Author: business

At the Openreach Regional Learning Centre in Bishops Stortford on a wet afternoon, I’m kitted out in safety-harness and helmet, standing in front of a thicket of telegraph poles, ready to climb. Openreach, the infrastructure arm of BT that owns and manages poles, cables and cabinets, sends its engineers on three-day climbing courses to train them to work at height. “When you’re at the top of your pole it sort of becomes your office,” says Openreach engineer Greg Jones. I put my foot on the first pole-step and, after a slow start, shimmy up in a kind of panic, afraid my courage might leave me. “Because of the nerves and lack of sleep the night before, this course is the most rewarding,” laughs Jones.

Britain’s 4.2mn telegraph poles are a largely overlooked feature of the landscape — which is much of their charm. But their quiet, diminutive power — in stark contrast with pylons, the steel towers supporting electricity lines, that can reach 68 metres in height — is perhaps due a reappraisal. Several thousand new pylons must be built to carry the 620 miles of new power lines needed for the UK government’s 2030 clean energy targets. Environmentalists are concerned and rural communities are protesting. Signs in the Scottish highland village of Brora read “Save Carrol rock and Loch Brora from giant pylons”. 

Telegraph poles were first erected in the 1840s to carry telegraph wires, and from the 1880s carried electricity. They expanded in number during the age of the telephone and — endlessly adaptable — have since remained a constant, supporting cable television and broadband services. Today, almost all are maintained by Openreach — which acts as a quasi-landlord for its poles, allowing network providers to use them. 

To many, it may come as a surprise that telegraph poles are even still in use, but digging and laying cables is energy intensive, and for crossing large tracts of land the pole remains a solid alternative and a sustainable one: they can last 50 years, while some have exceeded a century or more. 

One pole in Ingleby, Lincolnshire, was installed 131 years ago, and remains in active service, according to Openreach. In 2013, a pole dated 1894 was donated to The Orkney Museum, Scotland, where it has lain in storage-space slumber ever since. “I remember being quite exasperated with it,” says curator Ellen Pesci, “but an attached piece of paper stated its claim as the oldest telegraph pole in Britain. I realised I couldn’t just put it in the skip.” Openreach, however, dates another of its poles, now removed from the network, to 1878.

Martin Evans, founder of the Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society (TPAS) follows the fate of the UK’s telegraph poles with a watchful eye, often through binoculars. He has been a superfan since childhood. “They always pleased me aesthetically,” he says. “As a boy, I used to look out the window and anthropomorphise them.” When he set up his society’s webpage in the 1990s it was an opportunity to write humorously about something he loved, but now, with his “Pole of the Month” feature, the annual TPAS calendar and Telegraph Pole Appreciation Day on September 21, he finds his passion shared, if niche. Paid members total 1,300.

For Evans, telegraph poles have a whimsical poetry. He is not alone in waxing lyrical. In “The Railway Children” poet Seamus Heaney describes their white cups and sizzling wires and how “like lovely freehand they curved for miles . . . sagging under their burden of swallows”. Eric Ravilious paid homage to them criss-crossing the rural landscape in his painting “Wiltshire Landscape”. And Australian sound artist Alan Lamb, who died in April, made field recordings of wind whistling through telegraph wires; the best known is “Night Passage” (1998), recently reissued, created on his Faraway Wind Organ — a set of 12 abandoned poles and six wires in Western Australia, which Lamb bought and reimagined as a vibrating sound world. 

Evans also has his own pole. “I bought it a few years ago for a house we lived in near Welshpool,” he says. “When we first put it up, my wife said, ‘what are you doing?’” Eventually, though, “she saw it for the beautiful thing it was”. 

Openreach has partnered with the RSPB to encourage its engineers to volunteer for the charity and help install nest boxes

And who hasn’t been struck by their beauty on long countryside walks, where they peg out fields and river banks, some carrying a multitude of wires on a brace of cross-arms, others so shaggy with ivy that they are more tree than pole, with the look of the wild?

The telegraph pole’s story begins in a Nordic forest. According to Openreach, every year, the UK imports around 75,000 Scots pine poles from Norway, Sweden and Finland; the trees are already some 200 years’ old by the time they are harvested to replace ones that have been removed from the Openreach network. The coldness of the Nordic winters — as low as -25 degrees — slows the trees’ growth to one metre every 10 years, which makes the wood densely packed and highly durable. 

Once they arrive in the UK, the pole is checked by a pole-tester, an eccentric sounding job, with an eccentric piece of kit. “They use a Resistograph, which looks like something out of Ghostbusters,” says Shayne Addington, regional learning manager for Openreach in London and Essex. “It inserts a metal needle into the wood that can detect decay”. Other times, engineers test the wood by hitting the pole with a 1lb hammer. “A non-decayed pole will sound metallic, whereas decay will be more of a thud,” says Addington.

Already, I’m imagining a soundscape of pole-tapping engineers, enhanced by woodpecker accompaniment, as these birds have a particular taste for telegraph poles. The synergy between birds and poles is embraced by the aptly named Abby Chicken, head of sustainability at Openreach. Last year, Openreach created a partnership with the RSPB conservation unit to encourage its engineers to volunteer for the charity and help install nest boxes. 

