When the Windsors settled in France after World War II, they rented a grand villa in Paris in the Bois de Boulogne, decorated in suitably regal fashion with the help of Stephen Boudin, the interior designer who headed up Maison Jansen, whose elite roster of clients included Jacqueline Kennedy with whom he collaborated on the refurbishment of the While House.
In 1974, a grand conference hall was to be built in Riyadh that would welcome the oil traders and arms dealers and property developers of the world; it would need to be decorated with a suitably regal narrative.
We entered through a 15th-century half-timbered two-story gatehouse, so elaborately carved and decorated it would have suitably impressed any visitors to the house beyond.
The rooms, decorated in sedate shades of brown, orange and beige, were suitably high-tech, with an iPod deck, DVD player and two television sets, one that slid up slowly from a credenza at the flick of the bedside remote control.
The baroque splendour of the house hasn't been lost, a double-height drawing room with enormous windows is gracefully decorated, furnished with Chippendale chairs, and the entrance off the narrow street is suitably grand.
The tabletop environments range from dark, dystopian buildings and suitably grim terrain for the Warhammer 40k players, and a couple of other ones are decorated with castles and forests, for the Warhammer collectors.
Sold in engraved sheets ready to be colored, cut out, pasted onto cardboard and then glued together, the miniature playhouses could then be decorated with elaborate paper scenery and peopled with cutout figures in resplendent costumes and suitably histrionic poses.
The latter, decorated with a thumping piano line that recalls Elton John's Benny and the Jets and a suitably wall-eyed rap by Odd Future's Earl Sweatshirt, is stunning, its protagonists haunted by the fear that the financial crisis might bring an end to their gilded youth.
