Innholdsfortegnelse for 22-Mar-2023 i Country Life

New tax Declaration d’Occupation UPDATES to property taxation legislation in France will see all local and overseas owners—including those with second homes and non-residents who are not typically required to submit a French tax return—having to confirm the occupancy of their assets under the new Government rules. Regardless of where in the world they reside, if they are a private owner or involved with a company that itself owns assets in France, they will have until June 30 to declare their interests or risk incurring fines for non-compliance. Home owners should fill out the Declaration d’Occupation form found at www.impots.gouv.fr and declare who is living in the property as of January 1, 2023. Over the past few years, France has been working towards phasing out its taxe d’habitation (occupancy…

THE composer picks out a melody on the piano. It’s stirring—and sweetly sultry. ‘What do you think?’ he calls over his shoulder to the music journalist. ‘Awful,’ says the critic. Giuseppe Verdi smiles, scribbling the excerpt onto the manuscript. ‘Excellent—if you hate it, that means the people will love it!’ This much-quoted exchange—whether real or imagined—casts Verdi as the people’s composer, a role ascribed to him due to the widespread popularity of his music, which was created against a backdrop of political repression in pre- and post-Unification Italy. It isn’t only Italians who love his music—Verdi’s operas have become some of the most staged works in the repertory; barely a season goes past without the likes of Rigoletto, Aida or La Traviata appearing at the Royal Opera House (ROH) in…

IN the autumn of 1976, an eye-catching poster began appearing on the streets of Athens. Emblazoned with a red London bus, it announced an exhibition of limited edition original prints by UK artists at the British Council. The works being shown—which included prints by David Hockney, Patrick Caulfield and Eduardo Paolozzi, as well as young up-and-coming artists—attracted large numbers of collectors, students and expats. For burgeoning Bristol-raised art dealer Jill Yakas, who was organising the show not long after moving to Greece, it was quite a coup. More than 45 years and many exhibitions later, Ms Yakas still lives in a book-filled house in the leafy Athens suburb of Kifissia. As well as retaining her passion for art, she is the long-term treasurer of the Mediterranean Garden Society, an international…

THE nervy climate in which Blithe Spirit emerged in 1941 is reflected in a programme note for the first production stating: ‘If an air raid warning be received during the performance the audience will be informed from the stage… Those desiring to leave the theatre may do so but the performance will continue.’ How shrewd of its creator, therefore, to shape a play touching on a subject especially on the public mind at the time, namely death, within a wrapping that was light and escapist. When Noël Coward put pen to paper on a busman’s holiday with his friend, the actress Joyce Carey, in Portmeirion, north Wales, in May 1941, he needed a money spinner. He had been involved in war work, which had taken him abroad, and his plays…

ON May 17, 1837, some members of a new club established to promote political reform—the defining parliamentary issue of the moment—compiled their thoughts about the intended appearance of their future club house. The note, probably drafted by the railway investor and landowner Sir Henry Webb, was strikingly confident in tone. ‘We the undersigned submit that as the Reform Club will be composed of the greatest number of members and is established for the promotion of the most important objects, so it is useful and becoming that it be assembled in the most distinguished building of all the clubs at the west end of the town.’ It should, the note continues, be ‘a large and imposing building of three storeys [underlined]… after the model of the Venetian or Italian palaces; that…

Creamy chicken and spring-onion cobbler Method Preheat your oven to 160˚C fan/180˚C/350˚F/gas mark 4. Heat a splash of olive oil in an ovenproof dish, add the chicken and pancetta and cook until the chicken has browned and the pancetta is crispy. Remove to a plate. In the same pan, fry until softened the diced onion, carrot and celery, then add the garlic. Sprinkle over the flour, mixing it in, followed by the white wine. Heat until reduced by half, then pour in the stock and add the bay leaf. Simmer to reduce the stock by one-third and then return the chicken and pancetta to the pan. Pour in the cream and add the parsley. To make the cobbles, form the buttermilk by squeezing the lemon juice into the milk…

PSYCHOTHERAPISTS emphasise, very wisely I’m sure, that one should never use social media as a source of validation, but I do regularly turn to Instagram as the soft-furnishings equivalent of a YouGov survey, posting images that appear on these pages to gauge the extent to which they float people’s boats. There are three common denominators: roaring fires, cute dogs (never in the same post, obviously) and bright colour, so I wasn’t at all surprised when an image of a bathroom at Keythorpe Hall in Leicestershire with a tub painted bright scarlet elicited a rapturous response: burning-flame emojis, hearts, breathless ‘I love this!’ comments and 274 likes in a day or two (quite a lot for a nano influencer). Time was when the colour of bathrooms was limited to white…

IN 1874, an art exhibition was held at the former Paris studios of the photographer Nadar, which has gone down in the annals of art history. On the deep-red walls hung paintings of dancers, laundresses, bathers, racing, theatre scenes and landscapes. The artists included Degas, Cézanne, Pissarro, Renoir and Monet, who had banded together to display their avant-garde work because it had been rejected by the Salon, the French Academy’s official exhibiting body. The show attracted widespread hostility. Monet’s Impression, Sunrise, a misty view of his native Le Havre at dawn, presided over by the orange ball of a rising sun, was picked out for particular ridicule, and inadvertently gave rise to the name of the group. Only one woman took part—Berthe Morisot, who had also helped organise the exhi-bition.…

