August 22, 2013
My favourite things at the moment: Bodys Isek Kingelez’s city scape art, butterfly houses, copper watering cans, the very beautiful Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig. Read More
August 19, 2013
There’s nothing I love more than visiting a new English seaside resort and we seem to have notched up quite a few this summer, sigh. So in the first of a series of photo diaries I give you Scarborough on Yorkshire’s East Coast. It’s a fabulous town, full of beautiful Victorian architecture, both decaying splendor and starkly cared for beauty, there is an authentic British beach that feels like the shore that time forgot, all kiss me quick and bus mans holidays with a particular charm of its own:Read More
August 14, 2013
August 5, 2013
When we moved into this flat last year we knew that the kitchen would be one of the priority spaces for redecoration. There is something a bit depressing about cooking and trying to impersonate a domestic goddess with artex ceilings, yellow walls and orange & red tiles! And there is almost nothing I dislike more in the home than something false pretending to be something else, melamine cupboards and mdf worktops are essentially the trompe l’oeil of the kitchen world and our kitchen sang its impersonation boldly! However, the word kitchen is, like the word wedding, a touchstone for throwing money down a wishing well. Looking at the cost of a completely new kitchen is dream shattering, everything is amazingly expensive when the word kitchen is attached. In lieu of many thousands of pounds we have spent the last six months slowly transforming the space into something that we could be happy with for under a grand.
July 15, 2013
On this gloriously sunny day when I have a date with a book in the garden I am writing a very quick post in homage to grand follies, which I like to think of as the Alice in Wonderland’s of building design. Nothing delights me more than Victorian and Georgian architectural follies and I think one of my favourite British organisations is The Landmark Trust. The Landmark Trust takes on dilapidated old buildings of special note and restores them sympathetically to their original condition. It then rents them out as holiday lets which funds the restoration of future buildings, we have stayed in one before and it was an amazing experience. Landmark has taken on a truly formidable array of buildings from castles to cottages, follies to railway stations and much in between including The Pineapple House (above) in Dunmore, Scotland.
Here are some of my favourites from their portfolio:Read More
