8 ★ FT Weekend 2 November/3 November 2019Travel
Canada tiny, six-seater planeA
built in 1956 could be on the verge
of making a crucial step forward for
the global aviation industry.
Harbour Air, a Vancouver-based
airline that offers seaplane
sightseeing flights around British
Columbia, says it is on course to
begin test flights next month using
a venerable de Havilland Beaver
that has been retrofitted with a
cutting-edge, fully electric motor.
Harbour Air has a history of
innovation, in 2007 declaring itself
North America’s first carbon-
neutral airline thanks to a
programme of purchasing offsets.
In March it announced plans to go
further, turning its “seaplanes into
ePlanes” and forming a partnership
with MagniX, an electric motor
manufacturer based in Redmond,
Washington. MagniX has already
performed more than 150 hours of
testing with its 750 horsepower
motor on a mock-up aircraft with a
full-size propeller. Now the engine
has been successfully installed
into the Harbour Air Beaver and
the airline says it expects to
announce firm details of its test
flight programme within the
next fortnight.
Manned, electrically powered
flights have been taking place since
the 1970s but typically in very
small, lightweight prototypes
carrying only their pilots. Several
companies are now racing toShort cuts
Harbour Air’s 1956 Beaverproduce the first electric aircraft
suitable for commercial passenger
flights. Much recent attention has
focused on the Alice, a futuristic-
looking nine-seat plane built of
composite materials by Israeli
manufacturer Eviation. It was
unveiled at the Paris Air Show in
June and Eviation says it has
already secured more than 150
orders. The Alice’s first flight was
originally slated for the end of this
year but has now been pushed back
to 2020, meaning it may be beaten
into the air by Harbour’s 63-year-
old Beaver.harbourair.comSwitzerlandGrindelwald, the Swiss
village that became a key
destination for early mountain
tourists in the 18th and early 19th
centuries, will next month debut
the first part of a SFr470m ($475m)
modernisation project. The V-Bahn
scheme includes construction of
two new cable cars and an
integrated railway station. The first
cable car, due to open on December
14, will run from the station to the
Männlichen peak, replacing one
that has been running since 1978.
The second, to open in December
2020, will run almost 6.5km to the
Eigergletscher, shortcutting the
existing rack and pinion railway,
reducing the journey time from 40
to 15 minutes nd significantlya
increasing capacity. “As other
resorts have invested in speedy
new lifts, Grindelwald’s network of
quaint mountain trains and ageing
gondolas has given it a yesteryear
feel,” says Simon Meeke, managing
director of Powder Byrne, which has
been running trips to the resort
since 1985. “But things are about to
change — decades in the planning,
the V-Bahn will transform access to
these iconic slopes.”
v-bahn.jungfrau.ch
Tom Robbinsto take up residence in what the general
manager, Nicolas Socquet, called my
“back-up suite”.
“We would never let the Prouvé
house without one,” he’d told me on
arrival, suggesting that I might prefer to
use the 6x6 as a day room and pointing
out that the heating and air-condition-
ing are never going to be calibrated to
the level of the rest of the suites, which
are among the loveliest and largest
(none is less than 90 square metres)
that I’ve encountered.
No detail has been overlooked. Take
the tiny magnets they’ve sewn into the
edges of the white blackout curtains to
obviate light spill. Or the in-room
iPhone, loaded with information about
the estate and through which you can
live chat with the reception staff, oper-
ate the TV and order room service with-
out having to speak to anyone.
That said, I preferred to pass the early
evening leafing through the books
ranged above the desk, from Ernest
Hemingway’sA Moveable Feast, a mem-
oir of lifein 1920s Paris to a 10-volume
survey of Prouvé’s oeuvre published by
the Paris art dealer Patrick Seguin.
There were numerous art books too:
monographs on those from whom
McKillen has commissioned site
specific works, the likes of Ai Weiwei,
Daniel Buren, Sophie Calle, Tracey
Emin, Andy Goldsworthy, Lee Ufan,
Richard Long, Tatsuo Miyajima,
Sean Scully, Richard Serra, Hiroshi Sugi-
moto and Franz West, among many
more. By the end of this year there’ll be
more than 40 installations on the
estate, including a spectacularly ambi-
tious Skyspace from James Turrell, a
piece by Yoko Ono and a collaboration
between Frank Gehry and the artist
Tony Berlant.
