Overlooking rolling hills and ancient hedgerows, a former brickworks in Wiltshire has been reimagined as a new country house made from rammed earth — a mix of clay, crushed aggregates and brick from demolition waste on the site — and local limestone aggregate.

The pioneering building was designed by architects Tuckey Design Studio and decorated by Todhunter Earle. Sally Storey of John Cullen created the lighting design to celebrate the expressive building materials and support the rhythm of daily life.

‘Our client loves gardening and spends a lot of time outdoors, so she was very clear that it was important to be able to see what she was doing both during the day and when it was dark outside,’ explains Storey. ‘Our lighting scheme was integrated to celebrate the warmth and texture of the natural materials, to complement the architecture rather than compete with it.’

The display shelving on the back wall is softly backlit using concealed linear strips, injecting warmth and atmosphere into what is essentially a highly practical area. John Cullen Vorsa 40 directional spotlights are barely visible between the ceiling beams, introducing focused light on the sink, work surfaces and on the central table, ensuring the space is functional and feels connected to the rest of the house.

Using two different colour temperatures in the lighting — warmer on the back wall and brighter in the functional elements — softens the appearance of the space.

In the centre is a Victorian mill table, from JMR Antiques, Bristol. It complements the stain-washed timber joinery by Orwells Furniture. The terracotta floor tiles are from Terres Cuites de Raujolles.

This article first appeared in the October 21, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

In November 1884, a young John Bruce Glasier heard William Morris speak to the Glasgow branch of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and was enraptured. A burly figure with an unkempt beard, Topsy, as Morris was known to his close friends, left a strong impression on the future politician, who described him ‘in his ever-afterwards familiar dark-blue serge jacket and lighter-blue cotton shirt and collar, (without scarf or tie) and with the grandest head I had ever seen on the shoulders of a man… A kind of glow seemed to be about him, such as we see lighting up the faces in a room when a beautiful child comes in’.

Morris (1834–96) had joined the SDF the previous year and now, aged 50, was immersed in a punishing round of public talks to promote the emergent socialist movement. It was a year of personal transformation, having started with his co-founding of the Art Workers Guild and ending with the Socialist League, which he established on December 30 with Karl Marx’s daughter. Morris was convinced that there could be no radical development in design without an equivalent revolution in society.

As a young man, he had channelled his prodigious energies into the gentler revolution of Red House at Bexleyheath, south-east London, a restrained, vernacular-Gothic essay in warm red brick and tile designed by his friend Philip Webb.

Red House encapsulated Morris’s vision for a unified work of art, integrated with orchards and a rose-trellised garden and designed and made collectively. Its interior decoration challenged the discordant clutter of mass-produced furnishings that typified High Victorian taste. ‘If we want art to begin at home, as it must, we must clear our houses of troublesome superfluities… have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,’ he would famously exhort in The Beauty of Life, 1880.

After moving into Red House in 1860, Morris and his wife, Jane Burden, the daughter of an Oxford stablehand whom he’d married in 1859, threw themselves into creating what his university friend, the painter Edward Burne-Jones, called ‘the beautifullest place on earth’.

He and other friends, including Ford Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his wife, Elizabeth Siddal, would gather for convivial working weekends, delighting in the freedom to experiment with their ideas and skills. They painted murals and friezes, decorated furniture and plasterwork, embroidered curtains and wall-hangings and played bowls in the garden.

The style of many of these works evoked the chivalric romances and poems that Morris had read as a boy, but his interest in the Middle Ages was more than a nostalgic yearning for Olde England; he had a passionate feeling for medieval buildings.

As an Oxford undergraduate, he had been deeply influenced by Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and the idea, championed by Augustus Pugin, that Gothic design was aesthetically and morally superior. ‘Honesty’ — of construction, purpose and materials — invested a building with integrity. Hand-craftsmanship and a delight in the making imbued it with vitality and moral dignity.

John Ruskin’s belief in the ennobling power of labour and his tenet that nature is the source of all beauty flowed into Morris’s philosophy of design and manufacture. Both men were conservationists, eco-warriors and social reformers, preaching that art could transform lives and that industrialisation caused ugliness, pollution and inhumanity. Morris’s famous News from Nowhere, published in 1890, was a socialist-environmentalist manifesto dressed up as a utopian romance.

The Pre-Raphaelites were another influence, with their ideals of truth to Nature, social engagement and rejection of formulaic convention. Morris had developed his interest in medieval art when articled to the Gothic-Revival architect G. E. Street, where he made illuminated manuscripts and learnt to woodcarve and stitch.

Unsuited to an architect’s office, he turned to poetry, painting and embroidery. His wife remembered how she’d found a piece of indigo-dyed serge in a London shop and designed flowers for it, which they then ‘worked in bright colours and a simple rough way… the work went quickly and when finished we covered the walls of the bedroom at Red House to our great joy’.

In 1865, Morris moved to London, ironically having to leave the house where he’d been happiest because of the success of the decorating business it had borne. Established in 1861, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co specialised in artist-designed products for domestic and ecclesiastical interiors, with stained glass, filtering light through naturalistic tertiary colours, central to the firm’s early work.

By the time Morris opened his showroom in Oxford Street as sole proprietor in 1877, Morris & Co, as he’d renamed the business, offered a wide range of products unrivalled for their quality. They included mural decoration, carving, embroidery and metalwork, as well as the hallmark wallpapers and fabrics.

Accomplished at weaving, modelling and embroidery, Morris also learnt dyeing techniques and began to produce block-printed textiles in about 1870. The first design was Jasmine Trellis, its trailing stems printed onto glazed cotton for summer curtains and cushions. He became particularly interested in carpets and introduced hand-knotting to the Morris & Co range.

In 1881, the firm moved to an old silk-weaving factory at Merton Abbey, south London, which became the main production centre for hand-blocked textiles and hand-woven silk, woollen cloth and tapestries.

Composed around native plants and birds, Morris’s rhythmic patterns reflect ‘those natural forms which are at once most familiar and delightful… The rose, the lily, the tulip, the oak, the vine’. His first wallpaper pattern, Trellis (1862), featuring climbing roses and birds co-designed with Webb, was inspired by the Red House garden; Strawberry Thief (1883) depicts thrushes observed in the orchard at Kelmscott, the Oxfordshire manor house he rented from 1871.

The image of a pre-industrialised England that lay at the heart of the Arts-and-Crafts Movement gained popularity as the rural economy declined. Through articles by writers such as Lawrence Weaver, Country Life played a significant role in promoting Morris’s ideals — or at least those that appealed to its readers: beautiful homes by architects such as Webb, Lethaby and Lutyens; medieval manor houses gently resuscitated in line with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which Morris co-founded in 1877; good craftsmanship; a dream of rural England.

Paradoxically, given Morris, Webb and Lethaby’s socialism, these beautiful things were affordable only for the wealthy. Morris — Marlborough and Oxford educated with a private income — complained to a friend: ‘I spend my life in ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich.’ It wasn’t his only contradiction.

Although he advocated ‘simplicity of life, begetting simplicity of taste’ (a line from his lecture The Lesser Arts, 1877), Morris’s own interiors were richly layered, albeit aesthetically harmonious and uncluttered. The drawing room of his Hammersmith house was furnished with a wardrobe designed by Webb and painted with a scene from Chaucer by Burne-Jones, iznik ceramics from Damascus and de Morgan lustreware plates above the chimneypiece. Wall hangings were printed with Morris’s favourite Bird design, Persian rugs were laid over his Tulip and Lily carpet, with bobbin-turned ‘Morris’ reclining chairs, Asian metalwork and a grate and settle by Webb further adornments.

Morris studied the designs and craftsmanship of his antiques and took inspiration from their motifs and patterns. The floral forms of Evenlode, for example, echo those of Turkish and Syrian ceramics. Meanwhile, he lamented the destruction to ‘the beautiful works of the East’ by ‘western conquest and commerce’, and described the British Empire as ‘not a thing to love or to be proud of, but a disgrace and a nuisance, as a domination compounded of fraud, injustice and violence to be scorned by all honest men’.

Yet, not for the first time did he turn a blind eye to his anti-imperialism, when he undertook commissions for state rooms at St James’s Palace (1866) and a Golden Jubilee wallpaper for Balmoral (1887).

This year, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge marks Morris’s 130th anniversary with an exhibition centred around its rich collection of artefacts that highlight the city’s little-known connections with Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. A strong theme is the pioneering role of women in the Morris enterprise, artists such as Kate Faulkner, whose skills, from embroidery and tile painting to pattern design and gesso, were indispensable. The firm enabled women to undertake professional work and develop their own careers.

In 1885, May Morris took charge of the embroidery department and would play a key role in raising the status of the craft from that of a domestic hobby. She and her sister Jenny had been taught from an early age by their mother, who ‘laid with her needle the foundations of the firm’, and May went on to become a leading designer and embroiderer.

