Grampa came about through Taylor’s love of old grandfather clocks; Taylor loved these classic pieces but felt with today’s modern homes and limited hall space they needed to be redesigned and brought into today’s modern times. The end piece is a stunning and elegant streamlined version of a classic.
Photographer: FLORA HANITIJO
The convertible thing is relatively new to me. It’s a badge of honour in the car enthusiast world to look down on soft-tops. After all, with convertibles structural rigidity, light weight and handling finesse are sacrificed at the altar of seeing and being seen. Which perhaps more than anything speaks to the limited relevance of any of these dynamic qualities in the real world.
I think it helped that the first convertible I ever drove (perhaps five years ago) was an ancient VW cabrio belonging to my then girlfriend. It was red with a white vinyl roof, an erratic electrical system and an unshakeable smell of something like mildew mixed with a dead body. And it was hugely fun to drive. Things that in a car with a fixed roof would have been massively irritating (a radio that would play only one station, for example) simply added still more character. Somehow convertibles are able to transcend the limitations of the normal cars from which they are created, I think because each trip with the top down, no matter how mundane, is elevated by wind in the hair and a general sense of being more connected to the world outside.
It really isn’t that we didn’t want to embrace the digital world until now (doesn’t the word “digital” feel horribly outdated?). Instead the reason we’re just getting around to launching a real website for Orange Life, our print magazine that launched in 2004, is that we wanted to do something quite different from the traditional approach to online magazine content.
We’re beginning with something simple. As you’ll see the structure of our site is that of a blog. You’ll find daily content updates (sometimes multiple times a day) and our intention is less to be editors than it is to give our writers a context in which to write freely.
We’ve organized the editorial into five categories:
Art, Design, Architecture
Books, Music, Film
Fashion, Beauty, Style
Orange Life Things
Travel, Culture, Society
The labels are self-explanatory, but we encourage you to explore within each category. Virtually all articles are open to comments, and intelligent discussion and feedback is most welcome.
To be perfectly honest, we’re not sure yet who our audience will be, but we suspect it will be close to that of the printed version of Orange Life; that is, people who are interested in ideas for their own sake, and find style and substance to be perfectly compatible.
That’s all for now. Call it the start of the beginning if you like.
IMAGE
Living In London by Emma Hardy
