...ONE BOURBON , ONE SCOTCH , ONE BEER.............

...3 quick sketches for a pub we are working on here in the UK, out in the country in the Peak District, shadows and all.........

I haven't worked on a pub for a while now , although as designers they used to be our bread and butter ; a quick calculation would suggest that I have worked on well over 2000 of them in varying degrees over the years , so I should be getting the hang of it by now. Bear in mind as well that these sketches are never intended for publication - prior to the advent of the internet and websites they were never seen by more than four or five people ; they are always just a suggestion of the ideas , the potential of the finished interior in order to get clients to commit.

.....So, at least 2000 pubs and 5000 sketches or so along the way. Its a hard life.............think i'll have a beer.

.......and this is what a sketch will look like in line format before the colour is added..........   

                                   

............Further , we have just picked up the refurbishment for a new-build pub I did for North -West brewer J.W.Lees , The Kingfisher in Northwich.- I thought we had done it some five years or so ago, but checking our records it was at least twelve years ago........so thats more pub sketches , then .........and another beer................... and finally , one of my favorites - and this one didn't get to be built - for political reasons as usual.......where's that beer ?



...DOWN IN THE BUNKER......

.....I came across this hotel whilst leafing through a trade magazine and it looks stunning ; built into an existing concrete three-story Japanese Army building , the Waterhouse is located by the Cool Docks development in the South Bund District of Shanghai . The interior is elemental , almost visceral in the way that the public areas have been left almost entirely untouched .

To have this degree of clarity vision as the architect , this degree of trust and faith as the client , and to follow it through without compromise takes some doing  . Not every one's idea of a boutique hotel, maybe , but there are only 19 rooms to fill - small is beautiful........................this is cool.

Amazing.............looks really good - the dining room even has the original brick paved floor , so trying to keep the tables from rocking must be a bitch......

....the hotel's website is at....http://www.waterhouseshanghai.com/

....HEROES , JUST FOR ONE DAY

 Uh uh - here we go.....its that time of year when the footballers start stretching their legs again, only to get tired by , oh , around December or so..........so lets see........

Man City, at some £500 million by far and away the most expensively assembled football team in the UK and probably the Universe , got stuffed by United last Sunday in the Community Shield Cup, having only arrived at Wembley at 1.30pm for a 2.30pm kick-off ..........and they couldn't play their new £38 million striker Sergio Aguero as he has had trouble finding a pair of football boots to fit since arriving in the UK . Apparently his ill-fitting footwear caused blisters so painful that he was forced to remain on the bench.......thats ' remain on the bench ' as in being payed £200,000.00 per week for it. Nice work , Sergio !....earning that sort of wedge whilst sitting on your arse nursing a blister obviously beats slogging up and down alpine passes whilst carrying three fractured ribs , as the cyclist David Millar did in last years Tour.

Lets have one more look at those cyclists........

Johnny  Hoogaland , just after he was put through a barbed wire fence at about 30kph by a French tv car - having been patched up by the race doctor he got back on and rode some 40k to the end of the stage ; one rest day and thirty stitches later  he was back with his team , riding on for another two weeks through the Pyrenees and the Alps , up to the finish in Paris.....he finished 74th.

.....and Laurens Ten Dam - only ten stiches this time, after going straight into a ditch and over the handlebars.........he finished in Paris, placed 58th.

Bradley Wiggins broke his collarbone on Stage 7 : the following Monday it was plated , and by the Friday he was back on the bike . He is hoping to be back racing in time for the Vuelta a Espana , the Tour of Spain and the third big tour of the year , on August 20th......

A good domestique in a professional team - there are 18 professional teams in total competing on the Tours - will earn  between 40k - 100k , much the same as footballers ; oh , sorry , that's in a year - I forgot ; footballers earn that in a week ..........Mark Cavendish , a favorite of this blogsite , signed a three year contract in 2008 with his then current team HTC for around 40k pa.....

Still , once the Tour de France is finished for the year they can have a good long rest , not having to play week in / week out like the footballers..........or maybe not . In the five days following the finish of the Tour in Paris on the Sunday , Philippe Gilbert of Omega  Pharma-Lotto rode five Criterium , then on the Saturday rode the one day Classica de San Sebastian - which he won......and on Saturday August 20th they all meet up again fot the three week tour of Spain , the Vuelta a Espana  ........

How about a nice programmed easy lead-in to next years Olympics ?  The Tour de France will finish on the sunday in Paris , as usual ; six days later on the following Saturday it's the opening day of the Olympics and the Cycling road race . The gold medal is up for grabs, Cavendish and the rest fighting it out.

.....as Mark Cavendish says, ' Well, we are professionals - that's what we do '.

Maybe the footballers get tired just counting their money......or trying to find a pair of boots that fit.

....GIVE ME YOUR FREAKS.................

"Give me your freaks, your  whores , your harlots, your flunkies , your junkies, give me your starlets......" 

I came across the work of photographer Joel-Peter Witkin whilst we were looking for images for the decor of the rooms in Velvet , a boutique hotel we were completing on Canal Street in Manchester. In the end they were deemed too edgy even for the more liberated clientele in this part of town . so they remained in the book...' Disturbed Genius ' comes to mind . Allegedly he uses real dead bodies and foetuses , bought from his local Mexican morgue with no permission from the families.......the image above apparently is not one of twins - it's one head cut in half......hhhhmmmmm.........

.....I suppose the question here is when does artistic creativity overstep the boundaries of ' taste ' ? Taste is always used by society as a tool for public censorship - to my mind these images are not at all that far from the paintings of Francis Bacon . The medium of photography adds a disquieting sense of realism , particularly with regard to the discipline of black / white ; the disfigurements of the body still retain some semblance of humanity . Spooky , but I keep returning to them , fascinating  / macabre distortions of reality - the same sort of disbelief I suppose when confronted with the freak show at the travelling fair , although these seem to have long since disappeared.

......Very much on the dark side - maybe too dark as illustrations for a hotel , but I have for a long time been intrigued by the creative possibilities of subverting the natural order and using the constructs of a child's dolls house to create an alternate one peopled by freaks ,whores and sideshow carnival queens.............maybe I can reference these images further on down the road , maybe a dolls house , maybe another website for the darkside . We'll see.

To see more of his photos, should you want to , try  http://www.edelmangallery.com/witkin.htm..........and if you want to see how Velvet Hotel turned out then go to http://www.velvetmanchester.com/ and check out the gallery - it's ok to stop there, many people do........and we have just been asked to do another sixteen rooms , which is nice. The building that Velvet occupies on Canal Street will also feature in the work that I am proposing for my upcoming MA course.............more on that , shortly.

In the meantime , those photographs again..........................

Give me your poor ,
Your maladjusted ,
Your sick and your beat
and your sad and your busted.
Give me you has-beens
give me your twisted,
your loners , your losers,
give me your black listed.

Lyrics by Dory Previn