Thursday 14 March 2024

Stumper and Fielding, Portobello Road. A quintessential Gentlemen's and ...





107 Portobello Road
W11 2QB London, United Kingdom
020 7229 5577


 “We are an independent clothing store. Traditional English clothing with a contemporary twist.
Stumper & Fielding offers old school cool on London's Portobello road. With Harris Tweed designed with Stumper & Fielding in mind, handmade Loakes shoes, collegiate scarves and our own custom designs. Our boutique is filled to the brim with elegant, classic looks for the modern gentleman with a healthy dose of surreal British madness mixed in for good measure. There's nothing quite like Stumper & Fielding.”







Wednesday 13 March 2024

MERCHANT IVORY (2023) trailer | BFI Flare 2024 / The secret shocking truth about Merchant Ivory


‘I got you an Oscar. Why do I need to pay you?’ The secret shocking truth about Merchant Ivory

 

They were the box-office titans behind sumptuous period masterpieces. Yet underneath, reveals a new warts-and-all film, they were skint, stressed, prone to blood-curdling bust-ups – and ping-ponging between lovers

 

Ryan Gilbey

Tue 12 Mar 2024 16.21 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/mar/12/merchant-ivory-oscar-shocking-truth-emma-thompson-anthony-hopkins-howards-end

 

If you were asked to guess which prestigious film-making duo had spent their career scratching around desperately for cash, trying to wriggle out of paying their cast and crew, ping-ponging between lovers, and having such blood-curdling bust-ups that their neighbours called the police, it might be some time before “Merchant Ivory” sprang to mind. But a new warts-and-all documentary about the Indian producer Ismail Merchant and the US director James Ivory makes it clear that the simmering passions in their films, such as the EM Forster trilogy of A Room With a View, Maurice and Howards End, were nothing compared to the scalding, volatile ones behind the camera.

 

From their initial meeting in New York in 1961 to Merchant’s death during surgery in 2005, the pair were as inseparable as their brand name, with its absence of any hyphen or ampersand, might suggest. Their output was always more eclectic than they got credit for. They began with a clutch of insightful Indian-set dramas including Shakespeare-Wallah, their 1965 study of a troupe of travelling actors, featuring a young, pixieish Felicity Kendal. From there, they moved on to Savages, a satire on civilisation and primitivism, and The Wild Party, a skewering of 1920s Hollywood excess that pipped Damien Chazelle’s Babylon to the post by nearly half a century.

 

Merchant rose at dawn and stole telegrams that agents had sent to their actors, urging them to down tools

 

It was in the 1980s and early 1990s, though, that Merchant Ivory became box-office titans, cornering the market in plush dramas about repressed Brits in period dress. Those literary adaptations launched the careers of Hugh Grant, Helena Bonham Carter, Rupert Graves and Julian Sands, and helped make stars of Emma Thompson and Daniel Day-Lewis. Most were scripted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who had been with them, on and off, since their 1963 debut The Householder; she even lived in the same apartment building in midtown New York. Many were scored by Richard Robbins, who was romantically involved with Merchant while also holding a candle for Bonham Carter. These films restored the costume drama to the position it had occupied during David Lean’s heyday. The roaring trade in Jane Austen adaptations might never have happened without them. You could even blame Merchant Ivory for Bridgerton.

 

Though the pictures were uniformly pretty, making them was often ugly. Money was always scarce. Asked where he would find the cash for the next movie, Merchant replied: “Wherever it is now.” After Jenny Beavan and John Bright won an Academy Award for the costumes in A Room With a View, he said: “I got you your Oscar. Why do I need to pay you?” As Ivory was painstakingly composing each shot, Merchant’s familiar, booming battle cry would ring out: “Shoot, Jim, shoot!”

