A little bit of festive cooking from Alastair Hendy's Christmas House

After a trip to Hastings, I recently wrote about my visit to Alastair Hendy's Home Store and Christmas House. You can see the post here or read a condensed version below.

Food writer and stylist Alastair Hendy has created a Tudor escape in the middle of Hastings' Old Town. The Christmas House, or 135 All Saints Street, is one of the most complete Tudor houses in Hastings. Hendy has meticulously stripped it back to its original form, transforming the former town mortuary into a cosy haven of open log fireplaces and traditional enclosed wooden beds. Stepping into the low door, you really are taken back in time. For fives pounds entry fee, you get to see this lovingly restored project, plus a little tumbler of spiced mulled wine in the kitchen.

The house is also the setting of Hendy's fairytale, The Elves & The Baker, which is beautifully illustrated in an accompanying Christmas House storybook given on entry. And now that it is Christmas eve, I have set myself the task of cooking a couple of his delicious-looking recipes. I had alot to choose from- mulled fruit and nut christmas chocolate bars, almond and cherry sugar hearts, flowerpot baked ginger cakes and advent pretzels. I decided to go for the Chocolate, Hazelnut and Cinnamon Kugelhupf, Almond and Cherry Sugar Hearts (in my case stars) and Honey & Ginger Pears in Brandy. 

Here is the recipe for the Almond & Cherry Sugar Hearts, they're delicious but very sweet:

Makes 6 large heart biscuits, or if you had a star cutter like me, about 50 small stars!

300g ground almonds

350g caster sugar

Finely grated zest of 1 lemon

1 tsp almond extract

2 egg whites, beaten until just foamy

1 tbsp clear honey

icing sugar, to serve, 

1 x 100g tub candied cherries, halved

Mix together the ground almonds with the sugar thoroughly, then mix in the lemon zest, almond extract (I actually used vanilla extract), egg whites and honey until it forms a dough (a very sticky, crumbly dough- don't be afraid to get your hands messy). Dust the work top with icing sugar and roll out until about 2cm thick, then stamp out a series of heart shapes. Line a tray with baking parchment, dust with a layer of icing sugar and place the hearts on top. Stud each with candied cherry halves. Bake for about 20 minutes in a 180C oven on the lower shelf without browning. They should remain slightly soft and gooey inside. Store in a cool place in an air-tight tin. Serve on a snowdrift of icing sugar. 

 

Phoenix Observation Tower by BIG

Danish architect BIG has been commissioned to design a dizzying 420 ft tall observation tower in Phoenix, Arizona. Visitors to the Observation Tower will be able to enjoy 360 degree views of the surrounding mountain ranges in downtown Phoenix. This colossal piece of work is conceived as a tall core of reinforced concrete with an open-air viewing deck at the top. A spiralling promenade wraps itself around the concrete structure, containing flexible exhibition, retail and recreational spaces, plus an unforgettable view.

Images: courtesy BIG

Saint Laurent Spring 2013 campaign

Lensed by the brand’s creative director Hedi Slimane, Saint Laurent's latest campaign features Australian model Julia Nobis. The images are typically monochrome for Slimane, with androgynous silhouettes and boyish clothes. There is almost no difference from his recent campaign for menswear, which is how Slimane wants it to be- boys to wear womenswear, girls to wear menswear.

Slimane, previously head designer at Dior Homme, had been absent from the fashion scene since 2007, pursuing instead a successful career as a fashion photographer. He joined Saint Laurent Paris in March 2011 and debuted his first women's collection at Paris Fashion Week in October. His first menswear catwalk show for Saint Laurent will show in Paris in January.

You can also see his campaign for menswear here, which featured Dutch female supermodel Saskia de Brauw.

