sprks.com

Home styling for the complete novice

You’ve decided to let out your prop­erty for short-term hol­iday rentals while you head for the sun­shine, and the agency is sending over a pho­to­grapher to do some spiffy pics. As a rent-virgin, you are not sure what to expect and per­haps a trifle uneasy about splashing photos of your intimate sanc­tuary all over the inter­webs. However, the suc­cess of your rental, and there­fore the exot­ic­ness of your own hol­iday, is in direct pro­por­tion to the attract­ive­ness of your prop­erty, so how to you make the most out of what you’ve got? I’m a partner at posh London agency AccommodateLondon.com so I thought some prac­tical guid­ance would be useful:

Q: By spooky coin­cid­ence, we booked your pho­to­grapher to come on laundry day. Is it okay to leave the house fes­tooned with knickers and damp track­suit bot­toms?
A: No. Unless you have booked a super-model to wear them, please hide all extraneous under­gar­ments and clothing.

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Wimbledon homes for tennis stars

‘Have you had any inter­esting things left behind?’ Well, tennis balls, old trainers, healthy food­stuffs; Joanna is strug­gling for some­thing note­worthy to say. ‘And some splendid for­eign lan­guage adult magazines’, she fin­ishes with a tri­umphant flourish. I kick her under the table but the plaster cast on her broken leg is a sub­stan­tial con­struc­tion, cour­tesy of Chelsea & Westminster Hospital, and she feels not a thing.

We had picked up Reuters tennis cor­res­pondent Pritha Sarkar from the road­works dis­aster that is cur­rently Wimbledon Station and spent the day vis­iting the houses that would become home for the stars of the centre court. It didn’t help that Joanna’s leg was propped up on the dash­board of the Mini, or that I was doing the driving for the first time in a few years.

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Laurie Chetwood's Urban Oasis at LFA 2006

It’s called Urban Oasis. On first impres­sion, that’s an odd descrip­tion for this 35 foot sculp­ture sit­ting in the heart of London’s Clerkenwell Green. It could just as easily be described as an alien wind machine. Designed by archi­tect Laurie Chetwood, this eco-friendly tree-like struc­ture has provided wel­come relief from the heat and stress of over­heated London life of late. It has a wind tur­bine on the top and ‘branches’ which open and close with the sun. These branches gen­erate power from the attached solar cells. The branches also col­lect whatever rain water is avail­able and uses it in turn to irrigate plants encased in their own test tubes.

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Shelflife bookshelf at The Wapping Project, London - sprks.com

I shot this double page spread at the end of a long fashion and design shoot at The Wapping Project in the East of London. Charles Trevelyan arrived in a transit with his huge, slanted book­shelf sporting and integ­rated chair; def­in­itely cut on the bias, this one. Lucy and Hannah had sourced a great selec­tion of products at very short notice and we set the whole thing up against the old pumping machinery in the back of the res­taurant area in an hour, which was all we had before the evening’s diners arrived.

Shelflife book­shelf and Titanic lamp by Charles Trevelyan at Viable. Hoch Tassen glasses, Milkii milk jug all from Places and Spaces. Squint fabric covered teapot, Liberty. Drink Me lamp, Pint glass vase, candle holder, goblet and ash­tray, Emiko Oki. Cyclone lim­ited edi­tion bowl, Orrefors. Orange Slice chair in Horses Stampede fabric, Giant cup and saucer, Flames gas can­de­labra, Places and Spaces. Based Upon The Grain titanium dining table, Based Upon.

Photo: © 2007 Ken Sparkes. Stylist: Lucy Wetton  Assistant Stylist: Hannah Gostlow  Shot on loc­a­tion at The Wapping Project for Spaces magazine 2007. All Rights Reserved

 

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The bril­liant white town of Ostuni has attracted vis­itors for cen­turies but has always been con­sidered a little off the beaten track. That all looks set to change.

