Island Follies: Romantic Homes of the Bahamas presented by Alastair Gordon

Hello, welcome everyone to Design Miami. I'm very happy to see so many people and I know we're going to have a crowd very soon as soon as our speaker is here on stage. I'm Sarah Core. I am the Director of Development at Design Miami and it is my great pleasure to welcome you and introduce you to Aleister Gordon, who will talk about his book that he wrote during the pandemic Island Follies, the

romantic

homes

of the Bahamas. Aleister has a great CV, so he just wanted to apologize for reading it, but there are a lot of things you should listen to because they are very, very impressive.

Aleister Gordon is an award-winning critic, curator, artist, cultural historian and author for more than 20 years, who has written about art, architecture and the environment for The New York Times and in 2008 became a contributing design editor to the Wall Street Journal, as well as launching and producing the popular Wall to Wall podcast on the magazine's website. Gordon's essays have been published in many publications, including the Vanity Fair architectural digest Le Monde Architectural Record New York. Observer House and Garden and Dwell and from 2014 to 2019 he was an architectural design critic for the Miami Miami Herald and in 2022 he launched Poetics which plays a podcast about design that streams on Spotify and other major platforms.

I could literally go on and on. I know Allison is an incredible speaker. I'm so excited to hear him talk and talk about this project that seems absolutely perfect during the pandemic, so with that I'll welcome Alistair to the stage. Hello, it works fine, thank you very much. Thank you so much Sarah, thank you Craig Robbins for thinking of all this, and thank you to all my friends who came. I'm going to sit in one of these. These chairs look like regular chairs but they are made of brass so they can't be moved but I'll sit in one and see how it goes so like she said this project was the perfect coveted pandemic project to get across the Bahamas and look for a lost job.

And this is always predictable. Don't I have it? Oh, I don't have it on. So sitting in the audience is Tanya Malek, who here is being raised between her father Henry Malik on the left and her mother Anne on her, and we met, I guess. five years ago, six years ago in Eleuthera in the Bahamas and at some sort of boozy lunch at a friend's house and we just published a book about the Bell Harbor Stores, believe it or not, and she said would you ever consider make a book about my father, who is an architect.

I never heard of him, but the more I heard about him and the more she told me about him, it became a very, very interesting story, so we started to think I made about six or seven trips to the

island

s and each time we went to different place, different

island

, different part of New Providence and we were looking for these lost houses of his father, his father, no, he died in 1999, no, he wasn't obsessive about his legacy. or keep records, but her daughter Tanya really went out of her way to keep her records intact. um, surprisingly he was born in Czechoslovakia in the land of students, was expelled when the Nazis arrived and moved with his family to England, where he studied architecture. and I worked with architects Seeley and Padgett, who were a very interesting firm in London that specialized in historic conservation because a lot of buildings had been ruined by bombing in the Second World War, so there was tons of work for young architects like Henry Melek, but by 54 I think he had gotten a little tired of this job and accepted an offer to become an architect in Nassau and you can see here his uh, he just arrived from London with his pipe on the beach and his first Christmas.

I sent that Christmas card, so what was this? What was this word like? I had no idea how we could make a book or if there was a book. I do a lot of books that I have written. I don't know. I have published about 36, 35 or 36 books and I always try to find architecture and design. I don't think on its own it's like an object-driven study, it's particularly interesting, but when you have the people, when you have the characters, the creators, the collectors, the homeowners or objects that become a social story and a cultural history that I find interesting so I worked a lot in the Hamptons when I was younger and it was kind of resurrecting early modernism that had been forgotten and was kind of what I call um Finding the spatial needs of the leisure class , so it's not a heavy academic topic, but there's actually a lot of fascinating seriousness to it that you don't notice at first glance, so I thought how cool it would be to do it.

Same thing in the Caribbean, you know, or the Bahamas, eh, but every time I went, I'd just lay on the beach, you know, hang out, get a tan and swim. There were very few archives of architectural history in the Caribbean when I met Tanya. I realized this kind of ready-made story and here I show these two images. I call it a kind of archeology of the recent past because it wasn't until we were looking for a particular house in downtown Nassau that had been very spectacular. malix project in the 1960s, this was a house where Lord Mountbatten would come and stay with Prince Charles and how King Charles was an incredibly posh project and it had completely gone to ruin, so we found this garden at the back which is really kind of like Jurassic Park, you know, it was completely overgrown and all these kind of gaps were full of, you know, grime and green moss and everything, and then inside there were these beautiful tiles, but you could tell that we had to clean them with our feet to find them.