FROM the European Grand Tours of the 18th century to more modern pilgrimages, there is a long-standing tradition of literary ideas flourishing far from home. Ian Fleming wrote several James Bond novels from his Jamaican island retreat; Gerald Durrell’s childhood memories of his four years on Corfu sparked his career as a writer; and George Orwell’s time spent living firstly in Paris, then fighting in the Spanish Civil War subsequently found its way into both his non-fiction writing and, more obliquely, his novels. There are even authors who were unable to write about their home countries until they had left them—James Joyce being the most famous example. His best-known work, Ulysses, chronicles a day in the life of Leopold Bloom as he wanders around Dublin, but Joyce penned the book…

1920 Published July 17 A 400-house development at Dormanstown, begun outside Redcar, North Yorkshire, in 1916, was photographed by the magazine as an exemplary scheme. The houses were described as being of two ‘classes’, one with and one without a parlour. The absence of barriers and building detritus is striking. Every week for the past 125 years, COUNTRY LIFE has documented and photographed many walks of life in Britain. More than 80,000 of the images are available for syndication or purchase in digital format. To view the archives, visit www.countrylifeimages.co.uk and email enquiries to licensing@futurenet.com…

WE used to sneak in the back to smoke and charm girls,’ says Adam Clayton, bass guitarist of U2. That was in the 1970s, when he was a boarder at St Columba’s College in Dublin. Little did he guess that, in the following decade, he would become the owner of that same estate at the foot of the Dublin Mountains. In 1986, the band rented the house—which was standing empty—to record their fifth studio album, The Joshua Tree, in the acoustically gorgeous, lofty drawing room. The then owner, remembers Mr Clayton, had said: ‘If anyone wants to buy the house at the end of the recording, I’ll subtract the rental from the price.’ So, in 1988, aged 28, he found himself in possession of Danesmoate: a large Georgian house, numerous…

WHEN people talk about ‘crab apples’, they usually mean those ornamental trees glistening with little fruit from which they make delicious jams and jellies in autumn. But all those apples start off as flowers and many of the trees that bear them are equally as attractive when they bloom in spring—and often even more so. Botanists have a name for our native crab apple—Malus sylvestris—but it is seldom grown by gardeners. Most of the ornamental garden varieties are species, forms or hybrids from Asia and North America. There are some 40 wild species and hundreds of horticultural selections, all from the northern hemisphere, and immensely variable in their size, shape and beauty. Nurserymen tell us that there is ‘a crab apple for every garden’. Bees love them, because they produce…

THE Isle of Man’s only native breed could have stepped from the pages of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with its crazy horns; both ewes and rams can have four horns, two smaller ones sprouting sideways and two large, thick, unicorn-like ones soaring upwards. This is caused by a gene that splits the horn bud, sometimes resulting in three horns or even a bonkers five or six, which may be straight or curving backwards or forwards. Confusingly, ewes occasionally have no horns. The Manx Loaghtan is a small, lean, short-tailed primitive sheep probably of Celtic origin and related to Scotland’s island breeds, the Soay, Hebridean, Shetland, Boreray and Ronaldsay. The meat, which is Defra-registered as Protected Designation of Origin, is described as leaner and darker than that of more commercial breeds,…

CROCUS carpets and cherry-blossom avenues herald the onset of spring at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in west London, but, if you enter the historic Palm House, you will be transported to a tropical rainforest. Inside the 175-year-old glasshouse, the air is heavy and dense, filled with lush vegetation from some of the most threatened environments in the world (www.kew.org).…

Find the best properties at countrylife.co.uk WHEN would-be buyers of country houses dream about their perfect property, what’s often conjured up is a handsome, square-built Georgian-era old rectory or vicarage in a pretty village with a bit of land and views of the surrounding countryside. Quintessentially English, their appeal stems from a combination of beautiful architecture that boasts rooms with excellent proportions and an idyllic setting often next to a church in the heart of a community. They are also ideally sized for today’s families—with four, good-sized reception rooms, five or six bedrooms and large, but manageable, gardens. The setting is evocative of a scene from Jane Austen; indeed, in early June, The Old Rectory Society, formed in 2006 by the former Daily Telegraph editor Charles Moore, is hosting…

DRAWING NOW opens tomorrow in Paris at the Carreau du Temple, a former market, for the 16th time (until March 26). I have always found it one of the most enjoyable contemporary fairs because there is comparatively little pretension about it, when at so many other fairs and exhibitions one can hardly see the art for the jargon smeared all over it. At Drawing Now, there are always new artists and even new ideas to be discovered. Anyone wishing to collect modern art might be well advised to begin there, where quality is high and prices reasonable. Exhibitor numbers are still in the low 70s, as they were before the pandemic. Although there seem to be fewer from outside France than before—with only one from London—they come from across…

