The World of Interiors

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The World of Interiors

Editor’s Letter • December 2023

ANTENNAE

What’s in the air this month

Holy Smoke! • Now for an incense holder to make you smoulder, says David Lipton

Let’s Twist Again • Fate took a dramatic turn for Dominic Stora when he started sourcing vintage kaleidoscopes for his antique shop in a Normandy village. Realising that there was visible room for improvement, he began making them in various sizes and exquisite guises, from shagreen to ebony. The optics were clearly very good, reckons Marie-France Boyer: 46 years on, the man’s still firing on all cylinders and a fashion-world darling.

Bound to Please • Just as a first-edition book calls to be encased in morocco leather, so a grand pile demands furnishing fabrics that can match the pedigree and patina of their setting. Saltwood Castle in Kent offers a gilt-edged chance to test this thesis, and our deployment of fine damasks and brocades speaks volumes. Miranda Sinclair makes a strong impression.

Pear Bonding • Though perhaps not initially easy to love – ripening only reluctantly and, even then, keeping the fact well under wraps – these teardrop fruits have a way of taking permanent root in the heart. All elegance in a salad, for instance, draped in chicory or shocked with stilton; or persuaded by poaching into dulcet decadence… A devoted Daisy Garnett fails to stem her feelings.

Piriform Miracles • Is your winter scheme shake-up failing to bear fruit? Watch, rapt, as Rose Eaglesfield conjures a bumper crop of pear-shaped wonders

Frontier Justice

Stay-free

Flutter Bugs

A Prince’s Playhouse

Bards with Beards

Fish out of Water

To Have and To Hold • Whether it’s baseball cards, pop-star autographs or old-master paintings that fill one’s waking dreams, the acquisitive instinct seems to be alive and kicking in all human societies. No-one analysed the pathology better than the sharp-tongued aesthete Philippe Jullian in his 1966 book The Collectors – after all, as Mitchell Owens discovers, the author was himself a junk-shop junkie

Life and Lim

It’s a Mannequin’s World

Network • Clare Holley chooses the best merchandise and events worldwide

VISITOR’S BOOK

CARDINAL VERTU • Despite teeming with fine art and objets amassed by a high-rolling papal envoy, Castello di Gallese always conveyed an air of gloom. And little wonder. Over the centuries it’s been touched by tragedy, fratricide and a scandal that shook le tout Rome. But just recently this incredible treasure-trove in central Italy has become a conspicuously happier ancestral home – all thanks to the current châtelaine’s fortitude and prudence.

SMOOTH AS SILKA • Both texturally and conceptually, everything in the west London apartment of curator Silka Rittson Thomas is in a state of perfect polish – from the sheen on her dining suite to the glossy, walnut-tinted draperies of her tented bedroom. Rather than the result of extensive planning, though, it’s an effect achieved more naturally, says the owner, arising from her need to find the ideal spot for each piece in her ample collection. Tree Sherriff gets a feel for the place.

OFF THE BHUTAN TRACK • When is a Himalayan house not a Himalayan house? When it’s 7,500 miles away in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. And yet, location...