rupert thomas world of interiors

He researched each piece and he learnt where to sell it to get the best price. Im freaking out. His collaborations with supremely talented and skilled practitioners were built up across decades, with all bringing their best work to the projects. Has turned down a CBE and a Knighthood. One day I asked him how you can tell a fake from a genuine thing. I shall never forget spending happy days photographing and living in his Irish house, Patrick and I making cosy fires to sit by and watching the sunset from our bedroom window and becoming a part of the furniture. Sought after by the major design organizations, he travels the world photographing people and their homes. In retrospect, it might seem as though it was humanitarian, but the larger part was pure selfishness., He says its exactly the same with a robin that nested this spring in the garden. We are talking in his front room in Primrose Hill in London. Queen Anne Grace. Robert, interior decorator to His Majesty, King Charles III and at least five English dukes, plus pop stars and potentates, died on August 17, aged 76. Their first meeting was in a restaurant in Primrose Hill, and Bennett spent much of the dinner explaining the area to him. Things are somewhat becalmed as Hytner, having left the National, has not yet started up his new venture, a London theatre near Tower Bridge, planned to open in 2017. Gender. I worked at the front window. The production of his projects, which ran from first site visit and client meeting to the backing out for final occupation, was enormously complicated and involved a cast of thousands. Published monthly in print and daily on its website and digital platforms, The World of Interiors is a global title celebrating originality in design, decorating, arts and culture. You tell people that youre happy and they are bored by that. At 16 I briefly had a stall in Camden Lock. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. The Queen comes upon herself, comes upon having a private life that she has never really thought about, he explains now. Our builders dug it out and paved it in herringbone brick. His partner of 23 years, Rupert Thomas, is the editor of the World Of Interiors magazine and it shows the room is a comfortable cave of 18th-century pictures, a mantelpiece loaded up with cards (one handmade in the shape of a red-soled grey shoe) and a wall lined with books: fat Pevsner architectural guides, the journals of Anthony Powell, Virginia Woolf and John Cheever, Claire Tomalins Thomas Hardy biography, and volumes on the history of blue-and-white china. Print is dead. I approve of him, if only because it brings Labour back to what they ought to be thinking about. For example this, from an 80s fly-on-the-wall documentary he collaborated on, about a hotel in Harrogate: For years, hotels and restaurants were for me theatres of humiliation and the business of eating in public every bit as fraught with risk and shame as taking ones clothes off. The performance of going to a cafe would include his parents ordering a pot of tea, then smuggling bits of bread and butter, brought from home, to the young Bennett and his brother under the table while the waitress wasnt looking enough to turn any boy self-conscious. Well, I dont really, he says. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. I would study the image on my screen and continue to work on it until everything looked understood, and settled and true. I wanted to please him in the way that I want to please Nick. Magazine Editor. Tarr is a minor British inter-war painter and no one wanted it. In an age when editors of monthlies must compete, seemingly impossibly, with the daily dopamine hits of grams and memes and TikToks, The World of Interiors appears to occupy an earlier, more dignified era. If the magazine wasnt given great infusions of cash like its siblings, it was left largely alone by the executives, a trade-off that continues to this day and one Mr. Thomas, like Ms. Hogg before him, seems happy with. It was making a profit and there was no reason to sell it back again. (The tone of his journals, excerpts from which are printed in the London Review Of Books each January, is nicely encapsulated by the headline given to the 2010 batch: Alan Bennett eats a poached egg.), What dates Bennett is not his appearance or indeed his bookshelves, but his grasp of technology. When Frances Lincoln asked Robert Kime to make a book about his work in 2014, naturally I was both delighted and daunted when he rang and said that after much thought he had settled on me as his first choice for the new photography. We live near London Zoo, and if I walk the long way round, I see the giraffes. The World of Interiors has been bringing together the widest variety of the most sumptuous houses and architectural projects for over 