It’s been a busy two days in the office and I haven’t had time to post a few photographs since getting back from Dorset.

It was a sparkling happy weekend of sunshine and showers; I’m back down again there late tonight and in between meetings left right and centre will be spending as much time as I can in the garden.

Bulbs are coming everywhere; first early potatoes are in, and have you seen anything as beautiful as the extraordinary pink stems of rhubarb in the forcers? No, you have not!

What’s one of the most inspiring things you can do? Change your colours. As many of you know, we recently did a bit of a revamp in the shop, which at the back is now a glorious Indian Yellow thanks to Farrow & Ball. In front, a lovely smoky ‘Charleston Gray’ makes a perfect foil to the new collection of Bridie Hall at Home, which we officially launched on Wednesday - here are a couple of snaps:

(don’t you love Bridie’s Geometric solids in the window?  They are not yet on the website but contact Robin in the shop on 020 7430 2526 for more details).

But possibly even more exciting… a sneak preview of the new decorating studio, which we are getting ready. Here is Martin installing the most amazing wallpaper I think I know; David Skinner’s Malahide, a trompe-l’oeil Gothick paper based on an original at Malahide Castle near Dublin. You can find David’s website with his many superb papers here.  Order your rolls now! I have more coming for the hall in Dorset. I was emailing with him yesterday and said that the Gothick tracery strips were about to be papered over the lined background. ‘Make sure the decorator has a valium at the end of the day’ was the reply. You can understand why. Insane… but insanely beautiful too. A glimpse also of the Richmond Lantern by Robert Kime, looking splendidly at home.

More news of the decoration studio may follow in due course. But as if this wasn’t enough, I drove down to Dorset very early this morning with some trepidation. I’ve been up North and in London for a couple of weekends. So while I was away I had asked Kevin my builder to do a bit of a repainting job in the kitchen. More Farrow and Ball, this time ‘Wet Sand’, a dark yellowey orange from their archive range… and one of my favourite colours.

It was a little while ago – while I was staying down in Dorset over Christmas – that I thought it might be time for a change in the kitchen. Followers of this blog will know that I’m always in favour of a new coat of paint at unexpected moments; there’s nothing quite like it to shake things up. I sought inspiration in what someone living in the Old Parsonage might have done in, say, about 1972. Nothing too tasteful. Here is the result. I was pretty unsure how it would work – but I love it. Curiously—really curious—the room feels quite a lot bigger than it did before, yet simultaneously cosier. I’m sitting at the kitchen table writing this little blog and drinking a cup of tea, and I have to admit I’m quite happy! Darts night tonight in the village. Have a good weekend.

A little while ago, back last autumn, I took a walk across London on a sparkling October day.  I called that post London, beautiful city. A moment when I, for one, had a look again at this fantastic place that surrounds us and which we live in.

Today felt like the first day of spring, and London again came out to play. Who could believe the warmth in the sun? I meandered across Bloomsbury to Marylebone with my friend James, watching the light slanting softly across stone and brick facades… one of the happiest days I’ve had in a long time.

I suppose a morning like this was destined to be fun, when I found a tiny red mini parked at a jaunty angle outside the front door, and it carried on getting, well, better. The anticipation of spring fills one with hope.  Oh, and you will be glad to hear that my sport car envy has moved on from a Kelly green Porche to a midnight blue Merc. All for the best in 2012.

I’ve been in Scotland, back up in the Moray Firth for a few very happy days working on our architectural project there – shaping the early development of a new town near the coast just to the east of Inverness. An amazing project, the sort of thing that doesn’t come around so often! Anyway, long days drawing out the master plan and visiting site meant that, well, there wasn’t a lot of time to blog. So for those of you who make a habit of checking in on a Monday morning, my apologies. I hope it will be worth the wait. Some photos will follow.

But thinking of things being worth the wait, I wanted to post about two things which were a long time in the making.

First, an email I got the other day from my (internet) friend Martin Hibbitt over at Hibbitts of Oswestry, who has a fantastic website selling lots of very good things for your garden. Some of you, I know, have written from time to time asking me where I’ve got the lantern cloches that add a little bit of structure to the garden at this time of year and are the best thing I know to get your courgettes or early lettuces going. Here’s a reminder of what we’re talking about.