Images

French Film Club: Amour and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Two films that deal with love, loss and the aftermath of a stroke.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007, Director: Julian Schnabel)

This is the incredible true story of journalist and former editor-in-chief of French Elle magazine, Jean-Dominique Bauby, who after a suffering a massive stroke is left with a condition called locked-in syndrome. The film is based on his French memoir Le scaphandre et le papillon and describes his life both before and after the stroke. Bauby is mentally sound but completely paralysed, bar his left eye, which he learns to communicate with by blinking. The entire book was written by Bauby blinking his left eyelid as a patient transcriber recited a frequency-ordered alphabet. The transcriber would write down the correct letter once Bauby had blinked once, and so, after an incredibly long journey, a book was formed ten months later. It took about 200,000 blinks to write and an average word took approximately two minutes. An incredible feat. The film, starring Mathieu Amalric as Bauby, charts his life in hospital at Berck-sur-Mer, chronicling everyday events for a person with locked-in syndrome- you see his infected eye sewn up from his point of view as the screen gradually goes pitch black, you see him stuck in a heavy vintage diving suit flaying in the water, and you see happier times, his family playing on the nearby beach and the visitors he receives.

Amour (2012, Director: Michael Haneke)

This is a much more recent film, voted by the Guardian as top 10 best films of 2012. The film was screened at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the coveted Palme d'Or, a second win for director Michael Haneke. The film focuses on an octogenerian couple, Anne and Georges, who are retired music teachers and live in a relatively peaceful existence. That is until Anne sufferes a stroke which paralyses her on one side of her body. The story is based on an identical situation that happened in Haneke's family and the entire film is played out in one apartment based on his parent's home in Vienna.

Happy 100th Birthday Ray Eames

To celebrate what would have been Ray Eames' 100th birthday, here is a review of the film Eames: The Architect and the Painter, originally published in Blueprint Magazine on May 25, 2012. The film shows that the furniture designer, who died in 1988, was often overshadowed by her husband Charles Eames. Proving that the times are changing, and to celebrate her 100th birthday, Vitra has renamed a street at its Basel Campus after her. This new addition matches the already existing Charles Eames street. Vitra will also be screening a special edition of the film at their VitraHaus, the Herzog & de Meuron designed building on their campus in Basel.

It all began with the moulded plywood chair. Voted by Time Magazine as the greatest design of the 20th Century, and conceived for a competition at MoMA in 1940 with Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames attempted to reinvent the very idea of the chair. They wanted to mass-produce compound curves without any upholstery, for which they first experimented with plywood splints for the wounded military during World War II. A new film has been released, produced by Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey and narrated by actor James Franco, that is the first to document their life and work since their death. It was created as part of PBS’s American Masters, an award winning biography series that celebrates arts and culture with documentary film profiles. The film also begins with the moulded plywood chair, but goes on to tell a far more complex story, as I found out at the UK premiere held at the Vitra showroom during Clerkenwell Design Week.

Charles and Ray Eames weren’t just furniture designers; they were also artists, photographers and filmmakers, and most crucially, a couple. These weren’t job descriptions to them; they were a way of life. Charles and Ray were experts in creating an image of themselves; they became a cultural symbol of the ideal modern couple through their use of eccentric clothes and playful photographs. The film strips back these smiling publicity images with the help of lost love letters and archived material, to reveal the highs and lows of a couple bonded by both love and work. Accompanying interviews with family members and junior designers at “The Eamery” as they nicknamed it, give an intimate and candid view into the husband-and-wife team of 40 years.

The film focuses on 901, Washington Boulevard; the Eames’ unconventional studio conceived in a warehouse off Venice Beach, California. Described by former employees as a ‘circus’, the fascinating archival footage shows an informal environment with every kind of object on every kind of surface. Charles and Ray advocated ‘take your pleasure seriously’, a maxim that carried through their design process of learning by doing, but never delegating understanding. They sought to ‘make the best, for the most, for the least’, a design ethos concerned with a way of thinking and living, that soon became embodied in their marketing campaigns for their furniture.