30 years. Change). Start a FameChain Add to my FameChain. The architecture was a document, just like the decorative objects, which all brought their referential history to the composition. Its so successful as a business, and so solid, that Im very wary of pushing them in directions they feel uncomfortable going in, said Mr. Read. That began to go, I hope., Bennett has written that he gave Guy Burgess some of his own sentiments in his one-act play and film about the spy, An Englishman Abroad lines such as: I can say I love London. He was looking for someone to run the shop and I seemed to fit the bill. If Simon Upton, one of the magazines star freelance photographers, is dispatched to the United States, he will be assigned two or three projects to make the trip cost-effective. The intensely contained Hytner never owned up to living streets away himself. There were so many incidents when she was not actually physically roughed up, but people banged on the side of the van, hoping to get her out and waving her stick, that I always had one eye on her and it stopped me working. They did it twice and the first time I slightly messed it up though since the lines were in French hardly anyone knew. Share Having a fragment makes it human. in life and in his fiction, Alan Bennett is a bundle of contradictions. Out now in the current November issue of the magazine. Like all men of his generation, Bennett did national service. The van had been parked at various points along the road, and at length drifted down to his house. He got into trouble a few years back when he said in an interview that he didnt read contemporary British fiction, which was taken as being an affront to AS Byatt and everybody else but I just read other things. Full name. It was Ms. Hogg who essentially invented, through the magazines exquisitely crumbled aesthetic, the decorating style shabby chic. Garden Ours is a real London garden: tiny. Two decades after the internet changed everything, magazines mostly have yet to figure out how to thrive in a digital world. The office is one largish room with deeply scuffed wood floors, a drop ceiling and windows overlooking green Hanover Square. And thats throwing thought at it. Nick chose me, rather than the other way round, he says of Hytner. He became editor in 2000, only the second in the magazines 38-year history. Its common for magazines to commission stories only to kill them for one reason or another. But I knew. The World of Interiors - August 2011 Editor - Mr. Rupert Thomas. (modern), Alan Bennett photographed at home by Antony Crolla for the Guardian, Alan Bennett: I didnt see the point of coming out'. For years after, The World of Interiors shared office space with the Cond Nast circulation department in another building across town, leaving it physically and metaphorically apart. Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. It started with a pair I bought in the King's Road when I was 15 that laced up at the side. Subscribe now. When the digital-advertising apocalypse came for print in the last decade, gutting budgets along with staffs, The World of Interiors scarcely had to adjust. This sense of doubleness runs through Bennetts writing: in the diaries, there is often a part of him taking critical notice of what he is (or isnt) doing, a kind of extreme self-awareness. It showcases seemingly every facet of the decorative arts and crafts over centuries, from the pop artist Roy Lichtensteins Manhattan studio to an antique dealers 16th-century Shropshire pile to a shepherds hut, while reviewing books like The Peoples Galleries: Art Museums and Exhibitions in Britain 1800-1914. Its intelligent, witty and wide-ranging in its curiosity: a bible. Every crop of every picture. I cant say I love my country, because I dont know what that means. Does he think patriotism is a necessary virtue? Rupert. Thanks also to Cosmo Brockway for words . It started off just as a fling, really, but we became very fond of each other. I dont know. The December Fashion Issue of The World of Interiors is on sale now. WOW! In 2008, Robert was renovating the building he had bought in Museum Street into a London flat for Helen and himself and with a shop below. (LogOut/ He never made a room plan and was very clear he was not an interior designer. It would have distressed both of them. They incited me to orchestrate in rooms the old things I found in flea markets and antiques shops, inexpensive echoes of objects I saw in museums and historic houses. All together this acts as a kind of alchemy. He obviously thought I was a bit showbiz and corrupt. The legendary fashion editor Hamish Bowles has been appointed as the new Editor in Chief of Cond Nast's title, World of Interiors. No, no, its absolutely true, Bennett says, in that blissfully mournful voice that could have been designed for voicing