‘Seeking Beauty’ at the Coral

Ricardo Calderon and his wife Dinah hosted a champagne-fueled bash at the Coral Casino for international interior designer Veere Grenney and his new coffee table tome Seeking Beauty.

It took the New Zealand native, a longtime friend of the tony twosome, two years to write, with photos by Francesco Lagnese from his three beautiful residences – in Tangiers, Morocco, on the coasts of the Atlantic and Mediterranean, in Chelsea, London, and his “pocket Palladian” temple in parkland at Tendring Hall, Stoke-by-Nayland, in the chocolate box county of Suffolk; where I used to reside in a rented farmhouse with three Old Etonians when I started my second job as a district chief reporter on the Cambridge Evening News in 1974.

I also attended one of the most legendary birthday parties when New York publisher Malcolm Forbes threw his 70th bash in 1989 at his Palais Mendoub, overlooking the Straits of Gibraltar – flying us in on a chartered Air France Concorde and plying us with vintage Krug Champagne, Coco Chanel’s favorite, for the three days of the boffo bash with guest star Elizabeth Taylor, who’d been flown in on Malcolm’s private Boeing 737.

Among the rapt Coral Casino audience were Daphne Moore, Dinah’s mother, Jennifer Smith Hale, Anne Luther, Cynthia Spivey, Alex Nourse, Donna Barranco Fisher, Peter Kevoian, Kimberly Phillips Hayes, and Bruce Gregga.