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Blue Dog Jewellery - Venice, Grandest designs

 My forthcoming trip to Venice in April is sure to feed my fantasy of one day owning my own palazzo on the Grand Canal!  This article in The Times investigates the best areas to buy property in Venice, even if, like me, a palazzo is beyond your budget.

 

From The Sunday Times

March 29, 2009

Grandest designs

Crime writer Donna Leon explains her love affair with Venice, and Toni Sepeda looks at where and what to buy in the city, from bolt holes topalazzi

I forget the exact year when it became a status symbol to have a second home in Venice. Perhaps 1600, when Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice was first published? Owning a flat in the city can certainly complicate your life: just ask a Venetian. While you’re at it, ask him what it’s like to try to restore a house: it’s always a revelation to see a grown man burst into tears.

These difficulties, however, seem to have no effect on the growing desire for second homes there.

There is a majestic history to Venice: the Doges and the battle of Lepanto; the memory of La Serenissima and its trading empire; and a roll call of celebrated names who sought sanctuary in the city – Canaletto and Tintoretto, Monteverdi and Vivaldi, Byron. There is also a different, more personal history acquired only by those who grew up here, or have lived among the maze of calli and rughe along the banks of the canals for decades: the stories of people falling into the lagoon, the one about the house where the butcher’s wife went to live when she ran off with the shoemaker; the shop that used to sell the beststracchino cheese in the city before it became an estate agency.

The hero of my books, Commissario Brunetti, a detective born and bred in Venice, has watched these changes and spends his days walking through the sestieri (the districts that make up the centre of the city). His flat, added to the top of the building in the 1950s, is abusivo [illegal], and serves as a perfect symbol of what could be – and was – done until the building code was introduced in the 1960s.

Loyal to San Polo, where he now lives, Brunetti still cannot remove Castello from his heart, for it was there that he spent much of his youth. Whenever he has to go to San Marco, his awareness of the presence of so much well-hidden wealth causes him a vague uneasiness. Giudecca might as well be Patagonia.

Yet Brunetti is a man who is always warmed and comforted by beauty, so his spirit can still be lifted by a glance across the canal. Solid, bourgeois Cannaregio comforts him with its busy propriety and the sound of the Veneziano dialect in the shops and bars. Dorsoduro, now almost stripped of food stores, has only one restaurant that interests him. And Santa Croce, just beyond the door of his home, is the neighbourhood in which he feels most comfortable.

A careful look at the facades and rooflines shows how much illegal restoration and addition was done over the years, before the city administration decided that a private citizen did not have the right, and could not be trusted, to remove a window or add a few extra floors to his house. Friends of mine once discovered, when they were putting a lift into their 16th-century palazzo, that someone had removed – some time in the past 400 years – an entire weight-bearing wall. It was also not uncommon for people to steal rooms: simply to open a door and take over an uninhabited room in the flat next door. Over the course of a millennium, things happen and people forget. But where and what to buy now? While Venice is a seductive creature, she is also stealthy – which means you need to draw on all your skills to navigate her housing market. In a city where extensive interior restoration is possible, but exterior changes are largely forbidden, setting, neighbourhood and views all matter. Any buyer will notice that the advertisements in local estate agents’ windows highlight a property’s views, terraces, courtyards and proximity to a canal, rather than its size. Rooftop gardens are especially prized.

A prospective buyer must first select from the six competingsestieri: San Marco, Dorsoduro, San Polo, Santa Croce, Castello and Cannaregio. Then there are the islands, which include Murano and Giudecca. Each has its unique atmosphere, advantages, disadvantages and, of course, prices. You can pick up a two-bedroom flat in an unfashionable back-street for €280,000 (£260,000); a property of similar size in a converted palazzo on the main Strada Nuova would cost €1.4m. Here’s our guide to where to go and what you can get for your money.

San Marco: This sestiere is home to some of the city’s most desirable addresses, and the palazzi that adorn the Grand Canal are as impressive as they are expensive. They often sell for more than £10m. “The most valuable properties on the canal sell for €12,000-€15,000 per square metre,” says Sebastiano Doria, a director of the upmarket estate agency Views on Venice, who has yet to see any lessening in demand from British buyers. “We are working on the restoration of an entire palazzo by Campo Santo Stefano and the Ponte dell’Accademia. It is a perfect location.” Two-bedroom flats there are expected to start at about €1.875m. Dorsoduro: A slender peninsula, flanked on either side by the Grand Canal and the Giudecca Canal, Dorsoduro is favoured by expatriates and artists. The ample boat stops and stunning views mean prices here are on a par with those in San Marco. That said, there are still bargains to be found if you are patient enough – and willing to sacrifice space for location. Venetian Properties (00 39 041 296 0182, www.venetian-properties.com) is selling a 100 sq metre flat at Ponte Lungo, with views of the canal, the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute and the Bacino di San Marco, for €245,000.

The plethora of art galleries now springing up means that butchers, bakers and grocers have mostly disappeared – it’s easier to get a chilled glass of prosecco than a loaf of bread – but at least they’re better than the ubiquitous mask and bead shops.

