Architecture Wednesday: The Old Ballroom

Now this is how you do a ballroom, you know …

This home was once a ballroom in a former Edwardian hotel on Loughborough Road in south-west London before being renovated into an expansive three-bedroom, three-bathroom 1880 square foot apartment.

Originally conceived as a grand hotel for the urban expansion of Lambeth, the building is nestled among grand Victorian and Edwardian villas that were built to accommodate merchants and clerks leaving the smog of the city. It was also a salsa club and an acrobat arena before it was converted into apartments in 2008 all while retaining its original decorative scheme and grandeur.

Situated on the first floor—what we call the second floor in America—the apartment has an amplified sense of volume with soaring ceilings and a number of mezzanine levels, as well as a stuccoed dome that provides a focal point; the dome was recently repainted and wired with atmospheric up-lighting.

The open plan kitchen features a charming outdoor terrace paved with chequerboard flags and catches the south-facing sun. It has plenty of room for a table and chairs as well as pots full of herbs and flowers for the horticulturally inclined.

The main reception area opens up to a double-height space finished in a pastel palette while light floods into the space via expansive sash windows, which have recently undergone a full restoration to improve energy efficiency. A working fireplace provides a central point for the sitting room while the main floor includes an office, a full bathroom and adjoining bedroom currently used as a nursery.

Upstairs, on the left mezzanine, is the primary bedroom suite, with intricate decorative period plasterwork stretching out overhead and along the upper part of the walls. The room also has dual-aspect windows looking over the front and side of the street as well as an en suite bathroom with a large tub edged in Moroccan tiles, a vanity and water closet.

On the opposite side of the upper story is a second bedroom suite, with windows to the front, built-in storage space and a separate en suite.

As always, click to emBIGGERate …

The Spaces

Meme Dump

Miss Lindsey Is Dead

Well, well, well …♪♫ Ding Dong ♫♪ Lindsey Graham is dead. I saw lots of words about it on Facebook yesterday and kinda put it all together and do what he asked of America in 2016 when he said, on camera:

"Use my words against me."

And so these are some of his words … but first the facts: Miss Lindsey died Saturday night at his Washington home of what his office calls a “brief and sudden illness.” He served four terms, chaired the Judiciary and Budget committees, and spent decades as one of the loudest voices in American foreign policy.

First thing Sunday morning the stories came in … Cankles declared Lindsey a "true American Patriot" while fellow war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu said Lindsey was a beloved friend. But now let’s hear Lindsey Graham in his own words:

In December 2015, Graham called Cankles a "race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot."

In February 2016 he said: "I think he's a kook. I think he's crazy."

Also in 2016 he said: “There’s only one way to make America great again. Tell [him] to go to hell.”

In May he wrote: "If we nominate [him] we will get destroyed... and we will deserve it."

And he refused to vote for him. But then Cankles won the presidency and Lindsey Graham discovered golf and by late 2017 Lindsey was scolding the media for calling the president a “kook.” Not the first time his own words came back at him.

His best friend was John McCain, a man Cankles the Draft Dodging Bone Spur mocked for being captured in Vietnam and kept mocking even after McCain dead. Lindsey Graham wept for McCain on the Senate floor and then kissed the ass of the man who spat on McCain’s grave.

In response to Cankles remarks about McCain, Miss Lindsey said: “I don’t like what he says about John McCain but when we play golf, it’s fun.”

The words he wanted used against came in 2016, when he swore that if a Supreme Court seat opened in an election year, the next president should fill it; in 2018 he repeated the promise and added: "hold the tape." Then, in October 2020, as Judiciary chairman, he rammed Amy Coney Barrett onto the Court eight days before the election.

In November 2020, Georgia's Republican secretary of state said Graham had called him asking about tossing legally cast mail ballots. Graham lied about it and denied it, fought the grand jury subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, and lost.

On January 6th, with the glass still on the Capitol floors, doors still broken into pieces and insurrectionists’ feces still smeared on the walls, Lindsey Graham announced:

"Count me out. Enough is enough."

He was done with Cankles … but within months he was back at Mar-Illegal.

He cheered the country into war with Iraq and just three weeks ago he was on television promising that if diplomacy failed, Cankles was "going to take the Strait of Hormuz."

Graham infamously and shamelessly and relentlessly defended Cankles during corruption investigations, impeachment proceedings, rape trials, and manner of legal controversies, and was widely known as the biggest brown-noser in Washington.

Now, to be fair Lindsey was, at one time, a fair politician, working with both parties to get things done, and to the very end of his life, he was one of Ukraine's most reliable champions in the Senate. In fact, he died the day after standing beside President Zelensky in Kyiv. He will deserve some praise for that …

Still, during his Senate tenure, South Carolina has routinely ranked among the nation's worst-performing states in education, healthcare, poverty, infant mortality, and overall quality-of-life indicators. Miss Lindsey, long rumored to be a deeply closeted homosexual, was also a staunch opponent of LGBTQ+ rights.

We have Lindsey Graham to thank for that.

But how do you weigh that against a man who saw Cankles for exactly what he was, spoke of him as a bigot and a racist and a kook, watched him denigrate his best friend, even in death, and then spent over a decade bowing and scraping to a racist, fascist, con artist, grifter, thief and sexual predator.

Bless his heart.

The Funny Papers

Gary Huck, Lalo Alcaraz, Pedro X Molina, Jesse Duquette, Dennis Goris, Max Espinoza, Matt Davies, Dave Whamond, Daniel Boris, Bill Bramhall, Trevor Irvin, Barry Blitt,