Hello again! I’m back to continue my report from my maiden open house voyage. But, before I get on talking about my last few houses, from the Seven Dials and Fiveways trail, I think it’s time for a spot of lunch. Ducking out of the rain, the Seven Dials Restaurant is my reservation for today. The service is charming, and the décor is finely detailed. Not sure about the vague paintings on the wall but otherwise, a classy place. My spirits were furthered buoyed by the free mini starter of mushroom truffle soup, helped down by chunks of delicious bread. A main course of (actually quite small, but delicious) monkfish, fennel and divine tomatoes, served with a side of potatoes dauphnoise which is possibly some of the best food I have tasted in ages. Rounded off, despite the weather, with a pudding of white chocolate and hazelnut ice cream and I had a thoroughly enjoyable meal. The service flagged a little at the end, with the bill taking a long while, although this probably was just as well considering the price! However, it was fully worth it. I recommend it highly if you are open housing in the area, or doing anything, for that matter and fancy a high quality lunch. Anyway, enough about that.

My next port of call is a block of flats just down the road to Vernon Terrace, home of Six on Seven, two flats with a mix of painting, photography and one truly magnificent collage straddling the wall. Sadly, the photography on the stairs, while amusing, left a bit to be desired artistically. A charming little place though, with perfectly serviceable paintings, with novel ideas and good techniques.

Hello it’s me again! In-case you were wondering why it said I went to 7 houses and you only had my view on 3 in last weeks article it’s because I’m stretching one weekend’s work into two articles.

First up (well fourth up but you know what I mean) was Six on Seven. As soon as we got in we started hunting for a mat to wipe our (wet) feet on when we discovered there was paper taped on the floor. We hoped it would be ok to wipe our feet on that and headed towards the first door we saw. On the door was one of those open house signs which say PRIVATE. It said we should go upstairs for more art. So we heave hoed and got upstairs. I guess there were about three rooms but only one of them was open in which Julia Ridley was displaying her work. There was a sort of little off room counter thing which had two women in it. None of them said hello. Julia Ridley’s work was very pleasant to look at. She used earthy greys and blues and sometimes she used red. There was also a scary sculpture of a dentist, it was a real dentist’s chair but strapped onto the light that shines into your eyes was a picture of a dentist leaning over. I thought this was rather clever. Then we went out of the room and up some more stairs with Lynne Shields work on them. They were pictures of drag queens and some couples and some from a jazz festival. There were some pitures by Bernard Weyman, too. I’m not being rude but I don’t want pictures of other people on holiday unless they have been painted. This is not meant to be a family album. We had to run even though we had not finished looking through the house because we had booked lunch at the Seven Dials restaurant.

It was lovely to be out of the rain and in the warm and dry. We were seated and given menus and a complementary small cup of mushroom soup which was lovely. I ordered fish of the day which came on a bed of spinach. That arrived shortly after and was every bit as delicious as the soup. Then came pudding. I ordered vanilla ice cream which was very nice but it made me very cold and when we went outside I was a bit frozen around the edges. Another good thing about this restaurant is that they weren’t iffy about children.