Finding Niemeyer (Financial Times Weekend)

Aquim is a small, alluring, jewel-box of a chocolate shop on one of Ipanema’s most fashionable shopping streets. Inside, the usual bon bons and bars line the shelves. Behind the counter, there are several extravagant handmade oak boxes housing owner Samantha Aquim’s most rarefied chocolate: QO. Each set is numbered, with its own gold tasting fork, sliding drawer of chocolate discs and three pieces of Q0 shaped into an elegant, s-shaped wave, designed by Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s edible architecture,” says Samantha.

Niemeyer Foundation building, Caminho Niemeyer, Niteroi

If Niemeyer proposed a mid-century fantasy of what Brazil might look like in the 21^st century, then Aquim is one of the results, a symbol of a booming economy with an insatiable hunger for luxury and high style: the Q0 box retails at a cool €1,000. It may not be quite what devout Communist Niemeyer wanted, but there’s now an economic energy that fits with his utopian architecture, and with the country already giddy on the endorphins of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, there’s new investment – literally – in Niemeyer’s vision. His work isn’t just a history lesson: though he turned 104 last December, he is still planning and realising new projects while older ones are renovated. At the same time, specialist tour operators, like Cultour in Brazil, sell architecture-themed trips, while the likes of Journey Latin America in the UK have noticed an upswing in requests for Niemeyer tours. “Most tourists still want to see the favelas,” says JLA tour guide Felipe as we drive across the bridge from Rio to Niteroi, its wild, flying saucer-shaped contemporary art museum fast approaching. “The more cultured, literate travellers want to see Niemeyer.”

An architour of Oscar Niemeyer’s Brazil is like a trip to Disneyland for aesthetes, covering eight decades of history, from his first meeting with Corbusier – alighting from the Graf Zeppelin in Rio in 1936 – to today. No single architect has forged such a seductive collection of reasons to visit a country before, while the vogue for modernist Brazilian design pervades the most flash corners of its cities, from the Diz chairs by Niemeyer’s peer Sergio Rodrigues on every balcony of Rio’s most fashionable hotel, The Fasano, to some of the same designer’s 1950s pieces at Alex Atala’s D.O.M restaurant in Sao Paulo. So many of the key reasons to visit Brazil – including carnival, held in the 1983 Niemeyer-designed Sambodrome – are intrinsically linked to modernist Brazilian design.

My Oscar tour took in very long weekends in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, an overnight stay in Curitiba, several days in Brasilia and an afternoon in Belo Horizonte, where I visited one of his earliest landmarks, the 1943 Church of Saint Francis of Assisi.  For such a committed atheist, Niemeyer has managed to craft some of the most dramatic places for worship in the world. Just as everyone should visit the chiesas of Florence for the Renaissance glamour, Niemeyer’s churches are incredible objects in their own right, with the impact and modern drama of the Tate Turbine Hall, amped up with stained glass.

The Belo Horizonte church is a tiny, cartoonish, Palm Springs-flavoured hint at a remarkable and giant career ahead. While the local archbishop once cursed it as looking like “the devil’s bomb shelter”, it’s actually very sweet and now much loved. In cool Mediterranean blues and white, it’s a doodle for the epic wigwam-shaped Cathedral of Brasilia that would be realised in 1958, at the heart of the city he invented from scratch with urban planner Lucio Costa. The wraparound glass and coloured light-filled space of that building is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. You enter via an underground passage, on a vivid Hollywood-red carpet An hour passes quickly, your attention captured by the play of shadow and colour on the floor and altar. It’s a celestial space.

Cathedral of Brasilia

A new church is on the cards for Niteroi, as part of the Caminho Niemeyer, an as yet unfinished collection of buildings intended to inject new life into the area but currently caught in local government red tape. Niemeyer inaugurated the most artful of the collection of buildings – the Oscar Niemeyer Foundation – on his 103^rd birthday. When the front gates are unlocked, you can walk around its dome and its curved elevated walkways, but sadly nothing here is as yet ready and open for business. It’s still an emotional and rewarding experience; the Alphaville vacancy of the spaces here are vaguely sinister, and Niemeyer’s futurism has a charming naivety to it – the lines of the buildings predate the computer age, and you can see the hand-drawn imperfection of their curves. While Frank Gehry’s buildings in Bilbao and Seattle look like they’ve formed from pixels, Niemeyer’s clearly come from pencil and paper.

When I visited Niemeyer’s old Rio home, the Casa das Canaos, a short drive past the black steel tube of his Hotel Nacional (to be renovated and reopened for the World Cup), I had the place to myself, apart from the house’s guardian, José, who took charge of things when Niemeyer left the country in exile after the 1964 military coup. “He never came back, but I still work for him,” says Jose. “He’s an amazing man. He always treated me as an equal, never as an employee.” The house is a perfect 1950s time capsule, with white, kidney-shaped, curvilinear roof, glass-walled living room and the furniture that Niemeyer designed himself. It looks as if he left five minutes ago.

São Paulo might be as ugly as Rio is beautiful, but there’s a transporting quality to watching the sun set from the rooftop pool deck of the Hotel Unique. It’s an arresting, luxury-packed, postmodern landmark, designed by Niemeyer protégé Ruy Ohtake in the shape of a smile, with huge porthole windows. Anonymous tower blocks and transmitters light up in the distance through the twilight gloaming like a weird art installation – made all the weirder since the government banned outdoor advertising. The Unique is also the closest hotel to Nieyemeyer’s pavilions and sculptures in Ibirapueria Park, the most impressive of which is the Auditorium, with its snaking red tongue rising from a flat, angled white frontage, and its rear – a vast blinding white backdrop with an inset red screen. Against blue sky and green grass, it’s stark and powerful.

Brasilia is, of course, the main event – the UNESCO-stamped mid-century modernist theme park to end them all. At the same time, it’s the city that “no one goes to”, which is partly what makes it so thrilling. Arriving here is like touching down on a different planet – from the runway, Niemeyer’s new TV transmitter, completed in December and resembling a beguiling white triffid, is the first thing you see on the horizon. Wandering between the library, which looks like a giant, beautiful double-iPod dock, and the perfect Moonbase dome of the Honestino Guimarães National Museum, with the Cathedral in the distance, it’s wonderful to be able to take photographs without anyone else in shot. As white clouds part, and speed away, the iconic upturned and downturned domes and H-shaped structure of the National Congress fall into sharp sunlight, as if being hit with a row of theatre follow-spots. Dazzling white against vibrant blue – they’re magnificent.