For all the paradoxes and failings of Morris’s ideologies, his work stands out among the Victorian decorative arts as being untainted by later derision. The lighter style of the firm’s stock Sussex chairs, and of its later wares, coupled with the emphasis on sound, unfussy workmanship, has appealed to successive waves of design reformers, with wallpaper and textile designs, some refreshed in updated palettes, still in production.

Simultaneously, the artistic style of decorating with an informal mix of antiques, textiles and well-designed contemporary pieces, as revived by the like of Robert Kime and Ben Pentreath, owes much to Morris, as does the ethos of design companies such as ANTA, with its textile and ceramics workshops run by a conservation architect and fabric-designer.

As the exhibition sets out to demonstrate, Morris was an innovator who ‘looked backward in time to reimagine a new future’. The challenges and contradictions he encountered as he grappled with issues relating to commercial production, the environment, education, social inequality and colonial legacy feel just as relevant today.

This feature originally appeared in the October 21, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Offices have come a long way in the past two decades, when many resembled the fictional Slough-based paper merchants Wernham Hogg in the BBC series The Office. The sitcom’s gaffe-prone protagonist, David Brent, was frequently depicted carrying out misjudged practical jokes on a bewildered team held captive in an energy-sapping environment of nylon carpet, faux wood laminate and towering in trays beneath harsh fluorescent lights.

Anyone who wanted to create a more elegant working environment faced an uphill battle against hard drives, monitors and printers, desk phones, Rolodexes, fax machines and battleship-grey filing cabinets. Fast forward to today and, thanks to the advent of cloud storage, powerful slimline laptops and mobile phones, these have now been rendered obsolete. With the greater flexibility ushered in by covid, many offices have been transformed beyond recognition.

On a nondescript stretch of Hammersmith Road in west London stands one of the most aesthetically pleasing examples of this evolution. It would be easy to miss the handsome Grade II-listed house flanked by towering multi-storey office blocks; the property has had various incarnations, including a stint as the home of a now-defunct Conservative club once visited by Winston Churchill, a dance hall and the HQ for a defunct airline.

In 2020, it stood unoccupied, when it was chanced upon by interior designer Beata Heuman and her husband, John Finlay, with whom she runs the business. After a three-year renovation, No 188, Hammersmith Road is now a working studio, an office, a laboratory for trying out new designs and a basement kitchen where the team eats together.

The building also provides a showcase where clients can discover the designer’s approach. ‘I wanted somewhere that had a creative energy rather than a classic showroom environment,’ she says. Her own office is decorated in her Willow Tree wallpaper and furnished with an antique wooden desk surrounded by paintings and pot plants. ‘Where we work affects us so much that I don’t understand why anyone wouldn’t decorate an office properly.’ She cites Nancy Lancaster’s Yellow Room in Sibyl Colefax and John Fowler’s former premises in Mayfair as an inspiring example. ‘Obviously, if you work in the world of design, it makes sense to make an office look as nice as it possibly can.’

Moving east, the headquarters of architectural and interior-design studio Ben Pentreath can be found on Lamb’s Conduit Street in Bloomsbury. What started as a one-person practice in 2004 has expanded to a multidisciplinary team of 50, who work across what their founder describes as a ‘warren of office spaces’ that stretches across buildings, as well as a shop run with the decorative artist Bridie Hall.

‘In the early days, I needed a workspace, and the architect William Smalley needed a flat,’ explains Pentreath. ‘Together, we rented a property on Lamb’s Conduit Street.’ It was the start of a long relationship with the street and its landlord, Rugby School, which owns an eight-acre slice of the area, hence the name of the adjacent Rugby Street.

As the company has grown, Pentreath has accumulated more space, including Lamp Office Court, a double-height room lit with top lights and a hangar-like roof, created by covering over the gardens that sat behind the row of handsome neo-Georgian townhouses, many of which were damaged during the Blitz. ‘If you look at John Rocque’s maps of London, this street was originally residential, but, as the wealthy moved west and north, it became more commercial and many gardens were built over,’ says Pentreath. He thinks the current structure was possibly erected in the 1920s.

Today, it’s where most staff work, with some of the usual trappings of office life: long, shared desks, swivel chairs and desktop monitors. However, compared with offices of old, the space feels personal, thanks to successive trips to New Covent Garden Market to acquire houseplants, various framed architectural drawings on the walls and a lighting scheme designed by Sally Storey of John Cullen Lighting that ensures there’s not a single striplight in the building. Other personal touches include Pentreath’s mother’s studio pottery collection, dating from the 1950s and 1960s.”

‘I think it’s really important to feel visually stimulated, but I’m not hugely in favour of offices that are too curated or polished where computers are hidden away,’ says Pentreath. ‘Some, particularly in America, look like something a Hollywood set designer would create. They have a degree of unreality about them that I find unsettling.’

Lulu Lytle, co-founder of Soane Britain, works in an office above her family home in Bayswater, where she plans new collections of furniture, fabrics and lighting. It’s a fairly recent upgrade from the previous arrangement, which involved hot-desking at the company’s Pimlico Road premises or working at her kitchen table. ‘I’m someone who needs lots of things around me — which isn’t compatible with a functioning family home,’ she says.

The office is an attic flat with a tiny roof terrace where she works alongside her assistant, Isabella Darnton, who has introduced some rigorous discipline. ‘For the first time in my working life, I really appreciate a tidy environment and she has created a clarity I didn’t know I needed.’ Because of its position at the top of the building, access to the office is challenging, so much of the furniture arrived flat-packed. Everything is filed in ordered boxes, with projects stored in specially commissioned wicker baskets made in Somerset and organised by subject: new fabrics, lighting, rattan projects, marketing and so on.

Although there are concessions to modern working methods — she uses a laptop and often works sitting on the sofa next to her dog Panther — there are some processes that date from when she launched the business 30 years ago; letters are still written by hand and she has an archive of antique fabrics dating back to the 17th century within reach. Across one wall is a particular favourite: an Oushak Saph fragment from the late 17th century, from the Ulu Cami of Bursa in western Anatolia. ‘I love to be surrounded by beautiful things,’ she says.

When not travelling from project to project or attending building sites, most of George Saumarez Smith’s work takes place at the Winchester offices of ADAM Architecture, a Grade II*-listed building restored by the team at ADAM in 2011. ‘One of my reference points is the architecture office established by my grandfather Raymond Erith in a ramshackle group of cottages in Dedham, Suffolk,’ explains Saumarez Smith. ‘It was very low key and not at all aligned with the rather grand projects on which he worked. He took Quinlan Terry on as a pupil in the early 1960s and Quinlan’s room, which I visited often, had a writing desk and a drawing board. It was hung with pictures and had a single window — that was my idea of what an architect’s office was.’

Today, he tries to use technology as smartly as possible, but without relying on it completely. ‘I love drawing by hand; it’s only once removed from the physical act of constructing the building itself. That’s how plans originate before becoming digital models.’

In the 15 years of working in his Hampshire base, Hyde House, very little has changed decoratively. A drawing board large enough to carry A0 paper stands by a sash window. On the walls is a large drawing of the building he designed for fine-art dealer Richard Green on London’s New Bond Street in 2011. ‘I’m about to move into a new office, but the principles will remain the same: very little technology, only a long table and an adjustable drawing board, my pencils and my iPad.'

But for a laptop sitting discreetly on an 18th-century table in the corner of the room and flanked by two table lamps, little would give away that the converted saw shed next to the Hampshire home of Country Life's Interiors Editor Giles Kime is, in fact, his office.

As are many country-house annexes, this structure, which spent 50 years as a weaving studio, is now multifunctional, morphing from an entertaining space to a home office. Having distilled his working needs down to three essential components, a laptop, mobile phone and a small library of interiors, architecture and design books, Kime has created the most agile of workspaces. ‘The critical thing is that it’s separate from the main house. I’m lucky enough to have physical and psychological distance between my personal and professional life.’

This feature originally appeared in the October 14, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

'In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different,’ said Coco Chanel. David Hicks (1929–98) was certainly both — a highly creative dynamo with a unique talent, who cut a distinctive figure, even in the rarefied world of interior design in the last half of the 20th century. His deft skill for bravely furnishing classic spaces with lively colours and bold patterns, his fabrics and books, had a lasting impact on British taste.

At the outset of his career, Hicks made a conscious decision to plough his own furrow, diverging dramatically from disciples of John Fowler, of whom he commented ‘he had the country-house look all sewn up’. He was exposed early in life to a broad range of aesthetic influences; the chapel designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott at Charterhouse School, Surrey, which he attended until the age of 16; the elegant sitting room of the priest’s lodgings at the Grosvenor Chapel on South Audley Street, London (where his mother rented a room when he was studying set design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts); the lavish interior of No 5, Belgrave Square, the London home of the politician and author Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon; and the Palladian villas of the Veneto in Italy, which he visited when was freed from National Service in 1951.