 

‘You never went to bed without dreaming of ways to kill Ismail’ … Ismail Merchant, left, and James Ivory in Trinidad and Tobago, while making The Mystic Masseur. Photograph: Mikki Ansin/Getty Images

 

Heat and Dust, starring Julie Christie, was especially fraught. Only 30 or 40% of the budget was in place by the time the cameras started rolling in India in 1982; Merchant would rise at dawn to steal the telegrams from the actors’ hotels so they didn’t know their agents were urging them to down tools. Interviewees in the documentary concede that the producer was a “conman” with a “bazaar mentality”. But he was also an incorrigible charmer who dispensed flattery by the bucketload, threw lavish picnics, and wangled entrées to magnificent temples and palaces. “You never went to bed without dreaming of ways to kill him,” says one friend, the journalist Anna Kythreotis. “But you couldn’t not love him.”

 

Stephen Soucy, who directed the documentary, doesn’t soft-pedal how wretched those sets could be. “Every film was a struggle,” he tells me. “People were not having a good time. Thompson had a huge fight with Ismail on Howards End because she’d been working for 13 days in a row, and he tried to cancel her weekend off. Gwyneth Paltrow hated every minute of making Jefferson in Paris. Hated it! Laura Linney was miserable on The City of Your Final Destination because the whole thing was a shitshow. But you watch the films and you see no sense of that.”

 

Soucy’s movie features archive TV clips of the duo bickering even in the midst of promoting a film. “Oh, they were authentic all right,” he says. “They clashed a lot.” The authenticity extended to their sexuality. The subject was not discussed publicly until after Ivory won an Oscar for writing Call Me By Your Name: “You have to remember that Ismail was an Indian citizen living in Bombay, with a deeply conservative Muslim family,” Ivory told me in 2018. But the pair were open to those who knew them. “I never had a sense of guilt,” Ivory says, pointing out that the crew on The Householder referred to him and Merchant as “Jack and Jill”.

 

Soucy had already begun filming his documentary when Ivory published a frank, fragmentary memoir, Solid Ivory, which dwells in phallocentric detail on his lovers before and during his relationship with Merchant, including the novelist Bruce Chatwin. It was that book which emboldened Soucy to ask questions on screen – including about “the crazy, complicated triangle of Jim, Ismail and Dick [Robbins]” – that he might not otherwise have broached.

 

 

The documentary is most valuable, though, in making a case for Ivory as an underrated advocate for gay representation. The Remains of the Day, adapted from Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-winning novel about a repressed butler, may be the duo’s masterpiece, but it was their gay love story Maurice that was their riskiest undertaking. Set in the early 20th century, its release in 1987 could scarcely have been timelier: it was the height of the Aids crisis, and only a few months before the Conservative government’s homophobic Section 28 became law.

 

“Ismail wasn’t as driven as Jim to make Maurice,” explains Soucy. “And Ruth was too busy to write it. But Jim’s dogged determination won the day. They’d had this global blockbuster with A Room With a View, and he knew it could be now or never. People would pull aside Paul Bradley, the associate producer, and say: ‘Why are they doing Maurice when they could be making anything?’ I give Jim so much credit for having the vision and tenacity to make sure the film got made.”

 

Their films were dismissed by the director Alan Parker as 'the Laura Ashley school' of cinema

 

Merchant Ivory don’t usually figure in surveys of queer cinema, though they are part of its ecosystem, and not only because of Maurice. Ron Peck, who made the gay classic Nighthawks, was a crew member on The Bostonians. Andrew Haigh, director of All of Us Strangers, landed his first industry job as a poorly paid assistant in Merchant’s Soho office in the late 1990s; in Haigh’s 2011 breakthrough film Weekend, one character admits to freeze-framing the naked swimming scene in A Room With a View to enjoy “Rupert Graves’s juddering cock”. Merchant even offered a role in Savages to Holly Woodlawn, the transgender star of Andy Warhol’s Trash, only for her to decline because the fee was so low.

 

The position of Merchant Ivory at the pinnacle of British cinema couldn’t last for ever. Following the success of The Remains of the Day, which was nominated for eight Oscars, the brand faltered and fizzled. Their films had already been dismissed by the director Alan Parker as representing “the Laura Ashley school” of cinema. Gary Sinyor spoofed their oeuvre in the splendid pastiche Stiff Upper Lips (originally titled Period!), while Eric Idle was plotting his own send-up called The Remains of the Piano. The culture had moved on.

