Blog

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.”

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram

A required part of this site couldn’t load. This may be due to a browser
extension, network issues, or browser settings. Please check your
connection, disable any ad blockers, or try using a different browser.

A required part of this site couldn’t load. This may be due to a browser
extension, network issues, or browser settings. Please check your
connection, disable any ad blockers, or try using a different browser.

A required part of this site couldn’t load. This may be due to a browser
extension, network issues, or browser settings. Please check your
connection, disable any ad blockers, or try using a different browser.

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

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning

Sitting in the sunny kitchen of architect Nathaniel Mosley’s north London home, it’s easy to become engrossed in the kitchen table. The plywood piece of furniture is covered in scribbles, encapsulating the hubbub of family life that unfolds around it. “I hate homework” is gouged in biro. A felt-tipped puffer fish bobs along blowing bubbles.

In the neighbourhood of Stoke Newington, the tall Victorian terraced house was built in the late 19th century and immediately split into flats. It was “too grand for the area”, explains Mosley, who bought the section spanning the building’s first, second and third floors with his wife, the writer Emily Rhodes, 10 years ago. Then, the couple had one baby; now there are three children: Vita, 10, Ezra, eight, and Martha, five — plus Alfie the whippet. 

Together they’ve turned a space that was “badly planned, awkward and dingy” into a light and airy family home. Drawing upon the original high ceilings and good bones, generous living spaces have been cleverly spliced alongside cosy cubby holes and sleek inset cabinetry; sweeping curtain partitions add to the adaptability. 

It’s a far cry from the “push out and up”, kitchen and loft-extension renovation that prevails in London terraces; instead the space turns the traditional terrace footprint on its head. Central to the dynamical reconfiguration was the major decision to move the staircase — bringing together two disconnected sets of stairs into one central well.

“I love the flowing elegant stairs of Victorian houses,” says Mosley, who founded the architectural practice Mosley Thorold alongside Henry Thorold in 2017. “I didn’t want to do a pastiche but I wanted to take that feeling and use contemporary materials and fabrication to do something that speaks to tradition.” The result is a floating ribbonlike form, constructed in steel, painted white and clad in ash wood, with a flowing handrail atop string railings.

The layout fanning out from the stairwell is pleasingly unusual. The whole first floor is taken up with a kitchen-living room, but from there one encounters a series of small and surprising compartments. A downstairs corridor, for instance, doubles as a larder with built-in shelving, while you’d be hard-pressed to find the hidden downstairs loo.

Tricky-to-use small spaces have been smartly rethought. On the half-landing, a bijou music room has been created; a curtain allows the space to switch between landing and nook. Its rooftop has become an outdoor terrace, a place for barbecues and summer lunches. In the office, meanwhile, a ladder leads to a further nook above — this one rather more romantic and desk-sized: a bookish haven, eked out of otherwise dead space next to a high-up window. 

It’s here that Rhodes runs the charity Bookbanks — a new initiative devised to donate books via food banks — and plots excursions for Emily’s Walking Book Club, whose monthly meetups combine literary conversation with strolls over Hampstead Heath and Regent’s Park. The music room is also Rhodes’ domain, where she plays the cello. The children are following suit, between them learning the guitar, clarinet and piano. 

“The only reason I go in there is for the cookbooks,” laughs Mosley, pointing to a whole bookshelf of them next to the piano — a beautiful thing made from burr elm veneer. He’s happier in the kitchen, where a triple sash window illuminates the butcher’s block beneath. Here, with a view on to the trees in the garden below, and the resident swallows and swifts darting about, Mosley preps the children’s lunch boxes and does the majority of the family cooking. It’s the sort of house where rice, flour and sugar are decanted into labelled Kilner jars; on a countertop, an extra-long fruit and veg rack was specially made in ash wood for the space. 

Focus on materials is a big part of the Mosley Thorold ethos. The majority of its back catalogue is residential and based in London; they’re projects where a facade might be made up of large-format rough limestone blocks, or a spiral staircase clad in yellow felt. Mosley saw his own home as an opportunity to experiment. The kitchen cupboards, for example, are covered in sanded-down lino flooring. In an upstairs bathroom, bespoke cabinets are crafted from oiled chipboard edged in ash — a cost-effective solution that also looks cool — while a Victorian pine cupboard is painted in a Josef Frank-esque floral pattern by Dingley Dell. 

Much of the furniture, though, is of Mosley’s own design; the now graffitied plywood dining table, for instance, was drawn up quickly when they moved in and has since become a prototype for a smarter version made in solid oak for a client. “It has slightly bowing edges; I wanted to make it feel convivial, so everyone faces each other a bit more,” he says. 

