ALTERNATIVE TO WINDOWS BLINDS

Grade II listed. Materials: Stock brick in Flemish bond, facades and return to No 14 stuccoed. Extensions to rear in red brick. Late C19 tile-hanging to rear second-floor elevations. Slate roofs.

No 14 (Clarence House)
PLAN: Three storeys and two bays. Plan of main house rectangular, comprising entrance hall with stair to rear, front and back room to each floor.
EXTERIOR: Shallow porch to left bay carried on pair of Doric columns. Mid C19 Gothic door with glazed panels. Large curved bay window with three sashes divided by pilasters. Moulded architraves to windows. Six-over-six pane sashes. Sun Insurance plaque on first floor. Parapet with moulded cornice. Hipped roof. Later windows on ground and first floor of side elevation. Rear elevation has tripartite sash windows.
INTERIOR: The ground floor front room has a curved corner on return to rear hall. The hall and first-floor landing have plaster modillion cornice. The stair rises, in two separate flights, and has slender turned newels, stick balusters and mahogany handrail. The interior retains early-mid C19 joinery, including door and window architraves, shutters, skirtings, with some later C19 and C20 replacements. There is very little visible evidence of early C18 fabric, although a section of full-height panelling in the second-floor rear room may be of this period.

No 16 (Adelaide House)
PLAN: Three storeys and three bays. The plan comprises a rectangular frontage block with rear wing on N side forming L-plan. Frontage block comprises off-centre entrance hall with one room to either side, and with stair to the rear. The rear wing appears originally to have been two storeys, with a second floor added in C19. There is a two storey extension to rear of this wing, with a further single storey range extending to W.
EXTERIOR: The porch is placed slightly off-centre to right, with pilasters and side windows with margin-light sashes. Six-panel door. Moulded architraves to windows. Six-over-six pane sashes. Hipped roof behind parapet with moulded cornice. Rear elevation: Ground and first-floor windows to the main house are blocked. Second-floor stair landing has sash window with coloured margin lights. The late C19 windows to the second floor are raised above parapet level. C20 brick toilet extension in angle of house and rear wing.
INTERIOR: Doors to ground-floor rooms, and entrance, of main house have reeded architraves with corner rosettes. Plaster modillion cornice to hall and first-floor landing. The dog-leg stair with winder to turn has slender turned newels (that to ground floor replaced), stick balusters and mahogany handrail. The interior retains much early-mid C19 joinery, including six-panelled doors, door and window architraves, some plaster cornices and ground and first floor, shutters, skirtings, and chimneypieces, some with original grates. Later C19 cornice to upper floor S room; that to N room modified.

HISTORY: The houses occupy the site of a pair of cottages, possibly of C17 or earlier date. No 14 is thought to have been built on the site of the northern cottage in 1728. In 1834 the cottage to the south was sold, and a new house built on the site the following year, believed to be No 16 Park Road. It is possible that the remodelling of No 14 took place c1842, when the two properties were in one ownership.

SUMMARY OF IMPORTANCE: Of special interest as pair of early-mid C19 neo-classical houses which retain their essential plan form, staircases and a number of original features. No 14 may contain earlier fabric from an C18 house. They are important survivals of the elegant houses built throughout the Georgian period when Teddington, like neighbouring Twickenham and Richmond, was an affluent, semi-rural retreat from London.

Photography for EP Album Cover by Ice Arrojado Basit

Two weekends ago, I had a really awesome time shooting pictures of the alternative rock band “Antimano”. One of their guitar players, Tati, is a close friend and she invited me to conceptualize the art for their album cover and leaflet. They are launching their EP this month, and I’m really excited for them.

Their album is called “Satellites” and as soon as I heard the word I wanted to interpret it almost literally. We did two sets…

The first idea was to capture the band as they seem to defy gravity, like satellites hovering above ground. I asked them to jump in sync over and over, set my shutter in burst, and picked the best moments that’ll make it to the final set.

The second concept was inspired by SaAha Goldberger’s serial work on “Grandma Mamika”. I found his collection quite amazing and knew I had to try that out after seeing it for the first time. So, I photographed the guys on ground, and later went around the location to shoot high-rise building exteriors. Later in processing, I placed the cropped photos against the building backgrounds, and recreated the shadows and reflections to make them appear as if they were actually standing or hanging out on the walls in mid-air.

To tie the two sets together with a coherent look, I applied “anamorphic” lens flares –the kind that J.J. Abrams used on the TV series Fringe, and the same kind of lighting found in the 2009 Star Trek movie. I learned that those flares weren’t visual effects at all; instead, they’re optical, quite real, and are achieved by placing cylindrical glass in front of the lenses. So no one really had a tutorial or Photoshop brush for recreating the effect digitally. I had to base my flares on a screenshot from an episode of Fringe, and slowly built the light fractions on top of it, layer by layer until I achieved a realistic flare. That was totally fun!

So here’s Antimano for you. Catch them during their EP launch at B-side, The Collective, Makati City on September 23, 2011.