Having learnt the rules, Hicks set out to break them. His masterstroke was injecting touches of modernism; although his interiors rested on the firm footing of robust classic principles, they remained unburdened by historicism. Unable to find fabrics and carpets in large-scale, graphic patterns (many hexagonal) and vibrant colour combinations, he designed his own and they became a trademark of his style that was in demand worldwide, including the USA and Saudi Arabia, where he furnished King Fahd’s yacht, Prince Abdulaziz.

Back home, Hicks decorated the London houses of Mary Lee Epling, the wife of Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, and Mrs Rex Benson, former wife of Condé Nast. He also designed the Buckingham Palace apartment of the then Prince of Wales — proving to be an inspired and highly progressive choice.

Hicks’s rigorous architectural style extended to the garden he created at the Oxfordshire home he shared with his wife, Pamela, daughter of Lord and Lady Mountbatten of Burma, where he insisted on painting the swimming pool black because he considered the more popular option of blue to be ‘vulgar’.

He firmly believed in a visual coherence between inside and out, ensuring that flowers were out of view. ‘What will never have space in my garden are herbaceous borders. When I plant flowers, they are never seen from the house and will only be used as cut flowers.’ He preferred the strong profile of topiary in a linear design and has been referred to as ‘a straight-line gardener’.

This article first appeared in the October 14, 2026, issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Terracotta tones

Inspired by hand-carved lino patterns, this design by Fiona Howard celebrates the quiet joy of a day by the river. Gone Fishing Wallpaper in Ruddy Duck costs £144 per 10 metre roll.

Elegant mix

Teaming block-printed blooms with a hand-drawn pattern, Floral Block wallpaper in Chocolate and Red on a textured ground is by UK-based fabric and wallpaper studio Barneby Gates. It costs £141 per 10 metre roll.

Bringing the outdoors in

Inspired by the colours of an English garden, interior designer Octavia Dickinson has created three shades for Edward Bulmer Natural Paint, including Hedge Mustard, shown here. ‘Octavia’s palette feels natural, even in deep saturated colours,’ says Edward Bulmer. ‘Our pigments have proved to be a good friend, bringing that softly tonal depth, which she handles so well.’ From £66 for 2.5-litre emulsion.

Earthy warmth

Designed to bring depth and comfort to any room, Burnt Sienna paint costs £59 for 2.5-litre matt emulsion, from Neptune.

Hot news

Paint manufacturer Mylands and cast-iron radiator specialist Castrads have joined forces in a move that sees all Castrads designs available in any Mylands colour, making it possible to blend or contrast a radiator in any room setting. Radiator prices from £800.

Character colour

Made by Fenwick & Tilbrook for interior-design firm Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, Pimlico Green brings depth and joy to this inviting entrance hall, prices from £68 for 2.5-litre pure matt emulsion.

Soft hues

Known for the gentle warmth of her collections, Susie Watson offers an ever-evolving range of paint colours designed to create a harmonious finish. The paint colour fan deck costs £3.50, paint prices from £58 for 2.5-litre emulsion.

Green and pleasant

Fresh Olive brings energy to this kitchen cabinetry, its rich tones paired with softly neutral walls in Lambskin, from £21.50 for 0.94-litre matt emulsion, from Benjamin Moore.

Striking simplicity

Flag wallpaper features graphic shapes in a quilt-like design that has a nostalgic charm. It costs £195 per 10 metre roll from Fermoie.

New take

The Voysey House wallpaper collection reimagines original designs by influential architect and designer C. F. A. Voysey. ‘We’ve taken the essence of his work — his stylised nature, narrative charm and strong graphic structure —and refined it through contemporary scale, colour and materials,’ says Rebecca Craig, head of design at Morris & Co. Papyrus River is a mural wallpaper inspired by The River Rug, dating from 1903, and costs £439 for three panels printed as one continuous roll of 9 metres.

Blossoming beauty

CommonRoom’s collection of Japanese-inspired wallpapers is taken from Shin-Bijutsukai (New Oceans of Art), a Japanese magazine published between 1901 and 1906. Originally a woodblock print on paper, Sakura by Furuya Kōrin transforms cherry blossoms into a tapestry of form and colour. It costs £185 per 10 metre roll.

This feature originally appeared in the October 7, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Set in stone

British stonemasonry company A. F. Jones specialises in architectural stonework, interiors and heritage conservation. This newly built indoor pool is part of the renovation and extension of a listed property in Surrey, thought to be the first residential house designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, which demanded a carefully considered approach to each intervention.

Heritage windows 


Forming part of an extensive renovation of a Grade I-listed Elizabethan manor, these Heritage System bronze windows were chosen for their fine sightlines and ability to incorporate single-glazed traditional leaded lights secured with saddle bars and copper ties, by Architectural Bronze.

Wonder walls

One of the world’s leading authorities on conserving and re-creating historic wallpapers, Allyson McDermott offers a bespoke wallpaper design and making service, as well as a small range of wallpapers inspired by historic originals. Sudeley Castle Chinese wallpaper can be tailored to fit an entire room or ordered as two sets of four panels, from £2,688 per set.

Stone craft

Known for its British stone expertise, Artorius Faber’s range includes Chedworth English cobbles, made from limestone extracted from its own Dorset quarry. Their natural shape makes them useful for matching original cobbles found in courtyards and rural agricultural areas. They cost from £200 per square metre.

Sculpted decoration

Geoffrey Preston heads a small Devon-based sculpture and design studio known for its fine new decorative plasterwork, including ceilings, wall panels and more. Here, modellers Kate Montagne and Louisa Shorney are seen putting the finishing touches to a clay model before moulding and casting.

Antique inspiration

Marshall Brass operates its own small foundry in Norfolk, hand casting brass fittings using moulds taken from antique patterns. This Lifting handle costs £45.

Foundry find

From its foundry on the South Coast, Beardmore produces fine ironmongery, carrying out engineering, electroplating, traditional casting and hand finishing under one roof. CU1141 cupboard knobs are shown here in the process of being finished in Aged Brass and cost £155 each.

Flagstone flooring

Leading tile and stone specialist Lapicida is renowned for its antique reclaimed flooring. These flagstones cost from £354 per square metre.

Wood works

Traditional joinery specialist Jack Badger is known for crafting wall panelling, interior and exterior doors, flooring, gates, kitchens, staircases and all kinds of period architectural joinery. Here, a craftsman employs a hand-tooling technique called matting to enhance the depth and visual contrast of a carving.

Look up

Stevensons of Norwich offers a full plasterwork design, manufacture, restoration and installation service. Its range of finely detailed plaster mouldings includes the Claydon House, The Saloon small ceiling rose, inspired by the notable 18th-century house in Buckinghamshire. It costs £138.

Traditional paints

Dorset-based Rose of Jericho supplies traditional paints and lime mortars, supporting the conservation of historic buildings with authentic materials and in-depth expertise. It holds an extensive library of samples, collected over 40 years, to assist the identification of suitable products for repair work.

Fine fit

Specialising in bespoke kitchens, cabinetry and furniture, Saint John Architectural Interiors’s portfolio of projects includes this custom-made kitchen in a Grade II*-listed Georgian mansion.

Crafted skill

Johanna Welsh of Traditional Pargetting is admired for her skills in ornamental raised plasterwork, undertaking projects on buildings both old and new from her Suffolk base.

Oak originals

For more than 40 years, Stuart Interiors has specialised in bespoke oak joinery, undertaking detailed interior schemes such as libraries and panelled rooms to staircases and doors, including the Gothic-style tracery door design being carved here.

This feature originally appeared in the September 30, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'

‘A woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms,’ declared the author, Edith Wharton. Family and visitors pass through most, but some rooms remain hidden and unknown despite being ‘full of treasures and wonders’.

Perhaps the same may be said of the country house itself, where a rich vocabulary of rooms lies half-forgotten now that modern life has reconfigured its architecture. Gone are the army of servants that once buzzed in and out of carefully compartmentalised spaces: sauceries, spiceries, brush rooms and butteries — former hives of activity that have long since been repurposed or subsumed into open-plan designs.

Yet the humble scullery, we hear, is staging a comeback. This small back kitchen, where fish were gutted and pots were scoured, was once one of the country house’s grubbiest rooms, and the scullion — and later scullery maid — who toiled there, the lowliest of servants.

Staff or no staff, I’m all for reintroducing it. The clutter and clatter of washing up, and the muddy vegetables that, when scrubbed, splatter the tiles like a Pollock painting, require a new home now that the kitchen has become a popular place to dine and gather.