Evans’s favourite telegraph pole is in Gwynedd, Wales, which he calls “The Lost Pole of Bala Leisure Centre”, and features on the July page of this year’s calendar. “It doesn’t sound very romantic, does it?” he admits of the redundant pole, shorn of its wires, overgrown and tagged with a red “D” plate (meaning defective but not necessarily decayed). “It’s not the Lost Sands of Kalahari, is it?” But Evans is drawn to its whiskery charisma and its well-endowed stave of wooden arms.

Back at the summit of my own pole, I can understand his obsession. I stand, arms outstretched, with the wireless words of “Wichita Lineman” breezing through my head.

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Maria Speake was approaching the end of her degree at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, part of the Glasgow School of Art, when she informed her tutors that she wanted to create a salvage yard for her final year dissertation. It was the early 1990s.

“That went down like a lead balloon,” she recalls, perched on a long, sleek sofa in her airy Kensal Green studio. “They couldn’t understand how that might make a building, or how fragments of buildings are important enough in themselves.” She’d even found the perfect site for the project, next to the city’s 37-acre Victorian cemetery: “I was totally in love with the Necropolis. I love the architecture of death.” 

That particular project may have been doomed, but it was just part of her quest to breathe new life into old and discarded materials — decades before upcycling would come to have the caché and understanding it does today. With her fellow student Adam Hills she was skip-diving to rescue furniture, lighting and fixtures cast off from renovations and demolitions, to restore his Victorian flat in Glasgow’s West End. The pair had already developed a business plan to conserve the architectural materials that were routinely being dumped and destroyed with breathtaking gusto across the city.

Their pioneering firm Retrouvius was founded in 1993 — the name is a portmanteau of “retro” and “Vitruvius”, the Roman architect, engineer and author of the 12-volume treatise De architectura. 

Over the past three decades, it has become arguably the most high-profile purveyor of — and flag-bearer for — architectural salvage. Today it is both a retail business and an interior design studio, headed up by Speake, that reimagines how reclaimed materials can be used.

Now she has written a book, Retrouvius: Contemporary Salvage, bringing together 14 interiors projects — from elegant London town houses to a 16th-century Umbrian farmhouse and a harbourside home in the Hebrides — along with essays that chart the company’s evolution and influence.

Actress Helena Bonham Carter, a client, who wrote the foreword for the book, describes Speake as a “white witch”. Others call her a “house doula” or “shaman” for her ability to reimagine, rebirth and reconfigure architectural spaces.

“I don’t ever believe there’s one solution or two solutions,” says the warm, endlessly inquisitive Speake. “So I quite enjoy the bit where you turn everything on its head again and go, ‘OK, that’s just not working at the moment. Let’s completely have a rethink. Let’s step back.’”

When Speake and Hills started out, their clients were often, like them, restoring homes and needed period pieces — doors, shutters, fireplaces, cast iron baths (they supplied the loo for the infamous scene in Danny Boyle’s 1996 film Trainspotting — sourced from the demolition of a tax office in East Kilbride). Back then, salvaging was about sourcing materials cheaply, but also about conservation and a sense of history — a sentiment that still drives them. “People have always loved the story, the narrative,” says Speake. 

One of their earliest big salvage operations was in March 1998 at the Townhead Library in Glasgow. At the start of the 20th century the grand Italianate building was gifted to the city, along with 13 other libraries, by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Back in blissfully red-tape free days, Hills had organised a road closure, hired articulated lorries, employed a team of specialists and a crane and worked through the night to save as much as he could. The following day the building was razed to the ground.

The Retrouvius look that Speake has developed is hard to define — each project is stylistically distinct, but all of them are multi-layered, highly textured, elegant and characterful in their own ways. As Hills says, “when they’re newly finished, they do not look brand new.” 

Speake grew up in Oxfordshire with a sharpened appreciation of history and storytelling. Her mother, Birgitte, worked as head of conservation at the Pitt Rivers Museum of natural history, while her father, George Speake, an art historian and archaeologist, would take her on childhood visits to country churches and manor houses. When she was 15, a trip to Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge — where the merging of old cottages and a new extension provides a backdrop to a collection of furniture, art, and textiles — made her realise she wanted to pursue architecture as a career, playing on those childhood values. 

Sometimes it’s difficult to take the reclaimed option, but often it’s surprisingly easy and we try and show that through design

“People always talk about tactility,” adds Speake. “They just want to touch stuff. There’s this material quality; you just want to go ‘what is that?’ Or ‘what have they done on the walls here?’” In her work, materials are spliced, flipped and reconfigured so that it is frequently difficult to pinpoint exactly what’s salvaged and what’s not. Some of her favourite materials are used over and over, but in different ways. 

Fossilised Derbyshire limestone is one example — 200 tonnes were lifted from Frederick Gibberd’s 1955 Heathrow Terminal 2 concourse when it was demolished in 2010, and it appears in multiple Retrouvius projects, including an imposing fire surround for designer Bella Freud’s west London flat. Sections of patterned mirror, rescued from the art deco Unilever building on London’s Victoria embankment, were cut and assembled into a glamorous bathroom splashback in another project for Freud. 