Oleander pattern of these, uh, the majolica tiles that were made in Italy and brought over especially in the 1960s, so for me that was the moment of discovery that I always look for when I start a project, do you know what the history? here and how we do this and that's why I called this talk today, finding Henry because it was really about discovery for me, discovering a world that I didn't even know existed, but you know, the Bahamas in the '50s and '60s. We suddenly burst into this rather extravagant place of exile for Europeans, Americans and Canadians, largely because of tax laws.

You know you can go there and you don't have to pay taxes, so these are all Henry's pictures of this wonderful Bahamian pink color. that became the kind of visual touchstone for the entire book um and this image also became our favorite kind of significant icon of the book, you know, famous um, a famous photograph of Slim Aaron's Slim Aarons, who many of you should know that it was your job. I was also going around the Bahamas in the same period in the '60s and this is a German-made water car that was very popular in that period and Kevin McClory drives it and Kevin was some kind of very handsome Irish film director and writer who wrote and He directed. produced Thunderball, which was made in the Bahamas in 1965 and he just married the woman under the umbrella, uh, Boba Geary or not at that time, Bobo sigrist, she had several husbands, um, and she was kind of a debutante, She was an heiress. to this vast Forest of Fortune of English Aviation and they are his children and they are driving through the NASA harbor, about an hour after the thin Aaron strictly photographed the car that sank to the bottom of the harbor, so , but for me.

This really defines the moment so what do you give your rich and leisurely clients what are their spatial needs and what are their social needs? So if there is a Melick style, I'm not sure there is, but he was very eclectic, but he seemed to love the English garden

follies

, the faux ruins and the English garden

follies

of the 18th and 17th centuries. He incorporated them into these sort of whimsical pavilions like this one on Harbor Island. I don't think it was built well. I don't think it was built, no, this is a great aerial shot of one of his big houses in Lifeford Key and I show this only because it has three of the elements that he always used in most of his houses, which were Yes, I'm sorry, These pointers don't work with digital screens, but right, is it right for you?

Yes, it is to the right. To the right is this big four chord and then you walk into the front door and into this spacious. Patio, almost all of his houses had some type of patio and then inside you see this very high ceiling and that is so that the high tray ceiling overlooks these rooms, even when they are quite small, he would use these incredibly high ceilings to give them a sense of space, this is this beautiful detail of the Fendi store at the NASA center, so he was always taking, I mean, he was partly trained as a modernist, but he was taking these cues from his clients who came from England , United States and Palm.

Beach and places like that and those fancy little details, he was also very interested. I wish I knew more about this, but these are snapshots that he took of different vernacular huts in the Bahamas that were in ruins, you know, on the different islands, especially on the outskirts. Harbor Island um The Berry Islands places like that Eleuthera and these are just a bunch of snapshots that he did and he incorporated some of these beautiful molding details that, you know, had just been hand cut by Carpenters um and it was one of the first in terms kind of Caribbean Island Resort Architects to incorporate that idea, you know, instead of these huge Marriott or whatever Hilton hotel, uh Resorts that start up, started doing these little groups of, you know, beautiful Bahamas type cabins in informal clusters like This seems like a beautiful drawing to me.

The start. The reason he came was because he went. The partners became partners with this English architect named Rob AJ. Rob Rob Johns and his first project, well, his first project when he arrived was for this incredible character. the first of many truly eccentric heiresses that Henry Melick seemed to be tied to in one way or another. This is Josephine Hartford Bryce, considered one of the richest women in America at the time he inherited the Amp supermarket fortune and The portrait of her on the left is by Salvador Dali. She wears her mother's emeralds. Priceless emeralds, so Dolly had to go to the basement vault of a bank in New York City where she posed with those emeralds because the insurance company wouldn't let her out. from the bank and then made up this fantasy landscape in the background, but her husband, Ivor Bryce, who you can see on the right with Ian Fleming, was Ian Fleming's best friend and a lot of people, a lot of pop historians believe that Ivor was the model for James Bond.

In fact, he was an English MI5 spy, a very handsome guy who did real field work where he blew up like Italian facilities in South America and stuff like that, so he was a pretty extraordinary guy, um, I don't know. I can't really read it from here, but this is their Ode to these little octagonal pavilions painted like Venetian villas and wherever he could he put an obelisk, you know, as a kind of vertical marker in the landscape, but I think there are about 12 of them around the property, you can see them on the right is hard to see, but those little bands are bananas hanging from there, like Bryce said, it's essentially a folly erected in a private bay, there's a beautiful bay that no one else had built near it, so it was a long trip. about two miles and then you came to this amazing beach and they placed these stone sphinxes on either side.

