Wallpaper 12

PHOTOGRAPHY: JACK WILSON WRITER: EMMA MOORE

OUT OF OFFICE STEPHEN WITHERFORD

AND WILLIAM MANN OF WITHERFORD

WATSON MANN ARCHITECTS

How do you take your cofee?

William: One a day will do, strong

with hot milk. Stephen: I buy beans,

I grind them and make it myself.

How did your practice start?

S: The three of us had previously

studied together and we were all then

working in London. We cooked up

this idea where we would meet at

some horrible time one morning each

week and just walk and look. This

was 1997 and London was beginning

to change. There hadn’t been any big

construction for a long time as we

were just coming out of a recession.

W: We didn’t start of wanting

to iddle with old buildings, but we

quickly realised there were some

interesting, progressive clients who

wanted to do things that repurposed

existing structures without the

need to do away with them.

Is there is a strong vein of social

responsibility to your work?

S: We’re always thinking about how

our work its into the city. Our next

project is a contemporary almshouse

in Southwark for people in social

housing. The irony of all the

developments we’ve seen in inner

cities over the last 15 years is that,

despite creating space for more

people, there are more people than

ever sufering loneliness. The idea was

to make this almshouse a place the

public could access, with a large, open

communal room with a high ceiling

and garden courtyard, south facing

with a lot of light. It will have a café,

theatre, craft markets and a cookery

school where you can make and

eat meals together. For years we’ve

been collaborating with architectural

writer Ken Worpole. He’s from

a generation when Britain was more

socially orientated. Now, the idea

of living communally in London,

building with those concerns, no one

teaches you how to do that anymore.

We work with idealistic clients, and

they want to build because everything

they’ve seen so far, they don’t like.

They’re almost activists and they

want to show there’s an alternative.

wwmarchitects.co.uk

BODIL BLAIN

SHARES COFFEE

AND

CREATIVE SMALL TALK

WITH...

a pair of progressive

east London architects

As the lavour proile of cocktails

becomes more complex, and ingredients

lists start to sound like three-course

meals, techniques are developing to

bring more culinary raw materials into

a liquid state. One such method is fat-

washing, which has become a way to

beef up beverages without texturally

clogging the palate. Bringing all

the comforting, rich savour of butter,

coconut, peanut butter, bacon fat or

foie gras into a glass, the technique pays

dues to the perfume industry and its

age old methods for extracting aroma

from oil with alcohol. It entered the

drinks industry around 2007 when Don

Lee, of New York cocktail bar PDT, put

butter-washed rum and coke together

for his Cinema Highball. Essentially,

a fatty ingredient is added to a spirit and

then frozen so that the hard layer of fat

can be skimmed of and the remaining

spirit retains the lavour. Federico Pasian

and his team at London’s Quaglino’s

are experimenting with techniques such

as coating the inside of a bottle with

coconut butter for a Negroni, so that

the liquid in contact with the solid butter

acquires creaminess and aroma, while

at The Roosevelt Room in Austin, Texas,

the Silver Meadows cocktail features foie

gras-washed St Germain. Our favourite

cocktail fat, however, remains butter.

Pairing perfectly with rum, lemon, apple

and spices, cocktails such as the Baked

Apple (with brown butter bourbon,

sherry, apple butter, spices, Amaro,

orange liqueur and bitters), served

at The Bonnie in Astoria, New York,

are top of our wishlist this season.

pdtnyc.com; quaglinos-restaurant.co.uk;

therooseveltroomatx.com; thebonnie.com

Liquid assets

Strike it rich with the current fondness for fat-washed cocktails

‘REVOLUTION’ GLASSES,

FROM €73 FOR SET OF

TWO; ‘RASORI’ GLASS,

€73 FOR SET OF TWO, ALL

BY FFERRONE DESIGN

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