There are also lesser known gems in Brasilia: the black and red interior rotunda of late president Juscelino Kubitschek’s mausoleum, with its sinister up-lighting, resembles a chamber from the Death Star. Then there’s the perfect curl of the acoustic shell outside the Ministry of Defence and the abandoned, narrow crescent of the open-air auditorium on the road towards the Palace. Close by sits the Brasilia Palace Hotel, one of only two functioning Niemeyer-designed hotels in the country (the other is Hotel Tijuco in Diamantina). Its proportions are long and narrow yet boxy, the bulk of the building elevated elegantly with stilts. Even though it’s always busy, you feel like the only guest. There’s a glossy, JG Ballard desolation to it that’s immensely memorable and strangely attractive. Sitting by its pool in the blazing sun, it looks like any era from the mid-1950s to the distant future.

The real draw of Niemeyer’s work for the tourist – from design nerd to the uninitiated – is the unbridled sense of fun and fantasy it has. He’s more of an artist than an architect: the steep inclines on his buildings often make you feel like the penguins who used to struggle with Lubetkin’s photogenic but impractical enclosure at London Zoo. And Niemeyer’s huge domes are impossible to segment into successful exhibition spaces. But as vast concrete sculptures, how exciting they are! They capture the essence of a time when the world was promised jetpacks. But there’s no melancholy in their nostalgia, just child-like wonder. In the Niemeyer-designed museum in Curitiba, inaugurated in 2002 and freshened up in December, there is a definitive collection of models of his work, as well as several fine collections of varied contemporary art and design. It’s a great destination as these things go, but the most exciting artwork by far is the immense black eye-shaped gallery itself. From last year, a local company began offering Segway tours of the city that culminate at the building. Zipping around the adjacent concrete ramps and walkways and racing around a huge open concourse, the sense of joy and liberation is incredible. This is entirely Niemeyer’s vision of the future, we’re just privileged visitors, invited along for the ride.

Juscelino Kubitschek's tomb and memorial, Brasilia

 

 

Mark C.O’Flaherty travelled as a guest of Air France, who fly from multiple destinations worldwide to Rio and Sao Paulo via Paris, connecting with local airline GOL in Brazil 0845 050 5871, www.airfrance.co.uk, and as a guest of Journey Latin America, who offer two-week holidays focused on tours of Oscar Nieyemer’s buildings in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Curitiba and Brasilia from £3,584 p/person including flights, transfers, excursions and breakfast. 020-8747 8315, www.journeylatinamerica.co.uk

Salta – beyond the beaten track (Elle)

Despite earlier assurances to the contrary, it was very obvious that we weren’t going to be driving any further today. We’d had an elegant lunch at Estancia Colomé while waiting for the all clear, driven for an hour, and then… Where once there was road, there was river: vast, fast-flowing, mud-brown. So wild, it created its own surf. ‘This hasn’t happened in six years,’ said someone with a walkie-talkie. ‘We’ll tow you through in about an hour with a tractor.’ My partner and four other not-quite-departing Colomé guests looked sceptical, and well and truly adjacent to their comfort zone. An hour later half a tree floated past at high speed, as if towards a waterfall’s edge, and we drove back to the vineyard, defeated and largely stranded for the foreseeable. But I had a plan…

The journey around Salta in Argentina had, so far, been merely mildly adventurous. Harry at PlanBA – our tour operator, fixer and ‘man in Buenos Aires’ – had warned us that the drive might, on occasion, be hairy: some of the roads aren’t really roads, many come with vertiginous mountain aspects and unexpected rain can cause havoc. A few days earlier we’d been towed out of a ravine next to an alligator sanctuary. I’d never before been in a car whose wheels churned up mud across the windscreen rather than moving. I thought it only happened in films.

And yet, misadventures aside, Salta – which borders Bolivia to the north and Chile to the west – remained the most beautiful place I’d ever set eyes on. You have to forgive its capricious tantrums. I’d never experienced so many dramatically different, wild and alien landscapes in such a short period of time, while bedding down in serious luxury night after night. One minute there were lush, velvet-green Hebridean hills; a mile later, Wile E. Coyote red-earth desert with thousands of seven-foot cacti spread out as far as the eye could see, like some vast, static army in thorny camouflage.

After several days of 85 degree, blue-sky poolside lazing at the whitewashed-elegant House of Jasmines (previously actor Robert Duvall’s private residence), we moved to Estancia El Bordo, a rich, dark, colonial, antique-filled estancia that’s still a family home. It’s the embodiment of genteel Argentina estancia life – every mealtime calls for fine ornate china and silver cutlery, there’s sunset horse riding before rounds of gin and tonic, and every night is a dinner party.

From El Bordo we took Route 9 up towards Jujuy, stopping at the tiny clay-coloured adobe market town of Purmamarca for a lunch of steak washed down with Cerveza Salta Negra, a kind of effervescent, sweet stout that’s more Coca Cola than Guinness. We drove onwards and upwards, upwards and upwards, to an altitude of 4,200 metres – where we felt light headed and, most bizarrely, couldn’t whistle because of the thin air – then down again to the Salinas Grandes. Black clouds streaked across an otherwise blindingly bright blue sky and we took pictures of each other leaping into the distance and lying flat on the dazzling, crystalline white earth. Within the salt flats, it’s difficult to establish from sight alone what is solid, liquid or air. The salt resembles the crust of a frozen lake, or clouds that have become heavy and descended below the level of the horizon.

On our journey, it was the cemeteries I found most incredible. They were as beautiful as they were moving: simple stick crucifixes that had succumbed to the weather and come awry, standing next to ornate colonial-style iron crosses, gleaming white gravestones and mounds of pebbles. There was one huge graveyard at the foot of a lush green mountain on the way to Purmamarca and another on the desert road from Cafayate to Colomé, just past a ghost town with an abandoned post office and rusted petrol pumps. Its prosaic headstones stood within sculptural boulders in the dusty earth, covered in brightly coloured garlands of flowers that had been hung during a festival a few days before. The place felt so remote, it seemed inconceivable that anyone would ever visit. But the flowers were vibrant signs of life, memory and tribute.

