Ginny & Jude Designs

For The Love Of...The House of Eliott

11/2/2014

Remember The House of Eliott? I sure do. Originally released on the BBC in 1991, I imagine it probably screened in Australia a few years later - probably 1993 if memory serves.

As a child, being allowed to watch TV was a rare treat and this Sunday evening program with its jaunty violin theme song and billowing silk across the credits was one of only a few that wasn't a nature documentary. As you can imagine it was the highlight of our viewing week! My mum has even kept a letter my brother wrote to her (delivered by me), pleading he be allowed out to watch it with us even though he had been sent to his room hours earlier!

Centered around the trials and tribulations of sisters Evie and Beatrice Eliott as they establish their London Fashion house in the 1920s, this rather earnest period drama probably kick-started my deep and enduring love for the genre with it's fabulous clothes and strong female characters.

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Three Cheers

9/11/2013

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Today would have been my fathers 70th birthday; I am in Melbourne, staying with his wife in their home to celebrate regardless. There will be much laughter and gladness through the tears, along with copious cake and champagne

At the Yarra Boathouse in Melbourne, 2008

As a young session musician before the beard and long hair, 1960s

My father passed away last September; just shy of his 69th birthday and not a day passes by where he doesn't slip into my thoughts at some point. As he was a musician, my family and I and every one of those who loved him (and there were many) are fortunate to have the most beautiful and resonate mementos to remember him by. His poetry put to music remains behind on this earth forever; tender wisps of a life that was.

In those last days before he dropped the body, his dear friend Guy Blackman of Chapter Music (you can read his heartfelt tribute in Mess + Noise here) was a constant bedside companion finalising the details of what would become a posthumous retrospective of collected recordings from a lifetime of songs; In The Doorway of the Dawn. It is an immeasurable comfort to have these to conjure him beside me at any time.

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For The Love Of...Howards End

28/9/2013

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I got an early start on my passionate, romantic love for all things Edwardian. I was already an ardent fan of the carrot-topped Anne Of Green Gables (and therefore all things puffed-sleeved and early 1900s) when my mum asked my brother and a 9 year old me if we would like to go for a walk by the River or to go and see a film. If anything, this question says much of our love for walking; but on this occasion, we chose the film. Off we trotted to the city to the bright shiny lights of the George Street cinema complex.
The film we watched that Sunday afternoon was Howards End; the Merchant Ivory film adaptation of the E.M. Forster novel..

The sisters Schlegel

That afternoon would go down as a seminal moment in my childhood. This was no Anne-with-an-'e', this was something completely different - this was the murky world of adults; of lies, corruption, beauty, longing and ultimately death. I vividly remember with crushing terror the climactic scene where the bookcase slowly falls on Leonard Bast - the final moments of an already broken man; the gorgeous scene where Leonard walks through the night to see the countryside and finds dawn in a field of bluebells; the fiery shrewish pride of Helen Schlegal (a young Helena Bonham Carter) with her messy, curly pouffe of Gibson Girl hair; the thwarted kindness of her sister Margaret (a radiant Emma Thompson)

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For The Love Of...The House of Eliott

Three Cheers

For The Love Of...Howards End

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