Health Heroes

Country & Town House | 16 Apr 2020

Meet the people who will get you shipshape in mind, body and soul.

Deep under Regent Street, you’ll find yourself immersed in the Hotel Café Royal’s specialist Watsu pool with small floats attached to your shins. Here, Steve Karle guides you in an hour- long underwater dance of stretching, shiatsu, joint mobilisation and craniosacral work. You’ll feel weightless, and will leave the pool deliciously spaced out, your aches eased. Then you’ll bliss out again with the other parts of this Four Elements treatment: a body massage, hot stones and scalp massage.

• Health, Beauty & Spa

Hyderabad – The Weekender

Country & Town House | 4 Mar 2020

From high tech to a high fort. This is what you get in Hyderabad and Secunderabad the joint capital of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in India. It’s located between the Deccan Plateau and the Western Ghats. Hyderabad, the historic city, has Muslim monuments aplenty, thronging bazaars, and museums. Meanwhile, dear reader, Secunderabad – the modern admin city founded by the Brits – is of almost zilch interest.

• Travel: Asia/ Oceania

Theatre Review: The Welkin

Country & Town House | 3 Feb 2020

The opening scene of The Welkin, a world premiere by Lucy Kirkwood, is visually compelling. The audience is presented with what could almost be a bank of enormous television screens inside a broadcasting studio. But inside each frame, a live woman is doing housework: changing nappies, beating carpets. It’s not the only thing that makes this such an aesthetically pleasing play (with design by Bunny Christie). The sober and muted palette — of olive, fawns, creams – gives the feeling of walking into a Vermeer or 18^th century Dutch painting, although the play takes place in East Anglia.

• Culture

Elbows at the ready

Country & Town House | 1 Feb 2020

You can buy a new Jimmy Choo handbag for £130, a Belstaff parka for £150-£600 less than the RRP, or a Roland Mouret coat reduced by 85 per cent to £250. But this bargain world is accessible solely to those in the know. Luxury brands tell only a select few about the dedicated sample sale venues that aren’t in designer outlets and that typically discount by 50 to 75 per cent.

• Shopping & Fashion

Break for the Border

Country & Town House | 13 Jan 2020

I can’t keep away from Scotland. Yes, yes, I know it rains a lot. And if you go to the wrong place in summer there may be battalions of midges. And, OK, it’s true that far outside the cities a few still think that a vegetarian is someone who’s happy to eat oatmeal picked from the sheep’s liver and lungs of a haggis. But ah dinnae ken of many places I love more than Scotland.

• Travel: Europe/ Africa

The Weekender: 48 Hours in Cape Town

Country & Town House | 30 Dec 2019

The joys of Cape Town are legion: from its jaw-dropping setting below Table Mountain — one of the world’s natural wonders — to the Atlantic crashing beside it. With its virtually untouched coast that goes on forever (visitors are spoilt for beaches), thriving art and foodie scenes, winelands and buzzy energy, who cares, says Caroline Phillips, that it’s famously windy and grittily edgy, a dangerous city with a brash attitude?

• Travel: Europe/ Africa

Review: My Brilliant Friend at the National Theatre

Country & Town House | 9 Dec 2019

There are few more satisfying ways to spend five plus hours than in watching parts one and two of My Brilliant Friend, the stage version of Elena Ferrante’s publishing sensation, the Neapolitan Novels. April De Angelis has deftly condensed over 1500 pages into this two-part play (one book, one intermission, another book…twice) spanning nearly 50 years. Melly Still’s production combines a study of a close and complex female friendship with the backdrop of post-war Italy.

• Culture

Your family history on film

The Luxury Channel | 1 Nov 2019

I’m sitting surrounded by a pile of 31 of my mini DV camcorder tapes and 15 VHS ones. Bear with me. I know this doesn’t sound fascinating. But I am almost crying, actually. I’m the least techie person in the world. I do know that video is no longer, that it doesn’t exist, that it has gone in a puff of smoke to techie hell. And so I’ve lost access to hours of much-loved films of my kids in nursery school nativity plays, end-of-term concerts, my children at their first to 13th birthdays, that first swim, first tooth out…. You get the gist.

• Shopping & Fashion

The Weekender: 48 hours in South Africa’s Winelands

Country & Town House | 10 Oct 2019

The mountainous territory inland of Cape Town — known as the ‘Boland’ or ‘Uplands’ — boasts sandstone peaks, verdant rolling hills and beautiful valleys. It’s dotted with over 200 vineyards, producing globally renowned bottles. The Winelands area and its historic towns – Stellenbosch, Paarl, Tulbagh and Franschhoek, the self-styled culinary capital of South Africa – are known for a high concentration of stunning accommodation, from historical Cape Dutch through to sleek and contemporary. Its restaurants are among the world’s best, stellar eateries serving inventive farm and forage-to-fork cuisine.

• Travel: Europe/ Africa

Market Street Hotel Edinburgh

Our Man on the Ground | 24 Sep 2019

There are people doing a ‘silent walk’ wearing headphones, gesticulating wildly and singing Freddie Mercury songs in Edinburgh’s city centre. They’re pretending or believing that they’re on stage with Queen. Nearby there’s a man in a kilt playing bagpipes and someone else vying for airspace by strumming flamenco love songs on a guitar.

• Travel: Europe/ Africa

Escape to The Park in New Delhi

The Luxury Channel | 17 Jul 2019

‘Do not spit here’ and ‘Carrying tobacco products is prohibited,’ read the signs. This is the Gurdwara Bangla Sahib temple, New Delhi, India; a peaceful Sikh temple with acres of white marble and a gigantic holy bathing pool. Originally it was a bungalow for an important military leader of Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb. It’s as close to my hotel as, say, just 100 turbans rolled out end to end: call it half a mile. But let’s rewind. I’m staying in a hotel known for being Anything But Ordinary. There’s coconut juice, candies, comics and Wi-Fi in the hotel transfer car from Delhi airport. A welcome in the lobby by a sari-clad lady — with a dish of red powder on a rose-petal strewn copper tray — who places a marigold garland on me and a decorative Hindu bindi mark on my forehead. A lift with clouds on its walls and mirror on its ceiling: sort of Alice in New Delhi Wonderland.

• Travel: Asia/ Oceania

Escape to The Park Hotel Chennai

The Luxury Channel | 6 Jul 2019

Think of a place of dreams that transports the viewer. Imagine its being in the erstwhile location of Gemini Studios, a leading Indian movie studio. Then picture somewhere that has cinematic themes incorporated in its décor. This is the five-star art-concept THE PARK hotel, Chennai (Madras). Its grand atrium is like walking on set, with its ‘stage’ the seating area — as if guests are part of the performance — plus there’s a huge screen onto which movie images are projected silently as dusk falls.

• Travel: Asia/ Oceania