Made of green silk with a golden weft, sixty miles long and sixty miles wide

...when Solomon sat upon the carpet he was caught up by the wind, 

and sailed through the air so quickly that he breakfasted at Damascus and supped in Media.

Now playing: Steppenwolf - Magic Carpet Ride

Now you see it

Dreadful.

Now playing: The Cramps - Good Taste

Now you don't

Unfortunately, they come out much easier than they go in.

Now playing: Jack Johnson - Gone

at Home

Lord and Lady Rendelsham

Their Chelsea house (also decorated by David Mlinaric) as it appeared in The World of Interiors, 1988.

The house was in fact only twelve feet wide and arranged over three floors benefiting from a courtyard almost as large as the house itself. In the courtyard were two mulberry trees planted by James I in order to encourage silk weaving in England.

The drawing room

The drawing room chimneypiece designed by Mlinaric

The libray/dining room with its very Soane like ceiling

Lady Rendlesham's bedroom reflected in an English 18th century tear drop mirror

Sadly,  Clare Rendlesham died shortly after the house was completed.

Scale Model by Mirabel Cecil

The World of Interiors July/August 1988

Photography by Fritz von der Schulenburg

Now playing: Brian Eno - An Ending (Ascent)

Too old to be young.

And, too young to be old. 

Without saying it, that is what my client meant.

And that shall be the premiss when we begin their new house.

The double drawing room.

Currently a very poor mix of neo Georgian, Arts and Crafts, and contemporary Scandinavian elements. 

 With an absolutely hideous reproduction Louis XV chimney thrown in for good measure. 

Luckily, we had concentrated on a few good pieces for their transitional rental.

Current inspirations for the new house:

Lady Ottoline Morrell 

photographed by Baron Adolph de Meyer, 1907

Fontana Arte and Cole & Son

And, the randomness life can bring.

Now playing: Deee-Lite - Groove Is In The Heart

at Home

Lord and Lady Rendlesham

Their country house decorated by David Mlinaric in the late 1970s.

 

from Mlinaric on Decorating

David Mlinaric, The end of the Sixties - 
 

Everybody was to some extent camera shy. Nobody really wanted to go over the top in being conspicuous. The magazines that were interested in exposing this new thing, like Vogue or Queen were fairly uncritical to begin with, not like nowadays where everybody wants to score points off somebody else. The current celebrity thing has a lot to do with making a lot of money and we didn't have that aspiration. You could go out to lunch for seven and sixpence, and if you got fifty pounds for a photo shoot in a German magazine … you would just go out to lunch. We never thought it was the target, to make a lot of money. 

Now playing:  Big Country - In A Big Country

The curious Mr. McBean

Angus McBean
Self portrait as Neptune, 1939

"My mother and I completely redecorated our first £600 house. there was a variety of paints and styles, but there was one room which I had papered completely with a gold metal paper stuck on canvas, rather disgusting. and there was an awful lot of black paint everywhere. I had read somewhere that if you poured the top off gloss paint you got matt paint. So I did, and so it was, but alas it never really dried. When it was all done, my mother took against the house and so we advertised it for sale as ‘an artistically decorated house’. this term, applied to a house in South Wales, had never been heard before, it was something completely new. Newport was dazzled. people used to come and look round and say ‘Yes, it is artistic’– and so it was. We sold it at an £800 profit, with the money we bought a much better house, and my mother was bitten by the bug of buying and doing up houses in which I would do most of the painting and decorating.” - from Angus McBean: Facemaker by Adrian Woodhouse

Angus McBean photographed for Harpers & Queen, 1986
Flemings Hall, Suffolk

For more images of and insight into Flemings Hall see Smouldering brick and Mick Jagger by The Blue Remembered Hills.

Now playing: The Smiths - Asleep

An exile's garden

Part of William Beckford's exile was spent at the Quinta de Monserrate in the hills of Sintra, Portugal. Here, too, he left his mark. The waterfall and Vathek's arch (above) are present day reminders of his brief tenancy (1793-1799).

Now playing: Cocteau Twins - Pearly Dew Drops Drops

Je n'aime pas à résister à la tentation.

I am not over-fond of resisting temptation.

from Vathek by William Beckford

William Beckford

by Sir Joshua Reynolds
oil on canvas, 1782
National Portrait Gallery



William Thomas Beckford  (1760-1844)

 Beckford was the only legitimate son of Alderman William Beckford, twice lord mayor of London and Member of Parliament. His mother, Maria (nee Hamilton), was descended from the royal House of Stuart. Being the only child of a late marriage, he was given every encouragement. At the age of five he received piano lessons from the nine-year-old Mozart. He also received instruction from Sir William Chambers and Alexander Cozens in architecture and drawing. Upon his father's death in 1770, he inherited a vast fortune built on the  Jamaican sugar trade. Making him, as his distant cousin Lord Byron later put it, England's richest son.

