomb scare in the West End that same day.  It was life before the Good Friday agreement.

Which is a life that came back to me, in part, when I went to Arcola Theatre last weekend to see Gibraltar, by Alastair Brett with Sian Evans (who is an ex-Casualty script writer - I love Casualty), a play that suddenly seems significantly more timely than it did when I saw it, simply because of the subsequent death of Margaret Thatcher.  (Not of course that she solved the issues with Ireland.  But the Anglo-Irish agreement at least paved the way, a bit.)

But I'm getting ahead of myself:  the reason that I mention Ireland is that the play is based on the highly contentious 'Operation Flavius', the shooting of three Provisional IRA members by the SAS in 1988, all of whom were later found to have been unarmed.  The play also goes into drug running, MI5 informants,  gives an analysis of the television documentary based on the shootings, and provides a view into life on the Costa del Sol in the eighties.  And it's got a great little ditty about the SAS being 'Maggie's assassins'.  I'd recommend dinner at Mangal on Arcola Street beforehand.  The food is amazing.

And then, while we're on the subject of theatre, Brian Friel's Molly Sweeney at The Print Room - which has nothing to do with the Troubles or the IRA or indeed anything at all regarding politics or Margaret Thatcher, but is set in Ireland - is brilliant.  Really, really brilliant.  And it's not just me who thinks that (my husband tells me that I'm the worst critic ever because I'm so easily pleased.)  It's opened to 5* reviews.

Gibraltar is at Arcola Theatre until the 20th April.
Molly Sweeney is at The Print Room until the 27th April.

Palatial Glory

I play a game when reading World of Interiors, and I imagine I'm far from alone in doing so; each month, I decide which of the houses, apartments, castles or palaces I most wish were my own.  There is usually a clear winner, and April was no different: I would like the Liria Palace, and Cayetana Fitz James, the Duchess of Alba, is my new style icon (only for interiors, I might add.  I don't think anyone would suggest that she's the poster child for plastic surgery.)  Here are some images from the story:

The Goya room, and the Goya.

The Library, with it's exquisitely painted ceiling (I'm rethinking the stripes as I write this - why shouldn't my bedroom ceiling look like this one?)

The Green Room; please, please, just look at the trim on the sofa and the chairs, and all the cushions.  This room is somewhere close to my idea of heaven.

Isn't it beautiful?  Most of it is quite recently redecorated (comparatively speaking, as in, compared to most palaces I can think of which were generally last decorated a couple of centuries ago) for it was badly bombed and burned during the Spanish Civil War.  The collection of paintings was thankfully saved due to its having been sent to the British Embassy in Madrid and to the Banco de Espana.  Lutyens was called in to help with the renovation in 1942, and the Duchess of Alba chose all the fabrics and colours for everything else herself.  "First I rebuilt it," she explains, "and then I decorated it with order and good sense." I love all of it - and I have no doubt that Edith Wharton would approve too, as the proportions and design of each room are perfect, right down to the width of the mantelpieces.  It makes me think of Alberti's Renaissance churches:  form first, decoration second.  It is becoming increasingly clear that I actually need a palace to be able to fully indulge all my ideas for interior decoration. But in the mean time, here are some more images that I found:

The Lutyens stairs

The other end of the Goya room.  The surface of the desk looks like most of the surfaces in our house, only the objects are probably more valuable, and definitely less dusty.

The Hall of the Grand Duke - the Gobelin tapestries were also saved from the bombing and the fire as they had been dispatched to the Real Fabrica de Tapices for cleaning and restoration.  What you can't see, tragically, is that the ceiling is, I think, coffered, and covered in gold leaf - another, to my mind, brilliant idea to suggest to my husband for our own house.  He might even go for it - he loves gold leafing things - though his efforts are usually restricted to bones or plastic animals. My friend Christopher the jeweller, meanwhile, has bars over his bedroom window which he's been wanting to gold leaf ever since he moved in, in order, he says, to find out what it really feels like to live in a gilded cage.

The Liria palace is open one day a week, for two hours, by prior arrangement, sometimes, apparently, months in advance.  Suddenly I really want to go to Madrid, and there can't be anything last minute about it.

With Mary Fellowes

Mary Fellowes is a stylist and a writer; an ex-staffer at Vogue UK, she was the launch Fashion Director of Vogue Turkiye, and she's since and between worked for nearly every Vogue in the world, as well styling ad campaigns, catwalk shows, music videos, celebrities and - without naming names - seriously A List blue-blooded socialites.

