The Ideal Stress Free Sustainable Spotless 0 % Balance Transferred Life

Review: The Ideal Home Show 2006, Earls Court.

Since 1908 the Ideal Home show has charted mainstream British taste in houses and interiors. Not much has changed stylistically it seems, but the show has never really embraced architectural notions of progress, either formal or technological. If technology is celebrated here it is in the ability to minutely adjust your armchair or comes hidden in the pre-fabricated panels behind t+g cladding. Here, architecture – to the horror of architects – is no longer about abstract space or challenging geometry but psychological well-being and domestic comfort.

This year’s theme is sustainability and is represented by an enormous fake waterfall. Somewhere nearby lurk Channel 5’s Justin Ryan and Colin McAllister and their spectacular tree house in its “authentic rainforest setting”. Justin and Colin loom large over the show with their brand of metropolitan snobbism and shameless stylistic globe-trotting. Their Asian Influences bedroom (“Hey, even the paint used to decorate the walls is from the Breathe Easy collection by Crown”) typifies the show’s notion of sustainability as mainly to do with celebrating the earthy hues of exotic locales. So, their bedroom also uses “…fabrics woven in the far east by fairly paid workers” as if using fabrics woven in Brentwood by fairly paid workers would be utterly unsustainable.

Away from this billowy rhetoric the exciting action seems to be upstairs at the cheapo end where a furiously competitive market exists for highly toxic cleaning products and futuristic steam irons. Snake oil sellers of a never-to-be-achieved spotless domesticity demonstrate Amazing Pasta Storage Jars, weird robotic hoovers and Magic Saucepans. There’s also some sub Jack Vetriano artworks and vast armies of people selling you Spanish timeshares, botox injections, 0% balance transfers and eye massage glasses. Overall, upstairs as well as down, there is an astonishing number of products related to stress relief and relaxation. Much of the show is taken up by vast and slightly scary looking massage chairs, complete with digital consoles and heat sensors to (supposedly) locate your personal areas of pain and discomfort. Hundreds of jacuzzi’s lined like mother of pearl oysters and festooned with action packed nozzles and rubber water jets, take up much of the other half. What else is there? Well, some fairly anodyne furniture, the occasional bronze leopard or chrome nude, some celebrity chefs and a few bits of interesting new design. It’s not unlike 100% Design, 98% design maybe, but where the innovation is in cleaning products.

Ultimately, the Ideal Home show is about the home as a sanctuary from modern life: a repository for any number of labour saving devices and home spas and ergonomic dining chairs. As Adolf Loos wrote at the beginning of the 20th century, the modern house is a haven from the existentially alienating urban environment. Hence all the massage chairs and fish tanks. Outside, the world is creased, stained and stressful. Inside, all is steam pressed, deep down clean and profoundly relaxing. In its way it’s not that far either from Archigram’s 1960’s dream of the electronic cottage or the well serviced capsule home. It doesn’t look like that for sure – there are no roundy corners or space race styling – but the clapboard covered ideal homes on show are mass-produced, super insulated, custom fitted environments. Relax in your spotless Dyson hoovered Asian Influences front room, set the massage seat to 30 minute Shiatsu, sip some decaffeinated fair trade coffee from your super sized Crazy Frog mug and watch Desperate Housewives on the Plasma screen: the Ideal Life.

I Never Thought The Reviews I Read Were True Until...

Review: The Playboy Archives, Proud Gallery, Camden.

I’m starting to regret this now. I’m sitting in the pub explaining to a friend why I am reviewing the Playboy archives and it’s all sounding a little…..sleazy. “It’s about design” I say none too convincingly. I give up asking anyone if they want to come see the show with me and end up going alone, furtively shuffling ‘round the exhibition with a notebook like a teenager with a Pamela Anderson obsession. Having said that, once inside, the Playboy Archives is considerably less revealing than you might imagine. It consists of a collection of covers from 1953 onwards, some stand-alone photographs of famous Playmates of the Month (including, bizarrely, Katarina Witt) and some framed interviews with famous men. There are also various pictures of founder Hugh Hefner in the exhibition, usually shown wandering the near mythic Playboy mansion wearing silk pyjamas.

Playboy is generally regarded as upmarket soft pornography. In fact it is read by the sort of people who might baulk at the term pornography preferring euphemisms such as ‘gentlemen’s entertainment’ or, worse, ‘erotica’. In this, it aspires both to be something other than a humble porn mag, and to elevate the porn element to a civilised hobby on a par with pipe smoking and vintage motor-cars. For a start it has writing in it, and not just of the “I never thought the stories in your magazine were true until…” variety. It carries interviews with famous men (not women) and fiction from serious writers. It also though, unarguably, has lots of pictures of naked women in it. These pictures are either, depending on your constitution, rather tame or more explicit than you imagined. It’s not Razzle but it’s not The Lady either.

