Where do you draw the line?

I picked up the Farrow and Ball book, How to Decorate, its function, to simplify the often fraught process of decorating: the myriad choices that natural light, paint and architecture actually present.  It highlighted a few simple design rules which …

Inside the Country House

So I went on ‘Country House Week’, this is my fantasy life life made real.  Whizzing around  rural England to extraordinary homes, some still redolent with the family’s heritage and power others empty shells due to family hubris or the …

Trianon Today

Some buildings and their interiors  never fade from sight, they are too influential,  defining a style, a high-point in taste and design which become a touchstone for  subsequent generations.  Petit Trianon’s restrained neo classical elegance,  decorated to reflect the charm and …

Make mine a Pavilion

The Chinese Pavilion at Drottingholm the ultimate birthday present and example of Chinoiserie

The Queen’s Taste: Trianon

I finally went to Versailles, it was Monday the palace was closed to the public and we echoed through the vast space of the state apartments, I could have cart wheeled through the Hall of Mirrors…WHY didn’t I? I suppose …

Spring Green

Don’t tell anyone but I keep nearly crashing the car, May is the giddy climax of our English spring  and it’s so beautiful I keep on wanting to pull over/swerve wildly.  So far disaster averted.  You think I’m exaggerating? Well …

The Power of the Enfilade

I am gliding softly through as the clock chimes the hour, each door gives way to a space more extravagant than the next, the gilt boiserie glittering in the firelight and the doors sequentially leading me on, in enticing succession, …

Yup, Haslam Has It …

It seems fitting that the grand dame of House and Garden, Sue Crewe, should bow out in her final issue, after 20 years at the helm, with an interview of the reigning master of hi-society décor Nicholas Haslam.  I reckon …

9, Duchess of Devonshire

There has been so much written about the Mitfords, and by the Mitfords, both during their lives and after , that now as the final obituaries roll off the press for the last sister,  ‘wait for me‘ Debo, it is truly …

Clouded Over

A hundred years ago Europe walked over a precipice: the ensuing slaughter spiralled us into a 20th Century in which each strata of society was left gasping with gaping, bleeding wounds: from Royalty  and Aristocratic officers to the  poignantly named Pals Battalions, …