And this is the list of things that are inspiring her and bringing her joy, right now:

Live music at St. Mazie's in Brooklyn, after eating dinner downstairs at St. Charles Cellar.

Ruby red Jambox speakers, with Hans Zimmer on repeat.

Everything in Palm Beach, especially the vintage clothing stores. 

The movie Spring Breakers, by Harmony Korine.

Smurf-flavoured ice-cream

The rare Red Cardinal birds that appear on my New York City fire escape . . . 

. . . and imagining Richard Gere arriving the same way, as he does at the end of Pretty Woman.

La Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence - the chapel that Matisse designed in the South of France.

Political television dramas -  House of Cards, Political Animals, Homeland, The Kennedys with Katie Holmes - and Talenti Sea Salt Caramel gelato.  The latter is best consumed in bed while also consuming the former.

Running down the East River in New York and watching container ships go by, and imagining the goings on at the old factories across the water.

Galore fashion magazine in New York, for bringing back the hot sexy glamazons and for not celebrating emaciated miserable anorexic depressing models.

La Prairie Caviar Serum, and every single one of the products by Korres, the Greek organic skincare line.

Being whisked away to Otto Dix's Vienna by having brunch at Cafe Sabarsky, part of the Austrian Neue Gallery on 5th Avenue.  

Maison Martin Margiela high tops.

Being asked to go and style Sharon Stone in LA later this month.

Kale salads with lemon and pumpkin seeds.


Colourful printed loungewear and pyjamas from Anthropologie.

Jo Malone Nectarine Blossom and Honey bath oil.

Nicholas Kirkwood's new men's shoes - I want a pair.

Stripes

It was an editorial with Jenna Lyons of J. Crew that started my obsession with stripes.  (It's the Vogue UK September 2011 issue, if anyone wants to go and look it up.)

It opened like this:

(I immediately bought the jersey that she is wearing, incidentally. Tragically however, it didn't immediately transform me into Jenna Lyons.  I just look like a slightly overweight bumble bee.) 

Since then, from time to time, I find myself looking for and at pictures of her house:

Our walls are pale grey too, but they were even before I even read the piece.

We don't have a garden, sadly.

Okay so I'm not all over the antler/ horn thing above the mantlepiece, but I love the striped rug, and the shoes, and the fireplace. 

But this room, this room - well, just look at the ceiling. (I'm less into the black chalkboard wall.)

It is that last photograph that I return to most often.  Immediately I had seen it, the first time, I decided to repaint the children's bedroom to look like a circus big top, in thick blue and yellow stripes, and to paint the ceiling of our bedroom in pink and white stripes - and then I found out that I was pregnant with Esmeralda, and lost all impetus to do anything.  And even though she is now nine months old, no new stripes have appeared anywhere in the house, not even in the bathroom which is the one room I have redone since her birth. 

But I feel that my love for the simple stripe is about to be fully revived, entirely on account of a new book: Stripes by Linda O'Keefe (I can't seem to find out whether or not she's related to the artist Geogia O'Keefe, but I have found out that O'Keefe is the 1,550th most common surname in the US.)  It is packed full of amazing photographs, and it has alerted me to a vast number of buildings and designs and artists that I hadn't even considered seeking inspiration from:

Cat O'Sullivan's 1840s Catskills house. I want to live in it.

Missoni Shower Stall at the 2008 Milan Furniture Fair

Patrick Norguet's Rainbow Chair.  I have a weakness for anything named Rainbow.  It's Esmeralda's second name, after my most favourite of childhood ponies.  So when I saw that there was a horse called The Rainbow Hunter running in the National this weekend, I decided it was a sign and put a tenner on it, convinced that it was going to come in at 66-1.  I spent the hours preceding the race imagining how I was going to spend my winnings.  The Rainbow Hunter was the first to fall.  This has happened with pretty much every single horse I have ever backed.

Church of San Giovanni Battista, Ticino.  Suddenly I'm thinking that driving around Italy could be our next holiday.

Matilda Temperley, from the Human Zoo series (incidentally, although she's represented by Michael Hoppen, some of her works are currently available for £50 a print from my new favourite online gallery, www.lumitrix.com - it's amazing - finally we have the true democracisation of art.)

Inside the Pasadena Museum of California Art during Susan Silton's 2008 Inside Out intervention.