Time has given the 1950’s and ‘60’s Playmates an inevitable period charm – today they seem as de-sexualised as a bit of What the Butler Saw Edwardian saucy-ness. The period hairdos, moustaches (on the men, mostly) and clothes draw attention away from what was originally the point. In fact, hair is a key component in porn: at least of the pubic variety. In the 50’s and 60’s it was generally not seen at all. By the ‘70’s it is there in all its glory. In fact, given today’s tastes for depilation, it is perversely the hair that tends to shock most. The ‘70’s were also an excellent period for unusual props. Horses were a favourite, with naked women shown leading them through lens flare improved countryside like a porno Sandy Denny. By the 80’s, the bodies had become harder and, of course, more hairless. They also started to be designed for the job, leading to the purpose built caricatures of Pamela Anderson, Carmen Elektra and Jordan. The ‘80’s also saw the rise of various famous photographers including Mike Figgis and Helmut Newton, both shown in this exhibition. Here, porn brushes up against art, but in a fundamentally rather naff way. As Susan Sontag has pointed out, if pornography has claims to art, then it is more through its potential for transgression than through arty composition or ‘classy’ imagery.

Alongside the excesses of today’s so-called Gonzo porn, Playboy seems relatively harmless: very much the product of a boy’s imagination that thinks new gadgets, well tailored suits, sexist jokes and, of course, lots of naked ladies, are the accoutrements of sophistication. All, of course, unthreatened by anything as troubling as sexual politics, female desire or un-airbrushed flesh. The spin-off from this veneer of sophistication was that there was a certain subtlety and inventiveness that went into the presentation. But, just as the bodies have become more designed the magazine has become less so. Whilst the covers of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s were often graphically striking in their own right, the latest ones merely list the magazine’s contents around yet another famous face. And, as the bodies themselves have become more ruthlessly exposed to the light, they have had to work that much harder to retain our attention: shaved, taped, pumped up and, finally, photo-shopped into a kind of freaky perfection,

See, it was about design. So, I return to the pub, suitably unembarrassed, but not before I have picked up some new silk pyjamas on the way.

Why Kiera Knightley Should Be Purchased By The National Trust

Review: Pride and Prejudice.

So, I’m in the Rio cinema in Dalston – possibly the most multi-cultural place in the world - and everyone here is white and middle class. Outside, the cars on Kingsland Road throb past with their neon glow and the kebab shops light up the street and yet, in here, all you can hear is the sound of horses hooves on cobbles and silver spoons clinking on china. The thought occurs: why would anyone want to make a film like this now? Isn’t it about as relevant as Quinlan Terry’s houses or Viscount Linley’s furniture? Well, I happen to have a soft spot for Quinlan Terry, but still, the whole idea of period drama is rather worrying: a curious fixation on a world of restrictive manners and social segregation. Is this what we should be thinking about in 2005?

Then there is the film itself. The whole thing is bathed in a honeyed autumnal glow. It begins with the sun rising over a misty swathe of English countryside and gets progressively more picturesque after that. This film is as stylistically intense as Sin City. The quality of light in it was so seductive that after it I felt like hiring a lighting crew to follow me around. What’s it all about? Well, basically, there’s the Bennet family who are farm people, a bit coarse but basically good sorts. They have five daughters and no son or heir, so the house and farm are due to be given over to a male cousin, who is, as Jane Austen put it, a bit of a knob. The father is an amiably sardonic farmer. The mother is a petty bourgeois social climber obsessed with marrying off her daughters to the highest bidders. The eldest daughter Jane is beautiful, honest and shy. The second eldest Elizabeth is beautiful, honest and sharp. Into this scenario rides Mr D’Arcy, an impossibly wealthy bachelor, and his friend, the only slightly less wealthy Mr Bigley. The Bennets and the two bachelors meet at the village disco – sorry, local dance - where Mr Bigley promptly falls in love with Jane, and Mr D’arcy and Elizabeth begin their tortuous and acerbic on-off courtship.

Most of the action – if that is the right word – takes place within a succession of house interiors where the manners are adjusted subtly according to location. The Bennet’s house is filmed in a succession of painterly scenes, somewhere between Breugel, Pieter de Hooch and the sort of sentimental pictures of young children chasing chickens that the Victorians used to hang in their nurseries. Pigs waddle in and out of shot, mud squelches underfoot and there is a rich choreography of honest farm folk and quacking wild fowl. The house, a mix of Queen Anne and Georgian with classical embellishment is lovingly pictured in all its flaking and scuffed glory: a sign presumably of both the Bennet’s near impoverishment and of our heroine Elizabeth’s straightforward honesty. Beginning with the girlish honesty of Jane and Elizabeth’s conversations at home, social interaction becomes ever more elliptical and strained as they move through a succession of ever grander residences. Basically, the posher the house the more mean spirited the people living in it. Except for D’Arcy who has the grandest house but also the best taste. In one scene, Elizabeth wanders through his copious hallways, her eyes lingering over the suggestive physicality of a series of Grecian statues. She is clearly the only other person in the film capable of appreciating such beauty.

Away from the claustrophobic civility of the interiors, Elizabeth’s enthusiasm for walking is seen as evidence of her free spirit. The countryside is depicted as free and natural – a naturalness, of course, that is mediated through the whole biscuit tin and tea towel world of the English picturesque tradition. When the camera is not focusing on the all round loveliness of the English landscape, it is focusing on the all round loveliness of Kiera Knightly. Her character is, of course, the moral heart of the story, showing that honesty and depth will win out over frippery and snobbishness. But, appropriately, her face is always perfectly made up, her ‘kohled’ eyes and flawless skin as ‘natural’ as the perfect countryside behind her.

Always a sucker for shots of rolling hills accompanied by swirling classical music, and entranced by Knightley’s triumphant goodness, I was utterly seduced by it all. Coming out, Kingsland Road was something of a shock. But, you know, in a good way.