Please come, come, come to the front, welcome and that became a kind of brand and they were there. I won't go into details. because it is very politically incorrect, but they had very famous parties. She, Josephine, loved to gather many men and women and they would have models lying on a float in the bay and then any man she could get. to the float first I win a special prize you know first they had to get very drunk very decadent that's not the kind of thing I mean we were very boring compared to this generation I say it and I don't think there are as many eccentrics as before to be like that, Henry comes here take this, you know, it's almost like a ranch burger and it adds all these things to it, including this wonderful overlook, so this is the library and Creekside, you can get there by boat, go up the stairs, you know, no I don't know what you did , you just sat in the gazebo and looked at the water and then this crazy interior, um, on the right, you see this mural that is in a kind of planting niche in the dining room, which is Venus being the path to the shore, um . to the Bahamas and on the left there is a French surrealist painting of a woman in a hat with a city on top of the hat and this wonderful city, so this type of almost surreal interiors one of her next clients was equally eccentric Lady Lord and Lady, look and this is a house called Capricorn that was made around 1957-56, an Old Fort Bay very close by, very Roman, kind of Romanesque with that entrance and then a kind of Roman pool in the middle and a big patio, this photograph that Rizzoli insisted I take out of the book because they thought people would find it offensive, which I understand, but at the same time you know it was what it was.

Lady Peek issitting there, very elegant, she was very tall and thin. she had been a Scottish model and in her silk Matador trousers, I think that's what it's called having a party and there's the boring Lord Peak in his red trousers as the host and she was again notorious for having many young lovers in this period. These beautiful details on the right are a photograph that Henry Malek took himself. of this Iron Gate that was made in England with its fruit motif and you can see behind it that kind of pink wall with a white lattice and that was throughout the interior of the house um I don't show a lot of interiors just because I don't have much time, but then I bought this property when Lady and Lord Peek broke up Rebecca Harkness.

I don't know if anyone knows who she is, but she was a very famous heiress who supported dance in America and founded a famous dance school in New York, very eccentric, that's her with her Salvador Dali diamond brooch. It was said that he filled the pool with champagne, but I don't believe that unless it was a very cheap type of champagne because it's a big pool and then if any of you like Taylor Swift, not the latest album but the previous one, there's a song called The Last Great American Dynasty and it's about Rebecca Harkness. When I was writing this book, I was listening to Spotify and I heard this Taylor Swift song and I thought God, it sounds like she's singing about the same woman I'm writing about and then sure enough, she was and there's one of the lines in her song. that says "There she goes, the craziest woman this city has ever seen." he had a great time ruining everything Taylor Swift in his prime, another crazy thing he built in the same period, wife of the sea, this crazy beacon of crazy on one end of New Providence for the Fain brothers, uh, for him, sorry , pretend that Solomon and his brothers were successful merchants from Nassau and needed a party house outside the city, so basically that upper floor wasn't a working lighthouse, it was just crazy, you know, at this point in the water and, um, this is one of the daughter of the woman uh Josephine Bryce and the first one that Malik restored this beautiful 18th century house in the center and this is where they said it was where Lord Mountbatten and King Charles would come and stay every year on his way before going to uh um to Luther uh this, this environment that is very much re

presented

by life or the key, this kind of incredibly calm and well-off wasp, uh Community, uh, just to give a little seriousness to the study, the almost affable Knight of Leisure consumes freely and of the best food. shelter Services ornaments clothing weapons and accoutrements amusements amulets and idols or divinities and I thought that because of thirst and velbin and his theory of the leisure class I thought that this applied perfectly to this culture.

The key to Lifeford was that it was opened in the 50s by a Canadian businessman called EP Taylor, so this whole area was divided and many of the houses were designed by Henry Malek, one of the first he made for tea in his lifetime, which which I find almost more fascinating with something called I went to Rosanna Todd, who was kind of the richest single woman in Canada at the time, she was Doris Duke's best friend and they went, they went to school together and they travel all over together. the world. They're both over six feet tall, they loved men, but Rosanna never married, while Doris Duke married quite often and sometimes ran over her husbands and killed them, as you probably know, which is a true story in Newport and um Rosanna, who you see here at the Roman pool, this title pool that Malik designed, he built this house right on the beach with this wall separating it from uh he said she didn't really go to the beach very often, the water it flooded under that area and filled the pool where I was going to swim, so the inspiration was this painting by Uber Robert.

The French classicist and Doris Duke owned this painting and lent it to Roseanne as inspiration for the house you see on the right, so imagine this young architect and listen to this Canadian heiress you know hand you this painting and say: I want something like this. for me for my house and then he does it and now it's the most

romantic

of things imaginable, which is this ruin of a ruin, you know, intentional ruin now in actual ruin, um, there's the head of Neptune and the fountain used to come out streams from there and it's a magnificent thing, you know, when everything is covered in jungle vegetation and then my favorite room, his living room, where he had these famous afternoon teas, even in the summer.