Fluted terrazzo columns, salvaged from Liverpool department store Lewis’s, are reimagined as a spectacular backdrop in a 1960s St John’s Wood apartment. Speake describes her approach as “a carpet bomb of rich, unusual, rescued materials to build up texture; tactile and sensual; a jewel box of details.” 

Retrouvius HQ is spread across two sites in Kensal Green, north London. The pair first bought an old stable here in 1999, but they have expanded through a warren of rooms that now serve as a store-meets-warehouse. Speake’s design studio is just up the road. Hidden behind a row of Victorian terraces and entered through a garage door, the two-storey courtyard studio is built in a patchwork of materials that are densely interwoven in a sort of architectural game of Tetris. There are metal railings from the London School of Economics (with sections reshaped to make them more playful and contemporary); travertine columns sit among warm teak and sapele timber on the exterior walls; rusty panels are fixed with visible bolts; and huge windows (rescued from their children’s primary school) are flipped on their sides.

The playground for experimentation continues inside. In a deeply glamorous shower room, those travertine columns appear again, with a rich green marble floor. But here Speake contrasts both with contemporary wall tiles. “I need to keep it a bit calm,” she says.

There are walls in textural clay, clad in pitch pine reclaimed from old shutters, or covered in rich brown suede salvaged from leather panels in Old Marylebone Town Hall. “We’d had them for years and years, and no one wanted them,” says Speake. One day Hills decided to open them up, revealing a far more alluring suede on the reverse side. 

A constant curiosity propels her. “You’ve got to keep learning and responding. With every project, I think ‘what am I going to learn from this? What are we all going to gain from this?’” says Speake. Each project is “a big commitment”, taking “a minimum of two or three years of your life. So that’s why they all look quite distinct; we choose different projects with different challenges. It just makes it more interesting.” 

Over the past 10 years the focus on reuse has taken on a new urgency, as we all carefully consider the impact of what we buy and consume. In construction, those concerns are at scale. Even if her entire career has been focused on showing people the potential of discarded materials — which can often be far better quality than anything sourced new — interior design projects still present an ethical conundrum. “Every single one of our projects has to go through a process of stripping out, and there is a moment where I think ‘are we part of the problem as well?’ And you genuinely start to worry about that,” she says. “But at the same time, I do think that change is a human thing.” 

She used to describe their work as parasitic, feeding off a world of fragments from the past. “I don’t feel like that anymore,” she admits. “Sometimes it’s difficult to take the reclaimed option, but often it’s surprisingly easy and we try and show that through design. It has always been about encouraging and empowering.”

“Retrouvius: Contemporary Salvage: Designing Homes from a Philosophy of Re-use” by Maria Speake (Rizzoli)

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Birmingham-born Laurie Baker had served as an anaesthetist in China during the second world war, but it was a stop off on his way home that came to define his career. Baker — who had completed a degree in architecture in 1937 — was stranded for three months waiting for a boat in what was then called Bombay, now Mumbai, and it was there that he met Mahatma Gandhi. They discussed the need for hands-on architecture in the context of India’s widespread deprivation, and Gandhi urged him to return as soon as possible. In 1945 he did so. Over the next fifty years he designed and constructed more than a thousand buildings.

Many of those were created in Trivandrum, now Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of the southern, tropical state of Kerala, where he settled in 1969. Kerala is a region beautiful to behold, yet subject to extreme heat and monsoonal downpours. Isavasyam — a giant helical coil — was completed in 1998 and was the last house Baker designed before his death in 2007 at the age of 90. “He was much more than just an architect,” says Suresh, who commissioned the house with his wife Neerada. “He was a master builder, he understood engineering, he understood the climate and he knew everything about creating spaces and using materials.” 

Although nearly 30 years old, the innovative construction of their home is a template for contemporary architects looking at how people might live in our era of changing climate, while allowing the natural environment to thrive.

Isavasyam consists of four levels, with an internal courtyard and a sculpted roof that channels rainwater into storage wells in the garden. The walls use a “rat trap bond” system, where bricks are laid to create a three-inch cavity — a buffer zone for cooling and insulation. As Suresh, a civil engineer, says: “The house is one big exhaust fan: hot air escapes through venting chimneys and natural draughts enter through jali [latticed] openings and windows.” 

It was completed for one-third of the cost of conventional construction at the time. “It was our dream house, and it was all done so that the house could breathe,” says Suresh.

All Baker’s works were predicated on financial and structural frugality. “I learn my architecture by watching what ordinary people do,” he wrote, maintaining that this approach was always “the cheapest and simplest”. Baker’s houses relied on the most efficient and affordable systems for environmental control, today referred to as passive design. In terms of what we now call sustainability, he was decades ahead of his time.

Tropical Asia — stretching roughly from western India to eastern Indonesia — was a relative latecomer to industrialisation and urban sprawl, but from the mid-20th century the region’s rapid expansion, in tandem with global warming, has dramatically affected its own ecosystems.

