We are back. UK was fab. I have flu. Off to bed. 
Here are a few pics of lovely OLD buildings….and one or two new ones.
Pretty Buildings
Christmas Cake Update
So on Friday the Minx and I worked on the Christmas Cake.
Here’s one for the parenting police. We made lots of tiny holes in the cake with a skewer and then poured a couple of tablespoons of brandy over the top. The Minx is spreading the brandy over the cake to make sure it got properly impregnated. We’ve done this about three times since the cake was baked.
Next I made a vast quantity of marzipan using Delia’s recipe which was super fiddly as the eggs and sugar are cooked over a gentle heat to make a meringue before the ground almonds are stirred in. It makes really good marzipan though.
Here is the cake all marzipanned and ready to go.
Because Christmas cake isn’t made in the US there are no kitsch Christmas cake decorations for sale either, so the Minx and I decided to make some out of marzipan. Santa is still waiting for his snow white beard made of royal icing. The Husband insists that no Christmas cake is complete without a ‘frozen pond’ made from card and tin foil, so he’s been told to make one of those, before I make some royal icing and assemble the whole thing by the middle of the week.
Go Fug Your Room? Matthew Williamson’s London House
I've put a question mark here as I actually rather like the very funky, very London, house belonging to British fashion designer Matthew Williamson, which has been featured in both September's Domino and now in January's Elle Deco UK. However I can understand if it's not exactly other people's cup of tea and would love to know what you think.
Personally I love the way he mixes old and new, ethnic sensibilities, colours and patterns and the whole seems very much a reflection of his personality.
I'm not saying I would choose to live here – I'm not convinced I could cope with mirrored armchairs, spinal cord wallpaper, that bright a colour scheme and all the Indian stuff doesn't do much for me – but in the end this is a very personal space, doesn't feel 'try hard' unlike the Miles Redd space below and contains quite a lot of stuff I absolutely adore. It's probably closest in feel to the Betsey Johson apartment we critiqued pulled apart earlier this year, though it seems much less cluttered and the colour scheme isn't so execrable.
First up the two covers of the magazines provide an interesting Britain v America moment as both publications use exactly the same corner of the dining area on their covers.
Elle Deco's styling of the room is much less cluttered – no cushion on the chair, nothing on the tulip table, no globe in the corner and less junk on the console under the mirror. The chandelier also seems to have 'disappeared'. I like the pretty boxes they've added on the console and the Fornasetti plate over the mirror is inspired. Interestingly though, Elle Deco has put Williamson on the cover, which they hardly ever do, whereas Domino, which is usually no stranger to cheesey celeb shots for once doesn't have a person at all. Note that Elle Deco has made the room seem far less 'white' by punching up the colour, having the coloured wall reflect in the mirror, cropping away from the white window and er, 'painting' the ceiling. Which cover do you prefer?
{Images from Elle Deco}
Funnily enough the globe and the table dolly return when Elle Deco shows some interior shots, suggesting that Domino stuck with the original styling. I quite like that Designer's Guild wallpaper and am a sucker for white vinyl floors. And I love the mix of the Eames chairs, the tulip table and that fabulous peacock chair. The mirror is a bit baroque for my taste, but has a nostalgia factor for me as it was apparently bought on the Golborne Road, just round the corner from where I used to live in Notting Hill.
I love what he's done with this sofa. That is all. Curtain treatment is strangely boring though.
{Above images from Domino}
Mirrored armchair does NOT look cosy. Still loving the white vinyl floor. Love the windows and orange paint, not sure about the mirror mosaic fireplace, don't like the mirror, though I see what he's trying to do. Those books sure move around a lot.
Light installation in the stairwell. Best thing in the house. As Rachel Zoe would say, I die.
Fuchsia pink kitchen bar area. Personally wouldn't have done it quite such a girly colour. But still rather fabulous.
Ha ha! You can tell we're in London from the pokey bathroom. Thought Venetian mirrors with modern had been done to death by now, but like the collage on the wall. I used to do things like that in my teens. Haven't we see these vases before?
Lovely floral wallpaper in bedroom. Except it's not a floral. Wallpaper design is made up of spinal cords and ribs. I love the effect, but am far too squeamish to have this in a bedroom.
Muji
Oh, Muji, Muji, Muji how I love and miss you!
Oh Muji, Muji, Muji how I hate that when I try shopping at your online store you say it will cost me £19.99 (approx $30) to have your nicely made, affordable stuff shipped to the US. When on earth are you going to open a US online store? Thank goodness I have accommodating in-laws.
Here are some of my favourite Muji things.
All available here if you’re in Europe or you’re prepared to pay the shipping. Lottie writes a beautiful eulogy to Muji here. Here’s a description with photos of Muji’s new flagship store in Tokyo.