 

There was still an appetite for upper-middle-class British repression, but only if it was funny: Richard Curtis drew on some of Merchant Ivory’s repertory company of actors (Grant, Thompson, Simon Callow) for a run of hits beginning with Four Weddings and a Funeral, which took the poshos out of period dress and plonked them into romcoms.

 

The team itself was splintering. Merchant had begun directing his own projects. When he and Ivory did collaborate, the results were often unwieldy, lacking the stabilising literary foundation of their best work. “Films like Jefferson in Paris and Surviving Picasso didn’t come from these character-driven novels like Forster, James or Ishiguro,” notes Soucy. “Jefferson and Picasso were not figures that audiences warmed to.” Four years after Merchant’s death, Ivory’s solo project The City of Your Final Destination became mired in lawsuits, including one from Anthony Hopkins for unpaid earnings.

 

Soucy’s film, though, is a reminder of their glory days. It may also stoke interest in the movies among young queer audiences whose only connection to Ivory, now 95, is through Call Me By Your Name. “People walk up to Jim in the street to shake his hand and thank him for Maurice,” says Soucy. “But I also wanted to include the more dysfunctional side of how they were made. Hopefully it will be inspiring to young film-makers to see that great work can come out of chaos.”

 

Merchant Ivory is showing in the BFI Flare festival at BFI Southbank, London, on 16 and 18 March


Tuesday 12 March 2024

How Kate manipulated the royal Mother's Day family picture / Even Photoshop Can’t Erase Royals’ Latest P.R. Blemish


NEWS ANALYSIS

Even Photoshop Can’t Erase Royals’ Latest P.R. Blemish

 

A Mother’s Day photo was meant to douse speculation about the Princess of Wales’ health. It did the opposite — and threatened to undermine trust in the royal family.

 



Mark Landler

By Mark Landler

Reporting from London

March 11, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/world/europe/kate-middleton-photo-princess-wales.html?searchResultPosition=4

 

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a digitally altered picture of an absent British princess is apparently worth a million.

 

That seemed to be the lesson after another day of internet-breaking rumors and conspiracy theories swirling around Catherine, Princess of Wales, who apologized on Monday for having doctored a photograph of herself with her three children that circulated on news sites and social media on Sunday.

 

It was the first official photo of Catherine since before she underwent abdominal surgery two months ago — a cheerful Mother’s Day snapshot, taken by her husband, Prince William, at home. But if it was meant to douse weeks of speculation about Catherine’s well-being, it had precisely the opposite effect.

 

Now the British royal family faces a storm of questions about how it communicates with the press and public, whether Catherine manipulated other family photos she released in previous years, and whether she felt driven to retouch this photo to disguise the impact of her illness.

 

It adds up to a fresh tempest for a royal family that has lurched from one self-created crisis to another. Unlike previous episodes, this involves one of the family’s most popular members, a commoner-turned-future queen. It also reflects a social media celebrity culture driven in part by the family itself, one that is worlds away from the intrusive paparazzi pictures that used to cause royals, including a younger Kate Middleton, chagrin.

 

“Like so many millennial celebrities, the Princess of Wales has built a successful public image by sharing with her audience a carefully curated version of her personal life,” said Ed Owens, a royal historian who has studied the relationship between the monarchy and the media. The manipulated photograph, he said, is damaging because, for the public, it “brings into question the authenticity” of Catherine’s home life.

 

Authenticity is the least of it: the mystery surrounding Catherine’s illness and prolonged recovery, out of the public eye, has spawned wild rumors about her physical and mental health, her whereabouts, and her relationship with William.

 

The discovery that the photo was altered prompted several international news agencies to issue advisories — including one from The Associated Press that was ominously called a “kill notification” — urging news organizations to remove the image from their websites and scrub it from any social media.

 

Mr. Owens called the incident a “debacle.”