But if a scullery feels too passé, might I suggest a ‘scrollery’? It’s a dedicated sound-proofed den of my own invention: a place to direct residents playing videos on their mobile phones, which restores peace to the rest of the house. And why not extend the concept to trains in place of the old smoking carriages?

As for bringing back a designated ‘smoking room’, conceived by the Victorians to avoid polluting the rest of the household with bad smells and ‘man talk’, this reformed smoker is unconvinced. I suspect it’s the sort of space that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had in mind in The Lost World when he described the Piccadilly salon of Lord John Roxon as offering ‘extraordinary comfort and elegance combined with an atmosphere of masculine virility’ — and part of that sentence puts me off.

The 3^rd Marquess of Bute, however, was a big fan. He commissioned two smoking rooms for Cardiff Castle, ‘summer’ and ‘winter’, which could be enjoyed according to the seasons. The lavish, kaleidoscopic decoration of the former, designed by William Burges and located in the clock tower’s apex, was almost certainly influenced by his architect’s penchant for opium. It all feels far too decadent for today. Perhaps, in this age of anxiety, a ‘stroking’ rather than ‘smoking’ room, where pampered pets get undivided attention, is a fitting substitution.

Besides, there are other decommissioned rooms higher up my wish list. I fancy the idea of a ‘still room’ and visualise myself in a floral apron pickling and distilling the bounty of my unintentionally rewilded garden. I would start the day in my east-facing ‘morning room’, shifting to the ‘withdrawing room’ as the sun moved around the house. And if life got too much, I could drape myself across the chaise longue of my Victorian ‘fainting room’ and take smelling salts until I felt fit to seek company.

There are some spaces that are clearly obsolete. Take the ‘muniment room’, for example. Unless you’re Magdalen College, Oxford, whose Muniment Tower houses thousands of medieval deeds relating to its vast estate, your data is mostly digital. A ‘server room’, contained within a faraday cage to fend off hostile intelligences of an artificial nature, is a more future-proof solution.

For other rooms, it’s less cut and dry. The ‘lumber room’, a place for timber and disused furniture, gets mixed reviews in literature. In Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), it’s a room ‘to perish in obscurity’, while in Saki’s short story The Lumber Room (1914) it’s a mysterious place where young Nicholas discovers ‘wonderful things for the eye to feast on’: ‘a roll of Indian hangings, glowing in wonderful colours’ and ‘twisted candlesticks in the shape of snakes’ — all hidden away by his vindictive aunt who was ‘one of those people who think that things spoil by use and consign them to dust and damp by way of preserving them.’

Dickens had plenty of thoughts about rooms. While Scrooge’s lumber room is an unprepossessing space containing an ‘old fire-guard, old shoes, two fish baskets, [a] washing-stand on three legs, and a poker’, the warm-hearted Mr Jarndyce in Bleak House owes much of his good nature to his ‘growlery’. Part library, part boot room, it’s a small space for recomposing oneself and casting off a bad mood. ‘When I am out of humour, I come and growl here,’ he explains. Aristocratic women in 18th-century France already had such a sanctuary in the form of the boudoir, taken from the verb bouder, meaning to sulk or pout.

A room of one’s own, à mon avis, is a marvellous thing, especially if it has a pile of crossword puzzles and a small fridge containing chocolate. Whatever we call it, in the interest of domestic harmony, let’s reinstate it without delay.

‘The fluidity of his drawing comes across in everything. You see it particularly in sketches because the nature of a sketch is that they are more fluid and expressive. I love his piece of a teapot full of shells. I just think: “What a gorgeous idea”.’

This is what Lucinda Oakes has to say about her father’s work. George Oakes (1927-2017) was a decorative artist renowned for his time at the British interiors firm Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, where he was a director. Now, The Collection of George Oakes, and his wife Judith, will go on sale on October 1 as part of Dreweatts’ At Home auction.

‘He was always inspired by nature,’ Lucinda says, a statement evidenced in the collection which features a myriad bird paintings and sculpture — including an ostrich — a shell grotto and an array of colourful botanicals. The items for sale are from George and Judith Oakes’s home, Surrenden House, where they lived for more than 40 years. Painted furniture, textiles, decorative objects, lighting, studio materials and works on paper are all going under the hammer.

According to Joe Robinson of Dreweatts, Oakes, who was key to the development of the English Country House style we know and love today, occupies ‘a very special place in the story of English decorative art’. He adds: ‘His influence can still be felt in the way country house interiors are understood and enjoyed today.'

Oakes studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art before joining Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler in 1956 in a freelance capacity. He went on to work very closely with John Fowler and lead the hallowed firm’s fabric, wallpaper and carpet design departments and paint studio, until his retirement in 1993. He was best known for his mural and trompe l’oeil painting.

His unique artistic embellishments, often inspired by late-18th and 19th-century patterns, decorate the interiors of many great buildings. These include Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler owner Nancy Lancaster’s Haseley Court, Grimsthorpe Castle, Sezincote House and Daylesford House. He also brought his artistic touch to the likes of Chiswick House, West Green House, Christ Church in Oxford and Buckingham Palace. Many of his designs are still very popular today, such as Bowood, a chintz fabric discovered at Bowood House and redrawn as a carpet by Oakes.

‘George Oakes eschewed “sweetness” in his work, choosing unusual colours and unconventional subjects — cabbages, turnips, radishes,' says Wendy Nicholls, the chairman of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler. ‘He painted lovely birds, flowers, pots and plates, often contained within classical cartouches. He had a great sense of humour; a stimulating and wonderful person to work with, he caused you to think and to try your hardest to be fresh and original.’

‘It’s bittersweet,’ Lucinda says of the auction, made necessary because she does not have space in which to keep all of her parent’s belongings. ‘But, at the same time, what I’m really loving is showing people how brilliantly my parents put together their collections… to be able to show it off and say: “Look at what they did.” It’s a legacy in that sense, isn’t it?’

One of Lucinda highlights is her mother’s collection of teapots — which Oakes had brackets made for, so they could hang on the wall. Another favourite is Judith’s collection of purple slag ware glass. ‘There's a lovely photograph of that on top of a chest of drawers in my parents' bedroom, with these black papier-mâché wall hangings. It just looks so smart and beautiful, and I love that other people are getting to see it.’

Visit the Dreweatts website for more information.

Duredon Farmhouse, in the heart of Exmoor, was in such a state of disrepair when the lawyer-turned-interior designer Charles O’Connor and his partner, Edward Greenall, took it on that they decided to rebuild it from scratch.

The house stands in the middle of an estate and, due to strict planning restrictions, the new structure had to follow the footprint of the original building. The project, which broke ground in 2019 and ran during much of the pandemic, involved reusing most of the materials from the old house, including building stones, floorboards and roof slates.

The library forms part of a succession of three rooms, with the kitchen and dining room, separated by wide arches. ‘The arrangement has proved very popular when the house is let out to families, as it’s where people gather to watch television when others are in the kitchen,’ explains O’Connor, partner at the Dorset-based interior design studio Olpol & Co.

The starting point was the Derbyshire fossil-stone fireplace, supplied by architectural salvage specialist Lassco. ‘It dates back to the 1820s and sets the tone of the room,’ he explains. Several pieces were bought at a contents sale of Wormington Grange in Gloucestershire. Others came from the couple’s previous home. The walls are painted in Farrow & Ball’s Dead Salmon.

The ottoman, covered in a Robert Kime striped fabric, was bought from antique dealer Rebecca Christie Miller. On the floor is a rug from Salisbury-based auctioneers Woolley & Wallis. Meanwhile, a pop of contemporary colour is introduced with the tangerine-orange ceramic lamp with a gathered shade from Samarkand Design.

This feature originally appeared in the August 23, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'

There’s much debate today about whether a relaxation of formality has rendered dining rooms redundant, but one example in London suggests otherwise

Standing just off Kensington High Street, on what is often dubbed 'Billionaire's Road', is a house which was once a meeting point for members of the aristocracy, Pre-Raphaelites and leading proponents of the Arts-and-Crafts Movement.

Built in 1870 for George Howard, later the 9th Earl of Carlisle, and his wife, Rosalind Stanley, 1 Palace Green was designed by Philip Webb with interiors by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. The appointments were a very personal choice; unusually for his family, George chose not to go into politics or estate management, but to become an artist. The result is one of the most influential of Webb’s early ‘studio-houses’ and helped to establish the use of red brick and asymmetrical frontages for fashionable London properties.

But the interiors were arguably more interesting than the exterior. At the time, the standard Victorian decorative approach would have been to apply wallpaper, place furniture and hang pictures. However, here, the decoration, furniture, textiles and paintings were conceived as a single artistic environment best captured in the house’s dining room, the artistic showpiece of the home.