McKillen also collects architecture.
Tadao Ando designed the gates, the
benches, the art centre, a sobering sty-
gian structure for contemplation of the
environment, and has revived the
ancient hilltop chapel that stands above
a field of Grenache vines.
Elsewhere, Gehry created the music
pavilion, for concerts, screenings and
the occasion live-streaming of perform-
ances from the world-class Festival
d’Aix-en-Provence. Jean Nouvel was
responsible for the corrugated alumin-
ium winery orchai, and the historic
winestore has been converted by the
exhibition specialist Jean-Michel
Wilmotte into a space that is host (until
December 18) to a compelling show of
paintings by Swiss artist Liliane
Tomasko, wildly dreamlike abstract-
ions of photographs she takes of tangled
sheets on unmade beds. Meanwhile a
second auditorium complex, this time
by the late Oscar Niemeyer, is currently
under way, as is another major project
by Nouvel.
But wise to the fact that sculpture
parks — even those that attract up to
1,500 visitors a day in August — can
never be fully self-supporting, McKillen
has been diversifying in order to gener-
ate the income to sustain it.
First came the café and bookshop;
then, in 2017, the hotel with a spa
designed by André Fu and three restau-
rants, not least one from the garlanded
Argentine chef Francis Mallmann, who
cooks on an open fire and has converted
a former hunting lodge into a place of
pilgrimage for carnivores. The veget-
ables are very good as well, and the
made-to-order Madagascan vanilla ice
cream ambrosial, though at €42 for
500ml it surely ought to be.
The prices (main courses about €30,
desserts from €10) are less startling at
the more traditionally Provençal
option, Louison, named after Louise
Bourgeois and designed as a glass pavil-
ion surrounded by water to showcase
her polished aluminium sculpture,
“The Couple”.
The art indoors, even in the bed-
rooms, is remarkable too, adding to the
sense that this is less a hotel than the
home of a collector. And what a home!
To paraphrase Baudelaire, Château La
Coste is a haven of order and beauty, of
“pleasure and calm and luxury”. A cou-
ple of days here, and the world seems a
better place.F
lanking the gates to the Tuiler-
ies gardens from Paris’s Place
de la Concorde this weekend
stand two modest chalets, huts
really, with shallow pitched
roofs and wooden walls. Compared with
the square’s majestic Louis XV archi-
tecture, they’re an incongruous sight.
Thesemaisons démontables —literally
demountable or collapsible houses —
were designed by the French architect
Jean Prouvé to provide emergency shel-
ter for those displaced or rendered
homeless by the second world war and
have since become icons of mid-20th-
century design. They are here, until
November 13, as part of the French art
fair FIAC’s extramural exhibition pro-
gramme, because lately they’ve become
eminently collectable, as has Prouvé’s
furniture. Last year Sotheby’s sold a
maison démontable x6 — the numbers 6
denote its dimensions in metres — for
more than half a million euros. A rarer
8x8 was on offer at Design Miami in
2013 for $2.5m.
To best appreciate their groundbreak-
ing architecture, however, and to really
scrutinise their skeletons of folded steel
and ceilings of bitumen-coated paper,
you need to wake up in one. And the eas-
iest way to do that is to check into Suite
30, an original 6x6 and the latest addi-
tion to Villa La Coste, the idyllic hotel at
Château La Coste, a 200-hectare estate
of undulating vineyards, lavender
fields, olive groves, almond orchards
and woods 15km north of Aix-en-
Provence in the south of France.
Since 2002, the estate has belonged
to property investor and collector
Patrick McKillen — Paddy to his friends
— part owner, among other things, of
The Berkeley, Connaught and Claridge’s
hotels in London. The son of a metal-
worker who built up an exhaust-repair
business in his native Belfast, he learnt
to weld aged 10, he told me, a skill he
still uses when he can, and has long
revered Prouvé for the way he manipu-
lated metal.
Indeed he already owns two Prouvéprefabs (a 6x6 and a 6x9), which face
each other across the picturesque vege-
table garden behind his home on the
estate, a 17th-centurybastideof honey-
coloured stone. He uses them to house
his books: one a library devoted to art
and architecture, the other to food and
wine — because art, architecture and
gastronomy are what Château La Coste
is all about.
