Glittering Prizes

I called in to Treesong Designs last night, to catch up with Anhayla Lycia who, to my mind, makes some of the loveliest fountains and garden accessories in Second Life. And I wasn’t surprised to see that she’s been hard at work on a number of projects, as she was one of the first designers to start work with sculptie prims.

You can see the sort of results she is obtaining here, with a wonderful range of small marble cascades with sculpted backs. These are striking, and small enough for any home looking for a feature, but wanting to avoid the more usual fountain. I’ve seen something of the same effect used on one of the new houses in Tuscany, where the water cascades down from the upper storey and into a shallow pool. The effect is extremely refreshing!

I also noticed some striking gazebos in place, including this rather pretty elven stone one. But the main purpose of my visit was to see two of Anhayla’s projects that have recently won awards, so we pressed on till we came to a rather striking greenhouse (and I think it must be called that, and not a conservatory!).

I loved this. The use of the wrought iron reminds me of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, more commonly just called the University Museum in Oxford. The roof there is structured of glass and wrought iron, as were the roofs of many of the great Victorian railway termini (terminuses?) in London, like Paddington and St Pancras.

Anhayla has deliberately picked up on that. The challenge she faced for her award was to use as many TRU textures as she could in her design – although she could be flexible – as, for example, painting the white lattice work black in order to create that terrific wrought iron effect. Inside the greenhouse, you can (from this overhead shot) see that the tiles are just lovely, and Anhayla has also filled the greenhouse with plants that, to the Victorians, would have been seen as fully desirable, such as a range of rare desert succulents.

But for me, it is the combination of nature and industry that is so striking. It seems to me really in keeping with the Victorian love of wrought iron as a material – a sort of pride in industrialisation as a sign of progress and power, and yet achieving beautiful effects …

It’s an attitude that has fallen somewhat out of failure these days, where we have become more suspicious of the effects of industrialisation. In holding a perhaps healthier scepticism ourselves, we lose something of the tremendous enthusiasm the Victorian had for their magnificent monumental creations, and that can be a pity.

So this is certainly a piece to provoke thought – and the skill and imagination of its structure are very deserving of the prize they gained!

But this building is in marked contrast to the other one that Anhayla showed me. The diamond lattice work of the greenhouse was very far from being cute in the way that medieval diamond panes may be in medieval cottages. Her next project, however, made up for that!

This is taking the form of some attractive acorn-style cottages, designed for tinies. I couldn’t even come close to getting in (for me, one of the unending joys of SL is that I can be tall – and wear clothes with that certain elegance that is all too lacking in my rl). But I can see that these would be perfect homes for people whose desired alternative is a small, furry woodland creature. This is a playful structure, with considerable charm. Happy the squirrel or rabbit who takes up residence there!

And Dreams must have agreed, for Anhayla won another context there last month with these cottages!