Christopher Plummer, uh, before she died, you know, she kindly gave me some interviews and was a very good friend of hers and we would go there and stay and say it was the most extraordinary thing, you know, on the hottest day of the summer, she would do tea parties with that fire roaring in that fireplace and, you know, the high English tea service She would come out and she would entertain all summer and never really stay there all year. Very funny stories from Christopher Plummer, who adored her but found her incredibly eccentric. She started the Shakespeare Open Theater in Montreal.

He started a couple of other theaters in Montreal and was very supportive of theater in Canada and French Canadian films and in fact gave Christopher Plummer his first role in a Shakespeare play, for which he was eternally grateful here are some of the carryoutids o the nymphs and um nyads which were fountains with water that spouted water, a similar landscape that Malik created for one of the most powerful guys in the Bahamas at the time, Sir Stafford Sands, who was head of the treasury and head of the Tourism Department of the Bahamas. he was cast into outer obscurity when independence came in 1973, but has now been gracefully resurrected and his face, his chubby faces, on the Bahamian 10 note, but again, the project was mainly to bring back as many carved lions and fountains to surround this wonderful house and these beautiful gates that were made again in England with the canal brothers. um he also worked a lot in Jamaica at that time in an area called Port Antonio that used to be very popular and always because Errol Flynn I moved there in the '50s and started a hotel.

Now it's a little faded because the road goes north and doesn't cross well. I assume there will soon be a road connecting to Port Antonio, but this was for Pamela Woolworth, the heiress of Woolworth Fortune, again it's a very simple but beautiful type of vernacular design rather than a massive structure that Malik created. You can see the kind of small round pavilion in the corner on the left that was the dining room and then these. The different little pavilions were connected by a narrow hallway, so it never had this kind of mass of something giant, a giant structure, a poetry that was unfortunately burned in life for tea, famously documented by small errands again, the type of the ruling class with the daughters and the horse and you can again.

I need the pointer, but you can see the long La, there was the garden and that overlooked the beach there and again it burned down. I think in the '70s I was also in these clubs and resorts. the Windermere Beach Club, which is very, very well known and very exclusive again, using something similar, you know, dividing the structure into many smaller pavilions with sloping roofs, that's another slim snapshot of the club as it looked in the '70s, That's Malik with his wife and Tanya's mother on the left and we don't know who the other woman is, but you could see it.

I love this photo because he looks so happy in the middle of the two women and him in the Also time was starting, you know, these developers were starting to buy up these islands in the Bahamas and they were coming up with ideas for new types of resorts. and Henry was very involved in that and some, I mean, I don't think this was ever built, but you can see that he designed all these different structures that would be placed in different parts of the island, which is an actual place called Over Yonder Key, um, this kind of honest mirabilis from the Bahamas in 1965 because you had Thunderball. the movie Thunderball was filmed at NASA with Sean Connery hanging around everyone, falling in love with Sean Connery and then the Beatles were there the same year filming help, so suddenly the Bahamas became the center of the pop universe for at least that year and brought many more people to the islands that you know, with fewer rights and perhaps more socially and culturally avant-garde, one of them was Sam Clapp, a well-known lawyer from Boston, best friend of Tim Leary, so they were doing experiments with hallucinogenic drugs.

His wife Martika was photographed in the ornate Venetian bedroom Henry designed for her. We did this talk in the Bahamas and Martika's son showed up and no one knew she had a son and she was great because she had all these pictures. which I now hope to incorporate, but we didn't have many good photographs, so this is Clive Arrowsmith, he was the photographer who took that photograph of Martika and he visited this in the winter of 1970 and you can see they are on our At the top of the house I noticed Very strange statues of dragons and monsters dramatically illuminated.

From below there were hidden speakers, the palm trees that made strange animal noises and Airy sounds, that's this kind of psychedelic landscape that the applause created. um Mel, I'm kind of running through this uh Malik uh broke off his partnership with Rob Johns in 1970 and opened his own firm with an English architect named David White and a Bahamian architect named Wilfred Dorsett uh one of the first things he did , he not only became rich and titled Residences of people's houses. He was very interested in a more socially responsible and affordable type of housing and he did this wonderful project in the Bahamas, in this kind of very mountainous area that leads to the ocean, so that each of those houses has its own terrace. and it's like going up the hill again.

He did a similar treatment in Jamaica with a very popular resort called Dragon Bay Resort. I don't think it lasted long. The ruins are still there, but it was hit by a hurricane. shortly after opening and that's what happens to you because you know the Caribbean and why there is so little memory for the type of cultural institutions is because either you get caught in the hurricane, you know where the bankruptcy court is or simply or Ron, you know too much rum, uh, this. Again, they were the smaller vernacular cabins, but in the center there was a kind of Versailles courtyard, you know, with the restaurant on top.

