I have to admit that I hadn’t visited the Vyne for many years, indeed decades. This is a fascinating house to visit, once you negotiate the road system of Basingstoke with its mania for roundabouts which reminds you of Milton Keynes. The Vyne is a house in which you should look at the details, as […]
Until a few years ago, Chelsea had an annual festival with events across the area. It now seems to have split into a number of different festivals, but over the past two weeks there definitely has been a feeling of festivity, no doubt helped by the weather, with art, flowers and gardening shows bringing adventurous […]
Considered one of the most avante-garde architects of his generation in Brazil, Flavio de Carvalho (1899-1973) was also a painter, particularly of portraits, a writer, and a designer of clothes which he had the courage to wear himself. When you compare his achievements to that of the contemporary Brazilian painter Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato also on […]
Brazil is a country of contrasts – the energetic carnival in Rio, a passion for football, the modernist capital of Brazilia, the amazing landscape suffering from deforestation, and the simple life of the favelas. Brazil itself only became independent from Portugal in 1922, after which it was more able to find its own artistic and […]
Now semi-derelict and, though the existing building dates from around 1900, the Bargehouse has had quite a history from King James I’s Royal Barge House to a meatpacking warehouse and is now a popular venue for contemporary art and design exhibitions, with contemporary work contrasting against the old crumbling building. This week, several designers are […]
Standing like dark religious sentinels within the exuberant marble and mosaic Byzantine architecture of The Fitzrovia Chapel, ‘Scorched’ is one of the highlights of this year’s London Craft Week. The Chapel, designed by John Loughborough Pearson and his son Frank, and originally at the heart of Middlesex Hospital, is itself a hidden gem within this […]
The recent fire at Notre Dame must have brought back memories to those who lived and worked at Clandon Park House in Surrey. The Italianate 18th century house, designed by the architect Giacomo Leoni for the Earl of Onslow was almost totally destroyed when fire swept through the building in April 2015. Probably caused by […]
In 1885-6, a young Scottish architect William Flockhart, who had trained at the Glasgow School of Art, remodelled two Georgian town houses at 108 Brompton Road in South Kensington with a new Flemish-style facade and large well-lit studios for the court photographers Elliot and Fry. Later occupants included the sculptor Cecil Thomas and architect and […]
The Queen-Anne style Cadogan Hotel opened in Sloane Street in 1887, to designs of H B Brace, subsequently expanding into the buildings at the rear. The best rooms overlook Cadogan Place Gardens, which guests are allowed to use, and it was in one of these rooms that in 1895 the writer and poet Oscar Wilde, […]
Just as the architects Barr Gazetas have breathed new life for The Crown Estates into what was rather an uninspiring shopping arcade, so BOTTLETOP brings their creativity to support new employment in communities and turn problem waste into fashionable bracelets, belts, scarfs and bags. The 90-year old Quadrant Arcade is the only arcade in Regent […]
"The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul."
(Thomas Moore)
To be an architect means having a wide range of interests - architecture, art and creativity in all its variety of forms, sustainability, science and innovation. The greatest interest is often where these different worlds overlap and collide - that is when something imaginative often occurs that pushes us all forward to another place
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