A Spring Weekend...

With the sun blazing down and spring blossom flowering, it seemed a good reason to enjoy the beautiful Regents Park with a leisurely walk.


Although before we did that, I convinced Grigoria to check out the RIBA “Higher Education Design Quality” exhibition where my practice had 2 buildings (out of 180 entrants) selected for.


I mainly wanted to see the show as I’ve worked on both these buildings over the past 4 ½ years with the practice. It is nice to have my work showing along side 34 other distinctive buildings.

Once we’d seen enough of the show and browsed
through too many of the books in the RIBA bookstore, it was time for some lunch and Grigoria delivered a nice surprise with Villandry: http://www.villandry.com/

After the tasty French cuisine we then headed out into the London sun and discovered the many surprises of Regents Park.

Happy Birthday Cameron & Roslyn!!

Happy 6th Birthday Cameron for Sunday (15th) & 8th Birthday Roslyn for Wednesday (18th).

We hope you had fun playing with your friends on the new skate board and the sleep over was fun for you too Roslyn.


We’ll see you very soon.



Love Uncle Blair & Grigoria

Happy Birthday Maria...

The London weather chose to be on glorious form for Maria’s (Grigoria’s sister) birthday.
The sun was shining (temperatures reached a high of 25 degrees) but a nice breeze made sure we did not get too hot.

To celebrate the occasion Maria decided we should have some proper English afternoon tea (Blair was lobbying for a picnic in the park but to no avail).
The establishment of choice was The Tea Palace (http://www.teapalace.co.uk/).

The space was modern and simple with the emphasis being on the huge number of different tea varieties (the tea catalogue alone was around 15 pages long!) they offered.

We all chose the palace afternoon tea (yet again our eyes were bigger than our stomachs!) and everyone selected a different tea.


Everything was fantastic and the prize of most colourful tea choice went to Blair with a brightly coloured strawberry and raspberry tea!

Happy birthday Maria!!

Our Easter Weekend...

As the sun parted the clouds and delivered some great sunny weather, the Easter bunny delivered a fun packed weekend.

It really kicked off on Saturday with a few hours spent at Hyde Park with friends Olga, Geoff and baby Ellie.

Now Ellie has started walking they thought she should try to ride a small bike….the “Corn Popper” but instead she was more interested in playing football….she chased the ball around and wouldn’t let go of it!








Sunday morning started early with an Easter egg hunt around the flat, followed by a BBQ lunch / dinner with Olga & Geoff in afternoon.

As seen here Geoff & I are trying to get the BBQ going but after a good two hours of messing around we decided that the oven grill would do a better job!

With the sun blazing down again on Monday, it seemed a good reason to visit Richmond.
The initial idea was to have some lunch there along the river but once I saw that you could hire rowing boats I just had to get on the water!
After some negotiating to convince Grigoria that it would be fun, we were off with me doing all the work of course!

Well it may have not been quite the Cambridge / Oxford boat race speed or finesse but still our 40 minutes going up / down the Thames was good fun and more importantly Grigoria seemed to enjoy it too.

Later in the evening we cooked an Easter dinner for Maria & Alastair (Grigoria’s sister), and was very nice catching up with them.

All and all a fun weekend with good friends and great weather.