Pre-existing memories of Giverny

An exhibition of Monet’s work opened this week at the Grand Palais. It is the first retrospective of his paintings for around 30 years in Paris, where he remains resolutely unfashionable. His gardens at Giverny, in Normandy, are a major tourist destination. We visited last year and found the little town packed with visitors, all [...]

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A real jardin anglais in Paris

The hôtel de Charost in the 8th arrondissement of Paris was built in the 1720s and was subsequently the home for 11 years of Pauline Borghese, favourite sister of Napoleon Bonaparte, who lavishly decorated it in the Empire style. In 1804 it was bought by the Duke of Wellington and remains today the home of [...]

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Monuments and Memories

Is heritage about things or about people? Last Friday I attended a conference in London, organised by Europa Nostra and ICOMOS UK, which considered this question. Called “Monuments and Memories,” the conference was partly about the 2003 UNESCO convention on the intangible cultural heritage – which I now understand aims to protect performing arts, traditional [...]

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Modern heritage with a capital ‘M’

This weekend is Les Journées du Patrimoine, French Heritage Open Days, and one of the buildings involved is Le Corbusier’s masterpiece the Villa Savoye in Poissy, northeast of Paris. We were there last weekend. It is a splendid Modernist building, constructed around 1930 as a weekend home for a wealthy family. By all accounts, it [...]

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The Cheshire Cat at Versailles

From tomorrow, the chateau of Versailles is hosting an exhibition by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. He describes himself as like the Cheshire Cat, guiding the visitor through the wonderland of Versailles with a cheerful smile and a devilish twinkle in his eye. The juxtaposition between the baroque extravagance of Louis XIV’s palace and the bright [...]

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Dan Kiley and New York Fashion Week

Damrosch Park at the Lincoln Center was designed in the 1960s by master landscape architect Dan Kiley. Much diminished through neglect and misuse, the park is about to host New York Fashion Week, which is moving from its old home in Bryant Park. I am a huge fan of Kiley (see my previous posts on [...]

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Picardie’s floating market gardens

Last weekend we visited the hortillonnages in Amiens, over 300 hectares of marshland which has for centuries been managed as small garden plots surrounded by canals. There are no roads or paths: the plots are accessible only by flat-bottomed boats called bateaux à cornet. It is amazing to visit. Within a few hundred metres of [...]

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Dan Kiley in Brussels

I recently wrote a piece for the Historic Gardens Review on a courtyard garden designed by American master landscape architect Dan Kiley in Brussels. In 1989 AG Group (a financial company which became part of the troubled Fortis group) began redeveloping a run-down city block on rue du Pont-Neuf, near the Grand-Place. The project was [...]

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