Outdoor Terrace Café at a European Spa Garden, 1950s

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Outdoor Terrace Café at a European Spa Garden, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Outdoor Terrace Café at a European Spa Garden, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-8CE6AB

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Beneath the arched limestone arcades of a grand European Kurhaus or spa pavilion, a crowd of postwar holidaymakers has arranged itself at white café tables in the unhurried manner of people who believe that sitting in a formal garden and doing nothing constitutes a full afternoon's programme. The flower beds have been designed by someone who regarded restraint as a personal failing, with clipped spherical topiaries and massed seasonal blooms laid out in patterns that would have looked organised from a balloon. A striped market umbrella marks the midpoint of the terrace seating, the kind of detail that suggests someone in management once attended a conference on continental resort ambience. These spa-garden café cultures — Baden-Baden, Bad Homburg, Wiesbaden, and their Central European cousins — had been interrupted by a war and were now carefully resuming, which gave the whole enterprise a faint quality of proof: proof that one could still spend a Tuesday afternoon doing precisely this. The guests, dressed in the careful summer clothes of people for whom a public garden still required an effort, appear to have achieved the goal completely.

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