Eeyore (which, of course, he has done, reading the Winnie the Pooh books for BBC radio). Britains hotels are full buy shares in this stock for a piece of the action, New Help to Buy plan would be 'insane' says former government property adviser, Macrons France is trapped in a debt spiral it cannot escape, Vauxhall owner sues tyre maker Continental and car parts maker Bosch over cartel claims, Thousands of middle earners face 100pc-plus tax after Hunts stealth tax raid. Both those things make you want to go on with it both the praise and the criticism. Once, on a Turkish bus, he bought the headscarf of the lady in front of him a kandili print with a pattern of pea pods. Michelle R. Smith, an interior designer whose Brooklyn townhouse was featured in the February 2018 issue, recalled getting a last-minute email from the magazine saying Mr. Upton was in New York and could he come the next day? Let's take a look at their personal lives and find out how it all started. I've been going to Portobello on a Friday morning for 30 years - particularly Golborne Road, which is still junky, cheap and cheerful, like markets used to be. I tell him I still dont understand why Miss Shepherd ended up in his driveway; for years, visitors to the house were obliged to sidle past her parked van. Anyone can read what you share. To begin with, not surprisingly, she didnt get on with Rupert, but then she became ill and she became closer to Rupert than she was to me, really. She was, he says, very beautiful. Stimulating, occasionally heavy duty, delightful and testing in equal measure, Robert asked us to work as a team and we set about recording five of his own houses and several others he had created for exceptional clients he particularly loved, in England, France and the Caribbean. It wasnt started by Cond Nast, but rather bought by the company back when it was published independently as Interiors and headquartered above a florists shop on Fulham Road. The positives of negatives: in a digital world, this is the rare magazine that continues to use film. Robert persuaded her to let him sell it for her, and she set him up in a shop in Oundle. The knowledge there is phenomenal. Our goal is to document the rich diversity of ways in which we live, showcasing the stylish and the unexpected as well as applauding individuality. Robert was always at my elbow patiently explaining everything as he saw it, pointing out the significance of the rooms to him, why things needed to be as they were and constantly referring to his wife Helen whose highly developed taste in interiors was his touchstone. They didnt want to be beholden to country. We periodically update published stories to ensure they present the most up-to-date information available. Bennett also had a long-term relationship with his former housekeeper, Anne Davies, until her death in 2009. . So why start churning out clickbait like 5 Ways to Get the Downton Abbey Look? The World of Interiors is meant for a niche audience and the people who run it are fine with that. Interior Secretary DEB HAALAND testifies before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The gold-standard shelter magazine runs on a brass-tacks budget and refuses to kowtow to the internet. He will in turn be a hard act to follow, so I can only wish his successor, Hamish Bowles, well in whatever minor modifications he makes, preferably as few as possible. A thin, bespectacled man of 53, Mr. Thomas had on wool trousers paired with a green corduroy blazer and blue cloth tie, and exuded an air of bookish intelligence and modest British eccentricity. Markets I've been going to London junk markets since I was 14. His compositions involve site, landscape, architecture, spatial sequence, historical reference, texture, material, colour, and function. A production by the Theatre Royal, Bath, of The Madness Of George III, in 2011. It's an extraordinarily exotic start to the day. "To us, San Franciscans seem. Very often overawed clients would come into the shop and on seeing Robert would declare, are you the great Robert Kime I so admire everything you do, to which Robert would invariably wince, wave them away and say, oh, youll get over it. Personally, I find that the pen I use - a Waterman (pictured) - makes my handwriting look rather calligraphic and elegant. Bennetts work is full of timid characters overwhelmed by and attracted to bolder, flashier types: Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton in the film Prick Up Your Ears, for example; Benjamin Britten and WH Auden in the play The Habit Of Art; even Bennett and Miss Shepherd in The Lady In The Van. Like his staff, Mr. Thomas is frugal and workmanlike. Once he screeched to a halt, having spied a gorgeous wreck of a serpentine fronted chest of drawers in a hedgerow. We also earn affiliate revenue through products seen on our