By contrast, Prouvé (1901-84) was the
son of an artist, trained as a blacksmith
and taught himself the rest. Active in
the Resistance when France was under
occupation, he began to design houses
with frames and floor beams of folded
metal and walls and floors of easily slot-
ted-together pine planks that could be
erected in less than a day. Materials
were scarce, and a 6x6 required just
900kg of steel and 12 cubic metres of
wood. The one opened last month as
Suite 30 was first used in Lorraine, in
north-eastern France, in 1944.
Now, 75 years on, its fundamental
structure is intact, even if the catches on
the shutters have rusted and the floor-
boards creak. But as befits a suite in a
hotel of this calibre, it’s been sensitively
embellished and extended by no less an
architect than Richard Rogers’ practice
Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners.
“Richard’s a pal of mine,” McKillen
told me. (RSHP designed the entrance
to The Berkeley and are building a gal-
lery at La Coste.) But more importantly,
Rogers is an aficionado of Prouvé’s work
and to some extent owes his career to
him — it was Prouvé who headed the
jury that gave him his first big break in
1971, when he and Renzo Piano erew
awarded the contract to build the Cen-
tre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
RSHP have added not just solar-
powered electricity and running water,Clockwise
from top:
Jean Nouvel’s
‘Cuverie’ in
the grounds of
the château; the
kitchen in Suite
30, the Prouvé
cabin; the
cabin’s interior;
Tom Shannon’s
‘Drop’ sculpture
in the grounds;
the cabin’s
exterior
Adago Paris 2016; Patrick
Seguin Gallery/ Richard
Haughtonbut two cylindrical pods: one a compact
kitchen with twin-burner hob, fridge,
microwave, sink, surprisingly generous
work surface nd a retractable roof; thea
other a bathroom with a shower, lava-
tory and basin, though nowhere to stow
a washbag and not much light. Other-
wise, bar a blissfully comfortable super-
size bed, the house is furnished very
much in keeping with its age.
Having arrived too late to dine in the
restaurant, I ate my room-service sup-
per — a perfect salad of heritage toma-
toes from the estate’s organicpotager, oil
from its olive trees and rustic bread
from its kitchens — at a lacquered teak
Square table, another classic of 1950s
utilitarian design. It was the work of
Prouvé’s contemporary and sometime
collaborator Pierre Jeanneret, who
designed them, along with the V-leg
Committee chair on which I sat and the
easy chairs by the picture window, for
the government buildings in Chandi-
garh, the Indian city created by Jean-
neret’s cousin Le Corbusier at the behest
of Jawaharlal Nehru.
Against the opposite wall stood one of
Prouvé’s Bahut BA12 bent-steel and oaksideboards. And everything was illumi-
nated by one of Serge Mouille’s 1953
Lampadaire Droit floor lamps. All of
them originals, it goes without saying.
It was like staying in a design
museum. And I feel privileged to have
done so. But next morning I was glad to
trip down the hill from its elevated syl-
van setting (with views towards Mont
Ventoux, the Lubéron massif and, on a
clear day, the Alps), to the hotel proper,
to WiFi, bedside lights, rugs underfoot
and a spacious marble bathroom, andi/D E TA I L S
Claire Wrathall was a guest of Villa
La Coste (villalacoste.com), which
offers suites for two from €650 per
night. A night in the Prouvé house
costs €2,500, including the
‘back-up’ suiteFRANCE
Mediterranean Sea
maps news.com/©HERE kmParc Naturel Regional
Cavaillon du LuberonAvignonMarseilleAix-en-ProvenceChateau La CosteEven in the bedrooms, the
art adds to the sense that
this is less a hotel than the
home of a collector
Prefab perfection
France| Château La Coste has an unlikely addition to its art and sculpture
— a utilitarian wartime cabin reborn as a luxury suite. ByClaire Wrathall
V
isitors to the flight deck
often remark on the
apparent complexity of
our computer screens. But
to me, our screens — in
particular, our navigation, or map
displays — are models of simplicity.
Indeed, their restraint contrasts in
fascinating ways with the increasingly
detailed and function-laden seatback
moving maps available to passengers.