The region is warming at nearly twice the global average and is increasingly subject to heatwaves and flooding. With the UN attributing 37 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions to the buildings and construction sector, the region is particularly sensitive to a cycle of building, demolishing and rebuilding. The populations of large urban areas in tropical Asia have more or less tripled since 1990 — and architecture and city planning must aim to minimise the environmental impact. 

The Labri House, completed in 2021 in the central Vietnamese city of Huế, is immersed in a verdant environment, one that was embraced — and aided — by its architecture. Not that you can see much architecture: the house is tiny, set on a pocket of land hidden away on a tranquil lakefront. It is built from glass panels supported by a slender steel framework. Four transparent single-room volumes and their connecting corridors are curtained by vines.

The architect, Nguyen Khai, observes that the vines and birds and butterflies are as much at home here as the human residents. “When you see the house, you get the feeling that it has grown up randomly, so you are living in the plants and trees.”

Ng Sek San — a Malaysian landscape architect, engineer, designer and property developer — has devoted 25 years to assembling a series of houses and retreats known as “sekepings”. He adopts an approach of “reconfigure, renovate, recycle”, prioritising sustainability. 

Finding kampong (village) houses — whose passive design means they stay cool without air-conditioning — that are due to be demolished, Sek San instead spruces them up and transports them to a rainforest site, where they are bolstered with lightweight steel pavilions that leave a minimal footprint.

My architecture was expressive, but that was a manifestation of its functionality. And right from the start, I did not want to disturb the natural environment

Sek San is also dedicated to transforming rundown housing stock in Kuala Lumpur through recycling. “You can appreciate imperfection, where discarded elements become architectural features and where maximum impact [comes] from limited resources,” he says. “The only way to expand design in Asia is to make it cheap and affordable.”

In Laurie Baker’s adopted hometown of Trivandrum, Vinu Daniel founded his practice, Wallmakers. He has imbibed his forerunner’s philosophy and expressive form-making. Wallmakers has designed projects across southern India that combine architectural playfulness with a determination to reduce the carbon footprint.

The Nisarga Art Hub in semi-rural Angamaly, Kerala, was completed by Wallmakers in 2023 as both a family home and a performance venue for the musician occupants. It features unusual skylights that double as rooftop seating for a stage area, while its vast living space, looking over a paddy field, has bench-like shapes excavated from the floor. Yet it is distinguished not just by its geometric tucks and turns, but by its unusual means of construction.

Wallmakers builds through recycling — the walls of the house were created using a “shuttered debris wall” technique, where cement is mixed with all manner of waste material from the neighbourhood and soil collected on site. Daniel has been calling for a rethink in architecture in the face of the climate crisis. “In place of questions like ‘What should we build?’ we need to be asking ‘Should we build?’,” he says.

“It wasn’t called sustainable back then, I was simply being efficient and frugal,” says influential Malaysian architect Jimmy Lim. A 1992 property near Kuala Lumpur, for the brother of John F Kennedy’s press secretary Pierre Salinger, is raised on stilts and combines traditional Malay construction methods with a contemporary triangular footprint. “My architecture was expressive, but that was a manifestation of its functionality. And right from the start, I did not want to disturb the natural environment,” says Lim.

A similar approach is adopted by Boonserm Premthada of Bangkok Project Studio. His own home has been built using the residue produced by coal-fired power plants, shaped into handmade bricks — the unsustainable becoming sustainable.

Premthada says that his intention for the 2023 project, Back of the House, was to create “something that is not beautiful, but interesting” — a mischievous response to the uniform homes of an overbuilt city with 11mn residents. The house is deliberately ungainly in proportion and — with exposed pipework and mortar oozing from the brickwork — defiantly rough and ready.

In Australia, Phil Harris and Adrian Welke founded Troppo Architects in 1980, having conducted research across the tropical zones of the country’s north. The practice has four energy-conserving principles: the promotion of cooling breezes; ventilation by convection; reducing heat radiation; and sheltering walls and openings.

When their client Mike Rozak, originally from Seattle, realised he could run his software development business from anywhere in the world, he bought a large patch of arid land 50 miles south of Darwin, in the sparsely populated Top End region of Australia. It was the late 1990s. As he commented, drily: “There’s a lot of space here. You don’t feel crowded in.”

Although it is far from the congestion of Asian mega-cities such as Bangkok, the weather has similar challenges: it’s either very wet or very dry, and it is always hot. Troppo built Rozak’s home on a rocky ridge, and it stands in proud isolation. With an aerodynamic profile, it has an ephemeral appearance — most of its walls are simply fly screens — and it looks like it could quickly be folded up and moved, much like a traveller’s camp.

Laurie Baker set an extraordinary precedent. Yet his frugality was not virtuous so much as practical: frivolous design features can be difficult to build and maintain in searing heat and torrential rain, where many materials are liable to shift or be worn away.

Buildings function best when they work with, not against, their natural surroundings. But as the projects of practices such as Troppo Architects show, these principles of sustainability can be transported and modified — and have an ever-increasing relevance in the climate challenges of our times. 

