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"View Slideshow\n\nAmerican culture, at least the modern variant of it, has often been referred to as a \"car culture,\" and few would contest the label. English culture, being a couple of millennia older, hasn't grown up with cars in quite the same way.\n\nInteresting, then, that there's no real American equivalent of the Royal Automobile Club. Christened and sponsored by none other than King Edward VII himself, the club has been an institution on Pall Mall, London's famed row of posh private clubs, since 1911, when the architectural team of Mew\u00E8s Davis\u2014best known as the gentlemen who brought us the Ritz\u2014completed work on the building, intended as a gathering place for motoring mavens.\n\nFor nearly a century the club has served as a library of automotive history (its sizable archives feature materials going back to 1897), a treasury of car-related memorabilia and a repository of British racing trophies. But it's even more beloved as a genteel club where members can meet to share an elegant dinner, sip a cocktail, play a round of backgammon or even take a midmorning swim in a comfortable environment born of shared enthusiasms.\n\nBy the turn of the current century, however, the club\u2014and more specifically its Great Gallery restaurant\u2014was in dire need of refurbishment. When Robert Carter, of Felbrigg Design Company, walked into the room upon being hired for the project, he was confident that he knew just what to do. \"With my usual bravado, I instantly decided what needed to be done,\" he says. \"I could clearly see what I thought of as its flaws.\"\n\nWhen Robert Carter walked into the room upon being hired for the project, he was confident that he knew just what to do.\n\nChief among them was a phenomenon that might be called the diner's paradox. The room's opulence and grand scale were in large part what had made it so famous, yet many contemporary patrons were put off by the same qualities. Modern diners, notes Carter, are generally after a more intimate dining experience and don't always feel relaxed nibbling their salads in a room fit for a king. \"If it was completely full, that was fine,\" he says. \"But if it was only two-thirds full, it felt strange.\"\n\nIn addition, the restaurant abounded with missed opportunities. A stage at one end of the room, an architectural orphan, had been halfheartedly decorated with some plants and hanging tapestries. As for the large terrace onto which the room's doors opened, it was inhabited by a few empty chairs, some more plants and almost nothing else.\n\nCarter's mission, then, was to break up the restaurant's imposing volume without dishonoring the original Mew\u00E8s Davis design and to rescue the stage and terrace from their status as afterthoughts. Working closely with the club's Peter Bainbridge, he started at the bottom: installing new hand-blocked wood floors, inspired by those at Pavlovsk Palace in St. Petersburg, and then designing handwoven, aubergine-and-lilac-colored carpets whose pattern echoes that of the wood. The wood and the carpets now constitute three distinct \"islands\" within the room, a dividing effect further supported by the introduction of a pair of low, curving marble-topped cabinets in the middle of the room.\n\n\"As for the stage, the first order of business was to build a balustrade to keep people from falling off,\" says Carter dryly. \"That was a practical first step.\" Next he took down all those plants and tapestries and asked muralist Catherine Lovegrove to paint a series of colonial picnic scenes inside the restored French panels. Now, he says, the stage has gone from being a neglected space to \"the place to sit and to be seen.\" It's bested in elevation and exclusivity only by the Minstrels Gallery, a small alcove on the second floor that offers a view of the whole dining room from above the chandeliers, an experience Carter describes as \"pure Phantom of the Opera.\"\n\nAs nice as it can be to have a long, wide terrace at one's disposal, this particular one was problematic. The view, says Carter, wasn't especially lovely\u2014\"really, only of the backs of neighboring buildings.\" Harriet Scott, of the landscape architecture firm R. K. Alliston, transformed it into a topiary-filled oasis that now feels \"very much like a French garden,\" he says.\n\nIts membership privileges thus restored, the Great Gallery restaurant has rejoined its old Royal Automobile Club friends: the English Palladian smoking room, where club regulars gather to sip tea and play bridge; the Art D\u00E9co-inspired Brooklands Room, a smaller and more informal brasserie-style dining area; the columned indoor pool, still very much in use; the wood-paneled cocktail bar; and, of course, the library, where the documentary record of Britain's car culture is lovingly maintained. Robert Carter, in the driver's seat, has crossed the finish line to the sight of Union Jacks waving and the sound of champagne corks popping. As they're fond of saying over there: Good show."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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