ON a spring day in 1920, Joan Miró found his way to Pablo Picasso’s studio on the Rue de la Boétie, in Paris. For this much-anticipated first meeting, the young Catalan artist came armed with a cake, at the behest of Picasso’s mother, who was an old family friend. It would appear both artist and gift were well received, as Picasso soon took the fellow Spaniard under his wing, introducing him to the city’s avant-garde circles and even buying one of his self-portraits. During this period, the pair of would-be titans were experimenting with entirely new ways of seeing the world. Unbridled by any particular style or medium, they interrogated the principles of Surrealism, abstraction and the power of the unconscious. As Picasso married neo-Classical sensibilities with Cubist theories, Miró…

Santorini, €4.85 million (£4.27m) Located in the picturesque hilltop village of Pyrgos Kalisti, the Harpa estate comprises an elegant private villa and a perfectly formed boutique hotel. With only four bedroom suites, each with private terraces, the hotel would easily convert into a private residence. The charming stone-fronted villa features a master-bedroom suite, a fully equipped kitchen and a generous open-plan living/dining space. Outside, the heated pool and shaded dining area offer sweeping views across the charming countryside and out to sea. Sotheby’s International Realty (00 302 10 968 1070; www.sothebysrealty.gr) Kea, €1.2 million (£1.05m) Boasting panoramic views of the Aegean, this hilltop villa occupies a commanding position on the charming island of Kea, the nearest inhabited Cycladic island to Athens. Built in traditional style from local stone and kitted…

For all the latest news, visit countrylife.co.uk Terror of the trees THE independent inquiry into the Sheffield ‘chainsaw massacre’ has found that councillors in the South Yorkshire city behaved dishonestly and destroyed public trust. In a 227-page report, Sir Mark Lowcock, inquiry chairman, found that the council’s behaviour around the incident, which began in 2012, ‘amounted to a serious and sustained failure of strategic leadership’. His report also concluded that the council ‘lacked transparency, and repeatedly said things that were economical with the truth, misleading and, in some cases, were ultimately exposed as dishonest’. The scandal began when Sheffield’s council signed a 25-year contract with infrastructure-support service provider Amey, which included the removal and replacement of 17,500 street trees. Public opposition against the felling grew and reached a climax…

NATURALISTIC or ecological planting is increasingly popular, but even its strongest advocates recognise that sometimes it simply doesn’t look too good. Almost any planting looks tidy in spring and early summer: all of those neat hummocks of perennial growth, fresh shoots of grasses and delicate wildflower sprigs. Come late summer and the picture can be very different, tall perennials beginning to flop over, rank grass and a general air of confusion and decay. Even the most enthusiastic New Perennial gardener might lose heart at that point. There is also the wider issue of whether the most naturalistic plantings can be considered to be truly gardens—unease at last year’s awarding of Best in Show at Chelsea to the wild-looking Urquhart & Hunt garden is nothing new. Similar disquiet at wildflower-dominated…

THE mole can be faulted for many things. His old English name, ‘mould-warp’, means ‘earth-thrower’. The soil he carelessly flings around causes damage to farm machinery. The soft hills he creates with his subterranean burrowing endangers the limbs of livestock and horses and brings green keepers and groundsmen out in a cold sweat. His mining slices through the roots of crops and causes flowers to wither and flop. His inconsiderate dirt chucking renders silage unpalatable to cattle and can spread listeria. Defenders counter that he aerates the soil, improves drainage and eats the underground grubs that feed on plants. In Germany, in recognition of his environmental work, the mole is protected by law. Something both friends and foe can agree on, however, is the mole’s work ethic. The 5in-long creature…

Somerset, £1.6 million Set in 3½ acres and with views looking out over the Quantock Hills, Upcott Hall is a rare gem that has come to market for the first time in 30 years. The home has been a much-loved family residence during that time, providing seven bedrooms and impressive entertaining spaces, and is ripe for purchasers to upgrade the property to their own tastes. The accommodation is spread over three floors, with large cellars and plenty of period features ready to be incorporated into any future refurbishment. Beautiful gardens and grounds surround the manor house and have been re-landscaped in recent years. They feature ornamental lawned areas dotted with mature trees, ponds, water features, a walled garden and a small orchard. Situated in the hamlet of Upcott, the…

Scotland and the Origins of Modern Art Duncan Macmillan(Lund Humphries, £50) WHERE did modern art start? The usual answer is late-19th-century France, when the Impressionists, and especially their friend Cézanne, pioneered a new way of representing the world that involved more colour and less line. It is held that their example lay behind the great efflorescence of avant-garde styles of the first years of the 20th century, when Cubism freed painting from the need to show traditional form, Fauvism released colour from naturalism and Marcel Duchamp established that a concept or a ready-made object—his famous urinal—could be a work of art. He makes a convincing case that modernism first came from north of Hadrian’s Wall Of course, this ancestral line can be taken ever further back, but, at…