San Polo: This is still recognisably a family neighbourhood, where, crossing the main campo, you have to dodge as many kids on bikes as you do tourists. Many palazzi – each with a grand piano nobile featuring gothic marble windows and delightful views – have been conveniently and elegantly divided into flats. Prestige Property Group (01935 817188, prestigeproperty.co.uk) has a one-bedroom, 100 sq metre flat on the second floor of a converted 17th-century building between the Church of the Frari and San Polo for €750,000. The area’s peace and domesticity is marred by a shopping artery that connects Rialto market with the rest of the city, which can make getting about a challenge.

Santa Croce: One of the less familiar and more remote of the sestieri, this area has a wealth of charms. Its campi are small and intimate, with delightful buildings, unspoilt by hordes of foreign visitors, and a “neighbourhood” feel: local stores are open at all hours. The property on offer is just as simple and authentic: Knight Frank is selling a restored three-bedroom flat in the Materdomini area for €950,000 (020 7629 8171, knightfrank.com).

Castello:Behind St Mark’s Square, and bordered by the city’s largest public gardens, Castello(where the Biennale is held) is one of only two districts in Venice where the local dialect can be heard in all the shops and cafes. The streets ring with elidedcon-sonants: “Bello!” becomes “Beo!” This authenticity is reflected in beautifully restored properties such as a 130 sq metre flat in a 19th-century building midway between San Francesco della Vigna and Riva degli Schiavoni, on sale for €900,000 with Prestige Property (as above). It has wooden floors, high ceilings, and a coveredroof terrace with panoramic views.

Cannaregio: The western part of Cannaregio is nearly untouched by foreign residents and retains its local appeal, but it is an up-and-coming district, with many British investors succumbing to its more remote charms. The area is served by the smaller, more local black-and-white motoscafi rather than the larger, more crowded vaporetti that ply the Grand Canal. Restaurants are cheaper and better, shops are more affordable and property is not yet as expensive as in the rest of Venice. Venice Agency Real Estate is selling a one-bedroom, 45 sq metre flat with beamed ceilings for €380,000 (00 39 041 244 8945, veniceagency.com). The islands: These are places where you can really get away from it all, yet still bask in the unique charms of the city. Giudecca, which for generations of Venetians was an alien place, to be avoided, has become the latest hot destination and is drawing artists, writers and musicians – Elton John among them – away from Dorsoduro, its trendy neighbour on the other side of the canal.

“Ten years ago, investors weren’t aware of the area,” says Harry Lewis, a director of Savills International (020 7016 3740, savills.com), who is launching a number of new developments on the island this spring. “Now, despite the global recession, there is still considerable interest. The market in Venice hasn’t faltered.”

© Toni Sepeda and Donna Leon 2009.

Brunetti’s Venice by Toni Sepeda, with an introduction by Donna Leon (£12.99), and About Face by Donna Leon (£16.99) will both be published by Heinemann on April 2. To buy them for £11.69 and £15.29 respectively (including p&p), call the Sunday Times BooksFirst 0870 165 8585 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Anyone for Venice?

Our pick of what’s on the market in La Serenissima

Grand Canal. £8.3m

Five-bedroom 17th-century palazzo, presently undergoing renovation, has a private pier. The ornate baroque interior features columns and fireplaces.

Prestige Property;                01935 817188        , prestigeproperty.co.uk

Giudecca£3.1m

 

Ca’ Redentore is a two-bedroom, 320 sq metre palazzo flat with wooden floors and roof-terrace views of St Mark’s Square.

Savills International (               020 7016 3740        , savills.com); Views on Venice (               07770 850947        , www.vovestates.com)

Castello£368,000

Near the Arsenale, a one-bedroom, 60 sq metre flat in a restored 16th-century palazzo by Rio di San Martin has cherrywood flooring and marmorino plaster.

Prestige Property;                01935 817188        , prestigeproperty.co.uk

Dorsoduro £326,000

Two-bed flat near Campo San Barnaba has a bathroom and a living room/kitchen. The owner has the right to moor a boat on the nearby canal.

Properties in Italy;                00 39 349 452 0481        , propertiesinitaly.net

Tips for prospective buyers

- Spread the word: gossip is the main way to get what you want

- Be patient: the city operates at the pace of the oar, not the superhighway. Browse the estate agents’ windows, but ask lots of questions before you agree to view. It pays not to look too keen

- Be flexible: abandon any preconceptions about what constitutes an ideal place, and balance location and living space.

Posted by Shona Lockhart, 30th March 2009

www.bluedogjewellery.com

Blue Dog Jewellery - Venice would not be the same without Andrea Palladio

The stonecutter who shook the world

He rose from humble origins to become one of the greatest architects ever. On the eve of a major show, Jonathan Glancey celebrates the life and legacy of Andrea Palladio

• Jonathan Glancey
• The Guardian, Monday 5 January 2009
• Article history

Villa Capra, La Rotunda, by Andrea Palladio. Photograph: Sandro Vannini/Corbis

One way or another, most of us have encountered Andrea Palladio. His presence has been, and remains, quietly insistent in our daily lives - even though this great Italian architect was born 500 years ago, almost to the day, and his working life was spent in a relatively contained landscape between his birthplace, Padua, and the scene of some of his greatest triumphs, Venice.

