Preparing for London

Do you love planning and researching a trip as much as I do? It's almost as fun as the actual journey! I am getting ready for a trip to London and Yorkshire in the spring and have discovered three fabulous books on London to help me create my itinerary. Each one validates the well-known adage that if you are tired of London you are tired of life. They are filled with wonderful suggestions for things to do in London. Some have been on my to-do list forever, some are ones I have never heard of until now, and others are places I have already been to and now can't wait to revisit. Here are the books and some interesting things I learned from them:

Literary London by Eloise Millar & Sam Jordison. This books gives us the opportunity to walk in the footsteps of our literary heroes. It tells the stories behind the stories, giving us fascinating facts about London's best literary landmarks, taking us into publishing houses, cafes, parks and all our favorite authors' stomping grounds. There are charming maps within the pages to help us find the best of literary London. Here are a few fun and quirky things that stood out to me:

1) A Dickensian pub crawl including the George Inn on Borough High Street, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese (love the name) on Fleet street and the Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden which boasts a little plaque in the alleyway commemorating Dickens' time there. In his days the tavern had a slightly more sinister name: The Bucket of Blood!

2) Berry Bros & Wine Merchants on St. James Street. I walk past this wine shop every time I am in London. I loved learning that it has had the same slanting floor since 1698 (better for rolling barrels) and was the poet Lord Byron's shop of choice for his wine cellar.

3) Brown's Hotel. I've been to Brown's for afternoon tea but didn't know it was the model for Agatha Christie's "At Bertram's Hotel." An interesting fact: Brown's Hotel was opened by Lord Byron's former valet a few years after the poet's death in 1837 (and on Albermarle Street, the same road as Byron's publisher). And the tea is supposedly very similar to the one Miss Marple eats.

4) Maison Bertaux. Located at 28 Greek Street, Soho, this is London's oldest French patisserie. The Bloomsbury Group loved to gather here for pastries and coffee.

The Art Lovers' Guide, London. This is a fully illustrated guidebook about the finest art in London. I learned a few interesting facts about some very famous paintings.

1) "Ophelia" by John Everett Millais which is at the Tate Britain was worked on by the artist for four months. He worked on a riverbank in order to copy the background accurately. For the foreground his model Lizzie Siddal posed for days in a cold bath, becoming ill in the process.

2) "The Swing" by Fragonard is the most famous masterpiece of Rococo art at the Wallace Collection, one of my very favorite places to visit in London. The Wallace Collection is located in London's Hertford House which was once the home of Richard Wallace and his descendants. It is now a national museum exhibiting the family's acquisitions of European art, including London's finest group of 18th-century French paintings. Next time I go I will seek out "The Swing."

3) "A Bar at the Folies-Bergeres" by Manet is one of my favorite paintings and I have enjoyed seeing it at the Courtauld Gallery. This painting of the famous Paris musical hall was Manet's last major work. The Courtauld is located in beautiful Somerset House and has a fabulous collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Art. I haven't been for many years and after reading details about its impressive collection, I can't wait to go back. The description of the paintings by Degas and Renoir at the Courtauld are especially enticing.

The London Cookbook by Aleksandra Crapanzano. This wonderful book is both a guide to some of the best restaurants in London as well as a cookbook featuring some of the best recipes from these restaurants. Here are a three that I want to go to that feature some of the the best of British cooking.

1) La Fromagerie. This is a cheese shop with a cafe that is supposed to be a great place for lunch. The featured recipe in the book is "Alpine Fondue." In the notes for the recipe, the author writes that a great fondue is a balancing act, melding different varieties of cheese so no single one claims center state. This dish is served with bowls of cornichons, ham, boiled potatoes and cubes of crusty bread. I would love to order this dish if I make it to the restaurant!

2) Bucca Di Luppo.  An Italian restaurant that I have been to, it is located on a tiny street in Soho. This is another great place for lunch, especially sitting at the bar where you can watch the cooking. After reading about the featured recipe, Chestnut Straccetti with Mushrooms and Chestnuts, a pasta dish that includes chestnuts, pancetta, sage and mushrooms, I now want to go for dinner.

3) Nopi. One of Yotam Ottolenghi's restaurants, Nopi is a brasserie located in Soho. I have all of his cookbooks and would love to finally eat at his restaurant. The featured recipe is Purple Sprouting Broccoli with Olive Oil Mash. As the author says, "You may well wonder why I've included a recipe here for what is essentially mashed potatoes and grilled broccoli. The answer is simply Yotam. When Yotam cooks vegetables, magical things happen." That answer is good enough for me. I have been cooking his food for years and have total confidence that this dish will be delicious!