 

“At a time when there is much speculation about Catherine’s health, as well as rumors swelling online about her and Prince William’s private lives,” he said, “the events of the last two days have done nothing to dispel questions and concerns.”

 

Kensington Palace, where Catherine and William have their offices, declined to release an unedited copy of the photograph on Monday, which left amateur visual detectives to continue scouring the image for signs of alteration in the poses of the princess and her three children, George, Charlotte, and Louis.

 

The A.P. said its examination yielded evidence that there was “an inconsistency in the alignment of Princess Charlotte’s left hand.” The image has a range of clear visual inconsistencies that suggest it was doctored. A part of a sleeve on Charlotte’s cardigan is missing, a zipper on Catherine’s jacket and her hair is misaligned, and a pattern in her hair seems clearly artificial.

 

Samora Bennett-Gager, an expert in photo retouching, identified multiple signs of image manipulation. The edges of Charlotte’s legs, he said, were unnaturally soft, suggesting that the background around them had been shifted. Catherine’s hand on the waist of her youngest son, Louis, is blurry, which he said could indicate that the image was taken from a separate frame of the shoot.

 

Taken together, Mr. Bennett-Gager said, the changes suggested that the photo was a composite drawn from multiple images rather than a single image smoothed out with a Photoshop program. A spokesman for Catherine declined to comment on her proficiency in photo editing.

 

Even before Catherine’s apology, the web exploded with memes of “undoctored” photos. One showed a bored-looking Catherine smoking with a group of children. Another, which the creator said was meant to “confirm she is absolutely fine and recovering well,” showed the princess splashing down a water slide.

 

Beyond the mockery, the royal family faces a lingering credibility gap. Catherine has been an avid photographer for years, capturing members of the royal family in candid situations: Queen Camilla with a basket of flowers; Prince George with his great-grandfather, Prince Philip, on a horse-drawn buggy.

 

The palace has released many of these photos, and they are routinely published on the front pages of British papers (The Times of London splashed the Mother’s Day picture over three columns). A former palace official predicted that the news media would now examine the earlier photographs to see if they, too, had been altered.

 

That would put Kensington Palace in the tricky position of having to defend one of its most effective communicators against a potentially wide-ranging problem, and one over which the communications staff has little control. After a deluge of inquires about the photograph, the palace left it to Catherine to explain what happened. She was contrite, but presented herself as just another frustrated shutterbug with access to Photoshop.

 

“Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing,” she wrote on social media. “I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused.”

 

Catherine’s use of social media sets her apart from older members of the royal family, who rely on the traditional news media to present themselves. When King Charles III taped a video message to mark Commonwealth Day, for example, Buckingham Palace hired a professional camera crew that was paid for by British broadcasters, a standard arrangement for royal addresses.

 

When Charles left the hospital after being treated for an enlarged prostate, he and Queen Camilla walked in front of a phalanx of cameras, smiling and waving as they made their way to their limousine.

 

Catherine was not seen entering or leaving the hospital for her surgery, nor were her children photographed visiting her. That may reflect the gravity of her health problems, royal watchers said, but it also reflects the determination of William and Catherine to erect a zone of privacy around their personal lives.

 

William, royal experts said, is also driven by a desire not to repeat the experience of his mother, Diana, who was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997 after a high-speed pursuit by photographers. Catherine, too, has been victimized by paparazzi, winning damages from a French court in 2017 after a celebrity magazine published revealing shots of her on vacation in France.

 

Last week, grainy photos of Catherine riding in a car with her mother surfaced on the American celebrity gossip site TMZ. British newspapers reported the existence of the photos but did not publish them out of deference to the palace’s appeal that she be allowed to recuperate in privacy.

 

Catherine and William are not the only members of their royal generation who have sought to exercise control over their image. Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, posted photos of themselves on Instagram, even using their account to announce their withdrawal from royal duties in 2020.

 

Catherine’s embrace of social media to circulate her pictures is a way of reclaiming her life from the long lenses of the paparazzi. But the uproar over the Mother’s Day photo shows that this strategy comes with its own risks, not least that a family portrait has added to the very misinformation about her that it was calculated to counteract.