This was the time of Mad Men and archaic sexual politics, when the feminist consciousness hadn’t found a voice. In interviews, we always see Ray quietly stood behind her partner, despite Charles’ emphasis on their collaborative effort. The film challenges the assumption that Charles was the main designer by successfully documenting the frustrations of authorship and control, both with Ray and the other designers at the Eames office. The documentary highlights that it was precisely because they collaborated together as a couple that they were so successful. As is evident in the ironic title and also in the narration of the film, it is impossible to separate the two and their different roles in the design process. Charles was an architectural school dropout who never got his licence, and Ray was a painter who rarely painted. Instead, they became a brand, designing large-scale exhibitions and shooting quirky films, making a name for Boeing, IBM, Polaroid and Herman Miller in the process. As the narrator, James Franco says, ‘they wanted to work for the Google of their time’.

Now on DVD at First Run Features.
All images courtesy of Eames Office, LLC.

Royal College of Art Cafe by Weston Surman & Deane

Three architecture graduates from the Royal College of Art in London- Tom Surman, Joseph Deane and Percy Weston- have redesigned the school's student union cafe. The cafe is sited in an old RCA building on the school's Battersea campus in south London. The design is based around stripped scaffolding boards and reclaimed parquer flooring that form a warm wooden cafe, complete with bespoke kitchen units, shelving and tables.

 

Images: http://www.wsdarchitecture.com/

A Room for London by David Kohn and Fiona Banner set to stay

With the news that David Kohn and Fiona Banner's A Room for London is set to stay for 2013, here is a republished article originally from January. A ballot for the first two months of 2013 has just gone live.

Perched on the roof of Queen Elizabeth Hall on the Southbank, A Room for London is an installation by David Kohn Architects and artist Fiona Banner. A design competition was set up by Living Architecture and Artangel, in collaboration with the Southbank Centre, to create a temporary room on the hall for two people to spend a unique night on top of a London architectural landmark.

As the architects describe; "The proposal is for a boat, perched on the Queen Elizabeth Hall roof, that will appear to have come to rest there, grounded, perhaps, from the retreating waters of the Thames below. The idea evolved from narratives of travel and displacement in literature, in particular Joseph Conrad’s novella ‘Heart of Darkness,’ a story that begins beside the River Thames. The boat takes its name, 'Roi des Belges' from the steamboat that Conrad himself captained on the Congo. Visitors to the boat will be invited to create their own narrative by recording their experience on board".

This private, domestic space is anchored onto one of the most public setting's on the river, in full display to passers-by and other buildings. However, the visitors' privacy is completely contained within this small wooden boat, creating an unique experience looking over London for anyone who wishes to book out the room.

Photographs by Charles Hosea

Antony Gormley at the White Cube Bermondsey

At the weekend I ventured south of the river (not my usual territory) to Maltby Street food market followed by a visit to the White Cube Bermondsey, where there was an exhibition of new works by Antony Gormley. The exhibition aims to challenge the physical possibilities of the gallery space with an ambitious larger-than-life model of his sculptures, which visitors can enter through a 'foot' and journey through its inter-connected internal chambers. Fabricated from 100 tonnes of weathering sheet steel, the work is both sculpture and building, human in form but at no point visible as a total figure. After seeing similar works of his at the White Cube in Hoxton, I was glad to see Gormley had taken it a step further and created more of an architectural intervention. The internal chambers demanded the visitor to adjust their pace and bend their bodies to its awkward heights, guided by fractions of light above. Another interesting room proved to be a space dedicated to Gormley's working models from 2002 to the present day.

The building itself is also worthy of a mention. White Cube Bermondsey is the largest of the gallery's three London sites and dates back to the 1970s when it was used as a warehouse. The building was converted into a gallery by London-based Casper Mueller Kneer Architects. The 70s dark brick block has been modernised by a white mesh canopy and a set of huge glass doors at the entrance. Inside, there are three main exhibition spaces, private viewing rooms, an auditorium, a bookshop as well as three smaller galleries, collectively known as the 'North Galleries. Internally, the gallery spaces live up to the name of 'White Cube', with white boxes and polished concrete floors. The variety of rooms proved ideal for Gormley's sculptures, the full effect of the human-proportioned silhouettes appearing as you look back down the long central corridor.

Images: White Cube