The most charming element is these bathing companions near the water that he designed. concave roofs uh with flags, you know, happy flags, this is one of our Robin Hill, who is actually here today, he was one of the photographers that we worked with with new photographs and we were very lucky to find and be able to photograph this house which belonged to Regis penae, who I'm sure some people here know. He was a legendary figure in the French publishing world. The start. He helped start L magazine, El Decor, and several other magazines. He was also the one who popularized the beach. on Harbor Island because he brought famous models like L McPherson, you know, to come and shoot there, so suddenly the beach became this, you know, suddenly this exciting place that everyone wanted to go to.

This house is brilliant, so Henry Mellick worked with him and them. apparently Ray, she told me that they visited some islands where Regice had found particularly beautiful old Bahamian houses and loved the idea of ​​not having air conditioning but working with them. There's Regis on the right and there's Robin, my friend Robin and the beautiful garden. uh, these beautiful raised gardens that he made again this idea of ​​this almost like this exterior skin of wooden slats, horizontal slats that broke the sun but let the sea breeze through, so rajes he told me and I believed him that almost never Any I once used air conditioning only in the hottest areas, you know, during hurricane season, we get a little unbearable, but he said this really worked and was such a beautiful treatment again taken from the oldest vernacular of the Bahamas , but given. a new life this beautiful again with a very modern interior these low sofas surrounding that kind of whitewashed floor just a beautiful and elegant arrangement of furniture, books and objects one of Reggie Peña's best friends, uh, he was a famous French artist named César, who part of his work came from this place, so César would come from Paris and spend a month or two on the beach and collect so much plastic garbage.

I'm sure you've seen it if you've been to the Bahamas like this. perfect, pristine beaches and all of a sudden, you turn a bend and there's this huge plastic trash, so years ago, Cesar started collecting all this stuff, you know, like old sneaker soles and old plastic bottles that have been washed and rewashed by the uh by the ocean and then some on the coral, it wears down the plastic anyway uh Rajesh has one of the largest collections of Caesar's work, as you can see here at one end of the living room, A very important change in Bahamian politics and culture came in 1973 with Independence and the first black Prime Minister of the Bahamas, Pindling.

Lionel Pindling was a friend of Malik and he hired Henry Malek to design a house, you know, of a pretty impressive size, you know, his first. He was born in the Prime Minister's house, sowhich is very important, but one of the problems was that Pindling had introduced this theory of Bahamanization. It's hard to say what the decision was to stop hiring Europeans, Americans, Canadians, and Bahamian-born architects and builders from Only Heart, etc. and so on, so they got in trouble, um for that, but it was just a political thing anyway. Henry found himself drawn into this political controversy.

I would read that letter he wrote to the newspaper, but my vision is not so good. here well maybe I can do it from here, it's worth reading so I'll read it so someone basically said that Pindling should be fired because he hired a South African architect, which at the time was probably the worst thing to do, You know, because South Africa was still under apartheid, so he wrote a letter. They showed me an article, blah, blah, blah, that's how it was. written by Mr. Archer explains to his readers how evil and hypocritical it was for the Prime Minister of the Bahamas to have hired a South African architect to design his house and, furthermore, how iniquitous it was for the Bahamian government to give this terrible South African permit. work here perhaps you would be kind enough to print this letter because I would like to respectfully point out to Mitch, Mr Archer and indeed anyone else interested in the issue of trivialities and deliberate errors, that I am neither South African nor have I ever I have been to South Africa without being uncharitable.

I don't dare think that Mr. Archer turned me into a South African just to keep racist hatred boiling over, so I can only assume that he gave up when he was faced with the complicated problem of spelling. Czechoslovakia, which is my home country, that gives you an idea of ​​Henry Mallick's sense of humor, which, as you know, sometimes has even more rivalry than that, but that's the door, that's the house, no way It's one of his best works and I think it's up there. There was a lot of resentment and trouble just in the development of this mansion on the hill, but the incredible thing about Pindling in many ways is that he was the first to invite Nelson Mandela to a foreign country.

Pindling had been on this Commonwealth council with Queen Elizabeth and he really urged Queen Elizabeth to put pressure on South Africa to end apartheid and let Mandela out of prison, so when they finally let him out he said the first place The one I want to go to is the Bahamas and I want to see the Prime Minister pushing, so he came and there A big event, this is with Charles now, King Charles dancing with a lady doing pins in his house in which Malik designed another house in Layford Key with this amazing orchid garden and these crazy romantic statues again.