 

On Monday afternoon, Catherine found herself back in traditional royal mode. She was photographed, fleetingly, in the back of a car with William as he left Windsor Castle for a Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey. Kensington Palace said she was on her way to a private appointment.

 

Gaia Tripoli and Lauren Leatherby contributed reporting.

 

Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades. More about Mark Landler


Monday 11 March 2024

BARBOUR'S WORLD. ( Click to enlarge )

 












BARBOUR of South Shields and the Herd Groyne Lighthouse / River Tyne. / VIDEO:Herd Groyne Lighthouse scale model 1:16






Herd Groyne Lighthouse River Tyne.


There is a third lighthouse, just upstream of the pier, on the Herd Groyne at South Shields (which was constructed in 1861–67 to preserve Littlehaven Beach, then known as Herd Sands, which had begun to be washed away by the change of currents caused by the new piers). This very unusual lighthouse resembling a 1940s sci-fi movie space craft was built by Newcastle-upon-Tyne Trinity House in 1882 (ownership was passed to the Tyne Improvement Commission the following year). It consists of an upper hexagonal part (including the lantern) of wood and corrugated iron construction, sitting on twelve cylindrical steel legs. The whole structure is painted red and stands 49 ft (15 m) in height.







The Barbour story began in 1894 in the Market Place in South Shields, England. Today the 5th generation family owned business remains in the read, with Barbour’s headquarters located in Simonside, South Shields. Although it sources products from around the globe, Barbour’s classic wax jackets are still manufactured by hand in the factory in Simonside and each year over 100,000 jackets are processed via the central, subsidiary and local customer service operations.


In 2004, Barbour began to work with Lord James Percy, in the design and marketing of its flagship shooting clothing range—the Northumberland range. Technically advanced and highly acclaimed in 2005, the Northumberland Range won the Shooting Industry Award for best clothing product, and the Linhope 3-in-1 won the Shooting Industry Award for best clothing product, 2008. Percy was also involved, alongside Vice Chairman Helen Barbour, in designing the new Barbour Sporting collection launched for Autumn Winter 2011.

Barbour now has 11 of its own retail shops in the UK, and a presence in over 40 countries worldwide including the United States, Germany, Holland, Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Argentina, New Zealand and Japan.

There are now over 2,000 products across the two seasons and the collections now cater for Men, Ladies and Children. Broadening out from its countrywear roots, today the heritage and lifestyle clothing brand produces clothing that is designed for a full lifestyle wardrobe. As well as jackets and coats, the Barbour wardrobe includes trousers, shirts, socks, knitwear and a range of accessories.

Nevertheless, in whichever area the company now operates, it remains true to its core values as a family business which espouses the unique values of the British Countryside and brings the qualities of wit, grit, and glamour to its beautifully functional clothing.

HISTORY OF BARBOUR WAXED COTTON: CLASSIC OUTERWEAR
You can’t think of the classic Barbour wax cotton jacket’s provenance without a nod to England’s nineteenth-century marine industry. And if necessity is the mother of invention, hat tip to hardworking 15th-century mariners who slathered their sailcloth in fish oil. It’s the earliest known iteration of waxed cotton, the textile we admire so much these days for its weather-resistant functionality and timeless appeal. Resourceful ancient fishermen repurposed worn sailcloth as capes for themselves: the same properties to make their sails more efficient in dry weather, and lighter during storms, also kept their own backs dry.

A few centuries hence, “oilcloth” had morphed into a linseed oil-saturated Egyptian cotton, a flax plant derivative replacing the erstwhile smelly fish oil as a weather deterrent. A cheap alternative to leather, oilcloth could be used in many of the same applications. Problem was, linseed oil also made the material stiff in cold weather (and thus prone to cracking), and turned it yellow. It took a long time to dry once it was soaked, and it was toxic to some degree. Still, it served its purpose in the marine industry and remained more or less unchanged from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s.