Much of our trip took the form of an elongated loop. First, down from Salta to Cafayate, with one pit stop for rather too many delicious empanadas (yes, they’re essentially mini Cornish pasties) at the rustic but wonderful El Papabuelo in El Carril, and several more to take in the sights around Quebrada las Conchas. The Devil’s Throat was the most mesmerising and disorientating of the attractions; a cave full of distorted, rippled red stone with a vast back wall that looked like the bottom of a valley tipped up on its side, trees growing towards you, as if defying the laws of gravity.

After a stay at the swank, ranch-like Patios de Cafayate, and a night out at the riotous local folk festival that coincided with our visit, we began our drive up Route 40 towards Colomé, prepared for the worst. ‘You’ll see a sign for a short cut, but don’t take it!’ warned someone at Cafayate. ‘The Dakar Rally drove through last week and destroyed it.’ Why, of course it had! The first hour or so was plain sailing. Then the asphalt road ended, and we began driving through sand and over rocks, entranced by the ever-weirder and more spectacular boulder formations, ghost towns and frequent sightings of condors gliding overhead. Just after the village of Molinos – whose tiny church is hung with the most charming Andean, woven, stations of the cross – we were towed through a small river by a tractor. Then for an hour, we wondered if we hadn’t actually taken a wrong turn and were off-roading further into the desert. Surely nothing could be out here… Surely this can’t qualify as an actual route on a map? Then we came to a sign for Bodega Colomé.

Colomé is the incredible, impossible, Fitzcarraldo of organic wine resorts, built and planted by tycoon Donald Hess – with no expense spared – in the middle of a high-altitude nowhere. One of the most luxurious bodegas in Argentina, it takes up the whole village, produces well respected wines (the Syrah is a stand-out), and, most bizarrely, has an architecturally phenomenal museum devoted to the contemporary art of James Turrell. It’s a curious and delightful experience to go from off-roading through hell to walking into one of several vast, disorienting, pristine light installations by one of the world’s foremost conceptual artists.

Colomé was bliss. Until it came time to leave of course, and that tiny river we’d expressed only mild alarm at being towed through a few days before had turned into an impassable force of nature. But as I said earlier, I had a plan…

I called Harry in Buenos Aires. ‘So… a helicopter is nearly $3,000 so that’s out, but I saw a Caterpillar make it most of the way through the river when it was moving trees to try to stop the town flooding. I see no reason why we can’t abandon the car and get in that!’ And so, after another night of enforced luxury at the estancia, with a little palm-greasing for the driver in the form of crates of vintage Colomé wines, we dressed in swimwear and vests, sealed our Mandarina Duck luggage in bin liners, and climbed aboard a juddering piece of very heavy machinery to plough our way to the other side of the river. Once there, we made our way to the Hacienda de Molinos for empanadas, humitas and some restorative Malbec, while we waited for Santi, the guide Harry had arranged to drive us to Salta City for a flight to Buenos Aires.

‘It’s going to be a tough drive,’ warned Santi, on arrival. ‘And you won’t make your flight.’ It was, and we didn’t, but Santi would prove to be the most all-action Indiana Jones of guides and our experience was as amazing as the scenery we drove through. The rains in Salta had done much more than swell the river at Molinos: an hour after leaving the Hacienda, we hit a landslide several thousand metres up a mountain, on a hairpin bend. I had visions of us on the Caterpillar, heading back to Colomé – but instead, Santi jumped out, waded through gushing water over perilous freshly fallen rocks, hurled what he had identified as the most troublesome boulders over the cliff, and drove us over it and through. It was something he would repeat time and time again until we got back to the city where we checked in to the Legado Mitico hotel, changed out of our mud-covered swimwear and headed to the bar for cheese and wine. ‘So, how was your journey in?’ asked the waitress.

WHERE TO STAY

House of Jasmines, Salta. Dreamy, plush, rural grandeur. Doubles from around £215, B&B. Enq 00 54 387 4972002 ; houseofjasmines.com.

Legado Mitico, Salta City. Super-chic boutique hotel designed by Francis Ford Coppola’s favourite interior designers. Doubles from around £115, B&B. Enq 00 54 387 4228786; legadomitico.com.

Estancia Colomé, Colomé. Remote and resolutely luxe. Doubles from around £211, B&B. Enq 00 54 3868 494200; bodegacolome.com.

Estancia El Bordo de las Lanzas, El Bordo. High-ceilinged, grand quarters in a historic family home. Doubles from around £224, all inclusive. Enq 00 54 387 155041310; turismoelbordo.com.ar.

Patios de Cafayate, Cafayate. Plush wine, spa and golfing estate. Doubles from around £145, B&B. Enq 00 54 3868 422229; patiosdecafayate.com.

NEED TO KNOW/GETTING THERE

A car is essential, and if you’re driving on unpaved Route 40, it should be a 4×4. The driving can still be tough, depending on the weather, and hiring a driver and guide (through tour operator PlanBA, from £400 extra on a seven day itinerary) is a good option for the wary. Check on the availability of the petrol specific to your hire car, and refuel at every opportunity. Expect very little English to be spoken away from the main hotels, but the local people are very friendly and helpful. Plan BA offer seven nights in the best estancias in the area, including airport transfers and 24/7 concierge service from £1,787 p/person. There are regular short-hop flights between Buenos Aires and Salta, and Air France fly daily from London to Buenos Aires via Paris, from £806 return. Enq 0871 66 337777; airfrance.co.uk. Long haul flights are considerably cheaper booked from Europe than via tour operators in Argentina.

Savage knit (Financial Times Weekend)

Spring’s super-bright florals may already be in full bloom in boutiques the world over, but many of us are stuck firmly in the grip of a Siberian winter. Such is seasonality. Some of the new collections from the more austere houses of fashion take a conveniently heavier approach to the promise of summer ahead. Many practitioners of the luxe urban warrior look – for both men and women – have embraced a tough and tribal approach to knitwear. Often loose and supersized, it riffs on the same monochrome motifs, asymmetry and edge as the rest of their aesthetic.

