Events & the Pavilion — Majori Manor, Jūrmala

01

The pavilion

A glass room in the park.

Eighteen metres of glass standing on its own ground inside the private park, with the trees around the whole circumference. By day what is in it is the park: the light arrives through the pines rather than through a window.

It is one room. Nothing is partitioned off, and an evening held here happens in front of everybody who came to it.

The glass pavilion on the lawn at the edge of a pine wood, a brick path crossing to it and rows of chairs set out on the grass

The park, late in the afternoon

The pavilion and its lawn as the afternoon goes over into night, the dome slowly lighting from within and small lights coming up along the path

02

Day into dusk

And then the light goes.

The same lawn, an hour later

By night it reverses.

From anywhere in the grounds the pavilion is a lit object among dark trees; from inside it, the park is the dark it is lit against. Nothing is done to the building to make that happen. It is what a glass room does at the end of an afternoon.

The room

One room, and what is in it.

Structure: Geodesic glass, 18 m across
Floor area: Approximately 250 m²
Seated: 100–120 guests for dinner
Setting: The private park
Day and night: Glass by day; a lit object in the park by night

The trees stand around the whole circumference.

Guests in evening dress standing in small groups among linen-covered tables on a lawn strung with lights, the lit pavilion at the left and the event building at the right

03

The gathering

Where the evening begins.

On the lawn, before dinner

An evening here does not begin in the room it is held in.

It begins on the grass between the pavilion and the long building beside it, with the lights strung overhead and nothing yet settled about where anybody is sitting.

That half hour is most of what people remember afterwards, and it is the part a room with a door at each end cannot give them.

Arrival

Two buttoned leather armchairs drawn up either side of a lamp under a portrait in a panelled room — And later, indoors

04

Dining

A table that runs long.

The house's own rooms, laid

Dinner is not a course of the evening. It is the middle of it.

The house keeps its own dining rooms, and an evening in the park can move into one of them — the whole of a room, or a single table in it, for as long as the conversation lasts.

Which of them, and for how long, is a conversation rather than a page.

The pavilion and the long event building from the air at night, the lawn between them strung with lights and set with tables

05

The estate

The estate is part of it.

The pavilion, and the building beside it

An evening at Majori Manor is never just one room.

The pavilion stands in a private park of 2.4 hectares, with the manor house at the other end of it and the courts behind the hedge. What an evening here takes in is a decision rather than a floor plan.

Which is what the address is really for. A glass dome can be put up anywhere; a glass dome in the park of a 1910 manor house in the middle of Jūrmala cannot.

An evening inside the lit pavilion: guests in dark evening dress around candlelit tables under the glass dome and its strings of lights

06

The celebration

And the evening keeps going.

Inside the pavilion, later

The dinner, the speeches and the part nobody planned happen in the same eighteen metres.

Which is the argument for a round building and against a hall with a door at each end. There is no back of the room here. There is only the room.

07

What happens here

Six kinds of evening.

01

Weddings

And the dinner that follows, which is usually the longer half.
02

Private dinners

A room with a fire in it, three tables, and the door shut.
03

Corporate gatherings

The park keeps a room a good deal quieter than a room in town.
04

Cultural evenings

Books, music, and the people who make them.
05

Members' celebrations

The house's own occasions, and the ones its members bring to it.
06

Seasonal dinners

Dinners that belong to a season rather than to an occasion.