The Bouroullec Brothers' Textile Field installation at the V&A during the 2011 London Design Festival - I actually went to this, and Sholto loved it, but I was pregnant and so had completely forgotten about it.

So now I've returned to my idea of painting stripes everywhere, and have decided to do the children's bedroom ceiling in blue and white stripes (the same blue as the walls, which is Parma Blue), the bathroom in grey (Cornforth White) and white, and our bedroom in bright pink (exact shade as yet to be determined) and white.  It's going to look AMAZING.  I told my husband; his response was "Although you think you can see me, I'm not actually here."  I persisted.  "I just think it's a bit contrived," he said.  "No more contrived than what the Italians were doing during the Renaissance," I replied, "when flat plaster ceilings were coffered with stucco panels which exactly reproduced the lines of timber framing."  (I've been reading Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses, again.)

I'm going to win this one.  Painting stripes is going to be way less high maintenance than stucco-ing the ceilings.  

Sleek and Chic: Alexandra Robinson Furniture

One of the reasons I find it so utterly impossible even to consider moving away from Notting Hill is that I love the market - both on the Golborne Road and the Portobello Road - so much that I can't imagine living anywhere that isn't two minutes walk away.  I like knowing that I can buy a fur coat at any time of year.  I like that they often have random steel band performances in the backs of lorries.  I like meandering along and finding an old vase or jardiniere that it is just perfect for the bunch of tulips or pot of hydrangea that I've just bought, to the extent that we now have so many that we're running out of places to put them.  Equally I have enough trims and off-cuts and tassels to upholster a whole house (which is actually what I'm kind of doing, at least in my head.  I've just come across a toile that is going to be perfect on the chairs in the orangery of our non-existent country pile.) And both my husband and I like sorting through the endless junkety antique shops, finding treasures such as book shelves and old church pews and giant conch shells and pretty little chairs and stools; it's where most of our furniture originates from.  But although there was some we actually needed, there are more than a few bits that Andrew haggled in as a bonus; suffice to say, our house is ever so slightly crowded, and very occasionally I worry that it's beginning to look a bit too much like the upstairs of Arbon Interiors on the Golborne Road, i.e. a furniture repository.

Antique (well, old) trunks on the Golborne Road

One of my favourite furniture shops - I've tried to buy the neon sign but they won't let me because the electrics are more than a bit dodge, apparently.

Interior of the Cloth Shop on the Portobello Road.  Heaven.

But just occasionally, I come across something that makes me hanker after sleeker, chicer living, with clean lines and less clutter, and right now that something is Alexandra Robinson Furniture:

 Alexandra Robinson desk

 Alexandra Robinson console

I want both these pieces, and the parquet floor.  (Although I've actually got grand plans to paint our floors, I want them to look like a wild flower meadow, but my husband is as yet being somewhat unflinching in his opinion that it will be a disaster because my talent doesn't match my enthusiasm.)  

Anway, back to Alexandra:  having spent most of her working life at Christie's, she has seen more pieces of beautiful furniture and outstanding examples of twentieth century design than most, and has been able to fine hone her aesthetics over a period of several years.  "The early and mid 20th Century is, in my mind, the period that produced the most striking paintings and sculpture. I love the work of artists such as Modigliani, with his unique style of clean lines and earthy colours, and then later British artists such as Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, who both produced exquisite work, similar in their simple striking forms.  Furniture was seeing a dramatic change at this time too, both Gio Ponti and Diego Giacometti are among my favourites, and produced beautiful work that is also timeless."

Diego Giacometti, elephant table

Diego Giacometti, owl table

Gio Ponti, table

Alexandra started designing her own pieces because she couldn't find what she wanted when it came to decorating her own home - thus immediately showing that she has a more discerning eye than me, and that she's better at editing.  (I bet she doesn't go to Arbon Interiors to find a chest of drawers, and come home with a bookshelf and another chair.)  There's also a coffee table and a kitchen island in the collection, and more pieces are coming.   And she does bespoke commissions.  "I wanted to create a range of honestly priced furniture that would be beautiful in its simplicity and quality," she states. "All pieces are made in the UK by local British craftsmen and using materials such as solid oak and handsome stones."  

So when I've got my country pile, I know where to go to stock it.  And in the mean time, I think I'm about to develop a teeny tiny obsession with Diego Giacometti.  And as I'm never going to be able to afford Christie's prices, I'm going to have to keep on scouring the market, just in case one slips through the net.  

www.alexandra-robinson.com/furniture