And one more thing: a good friend just returned from London where she saw the Vanessa Bell retrospective at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. She brought me home a copy of the collector's edition of the March  2017 issue of Harpers Bazaar UK which includes two fabulous articles about Vanessa Bell and Bloomsbury written by Virginia Nicholson as well as a short story by Virginia Woolf that was originally published in Harpers in 1936. I am planning to see the Vanessa Bell exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery and can now read up on it. I will be adding this to my ever-growing pile of research for my trip!

A Classic Novel and the Perfect Setting

Happy September!

What books are on your wish list for fall? Do the books you read change with the seasons? When the weather turns cooler I often want to read a classic novel and this month I chose "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf. Have you read it? If you haven't, you might want to give it a try.

You may ask, why read it now?

Well, there are so many good reasons. Interest in Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf seems to be at an all-time high. Here is what has been going on recently, as well as what is coming up:

Charleston Farmhouse, the country retreat of the Bloomsbury Group, will have its 100th birthday next year. It was rented by Vanessa Bell in 1916 so that conscientious objectors Duncan Grant and David Garnett would have a place to work the land. Record crowds have visited this summer. I am sure that something special will be happening to celebrate the big anniversary next year!

This is also the 100th anniversary of the publication of Virginia Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out.  After all this time, she continues to be considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. She inspires writers, artists, readers and even ballet choreographers with her writing. Many works of art have been created as a result. For example:

A new ballet, Woolf Works, based on her fiction premiered last May at the Royal Opera House in London. It played to rave reviews. I saw this and it was truly amazing --  an original and beautiful ballet.

Last year the National Portrait Gallery in London hosted its first-ever Woolf exhibition which combined portraiture with biography. I was lucky enough to see this one also. It was an amazing visual experience and captured this multi-faceted woman so well. The most moving objects in the exhibition were the letters she wrote her sister and her husband before committing suicide and her walking stick which was found on the bank of the River Ouse near her Sussex home. 

This summer the BBC aired a drama about Bloomsbury, Life in Squares. I hope it reaches the U.S. sometime soon. Larger groups than ever visited Charleston this summer to see the setting for many of the scenes.

Priya Parmar wrote a biographical novel, Vanessa and Her Sister, about the early days of the Bloomsbury Group with a focus on Vanessa Bell and her sister Virginia Woolf. It is excellent. Luckily for those of us in Los Angeles, she will be speaking about Vanessa and Her Sister in October at the Beverly Hills Literary Escape. Go here to learn more.

And in the New York Times By the Book column this past weekend, in answer to the question "who is your favorite fictional heroine," the novelist Anne Beattie answered Mrs. Ramsay from To the Lighthouse. All of this made me realize that it was time to take a second look at this classic novel by Virginia Woolf.

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To the Lighthouse is considered Virginia Woolf's masterpiece. She wrote it in 1925, shortly after finishing Mrs. Dalloway. Just as modernist artists like Cezanne were trying to do something different in painting, Woolf was trying to do something different in the novel. Her goal was to change its form and push the boundaries beyond what had been done in the past. She wanted to write a novel that could incorporate the disorder and haphazardness of life, the ebb and flow of our thoughts and feelings, and at the same time tell a good story.

And so we are in the heads of the main characters Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, their family and friends, as we follow their thoughts and actions during their stay at the Ramsays' summer retreat. Woolf is exploring ideas and issues that were important to her and that many of us can relate to: the passage of time, the relation of the present to the past, memory, creativity, art, marriage, family, career versus motherhood, place as a muse, and the power of women. One critic at the time wrote about the book, "Nothing happens...and yet all of life happens." As always with Woolf, the language is beautiful.

She modeled the characters Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay on her own parents. The book revolves around the Ramsays' annual family gathering on the Isle of Skye off the coast of Scotland. Virginia wanted to evoke the ambiance of her childhood summers in Cornwall. With the character Lily Briscoe she explored the struggle within women to be artist, wife and mother. Was it possible to have it all? This was a question that haunted Virginia for most of her life. Mrs. Ramsay exemplifies the Victorian ideal of motherhood. Lily Briscoe represents the modern concept of the woman artist.

There are so many beautiful passages --

As Lily Briscoe struggles to finish her painting, she thinks:

"One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy."

When one of the house guests returns for dinner, Mrs. Ramsay thinks:

It must have happened then, thought Mrs. Ramsay; they are engaged. And for a moment she felt what she had never expected to feel again -- jealousy. For he, her husband, felt it too -- Minta's glow; he liked these girls, these golden-redish girls, with something flying, something a little wild and harum-scarum about them, who didn't 'scrape their hair off,' weren't, as he said about poor Lily Briscoe, '...skimpy.' There was some quality which she herself had not, some lustre, some richness, which attracted him, amused him, led him to make favourites of girls like Minta. They might cut his hair for him, plait his watch-chains, or interrupt him at his work, hailing him (she heard them now), 'Come along, Mr. Ramsay; it's our turn to beat them now,' and out he came to play tennis." 