Fast forward 150 years to 2021, when the Crown Estate put Grade II*-listed 1 Palace Green on the market. While the exterior design had been broadly preserved, over the passage of time, elements such as the original staircase and fireplaces, alongside decorative details including Morris wallpaper and textiles, had all but disappeared. Much of this happened when the house was subdivided into flats in 1957.

The launch caught the attention of Russell Smithers, CEO of property developers REDD. With the help of interior designer Martin Kemp and architects Pilbrow & Partners, they set about the careful redecoration of original features and the reinstatement of missing details where possible.

Central to the refurbishment of One Palace Green, as it is now known, has been the scholarly restoration of the dining room. Originally painted in a deep green, with gold gilding, its most notable feature was a frieze designed by Burne-Jones depicting the legend of Cupid and Psyche, based on the story in Morris’s The Earthly Paradise. The room was described in The Studio magazine in 1898 as glowing ‘like the page of an illuminated missal’.

Conservation architects Donald Insall Associates uncovered historical documentation detailing the original design, Kemp explains. ‘By the time I first saw the room, Burne-Jones’s frieze had long gone [it is in the Birmingham Museums collection] and we had to remove layers of paint to work our way back to see the original green.’

The paint colour, known as Peacock Green, was mixed by Patrick Baty of Papers & Paints and passages from Morris’s epic poem The Earthly Paradise are inscribed around the room. Detailing on the panelling, arches and ceiling is influenced by William Morris’s Acanthus design. It was stencilled in parts over raw gold by specialist decorators Britain & Co. As the original fireplace had been removed, a new one was sourced from Victoria Stone with Delft blue tiles in the surround. Ceiling lights in aged brass from Vaughan add a further burnished metallic touch to the space, which shimmers under candlelight.

Following the restoration, the house has been divided into five apartments and this room forms the centrepiece of a duplex space that spans the ground and lower-ground floors of the house. Upstairs at the top of the house is George’s original studio, which is now a living room overlooking Kensington Palace Gardens with dramatic 4.5 metre (15 feet) ceiling height

The interiors had been carefully photographed by the Howards for posterity, but rather than heavily leaning into the Morris legacy or faithfully recreating an Arts-and-Crafts style, the decorative approach has been lighter in touch. ‘We looked to the principles that made the original house exceptional, such as craftsmanship and natural materials,’ Kemp explains. To that end, rooms bear tangible touches of Arts-and-Crafts influences, but in a toned-down manner.

New wood panelling is painted in chalky heritage colours; handcrafted ceramic tiles in the bathrooms echo Morris motifs, but updated in black, grey and cream; and modern interventions such as air conditioning units are disguised in oak armoires. During the strip-out work, an approximately A3-sized fragment of original wallpaper was found in the first-floor drawing room. In its place, the team has placed a Morris-influenced design in neutral tones.

‘The temptation with a building of this significance is to become overly reverential. But the finest heritage projects don’t preserve buildings as museum pieces,’ Kemp says. ‘Here, it’s about being respectful to the architecture and knowing when to step back.’

Beauchamp Estates, Savills and UK Sotheby’s International Realty have been appointed as joint selling agents and prices start from £15m.

Layered look 


Prints and plains can be combined to create an attractive layered effect: curtains and ottoman in Nori Ochre, £86 per metre, with chairs in Emile Copper velvet, £90 per metre and cushions in Leon Stripe Green, £92 per metre, all from Jane Churchill.

Classical accent 


The six-inch-diameter Tracery velvet rosette with floral motif, from the Velaré collection by Samuel & Sons, features embroidery, cutwork and appliqué. Each rosette costs £138 and can be used to add decorative embellishment to upholstery and soft furnishings, including cushions.

Decorative appeal

Floral brass castings sit beneath each wicker shade and crown the central stem of the Edith chandelier, resulting in a Parisian-inspired flourish. Shown here in Indian Red, it costs from £4,998 for the large size from Porta Romana.

Rug and roll

Julian Chichester is launching his debut rug collection in collaboration with Amy Kent Rugs, drawing inspiration from his favourite Tapa barkcloth designs from the Pacific Islands, which traditionally feature patterns in black and rust-brown dyes. The Harvest rug costs £845 per square metre.

Lighting the way

A pierced brass ring and pagoda top add to the decorative appeal of the Artemis lantern from Hector Finch. It costs £4,158 for the large size in Verdigris finish and is suitable for indoor and outdoor undercover use.

Star attraction

Fabric and wallpaper house Zoffany will be hosting a pop-up at Focus/26 in partnership with interiors brand Sharland England, featuring its indoor-outdoor collection of fabrics produced with celebrated American interior designer Michael S. Smith.

The collection includes Kyoto Stripe, Lily Stripe and Thorny Vine, from £134 per metre.

A parallel career

Alongside creating an evolving collection of lighting and furniture of enormous stylistic depth and breadth with his wife, Lucy, Michael Vaughan is also a talented painter whose work has been exhibited in New York and London.

A new exhibition of his recent work, ‘Two Experimental Years 2024–2026’, opens at No 11 Avenue Studios, Sydney Mews, London, on September 24–25, 12pm–7pm, and then on September 26, 11am–1pm.

Moveable feast

Made from solid brass with a fluted glass shade, the Cotswold rechargeable table lamp can be moved around the home with ease — without trailing wires. It has a touch-dim function and costs from £174 from Corston Architectural Detail.

Glossy good looks

The tapered, high-gloss base of the Malmo table lamp in Cocoa pairs elegantly with its wide shade in Almond Cream to create a striking look. The lamp costs £288 with shade, from £174, by David Hunt Lighting.

The wonder of wool

The Rannoch Wools collection from Osborne & Little includes wool checks and geometric patterns in a palette of soft neutrals, heathered tones and rich earthy colours that have been inspired by the Scottish landscape. Prices from £105 per metre.

Chelsea calling

Head to the London Design Social on September 23–24 to meet the creative people behind an enticing collection of boutique fabric, wallpaper and homewares brands, including Parker & Jules, Barneby Gates, Eadie & Crole and Speronella Marsh.

Explore their designs and enjoy talks by celebrated design experts at Chelsea Old Town Hall, King’s Road, London. Visit The Design Social website for more details and to purchase tickets, from £27.33.

Antiques in Colour

At Westland London, five distinguished designers demonstrate how thoughtfully considered colour can transform the way we experience antiques and enhance their enduring relevance in today’s interiors.

From left to right, below, Henriette von Stockhausen (VSP Interiors), Edward Bulmer, Marco Mansi, Aliénor Cros and Darren Price (ADAM Architecture) have each designed their own gallery space, using pieces from the company’s expansive antique collections, with each room focusing on a distinct historical period.

The designers will be in conversation with Country Life's Executive and Interiors Editor Giles Kime on September 24, 6pm, at Westland London, No 295 Willesden Lane, London, discussing Antiques in Colour: The Role of Colour in Reimagining Interiors. Tickets are free of charge.

To secure a place, please email nicole@rawlinsgeorge.co.uk

Focus/26 on Design

The annual interior-design event takes place at the Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour, London, on September 14–18 and offers an opportunity to enjoy talks and view the latest launches from a host of leading brands that do not exhibit anywhere else in the UK.

Everyone is welcome and entry is free of charge. For the full time-table and details, visit the Design Centre website.

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'

When the new tenant of this house on the Blenheim estate in Oxfordshire engaged the team at Blyth-Collinson Interiors, he had a very specific brief, says founder Saskia Blyth. ‘His instruction to me was that, with the exception of beds, fabrics and towels, nothing else could be bought new. He wanted to walk into the house and feel as if it had been around forever.’

Armed with a guideline of colours from her client, Blyth set to work. The deep electric blue (main image) was inspired by a photograph spotted in a book; it was mixed on site and applied by decorative painter Will Foster.

Other colour transformations include a study where all the walls and the ceiling are painted black, green lacquer in the dining room and a hallway in rust. The generous sofa here (main image) was sourced by the decorator, who had it upholstered in an oatmeal-coloured Belgian linen. Over the top are several rugs and blankets that were found in various markets and antique shops.

The coffee table was made bespoke by FRD. The Dorset-based designer, who established his workshop in the mid 1980s and produced designs for Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, is described by Blyth as ‘the best metal-worker known to man’. The top of the table is made of polished brass with a hammered effect on the surrounding sides. Either side of the sofa are lamps by Vaughan. The table against the wall was a family piece and the blue lamp was found at Guinevere. At the windows is a pair of curtains in a heavy red velvet from de Le Cuona (all main image).

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'

In an increasingly digital, mechanised world, it’s hard to resist anything that bears the mark of slow and considered craftsmanship and deep cultural symbolism.

