Private air travel: a guide
Country & Town House | 20 Oct 2020
Meet the people who can get you home in a hurry, says Caroline Phillips. Read on for the lowdown on private air travel.
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Create an at-home spa with Esther Cato Wellness
The Luxury Channel | 25 Sep 2020
If you want a masseur with magic fingers who’s bookable throughout the year, Esther Cato is your lady. It’s not just that this healer-meets-ultimate-stress-buster-meets-masseur is so available. It’s also that she’s so good. So thank your lucky stars that government restrictions have just lifted, and book to see Esther in your London home for a deep tissue therapeutic massage. Or bag her for a pregnancy massage. Or a Swedish one.
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Sam Ashton-Booth & The Outside Oven
Country & Town House | 23 Aug 2020
Sam Ashton-Booth is newly redundant, so his venture The Outside Oven gives a new meaning to Eat Out to Help Out, whilst also giving a new spin to home-cooked meals. Plus, in these uncertain times, his feasts costs far less than any Michelin meal in a restaurant. The average food spend at The Ledbury was £125 per head, without alcohol. Caroline Phillips tells us more…
View Web pageThe best post-lockdown services
Country & Town House | 1 Jul 2020
Expect everything from a deluge of divorces (those already unhappy couples who were holed up during the pandemic) through to a mass exodus to live in the countryside, far from the madding, (masked) crowd. Anticipate dealing with your tubby Coronatummy – and body hair (that’s you, ladies) – and possibly finding a new career too.
Here’s our guide to the top dozen services and practitioners for the next steps. Whether you’re after the world’s best off-Zoom yoga, the ultimate post-lockdown facial or mouth-watering new foodie experiences, read on.
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Escape to Fingask Castle – home of the Fingask follies
The Luxury Channel | 26 Jun 2020
It’s like disappearing down the best of rabbit holes and arriving at a Scottish baronial version of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. The skew-whiff clipped topiary on the sloping lawn looks as if it’s been cut by a drunken gardener or the March Hare; the 240-acre estate is dotted with water-sprouting mermaids, characters from Robert Burns, Robert Burns himself and Ossian, the mythical Scottish Bard. The Queen of Hearts must have shouted, “Off with their heads” because there are decapitated heads (AKA stone busts) on the garden walls.
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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.
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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.
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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 18th century Dutch painting, although the play takes place in East Anglia.
View Web pageElbows 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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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