In the living room, his triangular-shaped walnut coffee table has an embroidered top that opens to reveal a half-finished jigsaw underneath, conceived for family puzzling sessions without the need to clear away the pieces. Opposite, sleek, floor-to-ceiling aluminium shelves hold a collection of old leather-bound books, passed down to Mosley by his grandfather — the writer and historian Nicholas Mosley, with whom he bonded over a shared love of Renaissance architecture. 

And art, more generally, is a running theme. In the main bedroom there’s a pair of watercolour landscapes by Philip Sutton passed down by Rhodes’ mother. In the kitchen, an Augustus John — inherited from grandparents — hangs above a painting by contemporary artist and friend James Decent, while a pinboard made from felt is covered in etchings by German expressionist Käthe Kollwitz, postcards of various artworks, and some surreal photographs of Rodin’s sculpted hands. 

In the main bedroom, a tapestry dating to the early 18th century, found at auction, fills an entire wall. “You can find some bargain [tapestries]; no one really wants them,” says Mosley. “They change the acoustics and soften a space.” It also adds a decorative and historical element to the otherwise spare and simple room.

Mosley and Rhodes are not overly precious though: a case in point is the children’s bedroom, where they all bunk up together, and posters of Taylor Swift are Blu-Tacked to just about every surface, including the ceiling. 

The three-in-a-room sleeping arrangement, so far, “works really well”, says Mosley. The children also have the run of the room next door, which has become a kids’ den with sofas and toys. It’s a space designed to be “quiet and peaceful”, says Mosley. “You can escape up here when everything else is a bit hectic.” Indeed, the whole house offers an ingenious solution to the push and pull and family life, the need for noise and quiet, areas to be social and others to be secluded. It’s a space that ebbs and flows — curtains opened, curtains closed — and no doubt takes games of hide and seek to new heights. 

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram

On a hot day in late spring, I arrive in Oslo for an exhibition at the Norwegian National Museum. I am poised to unpick the “New Nordic” aesthetic, which has, over the past two decades, grown into a regional brand of sorts — stretching from angular architecture to cool contemporary ceramics and tweezer food. But as I emerge from the city’s central station, I am faced with a celebration of Old Nordic. It is Norway’s Constitution Day, a national holiday, and the streets are bustling with bunads. 

The Norwegian national costume, dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, is a romantic spectacle of folk embroidery inspired by rose painting and woodcarving. Waves of people proudly wearing them swell through a cityscape now punctuated by sharp-edged 21st-century buildings, such as in Bjørvika, a residential quarter on the edge of the Oslo fjord that also includes a row of tall, thin offices known as The Barcode. At the heart of Bjørvika is the new Munch Museum, considered by many as the nadir of the city’s contemporary architecture. When it opened in 2021, it was voted “the ugliest building in Norway” in a poll organised by Arkitekturopprøret (Architectural Uprising), a group founded in Sweden in 2014 campaigning for new progressive styles that fit with classical or local tradition.

New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place explores a distinctive movement that, argues co-curator Martin Braathen, has united Nordic architects, artisans, furniture designers and chefs since the turn of the millennium in shaping a locally focused approach to lifestyle design. Its guiding principles are the use of regional materials, a lack of decoration or strong colours, a belief in sustainability codes and a — hotly contested — foundation in authenticity.

But it seems that despite this quarter of a century retrospective celebration, architecture is becoming something of a fly in the ointment. And few places more so than Oslo. In the 15 years I’ve been coming to this city, the skyline has changed beyond recognition. There are two Oslos: the old and the new, the former revered by the public, the latter championed by a particular cohort of architects and property developers. 

In the exhibition, Braathen uses the rise of the Nordic super-chef as his chief protagonist. “A ramson picked in the local forest is as exclusive as imported caviar, and your grandmother’s old recipe is more important than the one in the cookbook,” he says. The local and the traditional are key springboards for innovation. “This attitude has spread into other disciplines as both an ethos and an aesthetic.”

Take Nordic tableware. Like the little rock pools of foraged seaweed they hold, many contemporary ceramics in the New Nordic vein also look to the landscape. Michelin-starred restaurants, such as Maaemo in Oslo, use locally crafted crockery. Sissel Wathne, a Lillehammer-based Danish ceramicist whose pieces can be seen in the National Museum exhibition, believes that the new is rooted in the old. Her work embraces traditional glazes created from foraged reindeer bones. “You can’t use industrial raw materials; I have to go to the mountains and collect them and grind them,” she says.

Critics complain that Nordic architects have moved away from this ethos and are instead working in a self-referential bubble. Old Nordic apartment buildings are much loved for their distinctive high ceilings and ornate detailing. The concern is that these qualities are being lost in the name of sustainability and notions of progress.

Saher Sourouri, an Oslo psychologist who is the spokesperson for Architectural Uprising, argues that: “Most modern architecture [in Norway] has this poverty [of beauty]. There’s a lack of stimulation, there’s very little going on.” We are having coffee at a café in Frogner, the kind of unchanged historic neighbourhood he favours. If buildings tell a story, he says, then contemporary Nordic houses lack a narrative arc. “The facades are very simple, very boring. They’re flat. There’s no ornamentation. The windows are often asymmetrical. It’s all minimalistic.” And this aesthetic has become ubiquitous, he claims: “A lot of people wonder why everything has to be the same.” 

