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The rooms that were impossible to photograph - part II🪞 A while ago I talked about how difficult the tiny Turret Room at...
08/09/2026

The rooms that were impossible to photograph - part II

🪞 A while ago I talked about how difficult the tiny Turret Room at Syon House was to photograph. Mirror cabinets would have to be near the top of my list of interiors that are hardest to shoot and retouch. Every wall, angle and reflection seems determined to put me back into the photograph.

✨ Behind the headache is one of the most extravagant traditions of the German Baroque. Mirrors were enormously expensive, making them an unmistakable display of wealth. These cabinets were tucked into private apartments, intimate spaces within the court, yet their decoration could be elaborate. Access itself could be a privilege.

🏛️ The tradition was not simply French. Early mirror cabinets appeared in several European courts, while Venetian glass became prized. Catherine de Medici’s sixteenth-century cabinet des miroirs, for example, contained 119 Venetian mirrors. By the early eighteenth century, German courts had developed the form into a distinctive palace interior, combining mirrors with carved frames, stucco, gilding and tiny consoles for porcelain and other treasures.

🪞 What makes them so fascinating is that the mirrors became part of the architecture. Walls were divided into mirrored panels framed by ornament, while brackets and consoles were integrated into the composition to display porcelain, faience, miniatures and precious objects. At Würzburg, the idea reached a high level of refinement, with painted and engraved decoration worked directly onto the backs of the mirrors.

👇 Here are some of my favourites:

1-3 The mirror cabinet in the Ansbach Residenz Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung

4-6 The mirror cabinet in Würzburg Residenz Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung

7-9 The mirror cabinet in the Munich Residenz Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung

10-12 The mirror cabinet in Falkenlust Schlösser Brühl

13-14 The mirror cabinet in the Bayreuth Eremitage Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung

🏺The staircase that leads to ancient Greece🏛️ The Staircase Hall at Spencer House is one of those interiors where the jo...
01/09/2026

🏺The staircase that leads to ancient Greece

🏛️ The Staircase Hall at Spencer House is one of those interiors where the journey matters as much as the destination. Begun under John Vardy and altered by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart after 1758, the staircase leads from the Palladian ground floor into the Neoclassical State Rooms above, turning the act of ascending into a carefully staged encounter with antiquity.

🇬🇷 Stuart transformed the upper part of the hall into an imagined Greek temple. Columns are linked by garlands as if prepared for a festival, while the barrel-vaulted ceiling completes the illusion. Above the landing, Vardy’s great Palladian window remains, creating a fascinating dialogue between the architecture of the two men, and between Palladian Rome and Stuart’s newly discovered Greece.

🪨 Even the underside of the landing carries the story further. Its richly carved timber soffit is based on published drawings of the Roman ruins at Palmyra in Syria, while Stuart replaced Vardy’s original Roman-style brackets with flat supports decorated with a Greek fret. Ancient Rome and Greece were therefore assembled into a new eighteenth-century architectural language.

🎭 Then comes the optical trick. The delicate metal balustrade is painted to resemble luxurious fabric festoons, creating a trompe-l’œil effect in which something that looks soft and textile is actually fretted metal. The present decoration was recreated during the 1980s restoration using evidence from the surviving original paint layers.

🕯️ Hanging above the staircase is an extraordinary Venetian gilt repoussé copper and bronze lantern, traditionally believed to have come from the Bucentaur, the ceremonial state barge of the Doges of Venice. Its presence adds another layer to an interior already built from fragments of different antiquities, cultures and architectural traditions.
Spencer House

🏺Four years later, I finally got inside🏛️ Yes, I’m back at the Munich Residenz after four years. Large historic museums ...
31/08/2026

🏺Four years later, I finally got inside

🏛️ Yes, I’m back at the Munich Residenz after four years. Large historic museums constantly change their routes, reopen rooms and adjust their displays, and this time I had the wonderful surprise of finding a room that had been closed during my last visit. Four years ago, the Porcelain Cabinet was behind barriers. I had always wanted to see it properly, to get close to its gilded stucco and porcelain, so finally standing inside felt rather special.

✨ And the room has a fascinating secret: it was never designed as a porcelain cabinet.

👑 Created between 1726 and 1730 for Elector Karl Albrecht, the room was conceived by Joseph Effner and François Cuvilliés the Elder as the electoral treasury. Its walls displayed the Wittelsbachs’ hereditary and personal treasures inside mirrored glass cases, turning precious objects into part of the room’s decoration. In 1731, the family treasure was installed here. It remained until 1897, when it moved to the newly built Treasury. Since the early twentieth century, the former treasury has housed a selection of the Residenz’s internationally important European porcelain collection.

🪞 The architecture is just as extraordinary. The four gilded console tables were designed by François Cuvilliés around 1730 and carved in limewood in Munich. Their sculptural forms were made to carry precious objects, so even the furniture belongs to the original logic of the room: architecture, mirrors, furniture and treasures were conceived as one display.

🏺 Today the vitrines contain selections from the European porcelain collection, including Meissen, Frankenthal and Nymphenburg. Among them are pieces from the Perlservice made at Nymphenburg in 1792–95, the Vogelsservice from Frankenthal, a five-part Frankenthal vase set decorated with theatrical scenes, and Meissen figures based on models by Johann Joachim Kändler.

💛 Four years ago I could only imagine what this room looked like from behind its barriers. This time I could finally stand close enough to see the stucco, the gilding and the porcelain together. Some museum visits are worth waiting for.

