Repeat toast

Repeat, toast.We are in the realm of a harum-scarum set of talents, though there’s nothing green about them except the wads of folding stuff they intend to make. At Norman, a chic new Leeds brasserie designed and furnished with mostly bought-in kit by Jam, “menu” is the word There’s a door made of toast. Anley pauses to pick up an eviscerated Philips downlighter bulb and announces: “And this is what’s going to take us off the bread-line.”It’s hard to take it all in, for though the principals of Jam are not necessarily geniuses, they are massively ingenious, a posse of deconstructivist junkies whose addiction to cast-offs has put recycling back on the commercial menu for both private buyers and businesses. It’s 1998, after all, and here is young Anley leading the way through a studio full of artful junk with attitude: lampshades and a folding screen made of trashed 35mm film stock, sponge rubber furniture that can be pulled apart to form some other object of desire, and chairs made of sawn-off aluminium ladder parts and slabs of recycled squeezy bottles that blitz the eye with a hail of Monet-like dots, dashes and smears. cue dishy David Hemmings bounding up dusty concrete stairs to the studio above the pine shop, the Nikon swinging across his paisley shirtfront Cut to studio interior. Hemmings confronts two guys and a dolly bird in a white space chocker with weird stuff.

“OK,” he barks, raising the camera, “getyour clothes off and start getting it on with those washing-machine drums! C’mon, let’s go! Go-go-go! Yeah, that’s it, man, it’s a happening. Yeah! Gimme-gimme-gimme!” And the Nikon going k’shink, k’shink, k’shink.But, like Jimi said, when the six becomes a nine we mustn’t mind. And let’s not forget the film crew – they’re here too, with a clapper-board carrying five chalked words: “Blow-Up, director Michelangelo Antonioni”.And… There’s a whiff of Aqua Manda in the air and, somewhere nearby, a tranny whacking out “Hey Joe”. We’re in a suddenly ghostly Goods Way Road, a couple of stone-throws south of the hulk of King’s Cross station and overlooked by the stark outline of a vast rusting drum kit of gas- holders. There isn’t much else, just a petrol station and a pine shop where the furniture gleams like vanilla and butterscotch and just has to be made of Norwegian wood.

Jam almost belong to another time, a fab and febrile strobe flicker from the not quite dead vibe of the 1960s.
It’s easy to imagine. Just ease into a slow fade to 6pm on a winter’s night in London with an edge like a steel blade. Anley, his partner Astrid Zala, Ricardo Alvarez and Frenchman Matthieu Paillard are a paradigm of one strain of Britain’s design sub-culture: young, personable, and as hot-wired as a runaway Mini-Cooper nicked from The Italian Job. Well, you would, wouldn’t you, if your chromium objet d’art had just gone on show at the Louvre and the ‘phone kept ringing?

Anley, one quarter of the group of designers known as Jam, is on the make in every sense. After three years spent disembowelling washing machines in the dead of night, Jamie Anley jacked in his job at Prontoprint and had the kind of Hamlet moment that all young designers dream of. Here charges will be not much more than 4 per cent, which includes title insurance.

There is a 1 per cent annual property tax and community charges depend on the type of development.The International Property Show is on today and tomorrow at The Cumberland Hotel, Marble Arch, London, W1, 10.30am – 5pm, admission free.Ultra Villas, 01242 221500; Bennetts, 01625 586937; Florida Homes International, 01703 262888; Casa Travella, 01322 660988.. A two-bedroom village property in Liguria costs around pounds 38,000 and a large period apartment on Lake Como, from around pounds 85,000.Things are more straightforward and much cheaper, if you buy your retreat in Florida. “Before you buy the property, you must seek legal advice on this.”In Italy you also pay around 10 to 11 percent purchase costs Rates are low – between pounds 150 to pounds 400 a year. A rubbish tax is also due which ranges between pounds 50 and pounds 200.”Everything is perfectly straightforward, as long as you do not do it yourself,” says Linda Travella, of Casa Travella, who sells property in northern Italy. “A new home might well have a mortgage on it, which although the notary or lawyer will pick up and have it cancelled, it is possible to be landed with mortgage payments you know nothing about if you try to buy on your own”.