It was then, over a period of two years and with the combined efforts of three companies, a new generation of proofed cottons emerged, now impregnated with paraffin-based wax instead of linseed oil. The result was a pliant and breathable, water-resistant cotton that did not yellow. Manufactured exclusively for outerwear, the newfangled waxed cotton in short order supplanted oilcloth as the preferred material for heavy-duty foul weather gear.

Although J. Barbour & Sons Ltd. did not invent waxed cotton, the company was an early champion and purveyor of it. Barbour called the first thick, waterproof waxed cotton fabric Oilskin, and its clothing line Beacon Brand. Oilskin outerwear answered the demands of sailors, fishermen, and river, dock, and shipyard workers in coastal South Shields, a busy port in the North East of England that is still home to Barbour. Waxed cotton also appealed to farmers and gamekeepers, and even found its way into Barbour motorcycling apparel as early as 1934, later popularized by American actor and cycling enthusiast Steve McQueen.

THE MANY FACES OF MODERN WAXED COTTON
Nowadays the terms “oilcloth” and “waxed cotton” are sometimes used interchangeably to describe the same material, in spite of their real and historic differences. Our partners at Barbour make outerwear of waxed cotton manufactured to different specifications depending on its anticipated use:

Sylkoil is an “unshorn” wax where the cotton comes straight from the loom while it’s slightly fluffy and is then dyed and waxed. The natural imperfections of the weave are reflected in the rich variations of color and finish. Over time, this fabric softens into a lovely, slightly peachy looking cotton between waxes.

Thornproof is a lustrous wax with a deep color and even touch. The cotton is calendered between rollers and then dyed. The resulting finish is smooth cotton which we term Thornproof because it is extremely resistant to snags and pulls from spiky plants such as brambles and hawthorn.

In spite of waxed cotton’s utility and appeal, modern polymers (GORE-TEX® is an example) have threatened its extinction in recent years. And it is really no wonder: they’re more practical and require less maintenance.

This begs the question, why choose a Barbour waxed cotton jacket? You could as easily ask why a book holds sway over a tablet reader, a mechanical watch over a digital one, or wood over laminate, and the answer would be the same: because it possesses a depth of character its modern counterpart lacks. When you wear a Barbour jacket, you are wearing a piece of history.

And in the end, waxed cotton has rallied: while the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries may have seen its widest use in the marine industries, the classic waxed cotton jacket has made a comeback as essential outerwear for the discriminating country sportsman, fashion maven, and urbanite alike. It is a garment that develops patina with age, each mark a reminder of a page in a chapter, or a chapter in a story.

For many of us the waxed cotton jacket never went out of style. As stewards of a living garment—one that will likely enjoy use by multiple generations—we proudly wear this wardrobe beacon of our forebears.





Saturday 9 March 2024

WUNDER-CRAMMER

 

INTERIORS

WUNDER-CRAMMER

Ever wondered how much you can squeeze into a petite end-of-terrace house where an open fire is the sole source of heating? Well, here’s your answer. Furniture restorer Guy Marshall’s mid-19th-century cottage in north Shropshire is all of one room wide and two deep and yet he has still managed to accommodate an abundance of mainly Georgian antiques, including a rather handsome four-poster. Brimful, certainly; but it’s also beautifully – ahem – Marshalled

 

By Ros Byam Shaw

Photography by Jan Baldwin

https://www.worldofinteriors.com/story/guy-marshall-house-shropshire-england?utm_source=pinterest&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dhpinterest&utm_content=app.dashhudson.com%2Fthe-world-of-interiors%2Flibrary%2Fmedia%2F359358433

15 November 2023

 

View of the living room where a portrait of William Pitt hangs alongside a fireplace

 Originally, a front door led straight from the street into the living room, where a portrait of William Pitt by John Hoppner now hangs. Just below it is Guy Marshall’s evening roost – a wing chair covered in mattress ticking. He says the advantage of the house being so small is that he can stretch out his legs and toast his feet at the fire, which is the sole source of heat in the entire place. On the tripod table in the foreground a Regency penwork tea caddy sits alongside a Bow porcelain figure and creamware cauliflower teapot, both 1760s

 

Ten years ago, in his early forties, antique furniture restorer Guy Marshall bought his first house, an end-of-terrace cottage dating from 1850 in a quiet side street of a town in north Shropshire. Plain and modest in size – its frontage to the street is little more than three-and-a-half metres across – it fitted his budget, and his three further requirements: ceilings high enough for his chinoiserie long-case clock of 1705, a bedroom big enough for his 1800 four-poster bed, and a usable fireplace. Guy didn’t like much else about it.