The Iconic Tropical House by Patrick Bingham-Hall is published by Thames & Hudson

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Forty years ago I stood outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square with about 100,000 other people, shouting slogans against US nuclear weapons, against Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. As I write this, I am inside the now-former US embassy, gazing down on a statue of a slightly dim-looking Ronald Reagan from a room in The Chancery Rosewood, the new hotel that now occupies the huge old building, while holding a handwritten card that tells me I am Guest No 1.  

It has been a long rebirth – a reported £1bn construction project (Rosewood is cagey about costs) that has seen most of the building, a midcentury monster of a structure, demolished and replaced, with its distinctive eagle-topped façade retained and expanded.  And it has become a quite splendid hotel.

The embassy was a massive cold war statement, the physical manifestation of a new world order from across the Atlantic in which the US now called the shots: when it was commissioned in 1955 the Soviets were still building in the neoclassical socialist-realist style. It was originally designed by one of the most versatile architects of the modern era, the American-Finnish Eero Saarinen, whose buildings include The Gateway Arch in St Louis, the incredible concrete expressionism of the TWA Terminal at JFK – also now a hotel – and the terminal building at Dulles International Airport. (The TV series Severance used his Bell Laboratories in Holmdel as the Lumon HQ; suitably cool and sinister, exactly contemporary with The Chancery.)

The US’s embassy was part of a big drive to reinforce its image as the global zenith of modernity. But it was slotted into a delicate part of posh London, very much then still the core of the establishment, with its clubs and hotels and the homes of politicians and aristocrats. On opening in 1960 it was a surprisingly accessible place with a fine public library, furniture designed by Charles and Ray Eames (with whom Saarinen studied) and some of its grandest spaces still open to outside visitors. But it was not popular; despite Saarinen’s efforts to keep it in scale with its neighbours, and to use Portland stone to echo London’s grand public buildings, it looked like a massive Oldsmobile parked amid Morris Minors. The critics were scathing. The influential Reyner Banham called it “monumental in bulk, frilly in detail”; architect Peter Smithson dismissed its “frozen and pompous forms”. 

Slowly, however, it became part of the streetscape; not exactly loved, but accepted. In 1968 it was the locus of a huge anti-Vietnam war demonstration that was violently broken up by mounted police (actress Vanessa Redgrave was allowed to lead a delegation into the embassy to deliver a letter). Five decades on, it was a fortress, an almost insanely barricaded presence exuding unease and paranoia. It was those security concerns that ultimately led the US government (not, as Trump later claimed, under Barack Obama, but George W Bush) to move south of the river. 

Its transformation into a 144-suite hotel has returned a sense of decorum and urbanity to the site; the building is now accessible in a way it never was, even when it first opened. A row of restaurants faces the square, and a huge gold anodised canopy announces its entrance.

The architect of its rebirth was Sir David Chipperfield, designer of Berlin’s Neues Museum, London’s Royal Academy reinvention, The Bryant Park Hotel in New York and the Ned in Doha, the last also a revival of a midcentury modernist government building. I ask Chipperfield if he’d been an admirer of Saarinen’s; had the embassy been reassessed, after so many decades? “The truth is people never really liked the building. I was talking to a US ambassador once and he told me he’d have liked to knock it down. But working on the designs we did become fonder of it. It’s almost like it could be Mayfair’s town hall.” I had the sense that Chipperfield thought the interiors might be a little OTT (if he did, he’s not entirely wrong), and that his original proposal that the hotel open a north-south Mayfair axis might have made it a more public building. 

We might think the familiar embassy building looks much as it once did; but it does not. For one thing, apart from the obvious elimination of the sprawling battery of truck-bomb barriers, it has got taller. Quite a bit taller. “Saarinen did design a taller version,” Chipperfield tells me, “but it was already such a big building the embassy didn’t need any more space. Of course, that intent was useful to us when we went to planning.” 

The architects have added an extra, expanded floor, acting as a kind of cornice, its taller windows in the same prominent rectangular frames. There are another two new storeys above that, partially set back and accommodating vast penthouses and a huge rooftop bar, called Eagle Bar (it gets its name from the fierce-looking sculpture atop the building by Theodore Roszak – 11m long, cast from the aluminium of scrapped B-52 bombers and painted gold). The views across the city are panoramic and uninterrupted. With the eagle’s tailfeathers framing the terrace, there’s something a little kitsch about it; but it is not difficult to imagine this will be one of the hottest reservations in the city.

If it wasn’t for the oversized gold canopy, The Chancery wouldn’t really look like a hotel at all. The signage is discreet; staff are not the usual uniformed doormen. Inside, visitors climb a set of stairs to reach a lush-looking lobby (a bit excessively lush, maybe). Managing director Michael Bonsor tells me the huge chandelier is meant to represent “a swirl of leaves spinning in the green square” opposite; I take his word for it. Facing the door is a large painting by Christopher Le Brun; above it, one of the few surviving features of the interior: Saarinen’s restored, epic diagrid ceiling.

If the old US embassy was characterised by its formidable barriers to entry, its new incarnation is the opposite. There are no conventional check-in desks; all guests are greeted in the lobby and escorted smoothly up to their suites (it’s an all-suite hotel). They have also dispensed with that bane of the traveller’s life, check-in and check-out times; you can arrive and depart whenever you like (as pre-agreed). It seems to me one of the few real innovations in luxury travel.

