My hostess, Joanna Bird, had just taken off her uncomfortable bat wings when she opened the door of her Chiswick home, but blood-or something very like it-still trickled from the neck of Deborah Lanyon, an artist whose abstracted landscapes were on the walls.
I'm not a great one for Halloween, more of an American than British festival, but this one, I thought as I rustled through the brown leaves of the plane trees carpeting the pavements of west London, was going to be good. I wasn't disappointed. All was warmth and colour, in a house that's also a ceramics gallery. One guest arrived with a pair of splendid Hungarian Vizsla dogs: bulls may not get on well in china shops, but they only added to the decorative spirit of the occasion.
In the garden, a kinetic sculpture by the artist Rupert Newman blazed like a display of enormous jewels against the black velvet of the night. Seven large disks were illuminated by video images, each different, always changing, snatched visually from details around London. The technical challenge lies in exactly aligning the projectors. More curiosity, if less colour, comes on Monday, when Joanna opens an exhibition of Steffen Dam's glass, a shorthand for which might be jellyfish in jars, at Browse and Darby in Cork Street. I can't wait.
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Rodel House: The Georgian marvel in the heart of the Outer HebridesAn improving landlord in the Outer Hebrides created a remote Georgian house that has just undergone a stylish, but unpretentious remodelling, as Mary Miers reports. Photographs by Paul Highnam for Country Life.
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380 acres and 90 bedrooms on the £25m private island being sold by one of Britain's top music producersStormzy, Rihanna and the Rolling Stones are just a part of the story at Osea Island, a dot on the map in the seas off Essex.