Todd Lynn, S/S 2012

On the second floor of Rick Owens’ bunker-like black, white and concrete atelier in Paris, there’s a room which houses a row of samples of knit and fur mixed pieces from his studio’s Hun range. “Hun” is Owens’ nickname for his wife and muse, Michele Lamy, as well as the legend on the label for the most rarefied line that the pair of them design, previously entitled Palais Royal. While DRKSHDW is Owens’ diffusion, Hun is the couple’s stab at couture. The elephant knit pieces are typically black and bold. “They seem to satisfy Hun’s savage and voodoo inclinations”, says Owens, giving full credit for the line to Lamy. “I see her patron saints as Gustave Moreau – all swirling perfumed smoke and jeweled emotion – and Attila, with a savage little snarl.” The knits are as sumptuous as they are wild, hand crafted in Marrakech in a small studio Owens operates there.

Todd Lynn has several knits for men and women this season that fit neatly with his otherwise tough tailoring and leather style. Adopting a skewed, visceral and quite otherworldly approach, there’s a touch of H.R Giger to them. “The ladders in the knits are the focal point of each garment,” says Lynn. “It’s about textures but also the feeling of aggression that comes with that distressed look.” Lynn collaborated with London-based knitwear expert Sid Bryan on the collection. Bryan’s career kicked off after he graduated in 1999 when he created pieces for Alexander McQueen’s “Overlook” collection, themed on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. “Lee (McQueen) simply requested ‘big stitches’”, says Bryan. “I think there’s an instinctive, spontaneous, accidental approach to my methods which is about reacting to the knit and the outcomes thrown up though experimentation.”

The pieces that Lynn showed for spring were strongly reminiscent of some of the work of Richard Torry, part of the celebrated Brit-pack – along with Galliano and Bodymap – in the 1980s. Torry all but gave up fashion in 1991 to work in music, going on to co-found the band Minty with Leigh Bowery, but his work has remained influential, and his name a key insider reference. This year he has been working with The Old Curiosity Shop in London, recreating some of his classic men’s knits, with an expanded range being planned for Japan in April. The pieces have an intense, dramatic, organic feeling to them, most notably the classic  “Herringbone Sweater” which he first designed in 1985, taking visual cues from fish bones. They also have their roots in punk – Torry worked with Westwood and McLaren at the end of the 1970s, and recalls “taking my knitting needles to punk clubs.” His 1980s designs, with their contrasting loose and tight weaves and stripes, are so fresh and vibrant that they could have been created yesterday.

Richard Torry

One of Torry’s biggest struggles in relaunching has been in sourcing production. Most of his work is currently hand knitted in the UK, which makes it – like Rick Owens’ Hun pieces from Morocco – inherently special but also time intensive, expensive and very limited. “There aren’t the knitting pools of little old ladies anymore, like there were in the 1980s,” he says. Dublin-based John Rocha – who frequently incorporates punk-tinged knitted elements in his work – showed a range of black Amazonian-tribal inspired knits for women for spring, with leather detailing. He also finds production difficult, purely because of the lack of artisans. “I insist on it all being done by hand, but few people are training in it. And I want it to look modern. I put sparkle in there. Knits can be very contemporary – you can boil it to make it denser, and knit it hard and tight.”

Much of the new style of knitwear treats an otherwise soft textile as unlikely, provocative, armour. Someone like Mark Fast creates body-conscious dresses that are as overtly sexual as vintage, figure-hugging Alaïa, while Swedish designer Sandra Backlund shapes her knits for women into strong and sculptural shapes, with immense shoulders and necklines. “Heavy knitwear has become my signature,” she says. “This season I’m focusing a lot on details, and how to create 3D effects close to the body.”

Many labels are pushing the boundaries of what actually constitutes knitwear. This season, along with a sleeveless cardigan for women in a super-chunky cotton-blend stitch worked into a rope-like motif, Maison Martin Margiela produced men’s pieces knitted using shredded men’s shirts. Again, the DNA of it harks back to punk. While the technique is different from Vivienne Westwood’s seminal, loosely woven Seditionaries mohair pieces from the 1970s, or indeed Kurt Cobain’s overlong, frayed sleeves of early 1990s grunge, it’s still all about attitude. It’s soft, but it’s hard – knitwear with a needle-sharp edge.

www.curiosityuk.com

www.maisonmartinmargiela.com

www.markfast.net

www.richardtorry.com

rickowens.eu

www.sandrabacklund.com

www.sidbryan.com

toddlynn.com

Rick Owens – Shadowman (Metropolitan)

When the inevitable biography is written, Rick Owens’ life story will read like one of the dark, sensational and glamorous works of literature that he’s such a fan of: an art student from a small town becomes a druggy, bisexual, noir-nailed goth within the LA demi-monde of trannies and hustlers. He studies pattern cutting and hooks up romantically with fabulous, diamond-toothed celebrity restaurateur cum stripper cum lawyer, Michele Lamy. Spotted by Anna Wintour, he takes New York Fashion Week by storm and moves to Paris, to become the most influential designer of the 21^st century…

Rick Owens, Paris © www.markcoflaherty.com

Right now, Rick Owens is the overlord of high and dark fashion. His collections sell out at record speeds and Rizzoli have just published a coffee-table-sized coffee table book on his work. He’s attracted a cult following for his severe, often sinister, monochrome, draped jersey and leather aesthetic. This afternoon, when he walks into one of the vast, whitewashed, concrete-floored rooms of his 7^th arrondissement HQ – its shelves littered with skulls and Kaiser spiked helmets – one might expect an accompanying soundtrack of 5am Berghain Berlin techno, and perhaps for the temperature in the room to drop. Instead he carries a tiny espresso cup and plays Dorothy Squires Live at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane on his iPhone. “I like Dusty, but I really burnt out listening to her,” he says. “Now I listen to Dorothy Squires all day long. She has that whisky and cigarettes tone to her voice and I find her really moving.”

