Restoration Stories

Patina and Paint in Old London Houses

Philippa Stockley, Charlie Hopkinson

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Hardback

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English

Pimpernel Press Ltd
01 October 2019

Architecture; Residential buildings, domestic buildings; Lifetyle & personal style guides; Interior design, decor & style guides

A paean to the passage of time in old London domestic interiors. What is it about old pine panelling layered with flaking paint that enchants the eye and tugs at the heart? The soft shine of wooden boards, worn and gappy. Sunlight shafting through an open door out to an unevenly flagged yard where a clay pipe might turn up alongside a Thames oyster shell or a pottery shard. Blue-and-and white export ware; the molten lustre of mahogany or worn silver; the curiosity of tricorn hat boxes or a fragment of Spitalfields silk; portraits whose owners might once have lived here. Would they have believed that these houses would stand 250 years later? Time has imbued all these things with unforgettable patina - not only in museums, but even more in old Georgian houses still lived in and loved, repaired, and regenerated. Like pearls, warmed to lustre by the daily caress of a hand or foot. The majority of these extraordinary dwellings began as ordinary terrace houses, built to a pattern, often in pairs or small groups. Clusters exist in the East End of London: in Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Shadwell, Mile End. They are mostly Grade II-listed, and their owners put up with the bone-curdling cold of winter howling through gaps, with mending and colour-matching, patching and piecing. Not just put up with - they embrace it. And among them are some unrepentantly furnished with 20th- and 21st-century modern, finding poetic harmony across the centuries.

By: Philippa Stockley
Photographs by: Charlie Hopkinson
Imprint: Pimpernel Press Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 275mm, Width: 245mm,
ISBN: 9781910258415
ISBN 10: 1910258415
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 01 October 2019
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Unspecified

Philippa Stockley is an award-winning journalist renowned for her writing on London architecture and interiors, and a critically acclaimed novelist whose latest novel, Black Lily (Pimpernel Fiction) is set in seventeenth-century London. Stockley holds MAs in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art and in English from Oxford University. Charlie Hopkinson is an award-winning photographer of interiors, gardens and portraits, whose latest book, Head Gardeners, also for Pimpernel, won the Garden Media Guild’s Inspirational Book of the Year award (2017).

Reviews for Restoration Stories: Patina and Paint in Old London Houses

An exquisite celebration of period patina. * Sunday Times * Seduces on so many levels, most immediately through its photography page after page of serene interiors interspersed with close-ups....Yet this is not solely a picture book. [Stockley's] relaxed text combines a portrait of each house and its owners with local history, practical information and decorative tips...and she's a fount of knowledge on the quirks and tricks, as well as the economic and health-giving benefits of inhabiting a little-altered Regency dwelling that was once a wreck. -- Mary Miers * Country Life * Will be on all the smart coffee tables this Christmas. * The Times *