Ham Yard, London

Astonishment

It is my great pleasure to announce, to my utter astonishment, that this blog has won the Amara Award for Best Architecture Blog, for the second year running. This is indeed an accolade, and I want to thank the people who nominated the blog, all the friends who voted for it – thereby ensuring that it got on to the shortlist – and the judges who finally whittled that list down to a single winner.

As it was last year, the awards ceremony at the Ham Yard Hotel in London was highly enjoyable, with gracious hosting from Amara, many smiles and much appreciation from Sophie Robinson, who presented the awards, generous support from the sponsors (special thanks to Umbra, sponsors of my award) and a large crowd of enthusiastic people, including some fans of English Buildings.

There was much to take away from this occasion, not least the sense that there are a lot of people with interesting and engaging blogs in the world of interior design and that they blog because they love what they do and want to share designs, ideas, colours, objects, etc, etc, with the rest of us. And all of this is very positive – this is people telling others what they like, with the hope that they will like it too.

The list of winners in all the different categories is here.

Ham Yard, London

            Image courtesy John Nassari

Amara Interior Blog Awards

Last night I went to a very congenial awards ceremony at Ham Yard, the new, luxurious, and appealingly tardis-like hotel not far from Shaftesbury Avenue on the edge of Soho in central London. The nice people at Amara had told me a while back that this blog had been nominated for one of its Interior Blog Awards and, to my great surprise, it got on to the shortlist for the Best Architecture Blog. So it was, I thought, as a shortlister that I went along to the ceremony, to admire the interior, take advantage of the fine double-height bar (I'm propping it up in the picture above, but you have to be quite sharp-eyed to spot me), and give the winners of the various categories the applause they deserve.

So after some chatting, nibbling, and vertical drinking, we were summoned into the theatre (What has this hotel not got? A bowling alley? Wrong: it has one of those as well) for the award-giving. And imagine how my ghast was flabbered when the first award to be announced was in the Architecture category, and the winner was English Buildings. I staggered to the stage to pick up my award (a bit of modern design in its own right) and returned to my seat to take pleasure in the applause and clap in genuine enthusiasm the other 12 or so category winners.

The various civilized aspects of the event included meeting other bloggers and their representatives, chatting to some of the fine people who did the judging, and giving and receiving various congratulations. Another civilized thing was that I did not have to make a speech. That meant that I couldn't make public my thanks to those involved in making this event happen and bringing us all together – the people from Amara, the judges, the award sponsors (including G P & J Baker, sponsors of my award), and... I could go on, but I won't. Thank you all. Brevity is the soul of this blog: a picture, a couple of paragraphs with some personal observation and comment, then I move on. I sometimes think of my posts as Postcards from England. This one is more like a thank-you letter. A short one, but none the worse for that.