The great wide blue yonder

I end my week of blue with this beautiful photo of the hydrangea horseshoe outside Groote Schuur, the house of Cecil Rhodes. Between blue heaven and blue earth, the blue haze of Table Mountain and Devil's Peak.

Photo by Alain Proust to accompany text written by Graham Viney for The World of Interiors, June 1986.

Don't it make my brown eyes blue

To continue my theme this week of blue in decoration, and also to continue the occasional series of favorites begun in June last year, here are photos of a room Chester Jones designed in the mid-nineties in London. Jones is definitely a decorator able to blend traditional furniture, tribal forms, contemporary art, color, space and light (see here and here) into rooms with a completely modern point of view. This interior is twenty years old, has not to my eyes dated, and could have been created either side of the pond. In other hands such a mix would drift into being a hodgepodge.

In most of the rooms I choose to write about, even the historic ones from the 1980s and 1990s, I see a similarity - not of style, necessarily, but a regard for architecture, history, affability and idiosyncrasy. Some are grand, some apparently simpler, some more tailored and polished than others, but all are courteous, approachable and urbane. I could look forward to coming home to any of them.

I don't know if anyone else would say the same, and maybe it's my imagination but there are so few birds. I sit now at my dining table looking out to the tops of trees and see hardly a bird. A hawk wheeled by and there are a couple of swallows swooping around. I don't want to give the impression that the sky has exactly been a maelstrom of wings, but what I don't see is worrisome enough to make me wonder if it's just this city, a wider manifestation or, as I say, I'm fantasizing.

Photos by Andreas von Einsiedel for an article written by Elfreda Pownall in The World of Interiors, October 1996.

Blue

The second day of a self-indulgent indulgent week when I post about the color blue in decoration and, coincidentally, the third in an occasional series about bathrooms. I don't have a lot to say about it - my enthusiasm for blue has already been declared - but, as with the room yesterday by Mark Hampton, I could roost very comfortably here.

Let me give you a taste of Christopher Gibbs' text about the owner of the house, Piers von Westenholz.

"Piers and his friends looked back before the baleful blanching-out of Syrie Maughm, the thoughtless dragging, stippling and obliterating of architectural framework, the revolt against historicism, the ghastly chic of Evelyn Waugh's Mrs Beaver in A Handful of Dust, the litter of tawdry gewgaws and 'antiques' restored beyond any interest, quality or atmosphere.

"It was time to return to old England, England before the Industrial Revolution and mass manufacturing spawned that nadir of designed depravity, belle époque. They searched out, dusted down, revived and refreshed the true orthodoxy, anchored firmly this side of the Channel, grounded in ancient harmonies, preserved in our architectural traditions, and in the use of materials felled or mined in our islands.

"What was despised by the taste-makers of the past decades - oaky gothick, Tudorbethan, the sternly architectural and archaeological - is cherished by Westenholz. These foundations are garnished by often earlier, more familiar pieces - painted, or in mahogany, walnut, even satinwood - and by drawings, paintings and sculptures by his friends and contemporaries such as Book Bantock, Rory McEwan and Nigel Waymouth .... "

A fine piece of writing that, despite the patriotism, is full of heartfelt detestation of modern manufacturing and it's consequences.

Photo by Jonathan Pilkington for an article written by Christopher Gibbs for The World of Interiors, October 1997.

Given the chance ...

... was my answer when earlier this year I was asked if I always wore blue. Seemingly I had worn blue shirts and blue sweaters so frequently, probably daily given my predilection for the color, it had become a matter of remark amongst my students. I've checked in my closet and of the forty-three shirts hanging there twenty-two are blue or blue and white. Simply put, I like blue.

Imagine then the effect this room had (partial photo, I'm afraid) when I turned the page to it. Of all the beautiful interiors in Mark Hampton, an American Decorator, this room is probably the one I would have requested of Mr Hampton had I had the chance.

Mark Hampton, an American Decorator is a book long-awaited - it does not disappoint and lives up to the fanfare. One cavil: there is a pretty major proof-reading glitch - a large chunk of text repeated and a misnaming of a chair - beyond that, perfection.

Nowadays there's an apparently unending stream of books by and about modern decorators in which it seems to me there's little that is not trite. Lack of originality is a accusation levied at Mr Hampton but this book should give the lie to that, if only from the point of view that originality is a quality much hyped in this business but of which little is ever seen.

Photo by Eric Boman.