May 23, 2021 The Double Cube Room. The 9th Earl placed the painting by van Dyck of Charles I’s children Credit: Will Pryce/Country Life
In the early 18th century, Wilton House in Wiltshire underwent improvement at the hands of the 9th Earl of Pembroke, an enthusiastic amateur architect. For a new book on Wilton to this day the seat of the Earl of Pembroke John Martin Robinson assesses his remarkable legacy. Photography by Will Pryce and Simon Upton.
The splendours of Wilton today owe a great deal to the early 18th century and the figure of Henry, 9th Earl of Pembroke, (1689–1750), known as the ‘Architect’ Earl. His often-overlooked contribution to this magnificent house in origin a great Benedictine convent that was suppressed at the Reformation and repeatedly remodelled thereafter was described by Horace Walpole: ‘The towers, the chambers, the scenes which Holbein, Jones and Vandyke had decorated, and which Earl Thomas had enriched with the spoils
Yuki Sugiura
It s been over a year since we last had guests inside our houses for dinner. Now, on the first weekend that we re allowed to have people over, even to stay the night, we may need a slight refresher on how to play the gracious host and put on a dinner party worthy of a post-lockdown celebration.
Setting the scene
Our dining rooms are more used to being used as offices these days, dining tables piled high with laptops, notebooks and stacks of paper. It s time to clear all that away, get out the polish and lay the table properly. As interior designer Shalini Misra notes, The tablescape is so important; tableware, linens, plates, glasses and cutlery set the mood and tone for the evening. It s more than likely too, that most of your best dinner plates have been left unloved over the pandemic, so now is the time to get them out again.
Set inside the Covent Garden building that was once home to Bow Street Magistrates Court, NoMad London looks to have been worth the wait.
Big budget hotel projects are rarely delivered quickly, but NoMad London has been an especially long time coming. The team started work on the project soon after opening the inaugural NoMad hotel in New York in 2012. The lengthy gestation period is down to a change in location, an extremely complex and ambitious build and - most recently - the pandemic.
Covent Garden’s Bow Street Magistrates’ Court building - which tried many a famous name including Emmeline Pankhurst and the Kray twins - has been completely reworked internally. In fact Andrew Zobler - the owner of NoMad’s parent company Sydell Group - says the hotel is best thought of as an entirely new building within an existing one.