Indholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2023 i Veranda

NOT-SO-SUBTLE STRIPES A long way from the sweet sailor themes of Victorian England comes a full-on regatta of gallant striping. Broad, high-contrast color turns up the volume on wide Regency stripes, rainbow bayaderes, and more, giving the enduring favorite a wild ovation. And layering stripes on stripes? The ultimate power move. QUIRKY CHECKS & TRIANGLES The Gen Next of tartan and black-and-white checkerboards, today’s squares arrive in zesty, bright hues, simplified designs, and accompanied by multicolor triangles as Fermoie, The Vale London, and others debut playful new angles. GUTSY GRAPHICS Calling all nonconformists: The small-scale, ’60s- and ’70s-era motifs championed by the rebellious David Hicks are making a dizzying resurgence. The latest versions are tactile—think satin tiling, basket weave embroidery—lyrical, and in eye-popping sheens for patterns that still feel ahead…

I ARRIVE EXPECTING tartans, pipes, and single malts. I discover antler can-delabra, couture kilts, and bud vases hand-turned from sweet chestnut, walnut, and yew. I presume a glorious, fixed tradition will greet me on a recent trip to Scotland; instead I step into a vibrant, evolving world of craft. My journey is into the country’s northeast heart: the river-threaded valleys of the Speyside whisky region and the neighboring heather-studded slopes of the Cairngorms and Grampians. As I travel from distillery to distillery, from workshop to atelier, from reimagined country house hotel to design-intensive shop, I witness a fascinating, very Scottish conversation of the maker with the material. And I learn that while bursting in a new bloom today, that conversation has marked the local approach to land, water, tools, wood,…

In 1918 ART CRITIC ROGER FRY transformed an overgrown walled garden filled with vegetables and fruit trees at Charleston, a redbrick farmhouse nestled in the East Sussex countryside, into a living work of art. The rural home had become a refuge for members of the effer-vescent Bloomsbury group, a creative coterie of artists, writers, and intellectuals who countered the prim-and-proper Edwardian-era culture with antibourgeois ideals and other unconventional pursuits. Case in point: fleeing London in 1916 as World War I raged, seeking farmwork so the pacifist circle’s male members could avoid military service and devote their lives to their craft. Vanessa Bell (sister of writer Virginia Woolf) and Duncan Grant, fervent Bloomsbury painters and primary residents of Charleston, cultivated their avant-garde artistic legacies while immersed in bohemian country life. Fry’s rectangular…

DESIGN FROM THE BRITISH Isles has long been a siren song for VERANDA editors. This year, we’ve heard the call louder than usual, and it seems we’re not alone (no surprise, given the coronation of King Charles III). Summer’s hottest design event might well have been the Design Centre at Chelsea Harbour’s second-annual WOW! house, a charitable decorator showhouse that brought in top designers from around the world. U.S.-based RH also caught the fever, opening its first overseas showroom—RH England—in 400-year-old Aynho Park in June. Even jewelry and watch firms revisited their British connections with introductions inspired by archival pieces belonging to royals (p. 32) and a slender new wristwatch from Rolex recalling the firm’s London origins (p. 42). Looking ahead: Dreweatts’ sale of designer and antiques dealer Robert Kime’s…

Arcs of a Monarch QUEEN ELIZABETH II How could the princess imagine, in 1944, that the pair of Boucheron brilliant blue aquamarine and diamond clip brooches given to her on her 18th birthday by her father, King George VI, would become a queen’s adornment just eight years later? Britain’s longest-reigning monarch wore the pair throughout her life; now the French maison pays tribute with the Like a Queen collection inspired by the originals. Rings, earrings, brooches, necklaces, and even hair pieces sing of a father’s doting gesture and a daughter’s shimmering service. Yellow Diamond Jubilee WALLIS SIMPSON, DUCHESS OF WINDSOR She had a passion for high jewelry, yellow diamonds, and Harry Winston—not necessarily in that order. In homage to the duchess of Windsor’s 15 Winston pieces collected from 1946 to…

ANTIQUE REPRODUCTIONS JAMB It’s near impossible to tell the old from the new at Jamb, the sublime gallery on Pimlico Road by Will and Charlotte Fisher. And that’s by design. The pair have combined their backgrounds (his largely in antiques, hers in fabrics) since the early 2000s to expand Will’s antiques business into an impressive collection of 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century designs—seating, tables, mirrors, lighting, and famously fireplaces—that evoke (and could fill) the idealized English country house. Pristine new designs are the product of a cadre of British artisans and international specialists. The ideal, Will says, is to create pieces that mine their antecedents’ DNA so artfully that they slip into rooms of antiques unnoticed: a sleepy piece, he jokes. “One that looks like it’s grown roots.” FURNITURE, LIGHTING, FABRICS…

JOHN SINGER SARGENT famously said a portrait is “a picture in which there is just a tiny little something not quite right about the mouth,” a reference to persnickety sitters who tended to find fault with the finished product. (Sir Winston Churchill and his wife so disliked a realistic 1954 Graham Sutherland portrait that she smashed it before giving it to an aide to burn.) Thankfully Sargent and the great portrait artists who came before him persevered, leaving a record of faces—stern and smirking, haughty and humble—to fill London’s National Portrait Gallery, which reopened in June after a $53 million renovation. Though traditional portraiture took a backseat to photography and abstract art in the 1900s, interest has come roaring back, a counterbalance to the ubiquity of instant cell phone images.…

