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In the tradition of the traveling Court Masters of the Renaissance, my career has been defined by a nomadic devotion to stone. To understand the soul of a cathedral or the strength of a fortress, one must not only touch the stone but walk the land from which it sprang. The Alpine Descent My journey…
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A Lineage Forged in Picardy In the late 1980s, my journey as a carver was anchored in the soil of the Somme and the historic regions of Picardy. To work on Amiens Cathedral is to be humbled; it is the largest Gothic structure in France, a vessel of “lacy stone” where I spent my days…
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When one walks through the hushed corridors of the Ashmolean Museum, the eye is naturally drawn to the masterpieces on canvas. Yet, for a carver, the true revelation often lies at the periphery. There is a particular frame within those walls—carved by the incomparable Grinling Gibbons—that serves as a silent testament to a level of…
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In my teachings and during our retreats, I often speak of the “architecture of the self.” This is not a metaphor I chose lightly. It is a philosophy I learned with my own hands while working on the great monuments of the English Renaissance—buildings designed by the masters Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren. The…
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As a child in the aftermath of the Second World War, my world was defined by the jagged geometry of the City’s bomb sites. To most, these were merely ruins; to me, they were my first playgrounds. I climbed through the exposed foundations and scorched timbers of a London that had stood since the Great…
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There is a particular kind of stillness that settles over a historic building site before the public arrives—a brief window where the dust of the masons and the precision of the architecture exist in perfect, silent alignment. Looking back on the year 2000, while working as Head of Masonry and Conservation with St Blaise Ltd…
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To understand the 2005 commission for the Cannes and Perpignan centres, one must look further back to the foundations of my practice in Knightsbridge, London. It was there, while attending to the residential requirements of Middle Eastern royalty, that I first refined the application of “The Renaissance Proportion” for a discerning elite. Serving a royal…