Everyone, including Lily, is in love with Mrs. Ramsay. She wields power as the matriarch of the family and is based on Virginia's own mother Julia Stephen.

 Upon finishing the book, Virginia's sister Vanessa Bell wrote:

"...in the first part of the book you have given a portrait of mother which is more like her to me than anything I could ever have conceived possible. It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead."

In what is probably the most famous scene in the book, the family and guests gather around the dinner table to eat Mrs. Ramsay's famous Boeuf en Daube.

"Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candlelight, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things waved and vanished, waterily."

Virginia Woolf wrote about this famous scene:

The dinner party is the best thing I ever wrote: the one thing that I think justifies my faults as a writer... I don't think one could have reached those particular emotions in any other way."

Where would I love to read this book? Recently, while drooling over the interiors on my favorite design site House and Garden UK, I spotted this room at Ham Yard Hotel in London. It looks like the perfect bookish spot for settling in with a cup of tea and a good book. It has some of the artsy and bohemian spirit of the Bloomsbury set. Don't you love those lampshades and fabric on the couch and armchairs? I could easily while away a few hours in this delicious room!

What's on your list this fall?
And what is your dream setting for reading a classic book?

Ready for Fall

I don't know about you, but every year at about this time I start to crave fall. The middle of August feels tantalizingly close to September and I am ready for the crisp and cool weather of the upcoming months. And right now we are in the middle of a heat wave. Although the weather continues to be hot here in September, the month brings shorter days and with that comes a sense of the changing seasons. So even in Los Angeles we start dreaming about pumpkins and apple pie.

But in my opinion, there is no place more beautiful in autumn than New England. One of my favorite things to do in October is travel to the east coast and stay at a country hotel such as The Pitcher Inn in Warren, Vermont. This year we are going to New York -- we got tickets for Hamilton! -- and then on to rural Litchfield, Connecticut for some leaf peeping and all the other things that go into a New England fall. We were there many years ago and loved it. I remember gorgeous gardens, antique stores, great restaurants, Federal style architecture and country walks. Every porch is decorated with chrysanthemums and pumpkins. I can hardly wait!

With fall on my mind, I began to think of my favorite things to do at this time of the year.

So here goes:  

Ten Things About Fall That Make Me Very Happy

1. Traveling to New England

Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts
Photo via here

One of my favorite places to visit in New England, especially when we are staying in the Berkshires, is Historic Deerfield, Massachusetts. The village consists of one street lined with 18th and 19th century houses that have all been restored to their original condition. Each one is like a little museum.

Here are some other things I like to see and do in New England in the fall. The list is far from exhaustive and in no particular order, but includes some of my favorites.

Shop at the antique stores in Woodbury, CT

Visit the covered bridge in Kent, CT

 Go to The Mount, Edith Wharton's home, in Lenox, Mass

Drive the beautiful Mohawk trail in Western Massachusetts and admire the stunning fall foliage of the Berkshire mountains

 See art in Williamstown, Mass. The Williams College Museum of Art and the Sterling and Francine Clark Museum have stellar art collections

  Visit Stockbridge, the idyllic Berkshire village painted by Norman Rockwell

 While in Stockbridge, stop at the Norman Rockwell Museum
Explore Woodstock, VT, one of the prettiest towns you'll ever see 

Go to nurseries in the area, such as the White Flower Farm in CT
Visit my alma mater Bates College in Maine and walk on the Quad which is carpeted with fall leaves
Eat a bowl of clam chowder at M.C. Perkins Cove in Ogunquit, Maine

 Admire the fall displays of mums and pumpkins that are everywhere!

2. Fall Cooking

There's nothing like cooking up a Wild Mushroom Risotto such as this one from Judith Jones' The Pleasures of Cooking for One to get you into nesting mode. This is a great dish for a cozy night at home. Go here for the recipe.

3. Flowers

I love the colors of fall flowers. These are from a flower arranging class I took last year. 

4. The beach

I have always thought that the beach is at its most beautiful in the fall and winter months. This photo was taken on a gorgeous day in November. There is something about the light at this time of year that makes the air crystal clear and the water glisten.

5. Sinking into a classic novel

I have just started rereading "To the Lighthouse" and am swept away by the beauty of the writing.

6. Adding some tartan to the house

I think that tartan looks especially good in the fall. It has the same crisp and tailored feeling of the season. These dishes finally arrived from Scotland and they remind me of my wonderful trip in June and my visit to the Anta store in Edinburgh, which has to be the the mother lode for all things tartan. I love the way the dishes look on the kitchen table!

7. Pulling out my favorite cookbooks

There are certain cookbooks that do seasonal recipes really well and Nigel Slater's Notes From The Larder is one of them. His pork chops with pears and cream is one of my favorites. Go here for the recipe.

