Tea at Trianon: "The Bemelmans Effect”

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

"The Bemelmans Effect”

From Architectural Digest:

The heyday of the speakeasy coincided with the rise of Art Deco, of which the Chrysler Building remains the paradigmatic example. The Cloud Club will soon open on the tower’s 61st floor, in the same space that was once home to a men’s lunch club of the same name. “To me,” says AD100 designer Ken Fulk, “[the venue] is nostalgic for a more optimistic chapter in New York’s history. But I also don’t want to overly romanticize it.”
When Fulk first sized up the site, nothing remained of the original bizarro-Deco environs, leaving him to find inspiration elsewhere: 30,000 feet in the air. While he was on a flight, he took in a vista of cumulus clouds that jumpstarted his vision for the space. Later, he found precedents within the Chrysler Building itself. “Every single elevator tells a different story,” he says. “They’re all hand carved. Could you imagine doing that today?”
Fulk can. All the furnishings in the new Cloud Club, including a backlit pink-glass bar by Sogni Di Cristallo and floor-to-ceiling features by Lamberts and Bendheim, are custom. For Fulk, the analogue-bespoke nature of the space reflects something of our collective desires. At a time when “the entire world is at our fingertips,” he suggests, we are all seeking reassurance in the ghostly imprint of the craftsperson. “There’s been a big recognition of their efforts. How could there not be?”
In the case of the Nines, the handworn wins out. The space’s fluted plaster walls were “meant to look imperfect, as if they had been painted and repainted over the course of 100-plus years,” Butchko says. It’s a quality impossible to capture in photographs. But pull up by the bar and rub the rosy, pink cloth napkin between your fingers while you’re waiting for your drink to be prepared. Look around, and take it all in. (Read more.)