 Though his first major publications from that time were on food and wine, he began to also build a reputation as an architecture critic, working in particular for "Architectural Review", where he had been influential in steering the journal's then proprietor and sometimes editor Hubert de Cronin Hastings in favour of modernism.While living in Lyon, France, in the early 1920s, he was invited by the editor of the "Architectural Association Journal" to review the Exposition Internationale des Artes Décoratifs in Paris of 1925.In reviewing the exposition, he coined the term "Swedish grace" to describe the Scandinavian design of the time, evident in the work of among others Gunnar Asplund, though by that time a new, modernist architecture and design was emerging, as evident at the exposition in the work of its prime mover Le Corbusier.