Blog

Peter Hone, Master-Plaster-Caster.

I was working in the zoo serving the fellows, Sir Solly Zuckerman and the man who was the Naked Ape man, what’s his name? Luncheon, and functions in the evening when they would bring animals up for people to look at, it was very nice...

Old Albion, Ben Pentreath, Charlie McCormick and their Old Parsonage.

As some of you will know, architect and designer Ben Pentreath and plantsman, florist and collector Charlie McCormick live for most of the time in a small hamlet in West Dorset, although they have a London life as well. The dogs and their cat H...

Trereife House in West Cornwall, Lost Land of Lyonesse.

'The Kitchen was a smoking room before the war. I don’t know anything about the panels.' Next to the chimney piece, one of two framed birthday ...

Min Hogg's World of Interiors: Seaweed wallpaper.

‘Timner Wollard painted the wallpaper. She used to do rooms sets and backdrops for us, and then she and I concocted it together. That’s the best bit there, , ...

At Wardington Manor, the Land Gardeners.

'Walled gardens  - and restoring them  - is what we really want to be doing,' says Bridget Elworthy. Four years ago Bridget and her friend and partner, Henrietta Courtauld, started the Land Gardeners. Cutting gardens and seasonal cut flowers, soil ...

Measure, Draw, Build: George Saumarez Smith, architect.

    George's exhibition about drawing, the essential tool of the design process, Measure, Draw, Build, is at the RIBA until Novemb...

The Old Sweet Dove of Wiveton.

Almost everything here was inherited from Desmond’s grandparents Primrose and Dick Buxton, who bought Wiveton in 1944. The Buxton's  beautified the house and improved its gardens and model farm. Chloe Buxton, their only child, met her future...

David Bridgwater, his curious world.

Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to bibleofbritishtaste, with appropriate and specific...

Shulbrede Priory near Lynchmere.

  Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to bibleofbritishtaste, with appropriate and specific direction to the original...

Back to the Drawing Board: Pat Albeck.

In the autumn of 2016 I visited the artist and renowned textile designer Pat Albeck in the Oxfordshire gate lodge where she has lived for about four years. She came there with her husband the acclaimed stage and costume designer Peter Rice (who d...

Wonders of the East End: Malplaquet House.

  Grateful thanks to Tim Knox  and Todd Longstaffe Gowan. All images copyright bibleofbritishtaste/Tim Knox and Todd Longstaffe Gowan. Excerpts and links may be...

Stone and shell in Somerset-shire: Belinda Eade.

Flanking the chimney in Malplaquet House - the home of Tim Knox and Todd Longstaffe Gowan - are shell candle sconces in the Baroque taste made by Belinda Eade almost 20 years ago. As a pupil at Marlborough School Belinda had helped to  restore th...

Trematon Castle : "Escape culture all day & night at Bannermans."

All images except this one, copyright bibleofbritishtaste. Excerpts and links may be used,...

The real thing, Tanya Harrod, essays on making (and Peggy Angus).

Tanya Harrod published  'The Real Thing, essays on making in the modern world,' this week. Its essays are about art, craft and design, and the shifts and spaces in between them.These are subjects she has been thinking and writing about for 30 years....

New year, new build, Bavent House in East Anglia.

Lucy, Clea and Richard Turvill have been here now, in the house they built, for about 5 years. While they lived in London their countrified alter-egos had been well disguised. I thought they were truly metropolitan, but now I realise that they were s...

The Way We Live, Now.

'Nothing much has happened to our house for about 20 years in terms of its look,' says Christina Moore. 'It's not designed although I guess when we first put it together it was. We moved in here in 1984. Now it's about managing the amount of stuff th...

Big Old House, Fen-land.

Richard and Patricia Hewlings live in the Fens, the district known as the Holy land of England. Their house is a flat-fronted, red brick farmhouse with a pretty Georgian doorcase, and an older wing jettying out into what was once the farmyard at the ...

Reminiscences of my visit to Smedmore.

I stayed at lovely Smedmore House in Dorset, settled in its green declivity between ridge-backed Purbeck hills, in May. The first day was grey, with scudding wind and rain, but then the sun came out. This is a room in the old kitchen range, not much ...