8. Taking out fall table accessories

I have been collecting table ware with fall motifs forever and it's so much fun to take them out once October arrives. This table runner is from Italy and the leaf candle holder from a trip to Paris almost 20 years ago. The amber tea lights I bought in bulk one year for a party.

9. Lighting the candles at dusk on a fall night

As the days get shorter, candlelit tables bring a glow to the house and make staying inside feel very  cozy!

10. Wearing my Bloomsbury poncho

 Having lived on the east coast for so many years, I have been guilty of buying too many sweaters and coats for L.A. But it does eventually get cool enough here to wear some of them. This year I can't wait to bundle up in the Bloomsbury-inspired poncho I bought from Burberry last year. It was part of the Fall/Winter 2014 The Bloomsbury Girls collection and I got it on sale. After learning about the literary and artistic heritage behind this collection and Burberry's support of Charleston, the country retreat of the Bloomsbury Group, I was so happy to have one of these pieces. It will be perfect for a crisp day in October.

Have you travelled to any of the beautiful New England Inns during the fall months? 

I would love to know your favorites!

Two Day Trips Out of London

Even though it's a bit of a drive, a great day trip out of London is Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, the country home of the Bloomsbury Group. If you go to lunch at a charming pub along the way, the drive doesn't seem so bad.

That is exactly what we did a couple of weeks ago when we stopped at The Rose Cottage Inn on our way to Charleston. This is a wonderful spot for lunch, with traditional pub food such as Ploughman's Lunch and fish and chips.

The ambiance is cozy, casual, and old English

We arrived at Charleston and were grateful we had made the drive. The house looked beautiful with  climbing roses and vines all in bloom covering the front facade. I could only imagine what the garden must look like. That would be later; first we would be having a tour of the house.

We were scheduled for a 2:00 pm tour and had arrived a bit early which gave us some time to explore the fabulous gift store. Years ago I purchased some fabric and made two Bloomsbury pillows for my library at home. They always remind me of Charleston. This time I was tempted by the lampshades. Isn't this one gorgeous? The gift store at Charleston has to be one of the best gift stores around.

We had a fabulous tour of the house and heard some new stories. (Photos of the inside are not allowed.) I loved picturing the members of the group gathered together in this cozy place for country weekends filled with work in the mornings, relaxation in the afternoons, and dinners and long conversations into the nights. My favorite new story was learning that Quentin Bell wrote his landmark biography of his aunt Virginia Woolf in his father's (Clive Bell) bedroom. I kept imagining what that must have been like. Surrounded by his father's things as well as the ghosts of the other members of the Bloomsbury Group, he must have found plenty of inspiration.

As you exit Duncan Grant's studio you arrive at the garden. This time we spent a lot of time there. Lush, loose, and beautiful, this is truly an English country garden. It was easy to picture the garden parties that were held out here. As well as the plein-air paintings that were done by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. You can imagine them setting up their canvases in this lovely environment and painting to their hearts' content.

We wandered through, walking along paths and admiring the flowers

The borders were beautiful

I loved the old stone wall with its climbing plants

And its sturdy garden gate

This is a great view of the back of the house through the garden; Duncan Grant's studio is on the right with all the windows.

 More paths bordered by country flowers 

This is a great walking garden; evening strolls in the summer would be lovely.

After completing our walk through the garden we got on the road back to London. It was a wonderful visit and a great day trip out of the city into the Sussex countryside.

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Another fun day trip to take out of London is Richmond, about 30 minutes away, where you can visit Kew Gardens and Petersham Nurseries. Because of the rain we had to skip Kew that day, but we had a wonderful time at Petersham.You would be surprised at how much there is to do at this multi-faceted garden center!

Welcome to Petersham Nurseries

If you dream of having garden parties, everything you could possibly need is at Petersham. And unlike any other nursery I've been to, they have an award-winning restaurant with gourmet food and the prettiest ambiance I've ever seen. Not quite sure what I like best about Petersham -- their vast selection of plants, their indoor spaces with beautiful garden-themed decor for sale, or their glorious restaurant. Here is a look at all three.

There are many outdoor and indoor areas with plant material for sale --

I love these rustic wooden flower supports; you see them in gardens all over England and this is a great place to buy them!

It's fun to see what's available at Petersham's

This place is a treasure trove for gardeners

Roses on another wooden frame

So much inspiration here 

The beautiful seed room

Then there are the indoor spaces with everything you could want for garden decor --

Dream of hosting a garden party? You'll find everything you need here to create a magical outdoor setting.

And after a little shopping, you can have lunch at the glorious restaurant--

Dining under a canopy of flowers, trees and vines

The perfect setting for a summer meal

Surrounded by nature

With one beautiful vignette after another to gaze upon

If you are a garden-lover, don't miss Petersham Nurseries next time you are in London. It is filled with beauty and inspiration. Make a reservation for lunch and you will have the perfect afternoon out of the city.