Christmas Cake – Part II
The next step in the Christmas cake saga is to bind everything together with a simple sugar/butter/eggs/flour mixture. The only unusual thing is to use dark brown muscovado sugar which gives the mixture its dark colour and a unique taste. Interestingly this particular recipe (unlike, say, Delia’s) doesn’t use any of the traditional Christmassy spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg or mixed spice. The ‘Christmassy’ (for Brits anyway) taste and smell comes from the sugar and fruit.
Here’s the cake all ready to go into the oven for 4 hours. The recipe gives complicated instructions about lining the tin with a double thickness of greaseproof paper, wrapping brown paper round the prepared tin and then standing the cake on brown paper while cooking. I have no idea why you have to do this but we followed the instructions anyway.
Here’s the finished unwrapped cake. The next step is to wrap it in greaseproof paper and tin foil and then store it in an airtight tin, before ‘feeding’ it once a week with brandy. The cake will keep like this until the week before Christmas when I’ll take it out and ice it. The next step for me is looking out kitsch decorations online.
I assume that any Americans readers are staring to understand why this only gets made once a year.
Christmas Cake – Part I
Interestingly Christmas round these parts (or, as I should euphemistically say, ‘the holidays’) seems to be rather Germanic in flavour with plenty of gingerbread and not a sign of traditional English Christmas cakes, Christmas puddings or mince pies.
We missed our Christmas cake last year and so this year have decided to make one courtesy of all the glace’ fruit we shipped back from Vancouver recently (how funny that one of the British delicacies we miss most is glace’ fruit).
For those of you who’ve never seen one before, a traditional British Christmas cake is a dark and dense rich fruit cake, made some considerable time before the big day, left to ‘mature’ through the constant application of brandy and then coated with thick layers of almond paste and royal icing. It is a long and laborious process. We started ours yesterday, though in an ideal world you should start making your cakes and puddings about two months before the big day.
My ma-in-law has many splendid qualities, not least of which is her quite ridiculously good Christmas cake. A couple of years ago she gave me the recipe, though this is the first time I’ve actually made it. I was expecting some ancient family recipe carefully handed down through the generations, but instead discovered that it was a Waitrose recipe of very recent vintage. No matter, it’s absolutely delicious and the addition of less traditional ingredients such as dried apricots and glace’ pineapple means it isn’t as dark and dense as traditional cakes which are essentially a solid wall of raisins.
The first step, which the Minx and I completed yesterday, involved chopping and stirring an immense quantity of mixed dried fruits and nuts and then steeping them for 24 hours in orange juice and brandy.
An Atelier LZC tea towel covers up our nasty green countertop.
Barack the Vote
This was the genuine front page of the UK’s Daily Mirror after the last debacle. Guys, you know what you have to do. Please don’t let the world down again.
La Tour Trellick
We’re going to be back in the UK for Christmas. The day itself will be spent with friends in Bath, we’ll be visiting family and friends in and around London and then hopefully back to Notting Hill for a few days (though sadly not to the flat – we still have it, but it’s rented out at the moment).
You know how there are places in the world that just suit your personality? Well Notting Hill is one of my places. We lived there for twelve years before coming to Seattle and I still miss it horribly.
If the Eiffel Tower is the enduring symbol of Paris, then the Trellick Tower, which looms over the north end of the Portobello Road market is the enduring symbol of Notting Hill.
It’s not a pretty building. Built at the tail-end of the sixties, this Brutalist tower block by Erno Goldfinger (such a great name) soon became a byword for the sort of social problems that plagued tower blocks (and Notting Hill) at the time. But as the tower has cleaned up its act and Notting Hill has become gentrified, it has become a London icon and flats in the tower now command a huge premium, with top-floor flats, which have some of the best views in London, being almost impossible to come by. (I found this photo of the tower in my files – I’ve never been able to take very good pictures of it though).
It’s also become a sort of ironic design icon. Here it is on ceramics and teatowels from People Will Always Need Plates. I’m going to put a couple of plates on my Christmas list.
Britain v America – Book Covers
Here’s our next look at British v. American design sensibilities.
Last time round we hugely preferred the uncluttered British approach to magazine cover design, though we did stop to note the American fondness for glitz and glamour, as exemplified by Gwyneth Paltrow in a ballgown on the cover. Immaculately groomed movie stars and celebrities are everywhere here, all over the TV and on the covers of every magazine.
The British on the other hand are notoriously bad at glamour and polish. We can very rarely pull it off and so regard deliberate attempts at glamour with suspicion, resorting instead to cheerful eccentricity which often tips over into untidiness or even dowdiness. Brits like to call this ‘reality’.
Compare if you will the UK and US covers for the book Petite Anglaise.
