Nicky floats into the office to tell me that our clever contractor has discovered someone who makes ‘interior clouds’!!!!!! I pick myself up off the floor as I begin to imagine all the scope of possibilities this presents for our work…and jump onto GOOGLE.
I type in ‘indoor clouds’ simultaneously wondering how it is I haven’t thought to google this before…..
Immediately all sorts come up, and sure enough its Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde.
AND his exhibition, THE UNCANNY, is on right now in London until February 16th.
Now please can someone invent permanent clouds….and we really will be on to something. (not surprisingly Nicky’s whipping up some tissue paper ones for his flat as we speak)
Out on the 21st March
To view it in the the Oxford Literary Festival click here
And the best thing about it, is one has the TIME, for a little B&E. By that of course I mean ‘break and entry’. Whipping around with Nicky and my new BFF Joel Barkley (architect to the stars) and yapping about the joy of ruin….but we high brow it a bit and decide we are only interested in ‘ruin moderne‘. Partly because Joel lives in one…..and partly just because I happen to know one near to where we are staying.
No Entry signs being what Nicky would call ‘a step in the right direction!‘.
Its a terribly chic, (well it was probably pretty awful lets face it), abandoned hotel with an olympic size swimming pool just WAITING for Steven Meissel and a wallop of top models. At least it’s pink!
The old kitchen looking abso ready for the Saatchi gallery lets be honest……could be a Pablo Lehman installation.
How about lace concrete…..burnt out with sea salt. Can you top that??
And as we drove back, a bit giddy, I waffle on about one of my favorite architects Ricardo Bofill and the awe of visiting his cement factory years ago….which may well be THE most beautiful modern ruin but I certainly invite you to advise me otherwise. I’m saying how I must dig out my old photo albums and look at my 35mm shots of it……only to return home and discover its JUST been photographed by Richard Powers and is featured in this months Elle Decor!! So you can see for yourself…and I highly recommend that you do.
Photograph from Ricardo Bofill’s website
Before tinned Salmond swims further up-stream dragging the lowlands in his tubby wake and you need ID cards to cross Hadrian’s Wall, use as your passport to that maybe-new country up North this stunning book, THE SCOTTISH COUNTRY HOUSE, written by the king of Scottish scholars James Knox and superbly photographed by another monarch of the lens, James Fennell.
You’ll find ten private, and for the most-part heretofore unseen, homes….palaces is nearer the mark… their astonishing grandeur of gilding and porcelain and portraits mingled with below-stairs vignettes and snapshots from family albums, (though sadly not one of Lord Stair’s house, where congealing food used to be left on a wheezy hot-plate all day, covered with an old eiderdown), to say nothing of facades and gardens and landscapes. Among the most fascinating is The House of the Binns, the seat of the Dalzells ( a.k.a Dalziels), to which family Diana Vreeland was related….looking at these pics, you’ll suss where she got much of her pizzazz.
Beds and boots in The Binns
Bannisters in Bowhill
Arcades at Arniston
Forebeans at Foulis
Dishes at Dumfries