Every building Palladio designed, from a simple farmhouse to his grand monastic churches such as San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, was a gem. Designed inside and out according to a sophisticated play of perfect geometry, each one remains an ideal to live up to. Handsomely crafted, imaginatively sited and bringing the best of classical Roman architecture up to date, his buildings had a profound influence on architecture worldwide.

The Church of San Georgio Maggiore, by Giovanni Antonio Canal (known as Canaletto)

Such was the compelling nature of their design that, after Palladio's death in 1580, British architects began to create buildings - from modest working-class terraces to magisterial country houses, along with town halls, assembly rooms, churches, inns, farmhouses and follies - that owe the essentials of their design, their proportions and much of their architectural spirit to the one-time Paduan stonecutter destined to become one of the greatest architects of all time.

What drew the Palladians, as these young British architects came to be known, to the master's work was its crystal-clear design, free of the pomp and theatrical circumstance of those architectural styles, especially the lavish baroque that came before an 18th-century revival of Palladianism. Here were classical buildings that seemed ideal for 18th-century, protestant Britain. Palladio showed how it was possible to shape a form of architecture that seemed almost timeless. Informed by mathematical logic, it was highly practical, rich in terms of its ideas, and lacked any over-elaborate decoration. No wonder the brightest British Modern movement architects of the 1930s were as in awe of Palladio as they were of Le Corbusier. They saw him, if not altogether correctly, as a kind of proto-Modern.

The work of the Palladians - spearheaded by the Anglo-Irish Earl of Burlington and Colen Campbell, a Scot - became the dominant force in British architecture. They in turn influenced the work of American architects, and by the mid-19th century, examples of Palladian design could be found around the globe, from St Petersburg to Cape Province. Even today, there are architects, notably the father and son team Quinlan and Francis Terry, who continue to work in a tradition descended from Palladio. In fact, the Terrys attract controversy precisely because they insist on pursuing a line of Palladianism, in the design of numerous country houses, as well as major urban shopping and office developments - as if the days of Palladio, or at least his ideals, were still part, parcel and pediment of everyday life.

This month, Palladio's life, work and legacy will be celebrated at the Royal Academy, London, a much rebuilt venue that was once Burlington House, a fine Piccadilly mansion remodelled by Campbell when Palladianism began to oust the English baroque style developed by Christopher Wren. The show, bringing Palladio to a 21st-century audience, will be a feast of drawings, models, photographs and paintings by Old Masters proving that the spirit, if not the exact forms, of purist classical architecture is still relevant today. The exhibition is on tour, having started life last autumn in Palladio's Palazzo Barbaran da Porto in the heart of Vicenza, the northern city he did so much to make his own, with his wonderful buildings lining its streets.

Portraits of Palladio's clients by Tintoretto, Titian and Veronese will be accompanied by original editions of the books Palladio wrote and illustrated, in particular The Four Books of Architecture, his monumentally influential work first published in 1570. Copies of it were reproduced across Europe, the US and beyond in ever cheaper and more available editions. Still readily available, it was The Four Books that arguably did most to spread Palladio's crisp, classical style. He was certainly a great communicator, his writing style echoing his solid, unshowy architectural philosophy. "I will avoid lengthy words," he wrote, "and will make use of those terms which workers commonly use today."

What was it, though, that has drawn so many to Palladio, from Italy, Britain, the US and even, in the 21st century, China? In clinical terms, the answer is that he offered a practical, perfectly proportioned, unpretentious form of classical design that could be pressed into elegant service for many different types of buildings. But the answer chiefly lies within the experience of the buildings themselves. Palladio transformed pure geometry into gracious, useful buildings in carefully considered settings. Stand in a room by Palladio - any formal room will do - and you will experience the feeling, both calming and elevating, of being centred not just in architectural space, but in yourself.

Recently, I stayed in Palladio's Villa Saraceno, a farmhouse in north Italy now in the care of the Berkshire-based charity, the Landmark Trust. What struck me was just how easy it was to live here and how, during a prolonged rainy spell, it was no loss to be holed up in this quietly magnificent building that looks and feels like a Roman temple, despite being a pared-down, almost barn-like workaday farmhouse. With its combination of frescoed public rooms, airy bedrooms, vast kitchens and cavernous rooftop haylofts, it's as much an adventure as a home. And it is a building that clearly demonstrates how Palladio's work should never be confused with the prissy, uptight, oddly proportioned houses described as "palladian" that continue to be built by house-builders in Britain just because they feature sash windows and pediments.

Inside, Villa Saraceno was all commodity, firmness and delight, easily conforming to those three architectural essentials: well built, beautiful, with intelligent and practical use of space. Any number of 18th-century British houses share something of the special qualities of Villa Saraceno. Its echoes can be detected in the guise of grand, if austere, country seats such as Holkham Hall in Norfolk, and in the thousands of terrace houses that line the streets of Britain. Created in an age of ruthless commerce yet commonplace architectural grace, these are civilised, perfectly proportioned houses we have come to cherish.

Even Villa Capra - one of Palladio's most celebrated designs, with its four temple-like elevations overlooking the countryside around Vicenza, and designed as a salon for wealthy gentlemen to read, admire and discuss art, as well as dine well - has been reproduced several times, more or less successfully, in Britain, beginning with Campbell's high-domed Mereworth Castle in Kent.

This, quite simply, is Campbell's Villa Capra.

Although Palladio's tirelessly inventive buildings tell us much about this brilliant miller's son, who rose on the crest of a wave of inspired patronage, the man himself remains a rather distant figure. What we do know is that the young stonecutter Andrea di Pietro della Gondola was discovered at about the age of 30 by the poet, dramatist, diplomat and architectural patron Giangiorgio Trissino, who took his protege to Rome. There, the young man marvelled at, and drew, antique ruins, and adopted the name Palladio, probably after the angel Palladio, a divine fictional character who saved Italy.

We know, too, that Palladio was popular with local patrons, labourers and craftsmen. The Venetian nobility and clergy took to him, too. He was evidently an unpretentious fellow, marrying a carpenter's daughter and never buying a house. A spendthrift, he was never wealthy and his sons caused him much grief. One was a convicted murderer.

Even if his later buildings became more mannered and even a little baroque, Palladio was never as chaste a designer as his many disciples in Britain and elsewhere thought. He was, in effect, no Palladian. Many of his buildings, including Palazzo Thiene in Vicenza and Villa Barbaro at Maser, break the Palladians' rules of chasteness. Palladio was less concerned with a specific style than his many followers were; he was far more interested in a reinterpretation of ancient Roman architecture, the eternal notions of harmony and proportion, and the idea that buildings were a practical joy.

His last building, the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, with its magnificent stage-set revealing seven retreating city streets, each an optical illusion, was completed after Palladio's death. Still much in use, it seems an appropriate finale: Palladio was soon to be striding across the world's stage, his architecture a part of the everyday vocabulary of so many cities for ever in his debt.

Behind the apparent simplicity of Palladio's designs is a complex architectural chemistry, beautifully resolved through an innate understanding of proportion and highly crafted and immensely practical building skills. Hopefully, the buildings Palladio built and inspired will continue to serve - and delight - us for the next 500 years and more.

Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy is at the Royal Academy, London W1, 31 January to 13 April. Details: 020-7300 8000 and royalacademy.org.uk

Posted by Shona Lockhart, 29th March 2009

http://www.bluedogjewellery.com

Blue Dog Jewellery - why is fashion dangerous?

Designer death threats

Peter Jensen's catwalk show at London fashion week has resulted in death threats and protests. Rachel Holmes finds out what went wrong for the Danish designer.

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• Rachel Holmes
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 March 2009 16.20 GMT
• Article history

Peter Jensen's outfits included the controversial kamik boots. Photograph: Chris Moore/Catwalking.com

FASHION DILEMMA

Did Peter Jensen deserve a death threat?

He's hardly on a par with a genocidal maniac such as Adolf Hitler. He's not even reached Madonna's levels of cultural insensitivity by snapping up Malawian babies left, right and centre. So why is Peter Jensen currently having to behave like Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard?

It all started on a cold (and probably wet) day in February at London fashion week. Jensen's show was inspired by his Aunt Jytte, who ran a chip shop and a cab company in Nuuk, Greenland, during the late 60s. But it wasn't soggy batter or red-light-dodging drivers causing the problem, it was the collection itself. At first glance it all seemed pleasantly whimsical: there were some lovely floral prints and a couple of strange hats. In fact, the only thing that we commented on at the time was a cute polar bear jumper.

Who would have guessed that Jensen had committed a cultural faux pas worthy of Prince Phillip? It was all down to the models' boots: white, leather and thigh-high, with a flowery band around the top, they were inspired by traditional Greenlandic Kamik boots. Greenlanders felt that Jensen had copied their national costume and that this was disrespectful to their culture. There are only 55,000 of them living in a vast area, so you can sort of see why they're so fiercely protective of their national identity.

Last week (we're not sure why it took them so long to organise) around 40 women took to the streets of Nuuk in an official protest against the designer - according to Jensen, he even received a death threat.

There's no doubt that designers often take inspiration from different parts of the world. This season we've seen oriental touches like kimonos and obi on the catwalks, and there were plenty of tribal looks last season.

Jensen thinks the protesters may be particularly sensitive because he is Danish, and Greenland was a colony of Denmark until 1979. In an interview with vogue.com he said, "I am shocked that our loving tribute to Kamik boots and beadwork capes could be construed as in any way exploitative ... we hoped to bring the world's attention to the beauty of the Greenlandic national costume. We hoped that the people of Greenland would embrace the attention their heritage has received.

"The collection and the boots were made out of pure love and meant as a celebration from the trip which we went on in November. That I am now getting death threats is really taking this thing out of proportion."

All we're saying is that thanks to this furore, we've learned more about Greenland than we ever knew (or wished to know) before. If the people of Greenland wanted to raise awareness of their culture, they've gone about it in the perfect way.

Posted by Shona Lockhart, 27th March 2009

www.bluedogjewellery.com

Blue Dog Jewellery - Toy story

 

I always loved playing with lego as a child, as did my own children.  It's good to see that good design never goes out of fashion.  Despite the recession, this Guardian article shows how the lego brand is going from strength to strength.

 

 

Toy story

Never mind the recession - Lego is now so popular that there are 62 little coloured blocks for every person on the planet. Yet only five years ago this family business was on the brink of ruin. Jon Henley reports from the Danish town where it all began

Take a look at some of the greatest moments in Lego history

• 
• • Jon Henley
  • The Guardian, Thursday 26 March 2009
  • Article history

A model of Damien Hirst by The Little Artists, just one sign that Lego is cool again, and not just for kids. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

It's quite easy, wandering round the small town of Billund, to start believing in the existence of a Lego god. You can't help but feel a master intelligence is at work here - the place is so manifestly wholesome, the street plan so well ordered, the pavements so tidy. Unostentatious automobiles proceed slowly along all-but-empty roads, stopping politely for pedestrians nowhere near a zebra crossing. A jovial red-and-yellow Lego giant points towards the town centre; huge coloured bricks lie scattered as if awaiting deployment in some exemplary new civic amenity (except that, being Denmark, it's not immediately apparent what else the town might need).

I half-expect to be plucked from the pavement, brushed up a bit and plumped down in front of the smart rectangular building labelled Head Office: Lego A/S. My goal here is to find out how, in the teeth of global recession and barely five years since it was being read the last rites, one of the world's best-loved brands has come back from the dead. For Lego, born of an earlier and tougher depression, is positively revelling in this one: the little studded, primary-coloured bricks are selling like never before. In Britain alone, the company's turnover last year was up 51%.

Its home town, though, is a bit too much for some people. "I couldn't ever live here," admits Mads Nipper, who looks and - when it comes to plastic bricks - acts about 12, but turns out to be one of the company's executive vice-presidents. "I'm nuts about Lego, believe me; I eat, sleep and breathe the stuff. But there's a bit too much of it around here even for me."

I got my first Lego set at the age of five. Bits of it are still in a chest at my parents' house: a grey plastic base board, an assortment of rectangular red-and-white bricks, a few square ones, roof tiles, beams, a little door that opens and shuts, a red-framed window with three transparent panes, red wheels with grey rubber tyres. Exactly the same set is on display in the Lego Idea House in Billund, the front of the box adorned with a carefree 1960s kid in a home-knitted sweater who could almost, bar the unnaturally blond curls, have been me. Just along from that set, though, is a selection of Bionicles, fierce warrior-robots with strange Polynesian names who live on the mythical-mystical isle of Mata Nui and fight each other with an array of unwholesome-looking weapons. My boy, now eight, liked those a lot a while ago. Now he is more into the Lego Star Wars Magnaguard Starfighter, whose 431-piece complexities he (and I) spent many hours wrestling with over Christmas. That is on display in Billund, too.

Charlotte Simonsen, the company's spokeswoman, says more than 400 million people will play with Lego this year. After 50-odd years of production, there are apparently 62 Lego bricks for every man, woman and child on the planet. And most of us, I'd imagine, would say we felt pretty warmly towards these little chunks of injection-moulded acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. Some would go considerably further. Lego reckons it has maybe 250,000 Afols, or Adult Fans of Lego, around the globe. They gather for mammoth week-long conventions with names such as BrickFest, and vie with each other to build the World's Largest Lego Boat (14ft 7in long; 300,000 bricks), construct the Biggest Lego Train Layout Ever (3,343ft, and it ran through an entire Lego cityscape) or beat the Fastest Time to Build the Lego Imperial Star Destroyer (3,104 pieces; five builders maximum and no pre-sorting allowed; record: 1 hour 42 minutes 43 seconds).

There are enthusiasts out there who make animated film shorts using characters and sets built solely of Lego. A man called Brendan Powell Smith has built The Brick Testament - 2,000 scenes from the bible - using Lego. And half a dozen people are Lego Certified Professionals: company-accredited creative artists whose working medium is Lego. I'm not sure how many of them, mind you, awakened by some nocturnal commotion, have rushed bleary-eyed into their children's bedroom at dead of night and stepped on a Lego brick in their bare feet. Had they done so, they would surely have cursed Lego and all its works, and wished Ole Kirk Christiansen had never been born back in 1891.

Christiansen was the inventor of Lego; his descendants still own the company today. He was a journeyman carpenter, son of a farm labourer, one child among 13. Kirsten Stadelhofer, a Lego employee for more than 30 years ("Plenty of people here," she says, "do 40.") tells me Ole Kirk's story. In 1916, he bought a small workshop, the Billund Maskinsnedkeri. In it he produced furniture, tools, stepladders, ironing boards, footstools, and, sometime in 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, toys. To cheer the children up, he said.

Christiansen was by all accounts a good man, bespectacled, balding, universally liked. In 1934 he decided his growing company needed a rather catchier name than Billund Maskinsnedkeri and alighted on Lego, a contraction of the Danish leg godt, or play well. (It can also be construed to mean "I put together" in Latin.) At that stage he and his half-dozen employees turned out brightly coloured wooden cars, fire engines, pullalong chickens and quacking ducks. Christiansen was smart: when a 1930s yo-yo craze died, he sawed his stock in half. Each yo-yo made two wheels for a toy truck.

Quality was the watchword. Det beste er ikke for godt was his motto, or (roughly), Not even the best is good enough. Once, when his son Godtfred, who had worked in the factory since he was 12 and would eventually take it over, boasted that he had saved money by applying only two coats of varnish to a batch of toy ducks rather than the usual three, Christiansen made him go back and rectify his error, through the night, on his own.

