My hostess, Joanna Bird, had just taken off her uncomfortable bat wings when she opened the door of her Chiswick home, but blood-or something very like it-still trickled from the neck of Deborah Lanyon, an artist whose abstracted landscapes were on the walls.
I'm not a great one for Halloween, more of an American than British festival, but this one, I thought as I rustled through the brown leaves of the plane trees carpeting the pavements of west London, was going to be good. I wasn't disappointed. All was warmth and colour, in a house that's also a ceramics gallery. One guest arrived with a pair of splendid Hungarian Vizsla dogs: bulls may not get on well in china shops, but they only added to the decorative spirit of the occasion.
In the garden, a kinetic sculpture by the artist Rupert Newman blazed like a display of enormous jewels against the black velvet of the night. Seven large disks were illuminated by video images, each different, always changing, snatched visually from details around London. The technical challenge lies in exactly aligning the projectors. More curiosity, if less colour, comes on Monday, when Joanna opens an exhibition of Steffen Dam's glass, a shorthand for which might be jellyfish in jars, at Browse and Darby in Cork Street. I can't wait.
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Chelsea Flower Show 2025: What else to do in SW3 if you're coming to the world's greatest flower showThere's more to Chelsea than just the Flower Show so we've rounded up some of the best places to eat, stay and shop.
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Uniquely unique? The Yorkshire grain silos transformed into a home that's a symphony in glass, steel and curvesAmid the beautiful countryside of North Yorkshire, on the edge of the Castle Howard Estate, The Silos is a property for which the word 'house' simply doesn't cut it. And that's not the only way in which it's made us throw out the dictionary.