This is a beautiful interior again. It's not that big of a living room but Malik used to use these tray ceilings, in this case he turned the high tray ceiling into a tent ceiling completely handmade by local craftsmen and what he did was hang a chain of from one point to another, it automatically creates a catenary curve, so they just made these chains and then they laid out the line and then they molded it with mesh and everything poured concrete on top of the concrete, you know, they applied concrete and then they painted it with the stripes.

I think it's a beautiful detail. from his uh from his insides um this is again Boba who I she was the one sitting in the back of that Aqua Car before um I think there was a, if not a true love story, certainly an emotional connection and for him for a kind of Valentine's Day. card for uh Bobo sigrist or now Gary she became a princess at this point uh he made this beautiful swimming pool with a painting of a mermaid in the bottom uh and this wonderful garden gazebo with this beautiful Uh Russian style pattern on the railing these , these, I just fell in love with these, these, keys of life, a kind of lockjaw, uh, socialite heiresses like Hope Simpson, again recorded by uh, you know, the impeccable eye of the thin errands with her tiny waist and I don't know what company he kept. those shirts, but I remember the women's shows in Southampton and Palm Beach where those shirts and those gold earrings, so she had a house on the beach and the life sentence Kina was hit pretty badly by a hurricane, so she bought a lot atop the back of the Ridge on Lifeford Key and hired Henry Malek to design this wonderful series of pavilions again.

There is a very good aerial shot of the house with the kind of eight-sided bay window that stands out for the very classic Bahamian interiors with the mahogany even though they are not real mahogany, they are mahogany-like floors, the wooden ceiling, the ceiling with trays that again catches the light and really creates a beautiful interior light diffused from the tropical, the bright tropical sunlight coming in, that's the long terrace, you know where they are. They spend most of their time there Amanda Lindreth, who some of you probably know, is a well-known interior designer. She bought this house a few years ago and fixed it up.

She adhered perfectly religiously to Henry's Vision. You can see the drawings that Henry made. for this kind of fin um and Pavilion where they have lunch and breakfast and things like that, so this Bahamian gentleman Berkeley Ferguson who had had some experience in London with men's tailoring or something like that, I don't know very vague stories about this project, but he wanted a Bavarian castle , so Henry said he got it, you know, and they even have instead of the moat at the bottom, the driveway goes down and this wonderful staircase to the top where there's this kind of sun cord and now there's a jacuzzi that I think the new owners are finally going to get rid of and this is one of the larger key life houses in Tivoli, which was for a woman named Maria uh Dávila, who is very rich here. the mysterious woman in the middle uh in the night of Casablanca and in the Old Fort Club and um she wanted a kind of Pompeian again a kind of semi-ruined but not really ruined pavilion with the central courtyard and um this incredibly beautiful four courtyard where the garden type of tights with this um, this four chord pattern again.

I think I showed you a photograph of this before, but here you see the transverse axial dimension of this incredibly extended pool on the right, the four courtyards below the courtyard in the middle. Crazy patio with these almost like a petticoat, you know, kind of like curtains that fall when the sun gets too hot. You can sit on the verandah around the periphery of the patio and pull these crazy curtains back and forth. The interiors were also perfectly restored by the new owners, the white ones, they even found the samples of Imogene Taylor, who was a very famous interior designer from London, she was considered the queen of Colfax and Fowler.

You know the London design company and you can see the samples above. I left it there for the yellow patterns for this amazing living room with the very high ceiling and the other one was for the gentleman's bedroom, the most masculine type, this is the woman's bedroom, now this is one of the big ones. fornicity collections, you know, very, very rare fornicity furniture and even the floor was carefully painted to reflect the extraordinary exterior, uh, room and furniture collection, um, these things, I guess, come up for auction from time to time, Hey, that's the man in the men's room. and you can see, oh I'm sorry, if you can see it here, those are fake books, so you can close the whole room with that wall of books and then Malik, even you know his sense of humor, I think that says the most that foam.

The bound book says that the definitive author of the house is Henry Malek, the architect, sorry, again, wrong way, aerial shot of that incredible pool, uh, 70, 75 foot long pool, these pavilions in the other end that housed the pool, you know, mechanisms and I think a changing room. uh, very, very Roman, the decadent end of the Empire, completely opposite to the end of the island, uh, New Providence, this is Chris Blackwell in the red shirt. I'm sure many of you know who Chris Blackwell is, so Chris was doing all this, you know, amazing recording work. Island records in Jamaica and you know he is credited with the so-called discovery of Bob Marley.

There you see Bob Marley in the green sports suit and I don't know if it's Peter Tosh. Does anyone know if that's the guy in the white shirt? Peter Tosh anyway, that's the Whalers, you know Bob Marley and the Wailers and they were coming. Jamaica was getting very, very difficult and Marley was shot in an assassination attempt and Chris opened a Compass Point Studio, which looks like a very simple building in the On the right, there is now a restaurant or a cafe, but in At that time it was one of the best recording studios in the world.