 

The double-glazed windows had to go, and he replaced them with single-glazed multi-pane ones. Up came the fitted carpet that covered the concrete downstairs and the chipboard upstairs. He disconnected all the radiators, including the heated towel rail in the downstairs bathroom, and dismantled the fitted kitchen. And he made a simple wooden chimney piece for the fireplace.

 

Tucked into the corner, beside a mid-18th-century tea table, a faux-marble Solomonic pedestal bears a plaster bust


To say the house can accommodate a four-poster and a tall clock might give the wrong impression. It really is as small as it looks from the outside. A side entrance opens into a hall not much bigger than a chessboard. Steep stairs rise to the left, the bathroom door to the right is firmly closed (he plans to rip out the modern fittings) and ahead is the kitchen built over the old backyard. Through an open doorway is the front room. At the top of the stairs another diminutive landing separates a box room, which might better be described as a walk-in cupboard, from the bedroom, which is entirely filled by the bed. That’s it.

 

After moving in, Guy met a lady in her eighties who had been brought up here with her parents and brother. The house had yet to be extended at the back. There was one room downstairs, one upstairs and a privy in the backyard. Her father worked as a cobbler in a windowless cellar below the living room. She cried to see its transformation from the cramped slum dwelling of her childhood. Her reaction is hardly surprising.

 

A painted-pine glazed cabinet houses a selection of 18th-century Leeds Pottery creamware and, on top, a toleware egg boiler. The cutlery tray in front is late Georgian


Inside this humble shell Guy has created a world of old-fashioned beauty, such that stepping through the front door is like opening a cardboard box to find it lined with Spitalfields silk. The two tiny downstairs rooms, slightly hazy with wood and hand-rolled cigarette smoke, are filled by a notably refined array of furniture, paintings, prints, rugs, clocks and china, mostly 18th-century, some rare, some damaged, all covetable.

 

Convenience is secondary to aesthetics. The kitchen has been invaded and more or less edged out of existence by a Georgian chest of drawers, a grandfather clock and a serpentine sideboard. What you might call the business end has been shunted into a corner, where it cowers behind a damask-covered screen: essentially a Baby Belling cooker on top of a fridge, directly above which hang four luminous, gilt-framed oil paintings.

 

Hidden by a velvet-covered screen, Guy’s kitchen consists of just two appliances: a ‘Baby Belling’ cooker – a present from a friend, the decorator Libby Lord – and a fridge. Above them hang a country oak wall cupboard and a selection of oil paintings

 

 The stainless-steel sink under the window is the last remaining stub of fitted kitchen, and is due to be ousted in favour of an antique Belfast job. Does he cook, entertain? ‘I heat up a pie when I get back from the workshop, but I have been known to cook pheasant for friends.’ At which point he opens the panelled door of his Georgian store cupboard – not to reveal the Marmite, Tabasco, brown sauce and packets of tea that are all it contains, but to show how its interior is lined with layers of 18th- and early 19th-century hand-blocked wallpaper.

 

In the adjoining living room two wing chairs loosely dressed in ticking face the fireplace – now the only source of heat in the house – which is flanked by a bureau and a bookcase. There are three tripod tables, four broad-seated dining chairs, a cellarette, a padded stool, a bust on a fat marbled column and the chinoiserie longcase, its top grazing the ceiling. A glazed corner cupboard is stuffed with blue-and white pearlware, walls are closely hung, and the various surfaces are arranged with a choice selection of Georgian china. Full, but not cluttered.