Developments in the Oslo neighbourhoods of Storo and Løren have been the most heavily criticised. And the campaigners are not just pensioners with a penchant for 18th-century proportions: Architectural Uprising has some 150,000 followers on social media (the number is equivalent to around 20 per cent of Oslo’s population). “On Instagram, about 60 per cent are under the age of 35,” says Sourouri. “The younger generation are much more interested in the classical and traditional styles of architecture than people my age or older,” he asserts. 

While architectural trends in the wider region have broadly shifted, Norway, with its newfound oil wealth (a popular Norwegian football chant goes: “We can buy all of Sweden, if we want to”), has had an accelerated rate of change, argues Sourouri. The “Snøhetta effect” has seen a wide range of practices adopt the monochrome palettes and rocky silhouettes favoured by Snøhetta, the Norwegian architectural practice behind buildings such as the iceberg-like Oslo Opera House and the grass-roofed Bjellandsbu-Åkrafjorden Cabin in the wilderness south of Bergen.

While it is celebrated for its foregrounding of sustainability, rooting to the landscape and social responsibility, there is a pinch point between striving to create a new design and architectural language and connection to national heritage. And while design elements at the Snøhetta tip of the pyramid are often seen as inspiring, the style adopted by bigger housing developments, much like the ideas of haute couture filtering down to the high street, can be less impressive. Sourouri describes the apartment blocks in Bjørvika as “cheap, colourless and bland”.

Most modern architecture in Norway has this poverty of beauty. There’s a lack of stimulation, there’s very little going on

Oslo’s population has grown 40 per cent since 2000, and the number of dwellings has increased by 63,500 since 2006, according to Statistics Norway. All this, when the city is surrounded by forest on three sides and a fjord on the fourth, all of which are protected. Solveig Øvstebø, director of Astrup Fearnley Museum, one of the first contemporary buildings on the waterfront when it opened in 2012, describes the rate of new housing development as “insane”.

“You have neighbourhoods where you had villas with their large eplehagen, their apple gardens,” she says. “But then came developers, real estate and money. People started to sell the gardens. All of a sudden you sit and you look at all these square buildings. They’re made cheaply, efficiently; they all have their garage in the basement and building on top. They are cubes.” She also says that construction work, concrete and tarmacking has been blamed for poor water drainage. Uniformity and environmental damage would be at odds with the New Nordic ethos. 

For Sourouri and his fellow rebels, the issue is about both taste and the wellbeing of residents. “There is a difference between what architects like and think is the right way to build buildings today and what a large part of the general public think,” he argues. “A discussion I was drawn into was that you cannot talk about ugly and beautiful buildings: it’s simplistic, it’s populist and architecture is far more complex. But almost everyone talks about ugly and beautiful buildings.” On Instagram he can be heard saying: “You have to wear horse blinders when you walk in new parts of town just to protect your sanity.” 

But not all locals agree. “I love the new houses in Bjørvika,” says Norwegian author Martine Jonsrud. “They have a very maritime feel, the walls remind me of fish skin and the shapes are like Tetris, or big puzzles for children. It’s playful and stylish.”

Both the uprising and the city’s Heritage Office have caused architects to adapt their approach. A mixed-used building by Mad Arkitekter in Oslo’s Torshov neighbourhood in the north of the city had to be rethought after its original Lego-like designs were rejected by planning officials in 2014. It took nearly a decade to come to a compromise. The result: an update of a more traditional Scandinavian style. “In recent years, the Arkitekturopprøret [Architectural Uprising] movement has contributed to a broader acceptance of such harmonious and context-sensitive expressions, and to a renewed discussion around beauty in architecture, clearly addressing a sense of longing shared by many,” says Kurt Singstad, a partner at Mad Arkitekter.   

Other Norwegians have found a sweet spot between the old and new. One is Eirik Sevaldsen, proprietor of Panu, a restaurant on St Olavs Plass that plays with unexpected mixes — turbot, lobster, rhubarb — just as the design of his home on the west coast of Norway blends elements from different eras. 

“It was my wife’s old family home,” explains Sevaldsen. “Her grandfather built the place in the early 1930s, he was a carpenter. It’s an old house, a classical house. When we took it over, some people said: just build a new house.” Instead, the couple supported the original structure and built a contemporary oblong extension with a vast glass window overlooking the Atlantic, the two parts unified by the use of stone from Alta in the north of Norway. Two styles from different times complementing one another, like accessorising a bunad with a beanie. 

“New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place”, Norwegian National Museum, Oslo, until September 14; nasjonalmuseet.no/en

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram