Wellington Kicks the Candy Brothers off the Number One Spot

Nick and Christian Candy are landlords of London’s most exclusive residence.  The most expensive penthouse apartment in this most expensive block of flats has just been sold for £140,000,000. The address? One Hyde Park.

It has been four years in the building. A four year traffic jam from Hyde Park Corner to the Cromwell Road while the Candys' exclusive drills and acclaimed cranes assembled the legendary girders and struts of this iconic residence. (You must visit the website: it’s a marketing masterpiece.)

From where I sit (on the unfashionable side of the park) I cannot fathom the appeal of living above a tube station, in a building that will be empty for much of the year (too many nights in the penthouse will attract the attention of the Revenue,) with only despots, oligarchs and arms traders for company.

Besides, it’s only the second best address in the capital. Five minutes up the road is Apsley House which trumps the Candys in the postcode lottery with the address 'Number One, London.'

It is a beautiful and under-visited house. Originally built in the 1770s by architect-entrepreneur Robert Adam for Henry Bathurst, 1^st Baron Apsley, it was sold to the Wellesley family in 1807. In 1817, feeling flush after the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington bought the house from his brother and set about renovating and enlarging the property with the help of architect Benjamin Dean Wyatt.

Wyatt ripped out much of the original Adam decoration and replaced Adam’s delicate vines and painted medallions with a bolder, brasher scheme: lots of gold and cream, lots of silk and velvet, and a superabundance of mirrors, crystal and general glitter. As a final mark of victory over the French, Wellington appropriated the decorative style of Versailles and Napoleon’s Malmaison for his London town house.

Mementoes of Wellington’s success hang on every wall and much of the collection is post-battle booty. There’s an ugly portrait of Napoleon, looking tubby and toad-faced, by Robert Lefevre on the first floor and Canova’s larger-than-life statue of the Emperor (with its smaller-than-life fig leaf) glowers in the stair-well. 

The Waterloo Gallery houses 165 paintings from the Spanish Royal Collection, discovered in the luggage of Joseph Bonaparte, as he tried to make a run for it after the Battle of Vitoria.

Robert and John Adam were the Candy Brothers of their day. They built big, they built expensive and they built for the super rich. But will One Hyde Park one day be preserved for a grateful nation by English Heritage? I don’t suppose so. There can only be one number one.  

Olympia in Vogue

When Edouard Manet exhibited Olympia at the Paris Salon in 1865 she was the scandal of the season. Manet’s courtesan with her grubby heels, downy underarms, and boyish hips horrified a public accustomed to insipid Venuses painted with convenient waves and lustrous locks to protect their modesty. If Venus was the pearl of the oceans, Olympia was the bit of grit.

The critics were vitriolic. ‘Her face is stupid,’ remarked one, ‘and her skin cadaverous.’ She was ‘prematurely aged and vicious’ and ‘the body’s putrefying colour recalls the horror of the morgue.’ Warming to the deathly theme, another wrote that Olympia looked as if she were ‘dead of yellow fever and already at an advanced stage of decomposition.’

Particular bile was reserved for the thin trail of dark hair running from Olympia’s breast bone to her navel. The Salon had to appoint two wardens to stand sentry over the courtesan protecting her from the raps of angry canes.

Olympia is a memorable figure. She is sullen and bored, but sensuous. Her nakedness is carefully accessorised: backless mules trimmed with pale blue fringing, a gold bangle, pearl earrings, a thin black ribbon for a necklace and a pink carnation tucked behind her ear. What she is wearing is more interesting than what she isn't.

Which is why, when I saw the January issue of Vogue, I didn’t think Keira, I thought Olympia. There’s something familiar about the pose, uncomfortably propped on one elbow, with the shoulder slightly forced back. But more than the pose, it’s the necklace. It’s such an unusual choice – chokers haven’t been in vogue (capital V or small v) since the nineties – and such a curious combination of Olympia’s choker and pink carnation.

Vogue got their headline wrong. Keira Knightly: Renaissance Girl? How about: Keira Knightly: Modern Impressionist?