Own a piece of an Airbus with furniture made from upcycled parts – take a flight of fancy
- Lamps and side tables made from A320 windows, a sideboard that was once a fuselage panel – a variety of items is available from Airbus’ A Piece of Sky website
- For more exotic upcycled furniture with an aviation theme, try a rival company’s cluster bomb repurposed as a cocktail cabinet
Prices from all these companies do tend to be sky high, but many of us should be able to afford one of MotoArt’s recycled luggage tags, which it sells through planetags.com from about HK$175 (US$22) each.
Ugly brutes
The proliferation of brutalist concrete architecture across London in the 1960s and ’70s was a depressingly dull, grey chapter in the British capital’s architectural and social history. Some of the ugliest surviving examples include the St Giles Hotel, which opened in 1977; the much-maligned Tower Hotel, which opened next to Tower Bridge in September 1973; and The Park Tower Knightsbridge, which opened just three months earlier.
Surprisingly, a new brutalist hotel will launch in the city later this year, when America’s Standard Hotels opens The Standard, London in the former Camden Town Hall Annexe, in King’s Cross. Now sporting a new “daft hat” roof extension, as one critic has called it, the 1974 eyesore – known locally as the Egg Box – was sold by cash-strapped Camden Council several years ago, reportedly to the only bidder that didn’t want to demolish it. Standard Hotels’ first venture outside the United States, the hotel is accepting reservations from August 1.
On a brighter note, another plan to turn one of the capital’s brutalist buildings into a hotel recently failed. Just off busy Oxford Street, the fantastically hideous Welbeck Street car park met the wrecking ball a few weeks ago after new owners Shiva Hotels decided to put the early ’70s multistorey block out of its misery, rather than maintain the original facade, as had once been proposed.
Memory lanes
Deal of the week