His fixation with the late Welsh songstress – and one time Mrs Roger Moore – is far from contradictory. Everything in Rick Owens’ universe fits perfectly into place: the gothic tendencies, the transgressive sexuality, the austere, monastic, concrete aesthetic now translated into limited edition furniture, and the camp… Everything has its purpose. Like the high heels he designs for men, inspired by “the virility of Kiss in concert”. And the bumper-car hi-top sneakers inspired by “gangs in LA using their shoes to anchor huge basketball shorts, in an almost kabuki way.” But there are unusual interests too. He loves the BBC sitcom Nighty Night so much that he sold the DVD in his stores in London and Paris and he’s a huge Gary Numan fan. “I think of Gary when I’m working on every collection!” he says.

Still very much the anything-but-quintessentially American in Paris (he refuses to learn French, believing it’ll take far too long, and he likes the “layer of privacy” it provides), he frequently Channel hops and finds the contrast with London fascinating. “In London the kids are so much cuter,” he says. “There’s a scruffiness that the Parisians just won’t allow themselves. In Paris it’s about APC jeans, white button down shirts and a blazer, and in London it’s all wittier and cheekier.” Owens is drawn to the often acidic and subversive nature of British culture, from early 20^th century socialite Stephen Tennant to the 80s “queer” filmmaker Derek Jarman. “It’s that British dry wit I love. I’m reading a lot of Beverley Nichols from the 1920s, which has a lovely Cecil Beaton quality. There is an imperturbability about the British, while the French make a big thing about pretending not to be perturbed, but they are. They’re always indignant.”

When Owens travels to London with his partner Michele, they stay at Claridges – although if he’s travelling alone, he’ll stay at the Savoy “because the deco is more severe, and darker” – and spend their time exploring galleries and museums. “I always return to the Joseph Beuys room at the Tate Modern,” he says. “And I loved the Whistler show at Tate Britain. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t been in love with him before. He belonged to the most exciting of times.”

Rick Owens, Paris © www.markcoflaherty.com

Owens studied to be an artist, but turned to fashion because “art seemed like entering the priesthood, and I’m too frivolous” – though he now adores the pomp of the contemporary art scene. “I was at the Bermondsey White Cube opening recently and it was like Hollywood, all neon bulbs and epic proportions. And as we were leaving, there was a crowd of people behind the velvet ropes. It was so Day of the Locust, I wallowed in it.” He also moves in offbeat London circles: Lamy backs the designer Gareth Pugh, so there are strong links between the Pugh and Owens labels. “There’s a group around Gareth that have a great allure and mystique,” he says. “That crowd from Ponystep and Boombox are so talented, sharp, fun and sweet.”

When Owens and Lamy are out in Paris and London, they are the ultimate ambassadors for his brand: Michele in a ton of jewellery and Owens’ clothing, looking like a vampiric Egyptian priestess, and Rick with the poker-straight black locks that have become as iconic in fashion as Lagerfeld’s ponytail and Menkes’ quiff. And of course, always clad in black or grey, “even on the beach”. So committed is he to the palette that on the counter of his London and Paris stores there are bowls of M&Ms in varying shades of grey. Monochrome is the only thing that makes sense to him. “It sends a message,” he explains. “It says  ‘don’t look at my outfit, I’m presenting my face to you. You don’t have to look at anything else, I’m not trying to capture your attention with an interesting shoelace’.”

Owens spring 2012 collection is a development of his black and white aesthetic, with dresses for men and prints for women that hark back to the deco of the 20s. “I love that linear modernism,” he says. “It’s aspirational with a simple elegance. And I think it’s quite melancholy, because it’s looking for a perfection that will always be out of reach, forever.” And the future? Before that inevitable biography and the museum retrospectives? More furniture, perhaps a move into colour, but with a promise that it will “never be banal, or Marks & Spencer’s…” And then perhaps a hotel, finished with raw, bunker-like textures and fur bedspreads. “I’d love to create something on a nice coastline, somewhere remote. Maybe in North Africa, which is close enough, but far enough too. And on the top floor I’d create a Gary Numan suite.”

Amanda Harlech’s Perfect Weekend (Financial Times How to Spend it)

Lady Harlech has been working closely with Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel since 1997. She divides her time between a suite at the Ritz in Paris and her farmhouse in Shrawardine, Shropshire…

“The first joy of Saturday is walking out through the back door, across the grass, through the dew, opening up the greenhouse and picking something for breakfast; perhaps some strawberries. I love cooking with fruit: apples and raspberries and a couple of pears. Delicious. I might have that with porridge with my son, Jasset, and daughter, Tallulah. Jasset is a very good cook too and likes to make eggs and bacon. It’s so beautiful here. I have always looked for a view, wherever I have lived. The house is really nothing. It’s a little strip of a building but it sits in the circumference of the hills that divide England and Wales, with the River Severn at the bottom.

Lady Harlech, Shropshire © www.markcoflaherty.com

If I want a Turneresque romance of sky, mountain and sea I can find it just an hour towards the coast. I’m awake at 5.30am because of the birds screaming outside my window. I like to do a lot in the morning. I light a fire. I do yoga. It makes me feel present in my own body. It’s really good to take even a single minute to listen to what your body is telling you. I might reread something I’ve written, or play Bach on the piano that Karl gave me. Like anything, it requires practice. It’s a beautiful Steinway with legs designed by Karl. They connect up in a rectangle, which alters the sound.

There are wonderful shops to visit in the Shropshire countryside. I discovered Ashmans Antiques & Old Lace 20 years ago and was on first name terms with the owner, Diane, immediately. It’s an Aladdin’s Cave, a treasure trove of wonderful clothes. I’ve bought Imperial Russian outfits, linen nightshirts from the 18th century and a collection of 20s wedding dresses. Tallulah likes to shop there but prefers more dramatic pieces, with black lace and dark purple velvet. Close by is F.E Anderson & Son, where you can find the most amazing Irish Georgian antiques. I like jewellery and jewellers but I also like overalls, uniforms and dishcloths. Wherever I go I like to visit the local ironmongers. C.R Birch & Son has the best doormats, rat traps, floor mops and buckets. If you go to what I call a fashion homestore, the things are made of plastic and you get silly broom heads. I want things that have evolved over hundreds of years. It’s a bit like a Chanel suit – the perfectly evolved brush. I don’t want a cheap copy or imitation. Wilstone sells incredible firebowls; really beautiful hand-beaten bowls which you barbecue on, which I might do in the evening. There is a very good Indian restaurant, Enigma, but I like my own food too much and I’d like to have six to eight friends over for dinner. I might barbecue some lamb, stabbed with garlic and rosemary and thyme with a slosh of olive oil and black pepper. All it needs is some peas from the garden, new potatoes and mint. I have two wooden tables and some chairs in the garden and you can sit outside and look at the swallows and swifts and hills.