I got hooked on ‘petite’s’ blog a couple of years back, just as she was leaving her live-in partner and father of her child for someone she’d met in her comments box. The blog is hugely well-written and for a while was as suspenseful as a daily soap-opera. Petite (Catherine Sanderson) became globally notorious last year when she was ‘dooced’ for blogging at work – the first high-profile European blogger to whom that had happened. As a result though she managed to snag a big book deal for global publication of her story.
Until I came to live in the US I didn’t realise to what extent books etc. are repackaged for different geographic markets. Sanderson writes amusingly here about how much the text has to be ‘translated’ from English to American. The covers are also COMPLETELY different.
Sanderson’s book is half about her dissatisfaction with her day-to-day ‘metro, boulot, dodo’ routine, her unsatisfactory relationship and the difficulties and sometimes loneliness of bringing up a young child.
This is the half of the story which the British cover very clearly focuses on. Have you ever seen anything more mumsy and dowdy? You just know that there’s going to be dog poo/poop (see how good I’m getting at this English/American translation business!) somewhere in that picture. Note the flat shoes and huge nappy/diaper bag. And I bet her nail varnish is chipped and her legs are hairy. And yes I know that’s how most mothers dress, but do you really want to see that on a book cover? And no sign of the various menfolk in the book. Indeed it’s unlikely, despite appearances, that the woman on the cover has ever had sex.
The dowdy, old-fashioned, feel carries through into the design. Note all the sugary pink, serif fonts and pretty pretty flowers. Though maybe the layout, aside from the fussy illustration, is, in true British style, a little cleaner.
UK cover art for Petite Anglaise
The other half of Sanderson’s story on the other hand is about the illicit thrill of flirting on the Internet via blog comments and emails, meeting this stranger in real life and her subsequent mad affair. Her blog at the time this was happening fairly crackled with sexual excitement. And guess which half of the story the American cover focuses on?
US cover art for Petite Anglaise
Look at those heels! Is she even wearing any clothes? Note the cinema posterish layout. On this cover Petite has been turned into Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt is lurking behind the Eiffel Tower. This woman has sex all the time, NEVER has chipped nail polish and probably doesn’t know one end of a stroller from another.
And yes, I know real life is not like this, but really, if you’re feeling mumsy and badly put together, do you need to be reminded of it in a book cover? The only thing I don’t like about this cover is the actual title where the curly font and fiddly border reminds us of the American love of excessive ornamentation.
So,
Which cover would you buy?
UPDATE: I’m intrigued that people seem to be preferring the UK cover – would love to hear your reasons in the comments.
Britain v America – Magazine Covers
Ever since I moved from London to Seattle, I’ve noticed that there is a very different design sensibility between Britain and the US, not just in interiors but in every aspect of life.
So I thought it would be fun to launch a series of posts where we can compare and contrast everyday elements of British and American design and just have a chat round the differences.
First up, here are the May 2008 covers for British and American Vogue, which to me exemplify the two different design aesthetics (even though American Vogue is famously edited by a Brit).
May 2008 cover of British Vogue featuring Natalia Vodianova
The cover of British Vogue is simpler and cleaner, with far fewer words and simple fonts (though note the use of the serif font). Colour though is brought into the typeface.
The focus is very much on the model. Note it’s a model not a celebrity – celebrities do appear on the cover of British Vogue but comparatively rarely. Though admittedly the lines get a bit blurred with celebrity models such as Kate Moss, who seems to be on the cover of British Vogue all the time. The colours are very bright, clean and fresh and to my eyes very English. The whole thing seems much more uncluttered and spare.
May 2008 cover of American Vogue featuring Gwyneth Paltrow
American magazine covers – and this is no exception – seem to have a lot more going on. There are more words and more different font sizes (though only one sans serif font is used throughout). There are more emphatic caps and italics and a quote is included. All the words mix lower case and upper case.
The image used is much busier (and more obviously photoshopped?) – more Gwyneth, more dress, more background. There’s a lot more Hollywood glamour – a movie actress, big hair, silver and sequins. And with the mask, even obvious movie product placement (for the Iron Man movie, starring, you guessed it, Gwyneth Paltrow). The colours, though, are more muted and soft than on the British cover.
So, which one do you like best? Which one would you buy? Do you prefer the cover from your ‘home’ country? Does the other cover seem very different and/or strange? Does the British cover seem scarily uninformative and gaudily bright? Does the US cover seem more old-fashioned (as it does to me)? Or does the serif font on the UK cover look old-fashioned to American eyes? If you’re neither British nor American which one stands out for you? Am I the only person who thinks Gwyneth look strangely like she’s been carved out of wax?
Discuss.
(Just adding a poll, because your answers are intriguing me.)
So the thing that’s intriguing me, is that not a single person has said they prefer the US cover, but surely Anna Wintour et al must do focus groups and stuff about this sort of thing? And must think that the US-style cover will sell best? Can anyone out there explain?
By the way is the poll working properly? I’ve had all sorts of trouble getting it up.
