The Olympic Suite Restaurant, White Swan Hotel, Alnwick, Northumberland, UK

Dining in the White Swan's Olympic Suite Restaurant was a great experience. The photographs were taken by the author on 10 April 2012, after a meal commemorating 100 years since the maiden voyage of the Titanic.

The Olympic Suite Restaurant has the original panelling, mirrors, ceiling and stained glass salvaged from the Olympic’s First Class Lounge, at an auction in Jarrow in 1935.

The hotel's then-owner, Algenon Smart, had been a frequent traveller on the Olympic and attended the auction of the ship's fittings in November 1935, conducted by the London firm, Knight Frank & Rutley. He had the winning bids for elements of the First Class Lounge, the Aft First Class Staircase, and the revolving door from the liner's restaurant.

The First Class Lounge was described at the time as “a magnificent salon, pronounced by many persons as the finest room ever built into a ship. It is more suggestive of a state apartment in a palace than a room on shipboard.”

The room was decorated in the Louis XV style based on interiors at the Palace of Versailles. The walls were panelled with finest English oak carved with delicate boiseries decorated with scrolled floral-and-shell ornamentation, rather than the gilding that would have been seen in the French originals. At one end of the lounge was a non-functional grey marble fireplace with a carved mantelpiece and a curb of a pierced scroll-and-shell pattern, measuring 5.6 feet (1.68 m) wide in total.