Karl has never been here but the invitation is always open. He would only come by private jet so that would mean finding an airport that has got a runway long enough for it to land. I would love him to come. I have all kinds of ideas: I’d put up a great big white marquee and have waitresses in white aprons serving Diet Coke. I’d get a horse to jump over the table. To shop for dinner I go to the Farmers Market in Shrewsbury, which is great. You can get fantastic fish, amazing rabbit, delicious eggs and ham, local asparagus and samphire. You can sample oysters with Guinness. I buy spelt bread from the Shrewsbury Bakehouse, which is delicious and very good for you, made from ancient Roman wheat. It’s great to see people passionate about bread, and they are at the Bakehouse.

Sunday starts with the church bells of St Mary’s ringing. I live right next door to the vicarage. It’s a very stripped down church, with a pale blue stained glass window and worn flagstones. I like hearing the bells in the morning. There were very violent battles between the Royalists and Roundheads in the fields next to me. Apparently there is an underground passage from my house to the ruins of Shrawardine Castle. A friend of mine told me he sensed the house had been full of men either discussing or playing music; full of ghosts, but happy. These borders are both haunting and haunted. I have a four year old Irish racehorse called Roy. It’s great to ride down to the river or up to Rodney’s Pillar – the 18th century monument to the victory of Admiral Rodney over the French in the West Indies – where they say on a clear day you can see Ireland. I want to take up falconry. The birds don’t frighten me at all. I think perhaps I’m a throwback to the 17th century and I have a romantic idea that I may die in my house and the boldest of the animals move in. I like the idea of a fox curling up on the sofa next to the piano. If it’s a hot day it’s lovely to swim in the Severn, or lie in the garden naked on a carpet reading a book. I do a bit of gardening. I get my plants from the Dingle Nurseries and Derwen Garden Centre. I go there for seeds, bulbs and trees. I have an orchard with quinces that I have planted from there. They were little whips when I bought them. If I am lucky I will see them grow a little bit taller than me. It’s putting something back: “create a library and plant a wood”. On Sunday evening the best thing to do is go to bed with a book. I love all sorts of books, they just have to be well written. 10pm is the time to go to bed because I like to make the most of the next day. Of course sometimes you can stay up dancing in the kitchen until two or three, but that doesn’t happen often. Although when it does, it’s great.”

ADDRESS BOOK

ASHMANS ANTIQUES & OLD LACE, PARK LANE HOUSE, HIGH STREET, WELSHPOOL SY21 7JP (01938 554505). C.R BIRCH & SON, ROUSHILL, SHREWSBURY, SY1 1PQ (07074 272472). DERWEN GARDEN CENTRE AND FARM SHOP, GUILSFIELD, WELSHPOOL SY21 9PH (01938 553015). ENIGMA, SHOTATTON, RUYTON XI TOWNS, SHREWSBURY, SY4 1JH (01691 682666). F.E ANDERSON & SON, 5 HIGH STREET WELSHPOOL SY21 7JF (01938 553340). SHRAWARDINE ST MARY THE VIRGIN, 15 BROOKSIDE, BICTON, SHREWSBURY SY3 8EP (01743 851310). JACKIE JONES YOGA (BY APPOINTMENT 01743 367186). SHREWSBURY BAKEHOUSE, 7 CASTLE GATES, SHREWSBURY SY1 2AE (01743 248384). SHREWSBURY MARKET, THE MARKET HALL, CLAREMONT STREET, SHREWSBURY, SY1 1QG (01743 351067). WILSTONE, HEATHER BRAE, LEEBOTWOOD, SHROPSHIRE SY6 6LU (01694 751747)

Fine dining detail (Aston Martin magazine)

On the way to The Herbfarm, a 45 minute highway trip out of Seattle into a rural Martha Stewart fantasia, your driver will ask you what time you want to be collected. If you suggest any period shorter than four hours later, he’ll correct you: you simply won’t be finished. An evening at The Herbfarm is an epic performance, from the pre-cocktail tour around the herb garden to the velvet curtain that pulls back on the kitchen for the introduction of every staff member. And all this before the amuse bouche. The milieu may be classic country cottage, but the evening is a study in contemporary dining, where the food is but a single component in a far bigger event.

“It’s a myth that restaurants are all about food,” says Jennifer Sharp, one of the UK’s most celebrated restaurant critics. “Just as important is the space and ambience, whether it’s balletic luxury at Le Louis XV in Monte Carlo, the cramped, noisy cheerfulness of the Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco, or in Madrid, nearly 300 years of roast suckling pig from the wood-fired ovens at Botin. Every meal, every service, is a performance and the diner is both actor and audience.” Sometimes the elements are obvious, but sometimes they are more offbeat, like the smell of woodsmoke that Mathias Dahlgren traps beneath serving bell jars at his restaurant in Stockholm to evoke childhood memories of nearby forests, or the way fellow Swede Magnus Nilsson has his staff saw shinbones in half in the centre of the room at Fäviken before serving up the marrowbone.

Sur Mesure, Paris

The slick ambience at Vue du Monde, the dining room that relocated 55 floors up the Melbourne skyline this summer into the Rialto building, and which remains perhaps the greatest restaurant in the Southern Hemisphere, is the antithesis of the bucolic twee of The Herbfarm, but it has a similar attention to detail. There’s a radical, molecular, Willy Wonka-goes-classical-French kitchen here, but it’s also decidedly Australian, from the ingredients to the service and the sense of humour. There’s a “post-bushfire regrowth smoking balcony”, as chef Shannon Bennett puts it, with surfaces made from charred and lacquered wood, while the toilets are refined versions of the “outback dunny” and the tables are covered in kangaroo hide.

Design is integral to the way the dining experience works, as anyone who has suffered an evening in an ill advised “pop up” venture knows. The frisson of excitement that you get from a guerilla operation can’t compete with the sense of occasion that, say, a Friday night at the Ritz in London can still deliver. There remains a world where jackets are required and septuagenarian couples foxtrot, while elaborate salads and tartares are crafted at table side, flanked by the kind of refined, charmingly unreconstructed Belle Époque grandeur most frequently seen these days in an episode of Doctor Who just before something explodes.