Traditional Kuba cloth, a distinctive, graphic textile from the Congo region, is a fine example, admired by designers for its abstract pattern and textural beauty, which can be layered into rooms as wall hangings and cushions.

Hand woven from local raffia palm fibre — split into fine strips — on hand-operated looms using centuries-old techniques, Kuba cloth is known for its bold, geometric and often intricate design. Vegetable dyes enliven the natural tawny colours of the fibre.

There are two main types: flatwoven cloths with embroidery or appliqué and cut-pile ‘velvet’ cloths. The result offers a window on Africa’s rich textile history and specifically the artistic legacy of the Kuba Kingdom, which flourished from the 17th to the 19th centuries in Central Africa, now the heart of today’s Democratic Republic of Congo.

Made for everything from sleeping mats to prestige pieces, as well as ceremonial and funerary attire, Kuba cloth has had a lasting influence on art and design and is widely considered a precursor to modern abstract art. Henri Matisse (1869–1954) acquired examples of Kuba cloth and he is said to have remarked: ‘I never tire of looking at them for long periods of time, even the simplest of them, and waiting for something to come to me from the mystery of their instinctive geometry.’

Some early examples of Kuba cloth still exist, as Bryan Reeves of gallery Tribal Gathering London explains. ‘Although things made from fibre don’t last forever, it is still possible to find late-19th-century pieces,’ he says. ‘They have the distinctive geometric quality, as well as a lovely sense of movement and a free-flowing design, less structured than later pieces, which is what I look for.’ Reeves recommends reading Weaving Abstraction: Kuba Textiles and the Woven Art of Central Africa by Vanessa Drake Moraga (The Textile Museum).

Recently, the striking, graphic quality has inspired contemporary designs, such as printed cushions by Raj Tent Club, linen by Titley and Marr and cotton by Warwick Fabrics. Yet, Kuba cloth remains a deeply artisanal product, woven on traditional hand looms and finished with layered surface decoration to create the distinctively graphic result.

The demand for Kuba cloth in modern interiors is helping to preserve the techniques of its craftsmanship, as Ben Nel, co-founder of Botanical Boys explains. ‘Every cushion sold helps keep this weaving tradition alive,’ he says. ‘You can feel the hand in every thread — a kind of soul no machine will ever copy.’

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Having picked up the keys to what Studio Vero’s co-founder, Romanos Brihi, describes as a ‘white box’, his client felt rather underwhelmed by her purchase. ‘It felt as if it could’ve been anywhere in the world,’ he says. ‘What she wanted was somewhere with warmth, comfort and character.’

His solution was twofold: to soften the existing space by introducing architectural focal points and to source elements that would give the apartment a sense of place that rooted it to its location in the historic heart of London.

The oak bookcase was designed to fit around various panels required to access services such as the air conditioning. Described by Brihi as ‘a wall of interest’, it took its cue from the work of the Italian architect Gio Ponti. The team at Ultimate Library was commissioned to curate a selection of books that would reflect the interests of the well-travelled owner. ‘We also added mouldings to the walls, which helps to give the apartment its own distinct identity.’

The dining table, with a solid-oak top, was also designed in house and made by Treeslounge. The dining chairs, with their cane backs, are by the Danish mid-century furniture designer Niels Møller. Above hangs a pendant from the American lighting designers Urban Electric.

On the right-hand wall is a work by Leila Bartell from Tristan Hoare. ‘Then, we sourced lots of decorative accessories, ceramics and sculpture to bring in colour, texture and crafted details that would soften the formality and bring soul to the space,’ adds Brihi. ‘Ultimately, it’s a space that tells the client’s story; every element reflects the places and people that matter to her.’

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Jersey-based interior designer Bryony Richardson describes this Grade II-listed property as ‘a chimera of a house’ that had evolved over the centuries.

The first section was constructed in the late 1580s and the most recent additions were made in the 1970s, allowing her to reconfigure the internal space extensively better to suit the family’s needs without disturbing the rest of the house.

This sitting room is in the oldest part of the property and, as a result, remains structurally untouched. ‘We wanted this room to be somewhere the family could retreat to in winter evenings or when a storm closes in on the islands,’ explains Richardson.

The inglenook fireplace takes centre stage. Above it hangs some ironmongery that was found hidden in the chimney, together with the collars of much-missed family dogs.

As the house sits in a slight hollow surrounded by established gardens and fields, the views of greenery and western sunsets helped shape the room’s colour scheme. The walls are covered in a woven-silk, paper-backed fabric by Phillip Jeffries in a colour that hovers between deep pink and orange.

The bespoke sofas were made by William Yeowardand upholstered in Linwood’s Omega stain-resistant velvet — ‘essential in a family with three labradors,’ says Richardson.

In between is a box table covered in a Pierre Frey bouclé. As the room is designed for entertaining, this can be easily pushed out of the way, and guests can perch on the club fender, too.

In the far corner stands a lamp from Vaughan inspired by 18th-century splatterware. Above is a television that sits in a frame made locally to simulate a painting when it’s in standby mode.

This feature originally appeared in the July 29, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

Framed by spiky palms and overlooking the teal expanse of the Salcombe estuary in Devon, Overbeck’s, an Edwardian country house currently under renovation, harbours a secret that delighted me as a child.

Amid the curiosities collected by its eccentric owner was a hidden door. I remember the excitement of hunting for it and entering the dimly lit space beyond: a room with wall-to-wall dolls’ houses and petite proportions that were perfectly suited to a small child with a big imagination.

Decades later, my own children ran their tiny hands over the same dark-wood panels beneath the stairs, letting out appreciative squeals when they made their discovery.

Our country houses are brimming with hidden spaces, quickening the pulse of all those who learn their secret. Chavenage House in Gloucestershire, subject of the YouTube channel Life at the Manor and fictional home of the O'Hara family in the Disney+ adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooper's Rivals, has proved ‘full of surprises,’ notes James Lowsley-Williams — who inherited the Grade I-listed Elizabethan property in 2023.

One day, in a passage leading to a library and billiard room, he noticed a groove in the panelling behind a large Jacobean chest. When he pushed the panel, ‘it popped open’ to reveal a heavy steel door and a hidden room beyond that couldn’t be found on any of the plans.

‘The library was actually the dining room for the original 500-year-old house,’ he explains and, because in those days ‘every meal was candelabras and silver cutlery’, this windowless room was its silver safe. He had hoped to find ‘mountains of gold’ or some silverware at least, but he was met with dusty books and disused furnishings.

His grandfather had more luck in the attic, where a hidden room contained designs signed by George IV for the remodelling of Windsor Castle. He sold them to the Crown and the proceeds paid for Chavenage’s new roof.

Back in the 19th century, our fascination with the secrets hidden in country houses helped drive the trend for Gothic literature. As Allan Fea remarked in Secret Chambers and Hiding Places of about 1900: ‘In exploring the gloomy hiding-holes, concealed apartments, passages, and staircases in our old halls and manor houses we probe, as it were, into the very groundwork of romance.’

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, for example, drew on the trapdoors, hiding places and oubliettes of his ancestral home, Knebworth House, Hertfordshire, in The Haunted and the Haunters, in which the strange supernatural energy in the house is orchestrated from a room hidden beneath a hatch; whereas in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the garret occupied by Mr Rochester’s deranged first wife was inspired by the hidden attic room believed to have housed ‘Mad Mary’ at Norton Conyers in North Yorkshire.

Of course, in most country houses, hidden doors and secret passages served a primarily functional role. At Harlaxton Manor in Lincolnshire, a hefty jib door in the carved-oak panelling connects the great hall to the state dining room, allowing servants to move with discretion as they undertook their daily tasks.

Such doors were also an aesthetic choice, preserving the symmetry of an ornate interior. Yet even practical features were sometimes imbued with a proprietor’s sense of fun. In a false bookcase in the library of Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk, for example, the 6th Baronet included a volume titled La Porte, hinting playfully at the room hidden beyond.

At Hever Castle, the secrets are constantly evolving. A discreetly hinged wall panel with holly and oak marquetry once provided access to a turret to launch surprise attacks on assailants. When the luxury-loving Lord Astor purchased the Kent castle in 1903, he saw no need for a defensive tower and hid something else behind the door more suited to his lifestyle: a cocktail cabinet.

This appetite for whimsy is still alive and well. Andrew Tolochko of Solid Carpentry, which creates bespoke designs for clients in the London area, has noted an increase in requests for hidden features. ‘For many, it’s their dream from childhood,’ he tells me, whereas others are inspired by James Bond. Projects include a mirror concealing a home office and a hinged bookcase opening onto a lift to private apartments.

‘When the door is closed, you’d never guess there is something behind it,’ he says. Some clients have security in mind and request hidden panic rooms or vaults. ‘It elevates the interior, but it also has a function,’ explains Tolochko, who believes that a hidden space helps a property stand out to buyers and can even increase its value.

