Vintage-dusk | A floral installation
Following on from the Spring theme of yesterday’s photo-post, and in equal celebration of the onset of Spring, I decided to both fill my home with flowers, and share the results with you on The Daily Norm. I find that flowers are such an important part of a home. A different bunch of flowers can transform a room from one season to the next; their scent can bring nature alive within the confines of four walls; and their colour can be used to either enhance or improve an interior scheme. So although having regular flowers is something of an indulgence at £10-£20 per time, I’d rather spend on that and it last a week or more, than an equal spend on wine which disappears in one night (although lets face it, I do plenty of that as well…).
Rationalisation aside, time for me to introduce my latest floral scheme. It’s something of a contemporary design – more of an installation in effect, but I think it looks pretty good in the centre of my dining table. Playing on the vintage theme, I have combined both heavily gilded vintage gold frames with beautiful faded dusky pink roses. Being unable to afford over a dozen of the kind, I opted for 6 showpiece roses, and supplemented with contrasting green thistle and some purple foliage (whose name escapes me). All of these I placed in a variety of sized and shaped glass bottles, one stem in each, and positioned these in various locations within my vintage frame “installation”. I took the idea of single stem bottles from the Hotel Estherea in Amsterdam, where I stayed at the beginning of 2012, and whose daily sprays of fresh flowers made a huge impression on my design sensibilities. It’s a clear departure from the traditional vase, and with all of those different panes of glass standing side by side and reflecting through each other, the grouped bottles have an almost chandelier effect – the perfect degree of decadence for my vintage theme.
A vintage themed contemporary installation, perfect for the modern design-conscious home.
All photos and written content are strictly the copyright of Nicholas de Lacy-Brown © 2014 and The Daily Norm. All rights are reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
May 15
The Colours of Marrakech, Part 1: Rose City
Colour, smell, thunder, stares, snakes, spices, the sound of birdsong, the call to prayer. Morocco is a country of extremes and its dazzling city of Marrakech all the more so. Those extremes began as soon as we entered its airspace, as desert planes and mighty big African clouds overhead gave way to one of the most sparkling fancy airports I have ever set foot in. A further transformation manifested as we took a taxi into town. On the left, a modern city, its roads neatly paved and lined with illuminated orange trees. On the right an old city crumbling, smelly, loud, maze like. Children begged around our legs, women enveloped in veils eyed us suspiciously and the use of donkeys in the place of vehicles marked a return to centuries past. Marrakech is different from any place I have ever visited before, and the next few weeks on The Daily Norm will bear testament to our time there; a trip which tantalised each of the senses and engendered the thrill of the different and astonishment at everything we saw.
A focus on the visual is what will shape my tale of Marrakech, as I take inspiration from the colours which were visible in such extremes across the city. Known as Rose City, by far its most prominent colour is the peachy shade of soft terracotta which characterises its ancient Medina. Stemming from the red tint of local stone and mud, the colour is a naturally occurring bi-product of the city’s quasi-desert location. In fact the rosy hue became so synonymous with the city that when in modern times concrete started to replace traditional mud construction methods, the former French rulers decreed that all such buildings must be painted in the same colour of pink.
The result is a city almost universally sculpted from rose, a place where nature itself provides the rose-tinted glasses through whose sheen Marrakech can be seen to glow a warm shade at all times of the day. But as we will see from later posts, the city’s characteristic hue changes as it reflects the light, and when an intense sunset reigns in the skies, the resulting reflected pink is like nothing I have ever seen before.
But for today, and by way of introducing to this incredible Moroccan city, I give you photos of Marrakech in its most iconic warm terracotta glow, ranging from sunrise in the morning to full sun as the baking semi-desert conditions almost cooked the city streets below. This is Marrakech, Rose City, Daughter of the Desert, and it’s going to be a wonderful Daily Norm ride…
© Nicholas de Lacy-Brown and The Daily Norm, 2001-2017. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of the material, whether written work, photography or artwork, included within The Daily Norm without express and written permission from The Daily Norm’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.