Monthly Archives: June 2015

Grosvenor Chapel

I’ve never before been into Grosvenor Chapel, the parish church of Mayfair next door to Harry’s Bar.   It’s quite sweet, rather like a parish church in New England, commissioned by Sir Richard Grosvenor in April 1730, possibly designed from a pattern book by its builder, Benjamin Timbrell, who had worked with Gibbs on the Oxford Chapel.   It cost £4,000.   The spiral volutes were added by William Skeat during repairs in 1829 and the chancel was poshed up just before the first world war by Ninian Comper:-

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8, Mount Row

I have had a residual memory of delivering a brown paper parcel down an alleyway to a Tudor house somewhere in Mayfair when I was working on a holiday job at Heywood Hill in the mid-1970s.   I realised where it was when I was walking down Mount Row this morning.   In amongst the normal Wrenaissance of Mount Street is a perfect Tudor house designed by Frederick Etchells, the Vorticist and translator of Corbusier’s Vers une architecture, in 1929.   It is as un-Corbusian as it is possible to imagine, complete with wood carving and a plaster ornamental wall:-

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Summer Exhibition

I have forborne to comment on this year’s Summer Exhibition which has gradually been taking shape over the last few weeks, making its long progress through the selection to the hang to yesterday’s Non-members Varnishing Day.   Today I was walked through the exhibition by Michael Craig-Martin, the co-ordinator (or Chief Hanger as he is sometimes still called) and have realised what an achievement it is, beginning with the multi-coloured staircase by Jim Lambie which transforms the experience of arrival.   Each of the galleries is more clearly differentiated according to who hung it and Architecture is given its own fine space by being in the Large Weston Room.   It feels more logical, as well as more exciting, partly due to the choice of bright yellow as wall colour for the Vestibule and brighter pink for Gallery 3.

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Victoria Press

It was the memorial service today of Victoria Press, the most wonderful, formidable and directly spoken American collector who lived on Cheyne Walk and died in early April in her palazzo in Venice.   We had our last lunch with her not long before in Tessa Traeger’s little dining room in Rossetti Studios:  avocado and shrimps and cheese and crème caramel;  all Victoria’s favourite things.   Towards the end of lunch, she reminisced about how, having worked for Claire McCardell, the designer of sportswear, she arrived in London from New York in the late 1940s and fell in love with England – the buildings which turned half black in the rain, the broken-down pavements, the English who made friends with her, including Robert Heber-Percy, the ex-partner of Lord Berners and owner of Faringdon Park, who introduced her to English upper class life.   Then, we said our farewells.

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