"Lots of people," says Stadelhofer sternly, "might say that since it is only for children, it doesn't have to be well made. Ole Kirk thought that since it was for children, it could never be good enough."

In 1947, Lego bought Denmark's first injection-moulding machine and began making toys with some plastic components; its first big 100% plastic hit was a model Ferguson tractor, produced for Christmas 1951. Then, in 1949, Christiansen came across some intriguing English-made plastic building blocks called Kiddicraft, designed by a Hilary Harry Fisher Page, with little round studs on the top. Inspired, Lego started producing its own Automatic Binding Bricks.

The Lego System of Play - how virtuous it sounds now - was launched, to widespread indifference, in 1955. It consisted of 28 building sets, eight vehicles, various supplementary components, all interchangeable (as they still are; Lego bricks from the 1950s connect with their 2009 counterparts). The problem was, none of it really stuck together: the bricks were hollow.

After much painful experimentation, Godtfred, by now vice-president, patented the studs-and-tubes mechanism that made the system stable in January 1958. A toy that grasps simply, brilliantly even, what millions of children (and their parents) want, that today sells seven sets a second and has twice been named Toy of the Century, was born.

It would be nice to say Lego hasn't looked back since, but it wouldn't be true. At first, it did seem as if the company could do no wrong. In 1962, it expanded fast and furiously into Sweden, Belgium, France, Britain, America. The first Legoland, in Billund, opened in 1968, drawing an unprecedented 625,000 visitors in its inaugural summer to somewhere even the locals concede is quite a long way from anywhere.

To Lego City (the original town plan with its streets, houses, fire and police stations, unchanged in essence since 1955) were added Lego sets themed around space, robots, vikings, castles, space, the wild west and pirates - the first even remotely unfriendly looking Lego mini-figures, unshaven and scowling and carrying (heavens!) weapons. Then in the 1990s came the licensed products: Star Wars, Harry Potter, Bob the Builder, SpongeBob SquarePants, Indiana Jones. And then things started to go awry.

"We'd lost sight of what we were good at," says Simonsen. "There were other reasons too: the market was changing fast, children were getting older younger, computer games were really taking off. But basically, we'd got into movies, clothes, software games, own-brand stores, theme parks from Windsor to California - all non-core stuff that was absorbing vital management capacity. We'd moved far, far away from what we did well."

Suddenly, unthinkably, Lego was losing money. And not in a small way: after several years of increasingly heavy losses, in January 2004 the company reported a record deficit of Dkr1.4bn (£144m). Crippling debts amounted to more than Dkr5bn. There was fevered speculation that the Christiansen family (now, confusingly, spelled Kristiansen) would be forced to flog it, or large parts of it, to some all-American, plastic-fantastic interloper such as Mattel. All Denmark mourned.

Instead, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, Ole Kirk's grandson, took a deep breath and appointed a 36-year-old former McKinsey's management consultant called Jorgen Vig Knudstorp to dismantle Lego's sprawling house brick by brick, then put it back together again. Assets, including the Legoland theme parks, were sold. Whole product lines (particularly those for girls, with whom Lego has always had trouble engaging) were axed. More than 1,000 of the company's 3,500 jobs in Billund went, a shocking experience for a town whose pristine, ultra-automated factories produce some 36,000 Lego elements every minute - but one that seems, astonishingly, to have been accepted.

"This town isn't just about Lego any more, you know," observes a woman who asked to be called just Birgita, perching her youngest son on the back of her bicycle outside the supermarket. "It hasn't been for a long time. We're proud of Lego, certainly, but there are lots of other companies, lots of other jobs here now. The good thing was that all that happened when the rest of the economy was still in quite good shape. Heaven knows what it would have been like today, with half the world collapsing."

In two days in Billund I didn't meet anyone who felt Lego had behaved badly during the bad times. People were were looked after, retrained, and found other jobs. "In fact now we're doing well again, lots have come back," says Stadelhofer. "It's sounds like a cliche but really, Lego is a family."

It does feel a bit like that. The factories and packing centres may be operated largely by robots and automatic cranes, shuttling noiselessly between moulding machine, warehouse and sorting station with trays of green cacti, grey pirate swords and translucent spaceship windshields, but elsewhere gangs of cheerful Danish women pack boxes, engineers in white coats check tolerances - accurate, they say, to within 0.0002 of a millimetre - and the canteen at lunchtime is a warm uproar. The creative labs, though, are strictly off-limits.

Five years after reporting its heaviest ever loss, Lego last month said its net profit for 2008 had soared 32% to DKr1.35bn, on sales up a healthy 18.7%. Part of this recession-busting feat, Nipper concedes, is down to the fact that in times of trouble, consumers - in this case, parents - turn to "the well-known, the safe, the durable. Lego may not be the cheapest toy, but parents know it has stood the test of time, it will last years, provide hours of quality play, represent good value for their hard-earned money".

But also, he insists, Lego is cool again for kids. "Kids are ruthless little bastards," he says, only half in jest. "If they don't like the product, then at the end of the day the best marketing and distribution and all the rest of it won't make any difference. All you'll be doing is controlling the damage. What counts, all that counts, is that you're at the top of kids' wishlists. Which is, now, where we are again."