(It’s nice to look at a few photos from last year isn’t it? Rather gives one hope). ‘Sorry, Ben’ he wrote, ‘that it’s taken quite so long to get your garden cloches in’. Yes, it was an order for a few more cloches that I’d placed in about, um, March last year. But all good things come to those who wait.  Martin now has quite a few in stock. Can I recommend that if you crave a lantern cloche in your life that you move swiftly while they are here?

Another thing that took a long time in the making. Over the years we’ve collaborated a few times with fantastic Pat Randle, the son of John & Rose who run the Whittington Press. Pat (who has his own press, the Nomad Letterpress) printed the letterpress invitations for our Three Classicists Exhibition two years ago, and right now he and Ed Kluz are hard at work on the poster and invitations for the fantastic ‘Theatre Britannica‘ Exhibition of Ed’s work that we’re holding in the shop in May.

Well, about 2 years ago, I realised that I needed to hang a ‘health and safety’ poster in the office in order to comply with some dreadful law or another. Have you seen that Health and Safety poster? What a piece of visual junk.  See the attached image from the Health and Safety executive website. The real tragedy is that the old poster, which was, how can I put this politely, complete crap, was then replaced with a far more hideous version that came close to an inner circle of hell, where ugly typography, absurd photographs and sick liver background colour combined perfectly with patronising text to make something that simply did not belong here in Ben Pentreath towers.

All the more extraordinary, then, to read the Health and Safety Executive’s reasons for their bold new design:

HELLO!?!?!  More readable and engaging? Give me a break. Send the HSE on a Good Taste and Common Sense course, please!

Anyway, back to Patrick. Despairing of the situation, I thought that Pat might be able to help create a remedy. Our very own Ben P Health & Safety poster. He immediately got what I was after. We pulled out the Big Caslon. We contacted Reynold Stone’s daughters to get a copy of his Royal Crest. And we a created a handsome typographic printers’ primer sheet. That happens to contain the words of the H&S poster beautifully set in varying fonts and sizes.

Now, it took quite a long time to complete. Pat went AWOL on a trip to Africa for a good few months. But when he got back, he and I slowly collaborated to get it all just perfect.  And here are the photographs of the first poster of all, hanging here in the office.

Graphic designers, architectural firms, interior designers, business owners of taste – please note. Your health and safety poster crisis is now over. We’ve a limited edition of 250 posters, and they’re available from the shop here.  I might add for less money than the hideous plastic laminated thing for sale over at the Health and Safety Executive.

Do you know the really interesting thing? Everyone in the office kitchen now has a little read of that poster. You sort of can’t help it. It’s that nice to look at. As everyone knows, I am extremely in favour of Health and Safety at work. I am very very pleased to have done my little bit to help.

What was this blog all about? Oh yes. Here are some photos of Scotland, a little town called Dunkeld, on the River Tay, that I visited on my way north on Saturday afternoon—one of the happiest days I’ve had in a long while. A sober yet friendly town; qualities encapsulated in the painted Newsagent sign that I show below; don’t you love the way the plain sober text of ‘Newsagent’ and ‘Tobacconist’ contains the extraordinary fancy text ‘Gift Shop’? Bliss.

The sun broke through misty spring clouds. Rainbows bounded from every field, literally. A heavenly little place: inspiration on a plate.

Our new look home page. The website elves (well, specifically, our brilliant web designer Joe Smalley) have been hard at work making a few tweaks which hopefully will make it a little easier and more pleasant to find your way around. We’ve tried to get rid of unnecessary clicks to get between pages, and for those of you, like me, who like to be able to see everything on a page, the entire stock (department by department) can be browsed by scrolling down towards the bottom of the page.   What’s news and the latest blogs are also around and about up front. Hopefully all self-explanatory. The old departments can still be found by following the various links to those pages.

But please let us know if anything isn’t quite right, or if you would like to suggest any further improvements!

Ben and Bridie