I look up. The superhigh ceiling is stained in pale blue with fluffy white clouds painted over the intricate plaster moldings.
Ooh. I get it now.
“Did anyone think it was a sky lounge and look for it upstairs?” Jonas removes his coat, revealing more of his swoon-worthy bod.
A few of us raise a hand, eyes glued to his torso.
He drapes his coat over a chair, and tut-tuts in self-deprecation. “Please accept my sincere apologies! I should’ve asked Oli to warn you. You see when this hall was redone and renamed in the 1860s, sky lounges were yet to become a thing.”
“Fascinating!” Sandra exclaims. “Your house has so much history! And it was built in Jane Austen’s day, which makes it a perfect fit for our show.”
“Indeed,” Liam echoes, “this Georgian townhouse is much more in keeping with the Regency period than the Victorian mansion that canceled on us.”
Jonas rubs his hands together. “Listen, why don’t I give you all a quick tour before we begin the read-through?”
“You’re too kind,” Sandra objects. “Mrs. Everly and Oli already showed everyone their rooms.”
“Let’s begin with this very hall,” Jonas says, ignoring her. “Originally, it was less spacious and less tall. In Georgian houses, the reception halls were on thepiano nobile, the floor above the semi-basement. As part of her modernization project, my great-grandmother had this hall eat into the surrounding rooms and the ground floor.”
“We’re lucky she did that,” Liam adds his two cents worth. “What with the sky already painted on the ceiling, all we need is some video mapping and birdie sounds to turn this hall into Meryton or Pemberley!”
Jonas leads us out the door. “This house, like all Georgian homes, favors symmetry and balance both inside and outside.”
“There aren’t many Georgians left in Bloomsbury, are there?” Sandra asks.
“Very few, aside from Bedford Square and Gower Street,” he agrees. “The Bedford houses are almost as grand as this one. The terraced houses on Gower were a tad too plain for their time.”
That may be so, but they shine compared to the ugliness of modern architecture. I like Gower Street. Having said that, its identical brown-brick housefronts do look monotonous next to the comforting cheer of this property. I picture its façade of regularly cut red bricks and evenly distributed rows of tall, white-trimmed windows, and a grand entrance flanked by neoclassical columns.
The epitome of Regency pep.
The only disproportioned element is the small, wildish garden at the back. I glimpsed it through the window of the narrow dressing room where I’m going to sleep on a couch between a shoe rack and a chest of drawers for the next two weeks. My French mom, who loves the formal rigor of gardensà la française,would hate it. But she’d like the house.
Liam made the sleeping arrangements with Mrs. Everly’s help. To be honest, I’m not sure how to take the fact that I have no roommates. Was it a nice gesture on Liam’s part to welcome me to the company or was it a sign of mistrust? Should I be concerned?
Jonas leads our group into the chimneypiece salon flooded in light and fragrant with woodsmoke. The next stop on the tour is the kitchen. Its pantries, tables and cupboards are so Downton Abbey in their look and feel that I half expect Mrs. Patmore’s ample bosom to fill the doorway, followed by the rest of her.
Something’s baking in the oven. I think it’s scones. Their comforting smell makes my mouth water.Please, let them be for us!
We step into the entrance hall. Opposite the main door, a grand staircase carpeted in cream and blue gracefully rises. As instructed by Mrs. Everly and taking our cue from Jonas, we remove our shoes before climbing to the second floor.
Here, he shows us a dining room, two drawing rooms, a morning room, two studies, and a library. We’re shepherded from room to room as noiselessly as a herd of cats, if such a thing existed. Being shoeless helps. As does the fact that the floorboards are covered with soft carpets displaying beautiful floral patterns in noble colors—not that the patterns or the colors contribute in any way to the muffling properties of the carpet.
All the rooms, except Mrs. Everly’s study and the library, have been disfigured by camping beds, backpacks and suitcases. We’re thirty-four souls between the actors, musicians, and techs. Unfortunately for Jonas, the third-floor bedrooms had been insufficient for so many people.
I instantly fall in love with that room. Maybe it’s because it was left intact or because of the library’s delightful, blended scent of old paper, leather bindings, and ink. It’s the warmest, coziest, most charming library I’ve ever seen.
“You can use it for mediation or relaxation,” Jonas says as if reading my mind. “Just don’t smoke, OK? And handle the books with care. Some of them are rare editions.”
Sandra throws her hand high above her head. “Attention, please! No one will touch any book in this library, understood? And no one will as much as think about smoking inside this house. Right, folks?”
A chorus ofrights,yeses, andabsoluteliesanswer her decree.
Anand pulls a face. “Not even in our rooms if we lean out the window?”
“No,” Sandra says.
Jonas skews a smile. “How about the garden? You can smoke in the orangery if it’s snowing or raining.”