website and other platforms, frequently via products that our writers and editors have personally used and love. But Clarence House, the official residence of King Charles III when Prince of Wales, was the most prestigious. Its beloved by those in the creative and visual arts especially. They married when he was 23 and moved to a gothic schoolhouse at Mildenhall, near Marlborough, using two wings of the cruciform building as his shop. I used to. Despite the sense of familiarity that comes from having watched his television plays of the 70s and 80s, or read his autobiographical stories, he is not in any real sense knowable. He lays out the whole shoot from England from that series of photographs. But we were never like that, he said. There was nothing on it. He truffled out wonderful and exceptional things on a daily basis, especially the carpets and rugs he felt were the basis of a scheme. The other candidates had stopped talking about these things., The Conservatives, meanwhile, are quite close to a totalitarian attitude, he says. He is not a celebrity editor in the Anna Wintour mold. Still, the magazine has never come across as snobby, because three pages after Clarence House can come, say, the house-turned-museum that an African-American couple, a poet and her postal-worker husband, built in Lynchburg, Va., in 1903 and decorated with recycled materials and great flair. Its never settled. The glamorising of her that has happened has nothing to do with anything, really its just exploiting her. I assume he means Helen Mirrens more recent take in the film The Queen, and on stage in The Audience. In the film the author is trapped between the demands of two elderly women: his mother, declining up in Yorkshire, and Miss Shepherd, whose unruly presence tests the liberal principles of the new generation of artists, television people and journalists who, Bennett among them, had moved into Camden Town and done up the big old Victorian villas there (the knockers-through, Bennett has called them). For the Nationals 50th anniversary gala in 2013, he performed an excerpt from The History Boys, in which he took on the part of the wayward teacher Hector, originally played by the late Richard Griffiths. It's an imperfect, slightly grubby jewel in an increasingly pristine area. I have a friend who will quote his favorites. The magazines point-of-view is distinct, even wacky. If one could even sell a magazine memoir of today, it might be called The Getting-By Years: slashed budgets, reduced staffs, a noticeable diminishing of not just financial resources but ambition and copy-editing. He gets on the tube with his backpack. It wasnt, at the time, a humanitarian gesture, Bennett says. Ms. Prisant described the process: Rupert asks me to provide pictures of the four walls of a room that I might find interesting. I didnt know how to put work on it., Surely he at least uses an electric typewriter? A collection she had discussed with Robert before he died is under way. The action of the film takes place in the 1970s and 80s, so I assume that he has long since moved on into the digital world. (When quizzed last summer he knew exactly the colour of the watered silk covering four chairs he had sold to my parents in 1972.). He loves the comedy of Stewart Lee, and the geeky sitcom The Big Bang Theory, and the funny but so savage playwright Martin McDonagh. He and Thomas use the east coast mainline regularly to visit their house in Yorkshire; the line was renationalised after the financial crisis in 2009, but privatised again early in 2015, which he says was pure ideology on the part of the Conservative-led coalition. The office is one largish room with deeply scuffed wood floors, a drop ceiling and windows overlooking green Hanover Square. He had a wonderful and often self-deprecating humour. I have collaborated with the WoI for nearly 30 years, through the time of Min Hogg and her brilliant successor Rupert Thomas, Robert had a great sense of humour and the kindest heart which made all our collaborations a delight. His partner is Alan Bennett, the famous playwright and author of The History Boys, making him part of a London power couple, though he is loath to discuss his private life, or much else, with reporters. Except at The World of Interiors, which has lost none of its gloss and seems utterly unaffected by modern media trends. Subscriptions hotline: 0844 848 5202, open Mon-Fri 8am-9.30pm, Sat 8am-4pm. Burgess and Blunt wanted a kind of moral solitude, which is a very different thing. Year: 2011 Publisher: CondNet.UK ltd In a very weird way, by being willfully noncommercial, weve made ourselves more commercial. He had very green fingers. . All are skillful at multitasking and undaunted by traveling economy. As we speak, a memory about Bennett surfaces, something that Thomas told me when, nearly 20 years