Ostuni, Puglia

Down on Italy’s heel, Puglia has never been on most people’s hol­iday radar although pop­ular with Italian fam­ilies who come here to relax, eat good simple food and gen­er­ally get away from it all. A sort of anti­dote to la bella figura. It has a chequered his­tory, either being fought over by the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Longobards, Arabs and Normans, or simply being left to its own, mainly agri­cul­tural, devices. Now, Puglia has seen dra­matic growth as a poten­tial southern coun­ter­part of Tuscan Chiantishire, fuelled by Ryanair’s cheap flights to Bari and Brindisi, the lure of its incred­ible archi­tec­ture and unique, vibrant culture.

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Here in the UK, feel­ings about the Royal Wedding has been typ­ic­ally equi­vocal. Our media seem hes­itant to take a mean­ingful edit­orial stance, pre­fer­ring to focus on Ms Middleton’s dress or nutty local council rul­ings on the height of bunting. Among the Great Unwashed we find opinion wavering some­where between mild approval of the extra hol­iday and, um, warm approval of the extra holiday.

'Thanks for the day off' royal wedding plate

You will need to plan your wed­ding to ensure a ful­filling, hitch-free day. If you’re going to watch it on TV then you need do little more than stock up on Duchy Originals Gooseberry Posset. For those intending to see it in the flesh, here are some useful resources.

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This is m-house in it’s nat­ural hab­itat; a bit of use­less waste ground which costs vir­tu­ally nothing to rent. If plan­ners could get their heads round the idea that you don’t have to wreck the envir­on­ment to provide housing, there are thou­sands of sites in the UK like this which could be made into homes.

Tim Pyne's m-house

We’re not sure what to call it: is it a classy caravan or an ultra-chic pad with wheels? The dis­tinc­tion is the m-house’s raison d’etre and it’s greatest obstacle. Tim Pyne wanted a house on a bit of Essex estuary but was told he could only have a mobile home. Something on wheels, below a cer­tain size, which arrives on site in no more than two big pieces. The plan­ning laws do not, how­ever, say that it had to be flimsy or look tacky so, together with Michael Howe of mae archi­tects, he has pro­duced a 2-bedroom, 900 sq foot designer home that is totally com­plete and can be assembled in a day with min­imal plan­ning permission.

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Erice, near Trapani, Sicily

Zeus’ beau­tiful daughter Persephone was kid­napped and raped by Hades at Enna and Scylla devoured sailors in the Strait of Messina. ‘You’ll need extra insur­ance, of course,’ said the man at the car rental desk, ‘this is Sicily’. We insured ourselves to the hilt and headed for the mean streets of Palermo.

Palermo

Palermo was an Arab caliphate until Roger II invaded and made it the Norman cap­ital of the Kingdom of Sicily, which also included most of Southern Italy, for almost 600 years — the jewel in the Med’s crown. After a short dal­li­ance with Naples and the Unification of Italy in 1860, it con­tinued a long, slow decline, but has never for­gotten its proud past. Grand, raw, self-assured and untamed, Palermo may be Italy’s most under­rated city.

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Everything is all over the place and it’s making me depressed, so I’ve decided to move most of my material to this online col­lec­tion called sprks.

Here will be fea­tures, snip­pets, likes and dislikes, new and old, pro­jects, pho­to­graphs and writ­ings. I will be migrating the best stuff here and devel­oping the site at the same time, so it might look a bit funny here and there. It is April 2011 and it’s a lovely, warm, sunny Spring in London. Good omens.

Photographic port­folio: in the developer, so to speak, but I keep a sort of pho­to­graphic scrap­book on Flickr. Here’s a fancy gal­lery (Flash) for you to pre­view. Try it fullscreen.

I seem to have a backlog of posts stretching back to the dawn of time, so this site is going to be some­what ad hoc and un-chronological, but quality is important and that can’t be rushed. Photographic pro­jects will be also be posted here if they seem of gen­eral interest. Anyone who would like to use any of these photos, please ask me first.

Thanks to WP Shower for their excel­lent theme.

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