They all came, I mean, the stones engraved there. You already know U2. All. And he built apartments in the back. where the musicians said this is a bit and Henry Malek also did all that, he built the apartments and he built this little, you know, the pool house, the cabana and the pool where people like you know Keith Richards would hang out and Grace Jones was there. for quite a while, so right under life by key were all these very posh, entitled people, you know, you've had this rock and roll world, uh, and Henry created this kind of, you know, kind of Spanish hacienda, nothing particularly original, but it was what Chris Blackwell wanted, so when Bob Marley was shot, he basically told Marley: "Get out of Jamaica, come to the Bahamas and you can live in my house for as long as it takes." necessary until the dust settles and it is safe. back to Jamaica, so this is where Marley stayed for quite a while.

He also worked with Chris Blackwell. Henry worked with Chris Blackwell on several resorts, including the Shipwreck, right next to Nassau, which was never built. I will go. through this because we're running out of time, but another princess, an Italian princess, Sabila O'Donnell, had asked her to make this wonderful house, so she was best friends with her, maybe even lovers with um. I shouldn't have said that, but she let it slip, I'm sorry. um with Lord Mountbatten who you see there on his nightstand and Charles who often stayed there and I won't tell that story now that he's king.

I need to give it some respect um again this kind of wonderful studio in pink uh the living room. I'm going to fly through these. These are the famous sphinxes that were at one time in that first house. I showed him the Xanadu and they were placed on the beach. Many of you probably know India Hicks and David Flintwood. her husband Henry, one of the last projects Malik did was a guest house for them. Robin photographed it beautifully for us, very simple, but again these traditional English and Bahamian components that make up a very beautiful interior again, very simple white painted wood, you know.

Ceiling fans with ceiling trays have air conditioning, but they almost never use the air conditioning. This is, I think, almost his last project. Ryder is certainly close to the end because he died when it was still being built, um para niente, which gives you an idea of ​​him. He took this not-so-big Lop and Lifeford Key and, you know, he crammed as much money as he could into this square slot by putting that long axis of the pool diagonally and then these wonderful outside rooms that are in the landscape, so what the interior of the house really extends into these outdoor gardens and this aedicula or this thing on the right, I think it's called an aedicula and the classical architecture, you know, was the focal point again, I don't know.

I have a gauge, but you can see that the little Red Roof in the back of the hydro plant was kind of a focal point for the house and from there you could see these beautiful photos. Again, by our friend Robin Hill, using these portals to Create this idea of ​​the architecture that you know repeating itself on the outside of the house and here's the view, this crazy view from The Pavilion to those extraordinary trellises that Malik designed for Bougainvillea to really show that, so you listen, you see the drawings for these trellis obelisks on the left and then on the right when the bougainvillea comes out, it kind of dwarfs and camouflages the trellis with beautiful simple interiors that Tanya Malek actually worked on to maintain them , very pale, simple, white, off-white, marble floors, again, just catching the natural light and reflecting it back, these, you know, really elegant, uh, a kind of vocabulary that at this point in his career he had really started to mastering this combination of not only landscaping and architecture, but you can see in that shot that there is that cabinet that he designed with a broken pediment on top that again reflects the architecture both inside and out.

I'll just give you a couple of minutes. to show that he was so prolific that he not only did all these residential and tourism projects, but he practically created the scale for downtown Nassau, now it's a bit of a mess, you know? and he was actually allowed to go to the species. of rotting ruins, but he came up with this kind of four-story scale concept and it brings in historical elements, you know, from the Bahamas, so here you see one of those has four stories, one of those has five stories, itthat I am projecting. I don't know if this is what he was doing at the time, but he said that because of this idea of ​​these four floors, this was the building built suddenly in the year 62.

I mean, very early, so the ships, the cruise ships, when They walked in, saw Ross. and in the square they saw this, the building that looked like it had been built over a long period of time, so it was way ahead of the postmodernists in terms of, you know, using historical pastiche, but for a very important historical location and Truly the center of the Bahamas. culture at one time you could go there and you had all the fanciest shops in Nassau in these courtyards, now it's all boarded up, it's a bit depressing, um again, these fancy, all these different fancy buildings, all four floors, all maintaining this kind of scale, except for the Fendi building, which is a store, but this wonderful courtyard in the Norfolk house and that brings it together.

I just wanted to give you a sample. I could easily go on for another hour, but I wanted to give you a taste of what's there. the book, we have some books here, we don't have many books, but we have about 14 or 15. If anyone wants to buy one or have us sign it, Tanya is here too. I'd love to answer questions, Tanya, would you? To come up please, this is Tanya Melick, who is.Henry Malek's daughter, who was really the inspiration for doing this book, so let's give her a little round of applause, please, thank you and I just wanted to ask you and then anyone can do a question.

