Unpretentious, warm and welcoming, the interiors of Provence today reflect the heritage of Provencal life and the Provenceur’s enjoyment of the simple pleasures of life; the sharing of good food, the local wine and the art of good conversation.

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Provence until the end of the 15th century was a group of states entirely separate from France. It had its own language, government and a sense of style, with deeply rooted ideas and philosophies first founded in strong traditions. They kept goats and ate fish, grew herbs in abundance, as well as olives which were introduced by the Greeks. With the fabled vitis vinifera grape vine for stock they made wine and became great consumers of wild boar as well as truffles. The oak forests of Provence would have been prime truffle territory then as now. The little slivers of this celestial fungus harbors many of the amusing stories of the region. They were often obtained by nefarious means or through a local truffle fair not listed in any tourist guide.

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The Raphael Cartoons were made up of a mosaic of hundreds of sheets of paper glued together and then fixed to the wall. Raphael and his assistants would have painted them before they were transported to Brussels to Pietr Van Aelst’s studio, where they would have been cut up into strips for use by the tapestry weavers.

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The Rococo style was delicately elegant with a distinct preference for asymmetry. It was presided over by France’s King Louis XV’s mistress, Madame du Pompadour, a sophisticated lady of impeccable style.

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“Come tulip come and take color from my cheek” said Eastern Philosopher Mevlana in the thirteenth century when shrubs, bulbs and flowers were flooding into Europe from the near East. They went wild for them, especially Holland, who would make the tulip that grew wild in Anatolia in western Turkey an integral part of both its culture and economy

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Captain Arthur Phillip laid the foundation stone of Australia’s first government house within four months of sailing into Port Jackson on January 26 1788 with the first fleet. Against a background of a natural environment its indigenous inhabitants had never disturbed, at the time, it was an assertion of culture in the colonies.

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Swiss born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (1887-1965) was 29 when he went to Paris. Soon after his arrival he adopted his maternal grandfather’s name, Le Corbusier, as a pseudonym. He changed his persona from Jeanneret the small-town architect to Le Corbusier the world’s next visionary artist. He expressed a view that architecture had lost its way. He was convinced the bold new industrial age dawning required an audacious style of architecture. Who better to design it than himself. “We must start again from zero,” he proclaimed.

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In England, during the second half of the nineteenth century, painter, writer, textile designer and social activist William Morris (1834-1896) became the spiritual leader of a revival in arts and crafts that encompassed all the visual arts, including architecture and interiors.

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For seventeen centuries in Europe lighting was extremely difficult. It is hard for us to imagine how dark it was indoors in most houses, which were in the main only well lit on special occasions. Under normal light a room was seen in shadows, good wax candles were expensive, with tallow candles and rush lights smelly, quickly consumed or both. Until the invention of the ‘argand oil lamp’, and later ‘electric’ light, all classes and members of society were placed at a distinct disadvantage in ordering their daily lives.

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A villa by architect Andrea Palladio was a place where the owners could feel happy, secure and content, which is after all, what most of us still require and aspire to, a place where one can cultivate the head, heart, body and the soul.

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The decorative arts were never considered secondary by Augustus Welby Pugin. As an architect he might design the structure of a house, church or institution, but he conceived of the building, its fittings and furnishings as a ‘complete work of art.’

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From skinny self sacrificing super models to those demanding the use of ‘real people’, costume accommodates a desire to be noticed. It is the look at me, look at me syndrome, which has been in play for thousands of years. Today it collectively reflects a western society in which privacy has been stripped completely bare. But is fashion about more than a frock?

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In London much of the development in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was in the hands of aristocratic landowners. But were they ‘compleat’ gentlemen?

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From our London correspondent comes news about an exciting television series Downton Abbey, the most expensive British TV show ever produced. It is a great upstairs and downstairs story about life in an English Country House just prior to world war one, The dynamics of the people who live and work in Downton Abbey draw everyone into their emotional turmoil, one mostly internalized by its protagonists against their wellbeing. They are responding to the strict social and moral mores of their day which are under threat by massive societal change…

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The French court by the beginning of the seventeenth century shifted from an ideal based on chivalry to one based on refined manners. This meant that instead of an economy based on feudal war it was now based on leisure and peace. The Chateau at Versailles in France is an amazing place to visit. In [...]

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In France the châteaux of the Loire are mostly connected in many people’s minds with royalty. This is because the men who built them were scarcely less wealthy than the king, often richer and usually heavily involved with him. The fine limestone the châteaux of the Loire were built from occurred naturally in a vast retaining wall that runs all along the right bank of the Loire Valley from Blois to Tours, where it is mingled with sandstone, millstone grit and potter’s clay.

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