 

Found in pieces in a saleroom, the c1800 oak four-poster bed is now replete with hangings made from old velvet curtains, as well as an 18th-century portrait of a candlelit boy and a patchwork bedspread hand-stitched by Guy some 20 years ago

 

Every object, from a chaste creamware jug to a 1730 walnut chair with its unusually fine ‘cresting’ (more like it can be seen at Chatsworth), is placed for symmetry and balance, creating a rare feast for the eyes; rich without being indigestible. In the room above, Guy demonstrates a sort of back flip across the bed to reach the inlaid chest of drawers on its far side – edging round the posts inevitably knocks a picture crooked. He bought the bed in pieces ‘tied up with baler twine and covered in sheep muck’ and used antique velvet curtains to form the hangings and canopy. He also made the bedspread, a patchwork in large squares of old fabric. ‘I sewed that by hand, 16 hours a day for a week,’ he says, ‘to keep myself busy when I stopped drinking.’ The quilt is a nightly reminder of recovery.

 


A selection of Georgian engravings and mezzotints lines the walls of the tight staircase. With no space for fitted bookcases, this is made narrower still by the stacks of books piled on the right of each tread. Glimpsed on a chest of drawers through the bedroom door is a c1740 ebonised-pearwood bracket clock

 

‘I went through a rough patch,’ he says, ‘living in a series of bedsits and rented flats. I even lived on the road for a few years after I was expelled from boarding school. I had a copy of the poems of WH Davies in my pocket and thought it would be romantic.’ Although he rebelled as a pupil, it was his prep school, situated in a grand Georgian country house with some of its contents still in place, that sparked Guy’s love of antiques. ‘My father was in the army, so we lived in quarters with hideous military furnishings. I started buying antiques when I was 12.’ The habit remains, fed by Ebay and contacts in the trade who appreciate his taste, craftsmanship and respect for patina. ‘Even when I was homeless I needed a few nice things to lay out and look at – an old lighter, an antique cigarette case, a netsuke I kept in my pocket. Physical comfort has never been as important – another prep school legacy!’

Friday 8 March 2024

RALPH LAUREN | The Polo Gazette | Requiem for a Speed Racer




It seems Ralph Lauren and Lacoste are seen as “Preppy”(upper middle class) in many European countries, is it the same in the UK or are there other brands instead?

Socio-economic

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskABrit/comments/170j1zg/it_seems_ralph_lauren_and_lacoste_are_seen_as/#:~:text=Ralph%20Lauren%20is%20definitely%20worn,by%20more%20current%20fashion%20trends.

 

Hey guys,

 

Definitions

 

Preppy: I would say “preppy” would be associate with the upper middle although not exclusively. When I think about preppy in global terms would be private school, private university and working a working a high paying job(law, finance) in a big city.

 

Class: I know the class system in the UK is different than in other countries, but I’m using these terms much more in terms of wealth.

 

US: Brooks Brothers(Old Prep), Vineyard Vines(New Prep)

 

In the US I have seen people at elite and private universities wearing Vineyard Vines a lot. Like frat guys, trust fund people and those in high paying jobs.

 

Europe: For instance, in many European countries an American brand like Vineyard vines is unknown because they primarily serve the local American Market. The same happens with Brooks brothers.

 

Ralph Lauren meanwhile is seen as a more “International brand” even though it’s American. It seems in some European countries it would be the equivalent to wearing Brooks Brothers.

 

The same with Lacoste though Lacoste doesn’t seem to have a historically solid reputation as RL since they outsourced their production lesser quality manufactures but at least they’ve been trying to make a comeback.

 

Spain: Has their own local “preppy” brands like Scalpers and Pompeii.

 

How is it in the UK? So far the only brand which I found is Baracuta. The G9 Harrington Jacket would fit on the aesthetic I’m talking about. But where do you guys get your Polo’s? Fred Perry’s has many negative associations. At least some people from Europe(not the Uk) told not to wear it since it’s associated with right wing groups..etc