If the public spaces tend towards the kitsch end of midcentury – chandeliers, chunky statement furniture and champagne-gold aluminium columns – the rooms go pleasingly the other way. Capacious, gorgeous and soothing, they are the work of Parisian architect Joseph Dirand, and they concentrate on calm and comfort. “It’s interesting to conceive or to understand this building as, in a way, almost like kind of a modernist castle in the UK, built by the Americans in the ’60s,” he says. “This idea of something that has a certain grandness and power – what comes to mind when you think about a private member’s club in London.” His designs veer away from midcentury cliché, but retain a cool ’60s chic. “I had to transform to a kind of a British flavour; the ’60s is like James Bond, it is fashion, it’s art, it’s the music.”

My suite overlooked Grosvenor Square, so all I saw was a wonderful green canopy. This side of the square seemed almost unsettlingly quiet; better still, the windows actually open. There was a generous seating area, a marble dining table, a separate study and a large bedroom. The bathroom is vast and clad in Stilton-ish marble, exquisitely veined; it and the closet are the size, I might suggest, of a one-bedroom London apartment. Beyond are two doors: another closet and a kitchen that allow staff to enter the room without impinging on the living spaces.

Even the art is good; at a cursory glance, I noticed a Peter Blake and a Hockney. The Chancery has an art concierge, Elizabeth Antonsen; I visit her in her “art den” downstairs, surrounded by pictures. She tells me about the hotel’s 700-work collection and the ambition to collaborate with local galleries. “We’ll also be arranging studio visits and dinners with emerging artists,” she says. The other usual amenities are on the lower-ground floors: a vast subterranean ballroom, event spaces, a classy-looking spa in partnership with the Taktouk Clinic and a glowing 25m pool.

Back upstairs, the brash brasserie is Serra, a southern Mediterranean affair overlooking the square with good, solid food and bold flavours. The detailing, by New York-based AvroKO, succeeds in taming the sheer scale of the space but the too-familiar retro brass and wicker chic looks a little like Paris a decade ago. More surprising is GSQ, an all-day deli facing the square, of which Bonsor says: “We’re trying to attract people from offices with good-value coffee, not at Mayfair prices.” It’s intended to reanimate a forecourt that will now accommodate 150 diners. The first European branch of New York’s Carbone will take one corner; profound secrecy surrounds the occupant of the other corner, though it’s rumoured to be a new venture by Ruth Rogers. Upstairs, a bar called Jacqueline brings the core classic hotel lounge.  

Eero Saarinen himself never saw his building once it was completed. He died aged 51, the year after it opened. Perhaps 20 years ago it might have been demolished; now, Chipperfield tells me, “There is more reverence for that period. These buildings were simply better built. Look at that façade, the tectonic and material quality of it; we couldn’t build it now, it’d be too expensive. Yet so much of the architecture of that era is being destroyed, we’re in danger of losing an entire layer of culture.”

Even if most of the interior has been entirely rebuilt, the distinctive frontage – the best of Saarinen’s contribution – remains. It looks shinier now, and bigger, and most importantly more public than it has ever been; more a part of the square, and the city. What I remember as a locus of protest and, later, a militarised streetscape has faded away; this cold war monument has finally been returned to the public, an urban masterpiece that for so many decades we could not see. 

Edwin Heathcote stayed as a guest of The Chancery Rosewood, suites from £1,400

The Trilogy, overlooking the lake at Royal La Moraleja golf course near Madrid, is more akin to a series of sculptures than three properties. Architect Fran Silvestre designed each house, with their distinct clean lines and geometric volumes, to “create spaces that awaken the emotions”, he says.

On the market from €10.5mn, the homes are a world away from the identikit Moorish-style golf properties built in the 1980s and 1990s in southern Spain and Portugal’s Algarve — and not just in terms of price tag. Architecture wasn’t the priority back then: the focus for buyers was golf — playing 36 holes a day — while for developers it was to sell as many homes as possible, says Martin Ebert, an international golf course architect whose company, Mackenzie & Ebert, advises eight of the 10 Open Championship venues. “The tendency was to put in too many homes, each of a very similar style. At some developments, every hole was surrounded by houses.” 

But buyers and their expectations have evolved, says Paloma Pérez Bravo, chief executive of residential estate agency Lucas Fox, which is selling the properties that make up The Trilogy. There are more women and families in the mix, and a desire for architect-designed homes that speak to the local culture and lifestyle. “They want a family retreat with access to nature, wellness and culture,” she says. More people also are also wanting to play 12 and nine hole courses, which are faster and more inclusive for families, adds Ebert. 

Among Ebert’s recent projects is the 1,100-acre championship course at Moncayo, in Puerto Rico, where the first phase of golf residences, available from 2027, has been designed by architectural practice Hart Howerton, and will be managed by Auberge Resorts. The homes are built into the tropical landscape and the design, which blends modernism with Taino and Spanish Colonial influences, maximises light and makes the most of the ocean views. Golf is not the only activity on the agenda: residents can trek in the rainforest, hike in the mountains and fly fish. “Golf has become cooler,” he posits. “And so too have golf properties”.

