I have encountered the word "mews" many hundreds of times while reading British literature, sussed out that it was an arrangement of buildings, but never looked it up. This week The Guardian featured "Mews-style homes for sale in England," so it was time to dig deeper. One click at Wikipedia did the trick:
A mews is a row or courtyard of stables and carriage houses with living quarters above them, built behind large city houses before motor vehicles replaced horses in the early twentieth century. Mews are usually located in desirable residential areas, having been built to cater for the horses, coachmen and stable-servants of prosperous residents.The word mews comes from the Royal Mews in London, England, a set of royal stables built 500 years ago on a former royal hawk mews. The term is now commonly used in English-speaking countries for city housing of a similar design....Mews derives from the French muer, 'to moult', reflecting its original function to confine a hawk to a mews while it moulted. William Shakespeare deploys to mew up to mean confine, coop up, or shut up in The Taming of the Shrew: "What, will you mew her up, Signor Baptista?" and also Richard III: "This day should Clarence closely be mewed up".
The rather modest-appearing one embedded at the top is listed at £8,950,000 because of its prime location in Marylebone and its surprisingly spacious interior.
Addendum: This is the image from the listing depicting one of the bathrooms:
Reader Tom239 noticed that the view is into a mirror and the camera is not evident.
The bathroom tiling behind the bathtub - that could make you dizzy!
ReplyDeleteI forgot to include the url of that tiling:
Deletehttps://s3.amazonaws.com/propertybase-clients/00D1t000000CnPpEAK/a0O7T000007IREI/q4mzyn0n5/IMG_9021.jpg
It's hard for me to imagine myself living in any space that is as meticulously clean and tidy as those shown in real estate photographs.
DeleteInteresting (to me, at least) that the floors are "lower ground floor", "ground floor", "first floor" and "second floor". The interior looks very nice, but everything is painted white.
ReplyDeleteThat building has a basement (which is below ground) and three floors above ground: "lower ground floor" = basement (cellar); "ground floor" = first floor (or, ground floor); "first floor" = second floor (or second story); and "second floor" = third floor(or third story).
ReplyDeleteThe pic that's shot looking straight at the bathroom mirror doesn't have a reflection of the camera. Whoa.
ReplyDeletehttps://s3.amazonaws.com/propertybase-clients/00D1t000000CnPpEAK/a0O7T000007IREI/sl23ktbnh/IMG_9017.jpg
Fascinating. I hadn't noticed. It appears the shot was taken from outside the door to the bathroom, because the door handle is evident far left. How they managed to delete the camera and how they got that fantastic even lighting throughout the room is way beyond my comprehension.
DeleteI've done work like this before. The old school trick is to have two cameras, first taking a photo of the bathroom, then setting the second camera in front of the first, facing each other so the lenses are practically touching, move the first camera, take the other photo. Then, you Photoshop the second shot in the mirror to cover the reflection.
ReplyDeleteThe new way is to use the Content-Aware and/or Generative-Aware fills with some AI wizardry to simply select the camera in the reflection and it's removed automatically.
Here's a short video showing both: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZDARzuJFSE
I assumed something like that. But I suppose the shot from the second camera facing "out" would have a different perspective because it was filmed from the doorway rather than from the mirror's point of view. And ?presumably it would have to be flipped left/right to incorporate the reversal of a mirror reflection?
DeleteYou only need enough of the bedroom image to cover the camera's reflection, and the photo captures almost all of that, and flipping the images isn't a problem.
DeleteIf I were doing this, I'd likely get additional images to ensure I had everything I needed to make the edit.
That's big as mews go - I think this one in Edinburgh is more representative: https://search.savills.com/com/en/property-detail/gbedscedt250384
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