I hope so, but I wanted to ask Tanya. To begin with, what inspired you to be so dedicated? You know, a lot of people think they want to do this for their parents, but to move forward, get all your files together and be really persistent and incredibly affectionate. I think every child who loses a parent wants to do something to honor them, and when Dad died, I realized there was a lot of work that was slowly being done. disintegrating and deteriorating and like you said in the Bahamas, everything in the tropics everything deteriorates so quickly that new owners come along, they change the roof, they change the windows and suddenly a Henry Malik house is no longer a Henry Malik house, so I really wanted to preserve it.

This and so, when Dad died about the first month later, I said, "I'm going to make a book. It's going to be fabulous. I'm going to document everything." She was pregnant and then, three kids later, she still hadn't. and one day Alistair and I met at lunch, we had met before and we met again, as Alistair said during a rather drunk lunch and he heard me ranting about my dad and said how fabulous he was and that I wanted to make a book and I think he thought God, what did you call it, you said I think this will just be a vanity project, okay, I'll go to the Bahamas, take a look, it'll be a waste.

I'm going to go look at the properties and he came down and we spent three days running around the island and he'll say he was terrified because I was driving worse and we spent three days running around the island and then he says oh my God. In fact, I think we have something and it was just the day before, it was two months before Covet came and we were like, Oh my God, what's going to happen? You know, we're never going to get this off the ground and I think it was actually a blessing because oh, absolutely, your heart and soul into everything and you went down about four or five times and we documented everything.

We had two photographers flying around in the midst of Covid chaos and it took us three years but we finally got there, yes it was. the perfect project for the pandemic and it was also, you know, this idea that the more you told me, the more I got to know these characters like Sabilo Donald and some of the clients who were still alive, I realized that this is a social story fantastic, not just a history of design architecture and that's what made it so great and you were so involved with it and you knew all these characters and that's how it turned out to be a wonderful project, really fun but also interesting, that It took me further than I had ever done. something like this you know this Sometimes I look at some of these pictures and think: am I really talking about that?

Do you know Palladium? I used to write critiques against bad historical architecture and now I've fallen in love with your father's work. audience question anyone actually I have one for you two yeah you know there are so many amazing photos here and you talk about the passage of time and how some of these places have changed. I'm just curious. Check out this access you seem to have had. Are all of these houses still largely inhabited? Are they inhabited by people related to the original owners? I'm just curious how some of these clearly historic places have passed through time.

I think how many houses do it. we have there between 18 and 20. Yes, I think maybe two of them are lived in by the original owners, the rest changed hands. We've lost quite a few, I mean, during the book we had two that were shot down. They are documented in very small numbers in the book, but they disappeared and then you realize it's a race against time. And the great thing about this book is that I think we gave a talk on the key to life last week and people said, Oh my God. We didn't realize how prolific he was and the people who owned Henry Malik

homes

were like, "Oh my God, it's okay, I get it now and I think it was mostly about education that, other than preserving his history, he just wanted to educate why it was like that." important and preserve it and that's the nice thing about doing a monograph for a book about a forgotten architect or a period that you know, once people see your house in a book or they're about to tear down some house and the guy says: I know that real estate agents always say, tear it down, tear it down, you know it's too small, it doesn't have enough closets or whatever, that's the trend in the islands and the Hamptons and everything you know in Palm Beach, all these places , but what's good about it?

The book's only been out a few weeks now and it's establishing this, oh my gosh, which is a Malik house, you know, that's really important, so in that sense I think it's been incredible, much more than we expected, I think. that already, so yes, yes, thank you. The Bahamas has something like in Miami, where the Miami Preservation League is, or in New York, where the New York Historical Monuments Society is. I wish it had something called the Society of Antiquities and Historic Preservation but it has no teeth so when there is a building that should always be preserved on the historic list if someone does something total they don't restore it there are no ramifications so no It's nothing like Charleston or London where you get penalized for not doing it, so it's a bit of a mockery of the whole thing and So people are frustrated because these things are getting dimmed all the time and it's really surprising how little memory cultural there is and I think something like that I mean that the more books like this and the more exhibitions we can do, a great benefit will be achieved. difference, I mean, I think downtown Nassau, if they could preserve that four-story quota that your father, you know, invented or suggested, it would make it such a beautiful city, but I think that's it, the demands of development are so intense, you know that's probably not going to happen, but yeah, that's a good question.

I mean, there needs to be more strength. I mean, it's a start anyway, it's a good thing. Any other questions or well, I guess we can listen. Thank you all for coming it was really a pleasure if you want to get a book or look at the book come well thank you very much