30/08/2026

AWKWARD GUESTS? THEY HAD THEM TOO

🏛️ Over the last few days, I’ve been exploring some of the grander spaces I’ve encountered in Germany, but what has really caught my attention is what happens behind those formal rooms. Because court life wasn’t only about ceremony, etiquette and impressive interiors.

🚪 Princes and princesses also needed somewhere to retreat. Small writing cabinets, mirror cabinets and chinoiserie rooms offered more intimate spaces for reading, writing, conversation or simply getting away from the formality of court life. And discovering these rooms has been one of the most interesting parts of this trip.

🔟 This is exactly what I wanted to capture with this reel located in the New Residenz of Bamberg. As a photographer, I love that video allows me to take you with me through these spaces, not just show you the final room. You can follow the same transition I experienced, moving from the formal Audience Room of the Prince-Bishop’s Apartment into this much more private cabinet.

🪵 Created around 1707 for Prince-Bishop Lothar Franz von Schönborn, the Chinese Cabinet is one of the earliest surviving interiors of its kind in Franconia. Its walls combine elaborate wood panelling with chinoiserie lacquer decoration, alongside Chinese porcelain and highly crafted furniture. The panelling was made by court joiners Heinrich Sigmund Kempell and Andreas Bauer, showing the extraordinary level of craftsmanship at the Bamberg court.

📸 And don’t worry, we’ll get much closer to this room soon. There are so many details in the lacquerwork, porcelain, furniture and decorative arts that deserve their own carousel. This reel was really about experiencing the transition from public to private.

👀 If you escaped here, what would you do?
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Thank you to .bayern for this incredible opportunity 💙

THE SMALLEST ROOM, THE HARDEST PHOTOGRAPH📷 Photographing the Turret Room at Syon is a real exercise in spatial geometry....
25/08/2026

THE SMALLEST ROOM, THE HARDEST PHOTOGRAPH

📷 Photographing the Turret Room at Syon is a real exercise in spatial geometry. The room rises surprisingly high, yet occupies no more than roughly 8 square metres, leaving almost no physical distance to work with. Getting the whole composition into a single frame while keeping the architecture straight, the ceiling visible and the proportions intact was easily one of the trickiest photographs I made at Syon.

🏛️ Tucked into the end of Robert Adam’s 136-foot Long Gallery, this tiny bo***ir is entered through a concealed doorway within the library panelling. Even then, the entrance is not simply a single door: two further folding leaves adapt to the oval geometry of the room and its elaborate mouldings, creating an unusually secluded threshold. The arrangement offered maximum privacy and made the little room perfectly suited to the kind of intimate, one-to-one conversation for which these turret rooms were intended. Adam’s finished drawings for the turret rooms survive at Sir John Soane’s Museum, dating from c.1763–64.

🪨 The plasterwork is particularly important. Throughout Adam’s interiors at Syon, the stucco was executed by Joseph Rose, while the carving was carried out by Sefferin Alken and John Adair. Their work gives the room its extraordinary density, with mouldings, arabesques and classical ornament compressed into every available surface.

🕊️ And then there is the ceiling. Suspended from its centre is the remarkable gilded birdcage, associated with a mechanical singing-bird timepiece. It is a wonderfully characteristic Adamian conceit: architecture, ornament, entertainment and mechanical ingenuity brought together in a space barely large enough for a few people. The birdcage becomes the focal point of the domed ceiling, adding movement and spectacle to an otherwise intensely intimate interior.

🎨 Perhaps that is what makes the Turret Room so fascinating: almost every element was designed around the peculiar constraints of this tiny, elevated space. At Syon, even the smallest room was given the full architectural language of Robert Adam.
Syon Park - House and Gardens Syon Park

A TASTE OF THE STYLES AND LIGHT THAT STOPPED ME📷 Yesterday’s reel was a first glimpse at some of the places I discovered...
24/08/2026

A TASTE OF THE STYLES AND LIGHT THAT STOPPED ME

📷 Yesterday’s reel was a first glimpse at some of the places I discovered during these past fifteen days. Today comes the part that is, without question, my real passion: photography.

✨ So here is a little tasting of what I saw through my camera. Twenty rooms, twenty different ways of understanding light, texture, colour and space. I wanted to let the interiors speak through natural light, rather than simply record what was in front of me.

☀️ One of the great pleasures of this journey was being able to photograph with natural light throughout the palaces and museums I visited. I am incredibly grateful to the institutions and foundations who made this possible. It gave me hours to work with changing contrasts, from the softest low-contrast interiors to rooms where light became almost architectural in itself. I spent a great amount of time waiting, changing my position and watching the light shift across these rooms. Sometimes the photograph appeared immediately. Sometimes it took twenty attempts to find the exact balance between highlights, shadows, colour and detail.

🎨 Rococo could be luminous, delicate and almost weightless, or deeply dramatic when shadows took over. Empire interiors could carry the confidence and brilliance of an age of victory, or become darker and more solemn when thinking about the world that followed Napoleon’s fall.

✨ And then there were the details. Extraordinary Bavarian stucco, gilded surfaces needing just enough light to reveal their depth, and mirrors that turned photographing a room into a small battle against my own reflection.

🏛️ This is my way of tasting these interiors: through their style, texture and the way light reveals them.

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🔎 And now, the first photograph. Each slide will tell you exactly where it was taken and which room you are looking at.
1. White Hall, Würzburg Residenz. Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung

2. The state dining room in Augustusburg Castle. Schlösser Brühl

3. The summer dining room in Augustusburg Castle. Schlösser Brühl

4. The mirrors cabinet in Falkenlust Castle. Schlösser Brühl

5. The lower dining room in Falkenlust Castle.

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Bury St. Edmunds
IP333

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