What bliss to be back at Leighton House in Holland Park, open again at last after a delicate redevelopment. Once the home of the artist Frederic Leighton (1830-96), it’s surely London’s best-kept secret: Victorian redbrick without, orientalist fantasy within.
For me, the highlight of the £8m project is the restoration of Leighton’s winter studio, now scattered with old wooden easels; the building’s main attractions, of course, remain exactly the same. No matter how many times I visit, I can never get over the Arab hall, in which a fountain plays beneath a vast golden dome. If it’s mad, it’s also exquisite. Walk around, and you expect to smell rose petals and cardamom; impossible to believe, as your jaw swings, that Waitrose and M&S are only minutes away.
The custodians of Leighton House also look after its sister museum and near neighbour, Sambourne House, the terraced home of the illustrator Linley Sambourne (1844-1910). During our visit, Daniel Robbins, Leighton House’s senior curator, told a good story about Sambourne, best known now as a Punch cartoonist. Leighton once invited him to supper, which must have given him ample opportunity to feast his eyes on the extraordinary interiors of his bachelor pad. But faced with its peacock-blue tiles and gilded columns, its intricate latticework windows and bookcases inlaid with lapis lazuli, Sambourne went home and wrote just three words in his diary: “Food so-so.”
Candles in the wind
As winter approaches, I’m measuring out my life not with coffee spoons but in candles. In my childhood, candles were both workaday and rarely seen, kept in a box at the cellar head in case of the blackouts I can – just about – remember from the 1970s. But at some point in my adulthood, they became at once luxurious and ubiquitous: used either to create atmosphere (let us not deploy the word hygge) or expensively to scent a room for the purposes of relaxation (or something). Candles, it would seem, are a weird indicator of societal wealth – or perhaps I mean of its decadence.
The other night, my small niece quietly noted (out of the mouth of babes etc) that, thanks to this development, the British middle classes are uniquely – and somewhat bizarrely – prepared for the power cuts we may suffer this winter. Our phones and laptops will run out of battery, leaving us as helpless as moles. But unlike those animals, at least we’ll be able to see. How many candlesticks do you own? she asked me, accusingly. I admitted the figure was quite high: about a dozen. At this, she could only roll her eyes. Having carefully surveyed the collection at home, she was pleased to reveal to me, and to everyone else around the table, that she had counted 83.
Softly-softly in the loo
If you are a literary type and in the market for something new to keep in the loo, here’s a good suggestion: Eliot’s Book of Bookish Lists by Henry Eliot. Its title probably speaks for itself, but its contents are deliciously idiosyncratic: don’t expect a boring catalogue of Booker prizewinners or a long roll call of Shakespeare’s fools. Thanks to Eliot’s list of authors’ unusual pets, for instance, I now know that André Gide kept a potto called Dindiki. A potto, in case you’re wondering, is a nocturnal, sloth-like primate from central Africa, also known sometimes as a “softly-softly”. The Nobel prize-winning novelist fed his a diet of jam and condensed milk.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
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