Witley Park in Surrey is one such unforgettable property, its secret a testimony to the extraordinary imagination of its flamboyant former owner, the mining speculator and financier James Whitaker Wright. Beneath its lake, a glazed tunnel leads to a glass-domed underwater ballroom (now derelict), its apex marked by a statue of Neptune rising from the water. ‘Outside the clear crystal glass is a curtain of green water, and goldfish come and press their noses against the glass,’ reported the Royal Magazine in 1903.

Hidden spaces serving to save lives rather than impress visitors were no less creative. Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire, where Anne Vaux and her sister Eleanor ran a safe house for Jesuits during the Reformation, has three priest hides or holes: in the roof, behind wood panelling and in a shaft leading to the sewers accessible only by rope.

The cleverly hidden spaces outsmarted the persecutors, who, she says, ‘behaved like a lot of boys playing blind man’s bluff, who, in their wild rush, bang into tables and chairs and walls and yet haven’t the slightest suspicion that their playfellows are right on top of them and almost touching them’.

During Oliver Cromwell’s pursuit of Royalists, these hides found a second life. At Boscobel House, Shropshire, Charles II sought refuge in one beneath the attic stairs — only fractionally more comfortable than the oak tree he famously hid in on the estate.

In times of conflict, knowing the secrets of a country house — its underground passages and hidden stairways — gave the owner power over their visitors. In some cases, that extended to eavesdropping on guests, particularly political rivals.

In the Great Hall of Edinburgh Castle, a metal grill to the right of a colonnaded fireplace is the only clue to a secret chamber beyond known as a ‘laird’s lug’ (lord’s ear), where James IV once listened in on his subjects. Centuries later, in 1984, this primitive wiretap would unsettle the KGB, who insisted it be bricked up when Soviet leader-to-be Mikhail Gorbachev visited.

There are some secluded spaces, however, that you’d rather not know about. ‘Horrific’ and ‘terrifying’ are the words Lowsley-Williams uses to describe a tiny room up a stone stairway discovered by his grandfather: a prison cell, with a stone seat and barred window, and reportedly haunted. The discovery of a disused boiler room was also inauspicious. ‘We cracked the padlock and went down and then found a mountainful of asbestos, so that wasn’t ideal,’ he admits.

For better or for worse, heritage properties continue to give up secrets that are sometimes centuries old. In 2023, conservation work at Johnstown Castle in Co Wexford, Ireland, revealed a mysterious circular room hidden behind a bricked-up wall in a tower and accessible only by boat.

It may be ‘a small turret bedroom’, the castle manager told the BBC. ‘We will need to investigate this further.’ Meanwhile, in the Cotswolds, Lowsley-Williams’s latest find in his 50-room home has also left him perplexed. ‘The question’s still out there,’ he tells me. ‘What do you do with an unused vault by your library? If any of your readers have any ideas, let me know.’

This feature originally appeared in the July 29, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Dogs once knew their place, usually a back room furnished with a plastic ‘bed’, which bore the marks (and odour) of various generations of four-legged forebears. Roaming rights might well have been extended to the kitchen, but not to any of the more formal rooms of the house — and never upstairs.

As their place in the hierarchy of a house has risen from faithful and obedient servant to — in some cases — kingpin, the way houses are decorated has evolved accordingly.

Floor surfaces are chief among them; although terracotta, tile, natural stone and engineered-wood floors can cope, carpet, whether it’s loop-pile wool or woven seagrass, is unsuitable for the daily post-walk muzzle dives — and worse.

Enter the increasingly popular option of faux sisal, which offers the aesthetic warmth of natural fibres, but with the durability, waterproof and stain-resistant qualities of man-made materials. ‘It resists damage from scratchy claws, wet dogs drying themselves and muddy paws and — in most cases— c an be bleach cleaned,’ explains Barney Green, founder of Unnatural Flooring, one of the first to pioneer this method of floor covering. ‘A bonus is that the synthetic yarn we use doesn’t attract or accommodate fleas, pests or textile moths and all our fitted flooring can be easily wet cleaned if necessary.’

Increasingly, dogs in this country, where there is an estimated population of 13.5 million (the highest in Europe), are not content to slumber on the floor; interior designers are discovering that the dogs and their needs are just as important as those of the client themselves.

Witness the fact that elevated interpretations of indoor dog kennels and dog beds have become regular features at WOW!house held each summer at the Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour in London. This year, Henri Fitzwilliam-Lay’s bedroom suite for Misia had a stylish dog bed created by Porta Romana to sit within her Art Deco-inspired scheme. Meanwhile, in Sara Cosgrove’s serene celadon morning room with Phillip Jeffries, a dog kennel sits next to a sofa upholstered in silk. Two words spring to mind: good luck.

To address the inevitable damage, the solution is to embrace a fabric that can withstand such treatment, says interior designer Rebecca Hughes. ‘Engineered for durability, high-performance textiles are designed to withstand everyday wear and tear and resist stains and moisture,’ she says. ‘Better still, many are fully washable, making it easy to deal with muddy paws, pet hair and the occasional spill.’

Advanced synthetic materials, such as solution-dyed acrylic and high-tech manufacturing processes introduced in recent years, have raised these fabrics from stiff and scratchy to soft and barely distinguishable from any natural alternative. ‘They evolved so much that most people would never know they were originally designed for outdoor use,’ believes Gareth Marc of Zimmer + Rohde. ‘You get all the practical benefits without sacrificing comfort or style.’

A further flourish comes in the form of additional plumbing facilities installed just for dogs. The post-muddy-walk hose-down using an outside tap that might have sufficed for generations has been upgraded to a dedicated indoor dog-washing area. Usually located in a utility or boot room and supplied with hot and cold water, these take the form of specially designed dog showers or generously sized sinks. Some have low-level pot-filler taps to keep the dog bowl topped up with fresh water.

Last year, Emma Sims-Hilditch demonstrated how to do it with style at her WOW!house Courtyard Room. ‘It reflects a broader shift towards designing spaces that cater to every member of the household, pets included,’ says studio lead Christina Bull.

This feature originally appeared in the July 22, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Tucked away in a pretty Nottinghamshire village, this house was built by a lacemaker who helped to transform Nottingham’s city centre into the global hub of the trade in the 19th century.

The owner approached Emma Wraithmell of deVOL to help create a kitchen that reflected that history. ‘She was adamant that it was about restoring, rather than renovating the space and that would start with using unfitted furniture,’ explains the designer.

During preparation work, an old floor covering was removed to reveal the original Victorian red-and-blue quarry tiles that were once the standard choice for kitchens, sculleries and entrance halls. They informed the colour of the cabinets, which are from deVOL’s Shaker-inspired range and painted in the company’s Refectory Red with worktops in black granite. These are set against lime-washed walls in a warm burnt sienna to give a raw and unfinished feel. ‘The idea was to make it look as if this kitchen could’ve been there for decades,’ says Wraithmell.

A two-oven Aga stands in the chimney breast, behind which is a splashback made in tiles from the company’s Lace Market Tiles in sepia. By the window is a double sink with taps in aged brass. The lace café curtain is another nod to the past; it was sourced by the owner. A plate rack from the company’s Heirloom range, also painted in Refectory Red, displays collections of plates. In the centre of the room is a Victorian prep table, which was also the owner’s discovery.

The Real Shaker Kitchen by deVOL starts from £12,000.

This feature originally appeared in the July 15, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Casa Bonavita is very much a family affair — a hotel that feels like a home, but that you wouldn’t dare to call ‘a home from home’ — unless you happen to live in an immaculately decorated, 18th century Maltese palazzo.

The owners are Suzanne and Christopher Sharp, founders of The Rug Company, and before Bonavita opened as a hotel, it operated as their occasional home. Their daughter Sophie's pottery and son Jamie's antiques fill the space.

There were a myriad things to consider when they set about turning a home into a hotel, including planning for everyone taking a shower simultaneously. However, the couple’s flair for interior design and decor has always been innate. ‘Suzanne has the ability to create interiors which are both inspiring and comfortable, and there were constant discussions about… how to get the balance between functionality and design,’ says Christopher. Even when Bonavita is fully booked, there are quiet corners to escape to — with an expertly mixed negroni.

A huge number of craftspeople and artists were involved in the six-year project, but a consistent vision and the couple’s collection of fabrics, furniture, paintings and lighting, collected over the years, helped pull everything together. ‘In many ways, Casa Bonavita is an accumulation of a lifetime of visual memories, brought together to create a place that feels familiar, lived-in and deeply personal,’ says Christopher.

Textiles and artisanal works sourced from throughout the Mediterranean are complemented by antique treasures including a Genoese cabinet, packed with ceramics. One of the dining room’s walls is hung with joyfully-hued art, while a botanical mural by Italian artists Alfonso Orombelli and Luna Aulehla Greppi covers the other.