How to stay there, though, amid the combined onslaught of PlayStation and Xbox and Nintendo? It won't be easy. Nipper says Lego is confident children will continue to play with physical toys, although the company is active in the world of virtual play: an independent partner develops and markets successful console games based on Lego's Star Wars and Indiana Jones ranges, and Lego itself will be launching a children's MMOG - massively multiplayer online game - called Lego Universe next year.

Its ultimate goal, though, is somehow to integrate physical and virtual play. It is part of the way there: the website factory.lego.com allows you to download simple 3D design software, create a Lego toy online, then order the parts to build it; and there's a pretty funky robot, Mindstorms, for older children and adults, which communicates wirelessly with your computer and can be programmed to climb stairs, say, or select only the green M&Ms from a pile.

But Nipper dreams of a "seamless melding" of two interrelated worlds: a day when playing with a physical toy in a bedroom will somehow change its characteristics in an online multiplayer game, for example. Or vice versa. "Imagine," he says, "if kids were telling their playmates: 'Hey! Guess what! If you clip a set of shoulder pads on to this guy, he gets three times as many strength points online!' That would be the holy grail. But we're not there yet."

In the meantime, Lego is looking to a completely new venture. A British designer, Cephas Howard (who previously worked at the Guardian) has overseen the development of a series of 10 games, made mostly of existing Lego bricks and other components. First, you have to build them. Then, once you've played them, you can tinker with the board (by rebuilding it differently) or the dice, and see how the game changes. They won't be out until August, and much surrounding them is still secret. But the one I played with Howard in an office in Billund was an absolute cracker, based on the Ludo "get to the middle" principle, but with some very neat additions.

"When I was a kid," Howard says, "I had two passions: Lego and boardgames. Lego was great for imagination and creativity, but it was a solitary occupation. Boardgames were great for socialising, but they're not very creative. It seemed to me that if you combine the two, you might be on to something."

Howard's games haven't been launched yet, but already they're hoovering up innovation prizes at leading toy fairs. That Lego god, I'd say, is smiling.

Staff at Lego have business cards with their details printed on a toy figure which looks like them. If only we could get these at the Guardian!

The Lego version of Barack Obama's presidential inauguration. More than a thousand tiny figures were created out of Lego bricks to be part of the festivities

Posted by Shona Lockhart, 26th March 2009

www.bluedogjewellery.com

Blue Dog Jewellery looks at Alice Palace's new designs

Our Blue Dog Jewellery logo designer, Alice Palace, has been working on some illustrations for the launch of the new market research website we have been designing for my translation company, The Language Factory. Check out her final designs at:

www.tlf-researchtranslation.co.uk

We really love our new website and hope you will too. 

Alice writes in her blog:

This is one of the illustrations that I have done for The Language Factory’s new website:

 

AND a couple more of the illustrations I’ve been doing for The Language Factory website:

Have a look at Alice's wonderful card designs on her website.  We think you will love them:

www.alicepalace.co.uk

Posted by Shona Lockhart, 15th December 2008

www.bluedogjewellery.com

Blue Dog Jewellery - Art Review

Bling went the strings of my heart

Rich and strange or luxurious ornament? Whatever your view, Klimt's work is now so valuable, it's near impossible to put on a full-scale show. Still, Tate Liverpool has tried...

• Laura Cumming
• The Observer, Sunday June 1 2008
• Article history

The biggest scrum is in the gift shop ... the Klimt exhibition in Liverpool. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design and Modern Life in Vienna 1900
Tate Liverpool, until 31 August

When Gustav Klimt's 1907 Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer sold for £73m two years ago, becoming the world's most expensive painting, the experts were as baffled as the rest of us. The press choked over the price per square inch - approximately £6,000 - while the auction houses cheered. But everyone else wondered how a Klimt could outsell a van Gogh or conceivably be more valuable than a Rembrandt.

These were - and remain - legitimate questions, not entirely answered by the fact that the portrait is practically made of money in itself, Adele's bony face inserted like a seaside cut-out into a dazzling gold and silver surface. 'Mehr Blechs als Bloch [more brass than Bloch],' wrote an early critic, with prophetic wit, for this turns out to be the crux. What is more important to Klimt in the end: rampant decoration or the human race?

This is the first comprehensive Klimt exhibition ever mounted in Britain. There have been glimpses in group shows, of course; posters of The Kiss have sold by the zillion and the Klimt look - glinting rectangles and squares proliferating in kaleidoscopic permutations - is as ubiquitous as William Morris wallpaper. But anyone interested in Klimt's true value, in actual Klimts, should try and get to Tate Liverpool.

Like William Morris, Klimt is easy on the eye, his work shading into applied arts and crafts; like Morris, he believes in smocked artisans making everything from friezes to textiles. But unlike Morris, Klimt has no politics to speak of; in fact, he hardly ever speaks. In one of his few written statements, Klimt says whatever he represents is all in the work.

The work in Liverpool - more than 60 paintings and drawings - is weird, warped, gilded, excessive, pornographic, morbid and sometimes tender. It is also tense and constrained, with all the whiplash nervousness of its Art Nouveau extraction. It epitomises fin-de-siècle Vienna.