If there’s one dominant “new look” for fine dining, it’s a return to heavyweight, moneyed, tony glamour. Designer David Collins is a master of it. Restaurateurs who can’t afford him frequently rip off his look with lashings of marble mosaics, croc-textured banquettes and deco-meets-disco flourishes but they just can’t pull it off: it takes a master stylist to get it right. Massimo, the restaurant at the new Corinthia hotel in London, is a largely monochrome, maximalist space that’s a paradigm of the Collins canon: theatrical pillars, sparkle, slightly steampunk jazz-age lighting details and an overall sense of The Special. The charismatic, bespectacled Massimo Riccioli, celebrated for his muscular, boldly prosaic Italian seafood, loves how the space works with his menu. “It’s a great mix, because my food is quite stripped down,” he says. “And the room gives it a balance.” The detail is ravishing, from the oyster bar to the wall lights based on oars – a near subliminal nod to rivers and oceans. It’s a big-budget Busby Berkeley musical of a dining experience, with subtlety restricted to the kitchen.

Massimo, London

“If something is difficult, expensive or heavy, it’s usually very good,” says LA-based restaurateur Mr Chow, and that’s a truism for eating out. It’s difficult to get a reservation at Marcus Wareing at The Berkeley, it’s certainly expensive, and before you get into the inner-sanctum of its dining room, you pass through a door with theatrical heft that keeps the inside invisible from the hotel bar outside. It makes you feel as if you’ve passed into Narnia, albeit a dimly lit one designed by the aforementioned Mr Collins. It’s grand, intimate, and terribly grown-up, yet playful at the same time – just like its chef patron’s revelatory cooking, which remains among the most masterful in Europe. “I like warmth and darkness,” says Wareing, “So David created an interior to feel like being inside a bottle of Bordeaux.” This is where Chris Bailey, creative director of Burberry, dines with his partner after his show, rather than celebrating in the throng of London Fashion Week. It’s a destination dining room but also a casual canteen for the stratospherically successful.

Marcus Wareing at The Berkeley, London

If Wareing’s dining room is a bottle of Bordeaux, then Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester is a flute of Champagne. From the silver in the colour palette and the effervescent circular gaps in surfaces – as if caused by bubbles – the room is cool and sharp. It’s thawed a little since its opening, but when it launched it was almost conceptually glacial – waiters wore eyeliner and seemed to glide around the hushed space, arranging forks face down.

ADAD – as Alain calls it – is one of numerous Ducasse restaurants designed by Paris-based designers Patrick Jouin and Sanjit Manku. For the 540 seater, 43^rd floor miX in Las Vegas, the couple produced something suitably super-flashy, but were also inspired by the organic nature of a place that, as Jouin says, “inhabits the space between desert and sky”. At Ducasse’s Plaza Athénée restaurant in Paris – totally refurbished last year – the starting point was the idea of freezing time while acknowledging the OTT palace status of the hotel. It’s a grander room than at the Dorchester, but with similar touches of futurism. If pushing the door into Marcus Wareing’s restaurant at The Berkeley lets you in on a plush, dark and textural secret, then making your way through the larger door at the Plaza Athénée is like a trip through the looking glass. Painstakingly hand-embroidered panels surround the space which is dominated by an immense “exploded” crystal chandelier, hundreds of its tears suspended by invisible means around the main structure, as if in mid-blast. When Ducasse decided he want to “simplify” the menu with a relatively reductionist approach to ingredients, he wanted the room to change with it. The table setting is at first stark, and then slowly builds up and up, until it’s time for the tea trolley to come around, with potted plants from which your leaf of choice is cut. “We wanted magic to happen,” says Manku. “We suspended time with the exploded chandelier, so you wonder how long you’ve been within the space… it could be one or four hours.”

Manku and Jouin serve as choreographers as much as decorators. “You can sculpt emotions,” says Manku. “You can have a vast space and make it seem intimate.” Their latest project is the interior of Sur Mesure at the new Mandarin Oriental in Paris, now HQ for chef Thierry Marx. Marx does sublime things in terms of taste while deconstructing and arranging ingredients into visually dazzling concepts, adorned with edible flowers and bold brush strokes of colour. Sur Mesure is spacey, in a 2001 way. It’s dressed entirely in white cotton fabric, with abrupt folds and eruptions in strategic points. “You enter through a curved passageway, which slows you down and makes you unsure about what’s around the corner,” says Manku. “We wanted to create something celestial, not above or below the earth; avant-garde – to reflect the food – but comfortable. Conversation has to be possible. Too often restaurants are hyper-focused on the cuisine, so if you laugh too loudly or drop a fork, it makes you tense. We wanted to create the Parisian palace hotel dining room of the 21^st century. Remember, when Versailles was created, the Hall of Mirrors was radical and audacious.”

Alain Ducasse at the Plaza Athénée, Paris

A visit to the Lecture Room & Library at Sketch, London’s most ambitious art/theatre hybrid warren of bars and restaurants for over a decade, is an operatic and multi-layered experience. The maitre d’ leads you up the now iconic faux molten-chocolate staircase in her fetish-high heels, past staff in retro black and white French maid’s uniforms, into a room that blends a lavish MGM Hollywood sunrise setscape with contrasting Moorish aspects. Then Pierre Gagneau’s exquisite tasting menu starts rolling out: warm stone bass carpaccio; veal and morels with pear and gorgonzola sorbet; five lavish desserts all at once… The most fabulous thing about Sketch – food aside – is the undercurrent of the sci-fi sinister, or even macabre, along with the glamour and haute cuisine. There’s a Peter Greenaway, or perhaps Matthew Barney, element to all the costume drama, and an ethereal tone too – two huge portraits of a boy and a girl hang at either end of the room, painted white on white, appearing blank at first, and then slowly appearing as the aperture of your eyes adjust.