John Martin Robinson, Maltravers Herald Extraordinary and architectural historian

This is the London dwelling of John Martin Robinson, aesthete, architectural historian and controversialist. He holds the offices of Maltravers Herald Extraordinary, Librarian to the Duke of Norfolk and Vice Chairman of the Georgian Group ( tho he ha...

Romilly Saumarez Smith, a maker and her house in East London.

From  a temporary gallery arranged in the downstairs rooms of her house in Stepney, Romilly Saumarez Smith has just sold her latest jewellery collection. 'That collection is done now, we'll make up the orders but then we'll go on to the next one, an...

The Englishman's Room, Gavin Stamp and Anti-Ugly.

The architectural historian and writer Gavin Stamp is one of the  'new Georgians,'  pioneers of gentrification who brought up their families in the unloved and unlovely bits of London, where boarded up and multi-occupied old housing stock survived ...

Mr. Dodd at home, 2 : Country.

Local children nicknamed this seventeenth century folly 'Mustard-pot Hall.' It stands on the edge of a field in south-eastern England. ALAN DODD has lived here since the 1980s. I was a guest here one weekend about a decade later and I was smitten, an...

Philippa Kunisch, Jeweller.

Philippa Kunisch lives in north London, Philippa's jewellery has been sold in Liberty's, the General Trading Company and specialist shops in New York and all over America, Florence, Paris, Milan and Japa...

'Nymphs and Shepherds, Come Away' - Nicky Haslam's Hunting Lodge.

This week Nicky Haslam's Folly de Grandeur was published. It's the story of the house in which he has lived for over thirty years, told in a  prose which is never purple but ever so slightly lilac. He writes in the same distinctive, confidential ton...

More Spitalfields Life.

Eloise and Will Palin live in an old house in Spitalfields. It was built for a Hugenot silk weaver in 1717, one of the refugees from religious persecution in France who colonised the area then, and its beautifully proportioned rooms were paid for by ...

Thames-side.

A large family grew up in this early nineteenth century villa, standing close to the course of the Thames where it runs into London from the west. Most of these children have come of age but none have completely left  yet, and their discarded winter...

Sue and David Gentleman.

The artist David Gentleman and his wife Sue have lived in the same north London house, in the hinterland  between Camden Market and Regent's Park, since 1971. I have never seen it untidy, it is always serene, but there is a visual intelligence and h...

At home in West Dorset, John and Julia de Pauley.

John and Julia de Pauley and their two daughters live in Bridport, a market town next to the west Dorset coast. These photographs were taken on a broiling day towards the end of last summer.       John's late mother col...

In Camden Town.

This is the Camden Town desk from which the bible of british taste is published each week. There are many good things about living in NW1, but for years now all my old affection for the place has been drowned by the horribleness of being just around ...

Stephen Medcalf's books.

Just after bonfire night in 1989, Stephen Medcalf, who was tickled by the idea of being photographed at home, wrote to me , 'I do not promise not to tidy it a bit ... a clergyman in Norfolk told me what my room looked like from the way I sat in my ch...

Virginia White at home.

Virginia White is an art collector who works as an interior designer. She is a brilliant colourist. She likes Kettles Yard and the St. Ives painters especially. The last room in this sequence belongs to her daughter Iona.    https://virginiawhite...

The Anthony Shaw Collection.

Every surface on the lower floors of the small terraced house in which Anthony Shaw grew up used to display pieces from his collection. They were even on the kitchen worktops next to the toaster, but there was a palpable sense of more, unseen rooms o...

Mr. Dodd at home, 1 : London.

  ALAN DODD was born in Kent in 1942. He attended Ashford Grammar School, Maidstone College of Art (where David Hockney was one of his teachers) and then the Painting School at the Royal Academy. By the 1970s he was painting murals : five large arc...

The best hand-made wallpaper in the world is by Marthe Armitage.

  Marthe Armitage studied painting at Chelsea School of Art just after the war. When marriage and motherhood interrupted she laid down her brush, but then in the 60s she and her architect husband wanted to live with a new more minimal style of dec...