Monday 14 December 2015

I knows my place


I was due to be paying another visit to this fabulous house in Oxfordshire this week, but now it will not be until after Christmas. I thought I would show it again - it is like something straight out of a Harry Potter film, but genuine.

One of those gables is very similar to the one in front of my bedroom in the house I grew up, but this is not mock-Tudor, it's the real thing. Ours was 1907, and this house pre-dates it by about 350 years. I have learned not to get too jealous over the years. I have to  be wary of that in my job. I'll show you what I mean.

This is the last thing I made last week. It is a marble plug-hole for an 18th century, marble, champagne-cooler to be installed in one of many spacious out-buildings. Hey ho... (I angled the camera so as not to attract any bitchy comments about our lamp-shade from you-know-who).


14 comments:

  1. I want to live in that house Tom ...... I bet it looks wonderful at Christmas..... you must see some wonderful houses in your job.
    You have very nice hands .... long artistic fingers and it looks as if you look after your nails ..... very nicely manicured !!
    Do you have an Ikea paper lampshade ? XXXX

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    1. I cleaned my nails for the photo shoot, and the lamp came from Habitat as far as I remember - via China I expect. I have been using those shades for about 40 years now.

      My hands are getting a bit like Keith Richards's but not so extreme and possibly not for the same reasons. Like Keith - sort of - I can still play guitar as well as I ever could though!

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  2. I agree that Tom has nice hands. I like it when a man has clean, well-kept nails.

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  3. I cannot visualize this champagne cooler. Is it larger than a bucket? Does a cork go in the plug hole in the middle? Or, a spigot.

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    1. I'll send a photo when it's done. It's about two bucket's worth, but I have restored ones which are about 6 feet wide. They vary. The ice melts and should go down to an earth floor, but in this case, there are electrics - like heating - beneath a marble floor, so this one will drain through a wall.

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  4. I do like the idea of a champagne cooler,especially with a marble plug hole -surely the last word in grandeur. Or would that be one upmanship?

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    1. They were common from around 1720 onwards, but these days they are antiques, very seldom used for their original purpose.

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  5. It's gorgeous. Here, Mock Tudor is a 1970's thing, with a few really rather gorgeous Arts and Crafts Tudor revival houses from the 1920s. But the real thing is so much nicer, no?

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    1. Yes. Here, mock-Tudor was predominantly and Edwardian thing. 'An Englishman's Home is his Castle', and all that. Some of them were fortified with moats, but this one wasn't. They must have been mates with Henry.

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    2. Lucky for them Henry couldn't swim ;-)

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    3. Edwardian Mock Tudor is Arts and Crafts though innit? William Morris and all that. Oh well one man's tribute to the past is another man's bit of old tat.

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  6. I was born to live in a house like that; somehow it didn't work out.

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    1. I was born to live in an ersatz house like that, and it still didn't work out.

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