On seatback maps — which about
two-thirds of travellers turn to in the
course of their journeys — the world
and the aircraft (perhaps an accurate
image of the exact airliner model,
including an airline’s livery) are often
shown from varying vantage points
and distances. These views may
automatically switch, pan or zoom out
far enough to show you a curving
horizon or even a complete half-Earth
turning against the stars. The result is
arguably a grander perspective than
any window seat could offer.
Grand, meanwhile, is not a word that
our austere flight deck maps bring to
mind. Our “aeroplane symbol” is as
understated as its name suggests — on“heading up” rather than “north up”
orientation. So the map flows down the
screen and turns whenever the aircraft
does. That’s how some car sat nav
displays can work, except that in the
sky, thanks to the wind, the directions
in which we’re pointing and moving are
rarely the same — a subtlety that
seatback moving maps don’t highlight.
The displayed content, too, could
hardly be more different. Seatback
maps often label small towns, bodies of
water, landmarks, regional boundaries
and much more. They may use vivid
colours and imagery to indicate higher
terrain or deeper oceans; biomes such
as desert, savannah and forest; and the
portions of the planet currently in
darkness and sunlight. Such depth of
detail can reveal marvellous curiosities,
such as undersea features that no air
traveller could ever see (Porcupine
Bank, west of Ireland, is my recent
favourite). I’ve often wondered if a
prominent moving map designer might
hail from Guernsey — I used to see St
Peter Port, population around 18,000,
marked on a display on which almost
the only other labelled settlementswere Madrid, Geneva and London.
Our cockpit displays, meanwhile,
show no cities, no national parks, no
Earth-straddling line of sunsets.
Indeed, I struggle to think of much,
aside from the departure and
destination airports, that’s labelled on
both kinds of map. That’s why, if a
passenger asksabout the name of aout — but it does not bring up many
new ones, as might happen if you
zoomed in on many smartphones or
seatback maps. Over the South
Atlantic, say, en route from Heathrow
to Cape Town, the navigation display
can be largely empty for hours.
As a pilot who also loves to fly as a
passenger, it’s hard to say which maps I
prefer. The beauty of flight deck maps
— aside from their clean aesthetic, I
suppose — is the precision of their
fitness for purpose. They have allthat
pilots need nd not a pixel more. Buta
such a design regime, for all its
spareness, doesn’t leave room for
wonder. That’s why, when I’m walking
through a darkened cabin, I’ll
sometimes pause at the map in front of
an empty passenger seat,briefly
astonished at the glowing image of the
very plane I’m standing in, and the
lushness and detail of the blue and
green world below it.Mark Vanhoenacker is the author of
‘Skyfaring’ and ‘How to Land a Plane’. He
flies the Boeing 787 for British Airways.
@markv747; [email protected]the Boeing 787, it’s a small white hollow
isosceles triangle, the apex of which
indicates our exact position. There are
no automatic cycles of changing views
— the two-dimensional map is always
seen from above, so the horizon and
the Earth’s curvature never appear.
In he cruise, the aeroplane symbol ist
typically locked near the bottom of the
screen and the map is fixed in alake they can see out the window, then
I’ll typically turn to a general atlas on
my iPad. What little is displayed on our
map screens is largely customisable. A
typical selection would include nearby
airports (identified by four-letter ICAO
codes, such as EGLL for London
Heathrow), a few radio beacons,
nearby aircraft and our active route,
composed of way points strung out
ahead of us (which can be quite
different from the direct line typically
drawn between the plane and the
destination on seatback displays).
We can add imagery from our
weather radar and terrain database,
though individual mountains aren’t
labelled. On the airliners I’ve flown, the
screen’s background, whether the
Earth at that position is covered by
ocean, sand or forest, is almost always
black. Colours are added sparingly and
in accordance with formal protocols,
such as green, amber and red for
increasingly intense precipitation. Over
densely populated regions even such a
restrained map could become
cluttered, in which case we can reduce
the displayed range. This spaces itemsLeft, the
sparse
cockpit
map, and
below, a
seatback
displayMark Vanhoenacker
View from the cockpit
NOVEMBER 2 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 10/201931/ - 18:14 User:matthew.brayman Page Name:WKD8, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 8, 1