I’ve been outside it, all around it. I’ve watched on TV as world events focused upon it. I’ve studied its influence in history; I know intimate details of the lives of almost every Royal who has gotten near it. I’ve Viewed inside many of their other homes, including Holyroodhouse several times. But I’ve never glimpsed this one. It never occurred to me anybody ever could. I’ve assumed, but never even dared imagine the reality, of the Palace’s potent history as a design imprimatur across 300 years. I never dreamed the extent to which wing after wing was built to absorb, encapsulate, and magnify, the earlier Royal residences: particularly Carleton House, Osbourne House, and most magnificently, the Brighton Pavilion. In fact, most of Buckingham Palace might be read as a huge over-scale museum to properly house and display, with eight feet of breathing-marble in between, the individual treasures that were all piled up together at Brighton. I watched each episode three times with delight, forwarding-and rewinding to re-view some dazzling woodwork or plaster, while Hicks’s reassuring God-is-an-Englishman voice droned in divine chant about Queen Charlotte, or John Nash, or how much George III hated Joshua Reynolds. You, Patient Reader, will do likewise.
Ashley Hicks was to the manner born: suave, plummy, learned, sharp, confiding, aloof. He’s an interior designer who grew up spending one day a year on the balcony watching the Queen troop the color — you can look up his genealogy on your own. It’s his eye that drew me; from the first moment of his introduction in his own STUNNING studio somewhere in Norfolk, one knew one was in the presence of an artist. Hicks as a photographer is a master class: he looks at space in a way that inspires and improves your own point of View. You get the impact of being in the whole room, from his focus on one tiny detail.
I’m sure that’s why the Queen gave him the run of the joint. His photos capture the essence of decorated interiors. The videos are a quiet, pleasant, sotto-voce stroll around some of the most extravagantly magnificent objets-d’art ever created. The Prince Regent’s Apollo-like rays illuminate the Royal Seat century after century. Victoria lets Albert’s (brilliant) art-tutor “Dr. Gruener” run riot, with astonishing results. Edward VII so despises his father’s exquisite Florentinism that he repaints the entire palace in white with gilded trim. [Sadly, it makes much of the Palace seem like a dowdy copy of the Plaza Hotel; a mushy mid-Lanticism.] Queen Mary renewed the exoticism with vigor, and it is amazing to realize that the room right behind the staid Imperial balcony where the Royal Family wave at their subjects, is a dazzlingly intimate little Chinese cabinet room re-assembled from Brighton, so sophisticated that it comes right back around to a homey kitsch. Viewing these rooms, grand as they are, makes the Royal Family seem immediately human, and completely daft. All those dragons! Sign me up!
This is the house that every other house in the world looks to for decorating tips. Equal time, means I must point you to Thorstein Veblen, in case you ever want to know what the Theory of the Leisure Class has to say about obsessive collecting and upper-class twits and conspicuous consumption in general:
The Valley Village View 