Irish trees are gifted storytellers, perhaps as much so as their countrymen. It’s the sense you get walking the wood-lands west of Dublin in County Laois (pronounced leesh), the way the beech trunks bend and twist into alphabet-letter shapes, leaning into footpaths to whisper a story. If the trees could talk inside the walled estate of Ballyfin Demesne, they might marvel at the story of a 10-year-old boy who became the equivalent of a billionaire overnight. It was two centuries ago, and when this boy—Sir Charles Coote, a descendant of the first earl of Mountrath—grew into his bank account, he bought the land where this forest of raconteurs is rooted and built a grand country house on it. Oh, and what a show that was, with Pompeian tiles and Belgian…

CRUNCHING OVER GRAVEL toward a gray, pebble dash millhouse on an exposed slope above the River Ure, set in traditional farmland in the north of England, Mary Graham prepared to see her soon-to-be home. She and her husband, Sam, had known the house at a distance for years—Sam’s parents have a farmhouse half a mile away, and his uncle Sir James Graham lives at Norton Conyers, a nearby estate with Dutch-style gables that might have inspired Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre. “There are cousins and other Grahams tucked everywhere and have been since 1624. It would have been a great surprise if we’d gone anywhere else,” says Mary, cofounder of the London-based interior design firm Salvesen Graham with partner Nicole Salvesen. The house had been let to tenants by Sam’s…

Who needs a fantasy project when your bread-and-butter work is building dream houses for the Hollywood elite? Martyn Lawrence Bullard’s old to-do lists contain gems like these: Source and import carved Rajasthani walls for Cher’s bedroom in her Malibu villa; install two dozen custom-colored disco balls in RuPaul’s salon; educate Kourtney Kardashian on the finer points of mid-century-style furnishings before she impulse-shops 1stDibs. But a boy can dream, can’t he? And this one dreams of a grand country house that needs lots and lots of work. With his longtime East Coast clients, the L.A. decorator has spent the last few years upgrading one such home, Capard House, and it reawakened a spark he’s had since he was an entrepreneurial teen peddling antiques and bric-a-brac in London’s Greenwich Market. Not far…

It is obvious from the moment one stepsover the flagstone threshold of Sue and Alexander Jones’s barn conversion on the borders of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire that they like to look after their friends. The drinks tray is positioned to dispense cocktails upon arrival; the dining table can be extended to seat 12; and plenty of squishy, comfortable seating is arranged in groups to encourage conviviality. For this is the Cotswolds, a rural area of soft limestone houses and gentle hills within easy reach of London that is home to many of the country’s wellborn and well-heeled chattering classes who regularly gather in each other’s houses for drinks, dinners, and long Sunday lunches. A sense of welcome was essential to the couple when they were looking for somewhere to buy in…

PATTERNS OF EXUBERANCE Pages 22-23 Belmondo fabric, to the trade; dedar.com. Medusa wall sconce, $2,294; julianchichester.com. Page 24 Serat Stripe fabric, to the trade; robertkime.com. Kate Loudoun Shand Evelyn Stripe fabric, $177/yard; studiofournyc.com. Flare candleholders (from $50) and Stripe candles ($30/four); us.hay.com. Trolley tape, from $20/yard; fringemarket.com. A4 ($34) and A5 ($28) Venetian boxes; pentreath-hall.com. Ticking lampshades, £200; alvaropicardo.com. B Zippy Diamond vase, $380; marchsf.com. Alfie Stripe fabric, $262/meter; pennymorrison.com. Late 19th-century Louis XVI painted commode, $4,700; lolofrenchantiques.com. Bold Stripe fabric, $108/meter; volgalinen.com. Kilim, to the trade; vaughandesigns.com. Kate Loudoun Shand Dhaaree Stripe fabric, price upon request; studiofournyc.com. Tynemouth Ticking fabric, to the trade; robertkime.com. Chequer fabric, £168/meter; mollymahon.com. James Stripe fabric, to the trade; designs.cowtan.com. Circus fabric, $255/meter; fermoie.com. Page 26 Regency Stripe wallpaper, to the trade; osborneandlittle.com. Imogen Heath…

THE PAINTERLY CURVES OF ART NOUVEAU WERE revolutionary. The sinuous botanical motifs that arose in rural England at the turn of the 20th century lifted the unruliness of nature to “new art,” a powerful antithesis of the rising industrial order and mass production of goods. Art Nouveau sprung from its more pragmatic cousin Arts and Crafts, the handcraft revival led by William Morris, but its luminaries, such as architects Charles Rennie Mackintosh and A.H. Mackmurdo, sought to heighten the drama by reenvisioning flora and fauna through whiplash curls and expressive lines. Both would be eclipsed by modernism, but their intertwined influence lingered through the decades that followed. Art Nouveau’s latest resurgence in fabrics, rugs, and wallcoverings comes as no surprise to Genevieve Bennett of Liberty, the heritage British print and…

THE YEAR WAS 1962 and a young Mario Buatta, who had just discovered chintz, picked up a book on English interiors that would change his entire career. As he thumbed through the pages, his heart stopped when he alighted on photographs of Nancy Lancaster’s now-famous yellow room and, in his own words, he found himself. What was it about this sitting room that so swept him away? All the elements—stately architectural bones, vibrant color in its egg yolk–glazed walls, luxuriant silk taffeta curtains, and a collection of antiques that appeared to span generations—would become hallmarks of his rooms (with the exception of the architecture, as most New York apartments have eight- to nine-foot ceilings, not 18). Mario would often describe this room as a scrapbook of Lancaster’s life, and the…