 While touring England in 1779, he developed what he called a strange wayward passion for William Courtenay, the eleven-year-old son and heir of Viscount Courtenay. Beckford also became involved with Louisa Beckford, the unhappily married wife of one of his cousins. In 1780, the restless Beckford embarked on a European tour that his family hoped would ease his inner turmoil and dispel any rumors surrounding his friendship with Courtenay.

In 1781, inspired by a Christmas party held in Courtenay's honour at Fonthill, Beckford wrote Vathek - the story  of an impious voluptuary who builds a tower. A tower so high that he not only can survey all the kingdoms of the  the world, but he can also challenge god in his heaven. Beckford claimed to have written the initial French-language draft of Vathek in one sitting over the course of three days and two nights. He had based his characters on historical figures and provided a wealth of detail. He intended to add to this story four episodic tales.  While composing them, he arranged for the Reverend Samuel Henley, an oriental enthusiast and former professor, to translate the entire work into English and to add footnotes explaining the allusions.

Unfortunately, completion of the episodes was to be interrupted. In the autumn of 1784 scandal broke . Beckford was charged with sexual misconduct with young Courtenay. Reports of the scandal spread quickly, and, though his guilt was never proved, he, with his wife (he married Lady Margaret Gordon in 1783) and baby daughter, was forced into exile. In May 1786, in Switzerland, his wife died of puerperal fever after giving birth to their second daughter. Beckford also learned that Vathek was to be published anonymously, with the preface claiming that  the work was directly translated from the Arabic. Subsequently, Beckford published a French edition in order to claim authorship (the uncompleted episodic tales were to remain unpublished until 1912).

In Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Byron wrote, 

Unhappy Vathek, thou wert smitten with unhallowed thirst

Of nameless crime, and thy sad day must close

To scorn, and Solitude unsought - the worst of woes.

Beckford spent his time in exile traveling throughout Europe, eventually returning to England in 1796. Ostracised, he spent the remainder of his life collecting books, paintings, and rare works of art and building his extravagant Gothic pile, Fonthill Abbey. Beckford supervised the planning and building of what was to become the most extraordinary house in England. In 1807 the house's great central tower collapsed and was rebuilt. Beckford grew notorious as both the creator of the increasingly popular Vathek and as the reclusive owner of Fonthill, where he lived until financial difficulties forced him to sell in 1822. The tower again later collapsed, destroying part of the building.



The design of the interiors and the furnishings at Lansdown Tower,  the house Beckford later built in Bath,  gave tangible evidence to his creative genius. And quite possibly, if not laid ,  solidified the foundations of the English eclectic style.

One of a pair of silver-gilt waiters made by William Burwash for William Beckford

Coffer-shaped display cabinet
William Beckford and Henry Edmund Goodridge
probably made by English and Son, Bath
1831-41

Oak cabinet on stand made for the Scarlet Drawing Room 

Lansdown Tower, Bath

1831 - 1841

Oak cabinet

Most likely designed by Beckford and his architect Henry Edmund Goodridge

A superb example of the furniture Beckford commissioned during his final years.

Cabinet made in Paris around 1825

Richly encrusted with hardstones and mounted in gilt bronze

The panels were made at the noted Gobelins workshops in Paris, late 17th Century.

Roman chair, circa 1800 

Originally part of a suite of furniture at Fonthill Abbey

Sold at the Fonthill sale 1823

Siena marble console table    

Commissioned by William Beckford for the vestibule at Landsdown Tower, Bath. 
Most probably designed by the architect of the Tower, Henry Edmund Goodridge, in collaboration with Beckford.

Now playing:  Rimsky-Korsakov - Scheherazade 

Ida:

Personally, Veda's convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young.

One, quite possibly the only, really great thing 

about the HBO remake  of Mildred Pierce is the production design.

Veda:

With this money I can get away from you. From you and your chickens and your pies and your kitchens and everything that smells of grease. I can get away from this shack with its cheap furniture. And this town and its dollar days, and its women that wear uniforms and its men that wear overalls.










Now playing: Joan Crawford Club Mix

Bits and pieces

Guestroom in a temporary house until the clients can find one to buy.

Had this have been their permanent abode I would have fitted it out completely in this particular toile.
When they move, that is the plan.

Now playing: The Zombies - She's Not There

Worthy of admiration

Mount Stuart

Isle of Bute, Scotland

Like its creator, the 3rd Marquess of Bute, this sandstone palace is profoundly 

inspired by history, astrology, art and mythology.

The ever enchanting Lucinda Lambton conducts a tour of the astonishing
Victorian Gothic palace Mount Stuart.

The Purple Library

Now playing: Aztec Camera - All I Need Is Everything