ago, he and I worked together on the World Of Interiors. Christopher Bailey, the president and former chief creative officer of Burberry, said that while The World of Interiors appeals to the fashion crowd, its not fashionable. It makes you sound so pompous if you put it like that.. The men stood in the center of the office over a white tabletop that, on closer inspection, revealed itself to be a dormant light box for viewing photographic transparencies. Ms. Smith went on: He just showed up by himself with a tiny bag. Today's barber is my partner, Rupert Thomas, who, while professing to admire my abundant locks, manages to make me look like a blond Hitler. Well, electric typewriters, they hum. And World of Interiors is the only magazine that Ive kept and trooped around the world wherever Ive lived, he said. Its a much kinder world, is the theatre, than literature. Right Here, Right Now with Rupert Thomas of The World of Interiors. Then as I got older I realised its an affliction, really, and if youre shy you are just as self-centred as anyone who is outgoing and the life and soul of the party. But perhaps also more watchful; the one more likely to be making pungent little notes in the days journal, or transforming his close observations into works of art such as the Talking Heads monologues of the 1980s and 90s, or The Madness Of George III. A highly experienced and inspirational business leader, who sits on the Fortnum & Mason Executive as Chief Commercial Officer. Orders on www.subscription.co.uk/woi. Rupert Thomas. Assembled into a single narrative, they were first published in the LRB after Miss Shepherds death. Longstanding editor Rupert Thomas is stepping down after 22 years at the title. How does The World of Interiors still exist? Treasured artwork This 1940s picture by James Tarr of an urban back garden (pictured) was in an auction full of lots of big names about 15 years ago. By the time he worked on a project he always made a point of getting to know his clients in the most perceptive and psychological manner, working out what would make them feel nurtured, comfortable and safe in their houses. If we were ever to split up it would be about that, really. They're serious and thorough, but can be off-puttingly dry. The World of Interiors - November 2021. The pair live in Primrose Hill in London. The World of Interiors, by contrast, considers its mission to capture a truthful record of how people live, usually under natural light. After Oxford, a chance meeting at a student house party at Ashton Wold, the Northamptonshire home of the scientist Miriam Rothschild, led to his first shop. His friend Alastair Langlands, who wrote the 2015 monograph Robert Kime (Frances Lincoln), was astonished when he saw the habitually gentle, soft-voiced Robert in operation at antique fairs: He was extraordinary, always first at the gate as it opened, deciding instantly what he wanted, concluding deals at lightning speed.. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Rivals Hearst and Meredith face similar challenges. Oxford University : Exeter College, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, United Kingdom (Finished 1957) Enjoyed success with comedy revue 'Beyond the Fringe' In 1960 with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller. At first, he would give only Fridays over to decoration, but the clamour became insistent. More poetry than anything else but its good, he says. Mr. Thomas grew up in public housing in north London (his mother was a costumer) and joined the staff of The World of Interiors as a junior editor in 1992, after working for the art-book publishers Thames & Hudson and Dorling Kindersley. The latter is one of two JB Priestley plays he would like to have written himself, he says, the other being When We Are Married. In Bennetts plays, bookshelves often loom up to intimidate or overwhelm characters. In Bennetts very funny story The Uncommon Reader, the Queen discovers a taste for novels and thereby an inner existence. Since 1981 The World of Interiors has documented the rich diversity of ways in which we live, showcasing the stylish and the unexpected as well as applauding individuality. Cond Nast London The Adelphi, 1-11 John Adam Street London, WC2N 6HT, United Kingdom Wednesday: The Fed meets to decide whether to raise interest rates, with a .25-point hike . It is certainly among his most beautiful. I use it every day and feel a bit lost without it. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/04/style/world-of-interiors.html. They are waiting, you see, for the next note. So an AEG Traveller de Luxe manual typewriter it is lacking both expectant hum and flickering cursor. It was the mindless, repetitive and demeaning nature of that work that put the iron into my soul, he says.

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