Ebert regards the pandemic as a turning point: a younger demographic started playing — newly appreciating the combination of spending time in a protected landscape playing sport. Home sales near Spanish golf courses increased by 25 per cent between 2020 and 2023, fuelled in part by second-home buyers from the UK, Germany and Scandinavia, according to the Spanish Land Registrars Association. The average golfer’s age dropped from 46 to 41 after the pandemic, according to data from governing body R&A and England Golf, while the tournament organiser PGA’s ‘Golf for All’ report shows that players under 45 now make up the majority of on-course golfers in the UK and Ireland.

“Increasingly, golf courses are celebrated as areas where land has been protected, and where — between the holes — flora and fauna can flourish,” says Ebert. “Buyers like the fact the view is secure. On a golf course you always know what you’re going to be looking at in years to come.”

For a new generation, ecological considerations are a growing priority. Properties such as The Seven, a new development of seven homes by seven leading architects (including Silvestre) at La Reserva in Sotogrande, use local materials, have renewable energy systems and have designs that keep them naturally cool in summer and warm in winter.

The Trilogy takes its design cues from La Moraleja, an upmarket residential enclave a few kilometres from Madrid city centre that’s dotted with pines, cypress and olive trees; the three designs aim to frame the views and mimic the land’s contours. The Andalusian stone floors and locally sourced ash and brass finishes echo the hues of the surrounding forests. Silvestre says he wanted to create a sense of “calmness . . . peacefulness . . . protection and seclusion”. 

Increasingly, golf courses are celebrated as areas where land has been protected, and where — between the holes — flora and fauna can flourish

Privacy is an increasing priority, says Pérez Bravo. “The next generation of golf properties are family retreats; owners are looking to spend more time at the property — often several months of the year — and want it to feel private and personal.” Gated communities with security and concierge facilities are high on the wish list. But top-end security comes at a price: one property in The Seven development in Sotogrande, with its 24-hour security and gated entrance, is on the market for €22.5mn.

At Quinta do Lago, in Portugal, there are similarly high prices — up to €30mn for a new-build villa. But North Grove, the final undeveloped piece of land from the original master plan, has three plots available from €3.5mn without architectural design restrictions, allowing buyers free rein.

Meanwhile, younger buyers are putting down roots in new communities such as Finca Cortesín, in Casares, Andalusia, and those in Murcia, Alicante and Castellon. Often drawn by the local landscape they are looking for architecture that makes the most of it, adds Jules Cowan-Dewar, chief marketing officer of Cabot, which has residential golf resorts in St Lucia, Scotland, Canada and the US. “They won’t settle for somewhere that could be anywhere,” she says. “If they’re in the Caribbean, they want views of the ocean, storage for kite surfing equipment and outdoor living spaces to read and entertain, while in Nova Scotia they’ll want a deck to watch the lobster boats come in.” 

At Cabot Cliffs on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, London-based practice FBM Architecture has designed simple cedar shingle homes in the dunes with metal roofs that are a modern take on local coastal vernacular, with soft grey and blue interiors to reflect the colours of the surroundings. The development was one of 12 to win the Governor General’s Medal in Architecture last year. “Buyers want to feel connected to the place,” says Cowan-Dewar. The houses are all now sold, but ocean-view plots, where owners can build a custom property, are on the market from C$1.3mn (£709,212).

Building a home from scratch is the holy grail for many. After returning each year for a decade to Costa Navarino, the resort destination with four 18-hole championship courses in Greece’s Peloponnese, Theresa Kern and her husband bought a plot and instructed Athens-based architects K-Studio to design something that embodied the feel of the resort, with its rolling hills, olive groves and vineyards overlooking the Ionian Sea. “We loved the region and the people; we wanted somewhere to be with our three children and our friends where everyone could be together but also have their own space,” says Kern. 

The result, Southwand House, is built into the hillside using local quarried stone; views stretch over the pool to the golf course and the sea. Its low-rise design, with indoor-outdoor living spaces and four bedrooms, embraces modern architectural styles: architect Dimitris Karampatakis was determined that it sat comfortably within the landscape but was not lost in it. The inspiration was homes in the local Messinian villages, with airy central courtyards and covered outdoor areas. “It’s built for the family experience,” says Kern. “There’s space for entertaining and a lawn for football or volleyball.”

Karampatakis describes the architectural style as soft modernism; rather than the minimalist architecture of the 1960s and 1970s, texture is introduced. Rough concrete and carved stone will age beautifully, he says. “It appears defensive from the outside, but inside, it opens to the view. The classical-style Greek atrium with olive tree reflects Theresa’s poise and the dramatic view channels her husband’s high-energy extrovert nature.” There are limited plots still available at Costa Navarino, starting from €6.8mn for off-plan, six-bedroom villas.

It’s important for modern buyers to be able to add their personal stamp, says Pérez Bravo — which is not in line with the old-school ethos of many golf destinations where properties were supposed to dovetail with the character of the estate. When Wentworth Golf Club in Surrey was constructed in 1922, for example, private residential plots had strict covenants to ensure nothing too radical was built. 

