Borders giving designers the edge

Borders are back. In paper form for walls, but also as textiles for upholstery and soft furnishings. They are increasingly becoming a focal point in schemes, giving interior designers the edge in more ways than one. Knowing how much to use and where is a matter of interpretation, but knowing where to source is key. Adored by interior designers worldwide, top British textile designer Pink House by Rebecca Cole has become the go-to name for bespoke and vintage textile borders.

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A New Age of Elegance

Not since the 1970s when Laura Ashley’s love affair with all things Victorian/Edwardian has there been quite so much interest in this decorative era. Ruth Eaton, Coco Conran, Anna Mason and Sarah Vanrenen are in the vanguard of fashion and interior designers creating a new age of elegance for the 21st Century. To find out what is so appealing about late 19th/early 20th Century design, the blog invites you to visit The National Trust’s Lanhydrock House in Cornwall.

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House and garden tour: Polkadot Parsley

Are you the sort of house hunter who knows straight away whether it is ‘the one’ or not? This was very much the case for Jo Beavan who runs her successful online ceramic oven to tableware business Polkadot Parsley. Jo and her husband Simon who is a chartered civil engineer, have a long-standing love of France and of period homes. So when Jo spotted an Oxfordshire farmhouse for sale with a Georgian frontage and a French-style walled garden, the contracts were as good as signed. The only slight sticking point was that their own family house wasn’t on the market yet…

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Grandmillennial style

I am rather tickled by a phrase that has emerged from the U.S. to describe the return of Old School or English Decorating. It is a favourite blog topic and one that is currently experiencing a renaissance of interest on both sides of the Atlantic. Thanks to Emma Bazilian in her September 2019 piece for US House Beautiful magazine (a much preppier version of Hearst’s UK edition), Grandmillennial style has been coined.

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Pomegranate design for Lewis & Wood

Textile design is as much about storytelling as it is about design for me. The storytelling is important because I want to know how the design came about and from whom. When it comes to the plot, the quirkier, the better. Especially when the protagonist has not only worked as a set decorator in the world of film, for at least two of Britain’s most treasured interior brands, but whose debut fabric and wallpaper designs for Lewis & Wood are currently lining the walls of an interior designed shipping container in the Cumbrian Hills.

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Turning a shed into a home office

Rachel, a busy management consultant, asked me to convert her garden shed into a home office at the end of her Oxfordshire cottage garden. It needed to be a work space that Rachel really wanted to be in but also one she could separate from home at the end of the day. I have had some experience of shed conversions. I once turned our wooden summer house into a home office for a Marie Claire 101 ideas magazine interiors feature. There is something quite magical about creating outdoor rooms and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this one!
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