The Lecture Room and Library at Sketch, London

At the other end of the style spectrum, there’s a very self-conscious kind of modernist movement in certain kinds of dining, championed by the likes of Fergus Henderson and typified by his first St John restaurant. A stark, whitewashed ex-smokehouse with connotations of unprepossessing artisans and the Bauhaus, St John fits neatly with the cult of Labour & Wait styling and Gil Sans typography, while Viajante, another east London fashion and art crowd destination, follows the same food-first philosophy but takes a more rarefied approach. Like Henderson, chef Nuno Mendes has attracted a slavish following, but his food is more alchemical, throwing together offbeat combinations (mackerel and cherry granita served in a cloud of dry ice) and emphasising curious textures (“skin”, generally, is a fixation) for often amazing results. Viajante is 21^st century modernist and fabulously Bethnal Green: Mendes himself has arms tattooed with mysterious dots and lines “to represent all the lives I’ve lived while travelling”, while his staff wear black denim and present a wine list glued roughly into a copy of Stuart Pigott’s Planet Wine. The kitchen at Viajante is fully exposed and the focal point of the room. “We don’t like to show people a menu,” says Mendes. “We like to take them on a journey. And the building we’re in, the old town hall, is luxurious in itself, so I created a room that’s minimal. In terms of the way the food looks, I start with the product, the dish evolves and then we find the perfect layout. We use simple plates, so it’s like a blank canvas, and I like to work with negative space, and texture.”

The final, and perhaps most important detail of any restaurant is the corps of diners that actually keep a restaurant ticking over. They can make for quiet background ambience or show stopping entertainment. At Daniel Boulud’s three Michelin-starred Manhattan restaurant, Daniel, the room is posh beyond posh and arranged like a sunken theatre in the round, with tables for two on a balcony encircling the outside. From here, many guests enjoyed the sight, one evening, some years ago, of a man and woman dining in the middle of the room, getting steadily drunker, until mid-meal when the latter dropped facedown into her fish course. The man carried on eating as if nothing had happened. Sometimes, the most memorable kind of dinner-theatre has nothing to do with design, service, ceramics or background music because ultimately, dining out is all about people watching.

New London restaurants: JOE’S (Elle)

I didn’t try chef Maria Elia’s food at the revamped Whitechapel Gallery when she cooked there. This was largely because the gallery’s opening exhibition – a retrospective of sculptor Isa Genzken – was so bloody dreadful that it put me off ever going back. But anyway, here she is, taking over what used to be Joe’s Café and, for a period in the in the late 80s and early 90s, a space so highly charged with monochrome flash, fashion and cool that my best friend called her first born son Joe in tribute. Actually, it wasn’t just the Café she loved. Her christening decision was made in homage to owner Joseph Ettedgui’s whole empire: his boutiques (the flagship opposite the restaurant was a place of pilgrimage for first-wave Alaïa fans), his “it” fragrance, Joseph Parfum de Jour, and his swish way with typography. I never named a child after the restaurant, but it was always a favourite – and largely successful – third-date location.

Joseph himself sadly passed away in 2010 and JOE’S (as it’s now been reinvented and capitalised as), looks very different these days. The bold, silver and black Eva Jiricna interior that was immortalised in Patsy and Edina’s “Champagne for Lulu!” lunch in Absolutely Fabulous has been torn out, with only a stair rail and portholes in the doors downstairs left to remind us how beautiful it was once. It’s a less intimidating space now, with breezy, chatty service, warm leather and wood and weirdly chilly mushroom walls, but promise of more framed David Bailey photography to fix the latter. I miss the old look, but I don’t miss the old menu. What Elia has brought to Brompton Cross is largely fantastic, and should attract an infinitely more discerning, foodie crowd.

The menu is arrestingly modern with buzzwords and buzzier ingredients: Carpaccio; pearl barley; marinated beetroot… it just doesn’t get more au courant than beetroot these days. Amongst the starters there’s slow-braised octopus, mackarel with gooseberry chutney and a haddock (carpaccio, natch) with crème fraiche, lemon and chilli that’s the bees knees. It’s light but sharp, with a lot of spark.

Elia goes out of her way to create splendid plates for veggies. Her book, the Modern Vegetarian, is Quorn-free food porn for the meatless and her most interesting dishes at JOE’S are alternating “Textures of…” platters of one veg done several different ways. I shared the Textures of Peas, which included a soup, a mousse, pods and an orrechiette; each emerald green, each delicious and when grouped together, pretty enough to warrant reaching for the Hipstamatic. Monkfish with preserved lemon cous cous was similarly wonderful, although I found her strawberry risotto with bitter radicchio (something I make at home from a very different Guy Grossi recipe) overly complicated with too many ingredients in the mix. Many will love it though. Puddings are appealingly small, and big on fresh fruit. Elia’s cooking gives an overall impression of being offbeat but gently so, and full of lightness and freshness. It’s bringing culinary chic back to JOE’s, and one of London’s most enticing fashion districts, in a big way.

 

Food 9

 

Ambience 6

 

Service 9

 

Value 9

 

JOE’S, 126 Draycott Avenue, London SW3 3AH, 020-7225 2217

www.joseph.co.uk/joes-cafe/locations/

 

9am-11pm Tue-Sat; 9am-6pm Sun-Mon

 

STYLE OF FOOD: Contemporary British/European

 

PRICES

 

AVERAGE PRICE PER PERSON FOR TWO COURSE MEAL WITHOUT WINE: £23

SET MENU: Lunch Mon-Fri, £15 (two courses) or £17 (three courses).

 

PRICE OF BOTTLE HOUSE WINE: £21, Rodero Arneis, Vigne Sparse (white); £19 Cabernet/Malbec, Finca Los Prados (red).

PRICE OF GLASS HOUSE WINE: £5 (as above).

PRICE GLASS HOUSE CHAMPAGNE: £11, Olivier Collin.

PRICE BOTTLE HOUSE CHAMPAGNE: £50 (as above).

No private dining.

No garden/al fresco dining.

Bar for cocktails.

BEST TABLES: The tables in the back area have less noise from the street, but can feel cut off on a quiet evening.

WHO GOES: A very international Chelsea crowd, and of course Brompton Cross “ladies who lunch”.

NEAREST TUBE: South Kensington

 

GOOD FOR:

 

Quick bite after work

Pre theatre

Special occasion

First date

Group dinner

Work lunch/dinner