Yet modern interpretations take into consideration their surroundings in different ways. Southwand House, with its nod to ancient vernacular and use of local stone and wood, evokes the character of the landscape as well as of its current occupants. 

As Karampatakis points out, there is never just one story that a house can tell. “Each owner will fill the house with their life and it will keep reinventing itself.”

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I’m standing in a gender-neutral bathroom thinking about how I might start writing about this sylvan, curious, almost cultish dance venue in the Berkshires and then I look up. In front of me is a yellowing poster for the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival from 1965, with foam-rubber seats for $4 and shows featuring the Jacob’s Pillow Dancers and there, right beside, “Six American Indian Dancers”.

That same evening I join a small crowd listening to drums and singing, a hypnotic chanting, as members of the Mohican community, who were forced out of these lands centuries ago, celebrate the opening of a fire pit designed by Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr (a member of the local Nipmuc people), alongside a new $30mn dance theatre. 

Until 1978, astonishingly, Indigenous rituals were prohibited in the US. So it was a touching, slightly jarring moment; the displaced Mohicans invited back for a little moment of “reconciliation”.

Ted Shawn founded Jacob’s Pillow deep in the Berkshires, the rolling New England landscape that really does look oddly English, in 1933. His “Men Dancers”, an all-male dance troupe, performed in a barn and within a decade the entrepreneurial Shawn had built the first purpose-built theatre for dance in the USA. It’s a brutally simple building, a timber shed designed by local architect Joseph Franz. But it remains perhaps the nation’s most important venue for modern dance.

It is an eccentric place, a site which looks more like a summer camp or a Steiner forest school than a cultural centre. Its buildings are rough and ad hoc, a shaggy collection of timber huts, booths, sheds and barns, although occasionally they reveal themselves to be something more, their huge doors flung open affording glimpses of practice and performance. 

In 2020, one of the theatres on site burnt down and it has now been replaced by the more contemporary, though still quite self-effacing, Doris Duke Theatre, designed by Dutch architects Mecanoo. This new structure is the first on the site not to really resemble a barn. Instead its streamlined, curved corners and a broad arcade make it something different, a more contemporary presence but one still super-keen to blend in.

Mecanoo, founded by Francine Houben, emerged from the moment when contemporary architecture was being kicked in the backside by the Dutch, from Rem Koolhaas to MVRDV, smart, cultured designers who navigated high and low culture, the popular and the intellectual. But Houben is a modest character, endearingly unpretentious. There is nothing flashy here: just a simple box with chamfered corners. There are a couple of things I balked at: the columns, for instance, connect to the ground via galvanised slim steel shoes, so that the building seems somehow deracinated. The curving corners feel a little odd too, more suburban than rural. But these are issues of taste rather than quality. This, after all, is a $30mn building in an age of half-a-billion-dollar blockbusters.

Inside, retractable seating sits beneath a technical grid, its underside clad in timber to enhance the cigar boxiness of it all. It seats between 220 and 400. That it is timber is not just an homage to its neighbours. The wood, according to Jacob’s Pillow archivist Norton Owen, allows the audience to feel the dancers, to sense every jump. Small vibrations are carried through the floors and walls so that it seems to come alive with dance.

Intriguingly this is almost exactly how the Mohicans talked about dance themselves. At the moving land acknowledgment, Shawn Stevens (“Red Eagle”), a member of the Stockbridge Munsee band of Mohicans, explains how “Dance is about energy and returning energy to the earth, so that we all feel it together.” It is as eloquent an encapsulation of an architecture of dance as you can imagine. 

If I mentioned that Jacob’s Pillow has a slight tinge of cultishness, it is not entirely an insult. There is a constant buzz, thanks perhaps to the proximity of the students, teachers, technicians and audiences. This is a place of freedom in a surveilled society. Anyone can wander in and feel part of it, watching the dancers roaming around the structures like lithe beasts. The devotion to the cause here is evangelical. Everyone who works here tells you how much they love it, how wonderful a place it is, how full of reverence they are for its history. I can’t help approaching a few Mohican stragglers after the ceremony is over to wonder if the acknowledgment might not feel a little patronising (no one here is giving any land back), and even then I only get a gush of gratitude.

I do wonder, then, if the new building is a little too slick. The old barns here are still in use and they are wonderful, their beams, their lofty roof spaces, their walls and well-worn floors so redolent and seductive. But then the new theatre is also crammed with tech in a way they never could be.

AI and all that comes with it is the future, I am told here, which sounds odd to me as dance seems so visceral and embodied. Dancer and curator Katherine Helen Fisher has put on a show in the exhibition space that curves around the edge of the new theatre. I find it unsettling, a slew of interactive images that place the viewer at the centre of an immersive digitality. In the midst of this low-tech retreat you find yourself suddenly surveilled again, captured in AI-generated images which are spewing out carbon from some grim data centre. 

Still, this remains an enchanting place, with its haunted barns and shabby shacks and the occasional flash of high-tech present. At the end of my first evening here the site was permeated by the smoky smell of the firepit lit for the first time by StrongBearHeart to honour the land and the peoples who have occupied this place. Those cultures still linger, along with the echoing footsteps of the world’s great dancers.

jacobspillow.org

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