Look at Salome, with her bared breasts and beauty spot, face decadently wasted. The eye runs up and down her body, hemmed in between long golden columns, following the whorls and curlicues of breast, hair and gown, before you notice with horror that it is not a swathe of opulent cloth but a decapitated head that dangles from her manicured claw.

Look at Ria Munk on her Deathbed, Klimt's paint a flawless maquillage from cheek to lip; she's not so much dead as modelling his sense of style. Or look at the celebrated Beethoven Frieze, several hundred feet of it especially recreated for this show, supposedly illustrating the theme of man's struggle for joy. What you see, aside from many palely loitering figures, are three naked Kate Mosses with enormous hair, a gigantic, bug-eyed ape, enough costume jewellery to furnish a panto and a knight whose armour glints like a rapper's medallion.

It is a pile-up, an overload, this trove of treasure literally glued to the surface, and even the concise draughtsmanship cannot keep it in check. It is often said that the knight is like a Byzantine saint - face entirely haloed with gold - but the update is more anomalous than transcendent. This is the characteristic dichotomy of Klimt's art, this tension between figuration and decorative flatness, background vying with - and often overwhelming - foreground.

In Liverpool, the evolution of Klimt's style is well elucidated. He begins like any old Symbolist, all pale nudes, allegorical gardens and undertones of sex. He has a John Singer Sargent period - efficient society portraits - and a Whistler phase of women in white, and then the furnishings slowly disappear. You can just about see the chair on which Viennese hostess Marie Henneberg is lolling, a purple haze of violets at her throat, but 10 years later Eugenia Primavesi is sitting on nothing but proliferating pattern.

Once you spot an influence, you see them everywhere - Monet in the landscapes, then Seurat; Munch in the hunched and syphilitic striplings; Beardsley in the graphic precision of the figures, with their sinuous, unfurling rhythms. Even towards the end of a comparatively short career (he died of a stroke at 55 in 1918) some of his girls are still wearing Pre-Raphaelite daisies in their hair.

And in a way, this eclecticism is pure Klimt, piecing a picture together in gilded mosaics, stuffing it with all the luxuries of world art from the spiritual to the sensual, melting solid flesh into fantastical ornament, rich and strange and, in his strongest works, vividly disorientating. What shape are these nymphs, are we in water or air, what's in front of what, what is this strange hybrid of whale and peacock?

Tate Liverpool has a proportion of the fantastical, glowing images, both drugged and yet somehow hyper-alert, that became so popular in the psychedelic Sixties. It also has an isolated gallery of erotica you might wander through without quite noticing what these nude models are up to on Klimt's couch, so delicate and incomplete are the drawings.

But anyone visiting the show to see Klimt, and only Klimt, will have to make a protracted effort to keep him in sight. For the curators have organised the show by collector rather than period or theme, reconstructing the boudoirs of Klimt's Viennese clients all the way from the marble walls to the filigree trinkets. They argue that Klimt thought patrons as important as artists and that any painter who believed the frame was as significant as the painting would not have made a distinction between art work and object; which is true, but a damaging principle. For what it means is a preponderance of society portraits and cigarette cases, of photographs showing where some Klimt was positioned in the Wittgenstein family home, but instead of the Klimt, the coalscuttle.

Of course one understands that the price of the Bloch-Bauer has distorted the market to such a degree that insurance costs for a full-scale Klimt show would be prohibitive. It is also true that a case could be made for Klimt as the ultimate consumerist painter, maker of luxury items. But even this would have to present the furthest reaches of his work, stinted here, where the paintings metamorphose into something more like outlandish precious minerals in their own right.

Still, this is more of Klimt than we have seen all together before and it includes some startling images, not least the landscapes he painted in the final years that are streaming towards total abstraction. And perhaps there is some visible connection, after all, between the avant-garde clothes designed by Klimt's companion Emilie Floge, shown here in their radiant sequins, patches and stripes, and the smothering opulence of his most radical paintings.

Blue Dog Jewellery recommends Angie Lewin

 

Angie Lewin is one of my favourite print designers and will be exhibiting her latest limited edition prints at Cambridge Contemporary Art Gallery from Friday 30th May until Sunday 22nd June. For full details check out the gallery's website:

http://www.cambridgegallery.co.uk/artists/prints/angie_lewin/

Angie Lewin was born in 1963.

She studied Fine Art Printmaking at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design (1983-86), followed by a year on a part-time postgraduate printmaking course at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts.

Angie Lewin's current work is based on the plant forms, especially seed heads, seen against sea and sky, on her walks on the North Norfolk coast. She is concentrating on linocut and wood engraving. She prints relatively small editions of rarely more than 35.

Angie Lewin is a member of The Printmakers' Council.

Blue Dog Jewellery visits Top Drawer Spring at Earls Court, London

After my successful visit to the Collections Jewellery Show this morning I then attended the Top Drawer Spring Exhibition at Earls Court to see the latest in jewellery design and all design-led products. It has been a busy day but well worth the trip as yet again I was so impressed by the wealth of design talent at the show.  Having visited Top Drawer Autumn last year I was sure that there would be something of interest at the Top Drawer Spring show and with over 800 innovative designers to choose from I was not disappointed.  In fact there was too much choice so, regrettably, I had to only focus on items of interest to blue dog jewellery such as jewellery (jewelery) of course, greeting cards, jewellery boxes and packaging.