Category Archives: Travel

Travel: Day Trip to Polesden Lacey in the Mist

January 2, 2017

Image: Design Soda

Happy New Year people, hope you all had good ones, I’m easing myself into 2017 with a gentle post today on our recent day trip to Polesden Lacey, near Dorking. This is exactly my kind of daytrip, a place with nature and a house that reminds me of the countless interwar novels I’ve read, with an interior I could feel at home in and all coinciding on one of those days we’ve had recently where the outdoors is engulfed in beautiful delicate clouds of ethereal mist. Winding down country roads, with trees above our heads forming arches and silver birches lining borders, all surrounded in enveloping mist, made for the very definition of other-worldliness in my eyes and just what I needed the week before Christmas.

Margate Dreamland Revisited : Postcards by the sea

September 5, 2016

Over the bank holiday weekend I took a lovely daytrip to the seaside town of Margate in Kent with two of my favourite people. It’s been three years since we last went and the town continues to evolve and expand beyond the ruins of desertion and downward turns. It’s still the town that Primark left, and indeed the Woolworths still sits with its 2007 shopfront unoccupied, but last time the century old amusement park Dreamland was also closed and forlorn and like much of the town shaped by a decaying glamour which I caught on my picture tour here. As more artists move down to the area, and the town continues a regeneration after the building of the Turner gallery in sympathy with its past, Margate is changing. We visited Dreamland, and although at 35 I may not be quite the target audience (best not relay the tale of three grown women atop a Ferris wheel having a decidedly regretful moment) but I have massive heart eyes for this sherbet dibdab writ large. From its sweetshop-seaside-rock colour palette to its fifties typography, the new Dreamland’s is a colour walk of kitsch and nostalgia and a perfect part of the seaside landscape of a famous kiss-me-quick town. I’m a little in love with it. So, today’s Through the Aperture post is devoted entirely to Margate Dreamland and it’s candy floss dream of kitsch. Enjoy!

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Design Soda Travel Guide : Lisbon

July 4, 2016

We’ve just had 3 days KID FREE in Lisbon. It was bliss, Lisbon was magical, welcoming, pretty, hilly, hot & inspiring. It’s a great city for design lovers, a town of typography and tiles, pretty paving, colour, great food and a really convivial culture. We packed so much into a short time, I knew I had to see beautiful Sintra and also to escape to the beach for a few hours so fitting in all the cultural sights and the things highlighted in the fabulous Wallpaper* guide was a bit of a squeeze but well worth aching feet for. Today I’m sharing the top things we saw, did & ate in the city and on trips around which I think you could comfortably squeeze into a long weekend, wherever possible I have included a google map for directional purposes.Read More

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Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence

February 18, 2015

Last year when we visited Istanbul I saved back a few snaps from a visit to the truly awesome Museum of Innocence. In anticipation of The Barbican’s new exhibition this month ‘Magnificent a obsessions: The artist as collector’ (which I will definitely visit) I thought I’d share our experience of Turkey’s finest exhibit. Read More

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Mitford Family Portrait

October 3, 2014

Like many young English girls over the past eighty years, Nancy Mitford’s Love in A Cold Climate was a defining novel of my youth. This week the last remaining Mitford sister Debo’s funeral occurred so I thought that I would quickly share one of my favourite Mitford scenes on the blog. This is a snapshot from the pub Debo owned in Oxfordshire, The Swan Inn. A few years ago I visited the house where the Mitford’s grew up as a part of an open garden scheme and stopped for lunch at the pub Debo owns a stones throwaway from the house in Burford. It is a comfortable old inn, a million miles away from the splendour of Chatsworth House that Debo would call home as the Duchess of Devonshire and is crammed full of paraphernalia of the Mitford family history saga. We had lunch by the fireplace which was adorned with these family portraits of all the sisters in their youth, from the communist to the fascist, the Mitford’s represented an astonishing curio of inter-war aristocratic life with all its pain and eccentricities.

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