The Valletta Bar’s walls have not been left behind and are enveloped in a bespoke, hand-painted vista of 17th-century Valletta, by de Gournay. The kitchen is tiled in Sicilian slabs and the grand entrance hall boasts a frescoed ceiling.

The seven bedrooms and suites in the original house (Suzanne and Christopher bought it 15 years ago before purchasing the neighbouring house and land) share high ceilings, but are all unique in design. Suite 5 is located in the former chapel and comes with a private terrace and a statement bathroom featuring a domed ceiling and marble bath. Suite 4’s bathroom is equally impressive with its floral fresco framing the bathtub.

There are five further bedrooms and suites in the Dower House, which can be booked on an exclusive-use basis. This newly built structure fits seamlessly with the existing buildings, accessed via the verdant garden. The building's courtyard centrepiece is a swimming pool atop a subterranean spa. There are more rooms in the former stables and a soon-to-open, stand-alone suite (The Folly) whose lucky guests will be able to brag about their private garden, plunge pool and one-of-kind oval-shaped bedroom.

The ceramics — from monogrammed red dinnerware to statement lamps and urns bursting with fresh flowers — are all painstakingly made, 500 metres away at Villa Bologna, a historic estate that has been home to a pottery studio since 1920.

Back in 2020, Sophie took over the running of the studio and reinstated archival designs. Each piece has a charming story behind it, but few can beat her own tale of growing up with Villa Bologna ceramics filling her home and one day not only owning the business, but supplying her parent’s hotel in the same village.

Art bleeds into the outdoor spaces of Casa Bonavita, too. Between the honey-hued buildings and the palm-and-bougainvillea-framed pool, a vast garden unfurls, studded with ancient columns, statues and fountains.

Christopher nurtured the garden himself: ‘The vision was to create a series of secluded spaces through generous, layered planting, allowing the garden to remain on the edge of wildness while still having structure.’

Plants were chosen with the climate and seasons in mind so that there is something beautiful to look at year round. Once again, this acute sense of care lends itself to a family home; Christopher was dead-heading geraniums when I spoke to him — not your typical proprietor.

Red Savannah can organise four night stays at Casa Bonavita from £2,195 per person, on a bed and breakfast basis. The price includes private airport transfers from and to Malta airport, and return economy flights from London Heathrow to Malta (including a checked bag).

This is the third part of our series on the experts' experts, in which we spoke to two dozen members of the Country Life Top 100 about the artisans, dealers and writers whose work and wisdom have played a huge part in their careers. The previous instalments saw them name the greatest craftspeople working in Britain and the best furniture designers.

Tim Crump, Oakwrights: I like the look of old painted furniture against the oak frames of our homes, so I recommend John Cornall Antiques, Warwickshire, who has simple painted pieces, occasionally, Shaker in style, which are hard to find in the UK. Although not an antique dealer, Shaker of Malvern, Worcestershire, makes beautiful Shaker furniture—which will be the antiques of the future.

Meg Boscawen: Katie Turton, the founder of Perpoli, has an eye for sourcing truly special pieces and a natural talent for uncovering objects with character, history and soul.

Edward Smith, Artorius Faber: Jack Laver Brister always seems to have some interesting things.

Chloe Willis, Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler: Ed Foster and his mother, Val, of Foster and Gane, have an Oxfordshire shop full of interesting pieces, from antiquities to 20th-century works, and I always find something I love. My friend Molly Alexander has opened a store near us on Pimlico Road, London W1, and it is sensational. Strength, restraint and effortlessly chic.

Geoffrey Preston: Su Daybell has a brilliant eye. Her Tetbury shop, Twig, in Gloucestershire, is a place to look for unusual and unique pieces.

Shankar Kothapuram, Tom Stuart-Smith Studio: Darren Jones of Lichen Garden Antiques, Oxfordshire, always finds what you want, even before you knew you wanted it!

Bee Osborn, Osborn Interiors: Liz Morris Decorative Interiors, specialist in French, Swedish and English furniture and interiors, and Martha’s Attic, Oxfordshire, for all kinds of decorative antiques.

Angelica Squire, Studio Squire: We have found some wonderful pieces at Dorian Caffot de Fawes, London NW8, and also eagerly await the Friday drops by Four Quarters Home and Passé The Store.

Hugo Bugg, Harris Bugg: Darren Jones at Lichen Garden Antiques is our go-to dealer. He has an exceptional range of stone and garden antiques, an outstanding eye and sources that are impossible to match.

Lonika Chande: 8 Holland Street, W8, and Sauce, E10, are both wonderful for 20th-century pieces with personality, whereas Lorfords, Gloucestershire, is always a favourite for its breadth and inspiring mix of antiques and decorative objects.

Robbie Kerr, ADAM Architecture: Tim Corfield has been fantastic to work alongside, helping to bring his amazing depth of knowledge to shape clients’ searches.

Francis Terry: I am a huge fan of Will Fisher at Jamb, whom I have known for many years. He has such a great instinct for antiques and a love of classical architecture. He also has immense energy and, together with his wife, Charlotte Freemantle, has developed a wide range of excellent reproduction lighting, fireplaces and other antiques.

Rupert Cunningham, Ben Pentreath Studio: Molly Alexander recently opened the most beautiful shop on London’s Pimlico Road, SW1, a few doors down from her mentor Will Fisher’s great Jamb showroom. Inside you’ll find a beautifully curated blend of 18th- and mid-20th-century pieces.

In a world of Amazon, Netflix, Deliveroo and Hinge, there is little that can’t be summoned with the tap of a few keys, from furniture and films to pizzas and paramours. The result is a collective impatience that has entwined itself with almost every aspect of our lives, including our homes.

For many, the combination of online shopping and social media has turned creating a home into a process akin to Supermarket Sweep, based on poor decisions and little or no product knowledge. It’s a retailer’s dream; enticing backlit images create desire that can be sated with a couple of clicks and three payments on Klarna. It’s also a far cry from the tradition of the trousseau that once existed in many cultures, which was used to collect linen, silver and household goods in anticipation of establishing a home.

• The best antique dealers in Britain
• The best craftspeople in Britain
• The best furniture makers in Britain
• The most inspiring books on architecture and gardens

The combined effect of rash decisions and poor quality is having a disastrous impact on the environment. Little of what we’re now buying is likely to last a decade, let alone be passed to the next generation. Most of it is destined for landfill. Yet we need little reminding of the benefits of both quality and timelessness; historic houses are furnished with pieces that have lasted for generations, not only because they were made with care, but also because they could be maintained and, when necessary, mended. They are integral to houses that owe their beauty and sense of place to evolution rather than revolution.

Online shopping has put even greater distance between the source of production and the end user. It’s one of the reasons why, this week, we publish our annual Experts’ Experts feature, which includes recommendations by designers on our Top 100 list of specialists who put their heart and soul into the goods and services they provide, from stone fireplaces and Windsor chairs to garden furniture and exquisite brass bookshelves, made in rural workshops from Herefordshire to Hampshire.

These carefully crafted pieces are made with materials that don’t diminish with age, but instead develop a patina that lends them a distinctive personality all of their own. Nor will they ever date; quality never does. Better still, they will last a lifetime, not only because they are beautifully made, but because we are more likely to treat them with the respect they command.

Few of the experts listed here will rank at the top of an internet search; instead, their success is based on a mix of word-of-mouth recommendations and a cast-iron reputation for genuine talent. It’s not only craft skills that are the basis of their appeal, it’s trustworthiness, creativity and the wisdom that is only ever attained through experience — qualities that speak far louder than any Instagram post.

The full list of experts' experts can be found in the July 8, 2026, edition of Country Life magazine — and will appear online over the next week. We start with the list of the finest craftspeople working in Britain today, which you can read here.

This leader article appears in the July 8, 2026 print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Tim Crump, Oakwrights: I ride my bike past Hugh Peachey’s workshop, The Masons Yard in Herefordshire, and it is brilliant to see the beautiful fireplaces he is carving. A clean carved stone fireplace is a great complement to an oak-frame house and Hugh hand creates some fine examples.

Meg Boscawen: Without hesitation, Rupert Bevan in Shropshire. His work spans such a diverse range of disciplines and products, all executed with exceptional raftsmanship and beautifully considered detail. There is a timelessness and elegance to everything he creates that I find incredibly inspiring.

Ben Naylor, Jack Badger: I respect Mike Dennis for his passion for traditional crafts, deep knowledge of historic building techniques and commitment to sustainable, time-tested methods. He also has a remarkable ability to communicate the history and principles of traditional joinery in an engaging and accessible way.

Edward Smith, Artorius Faber: So many, but North Yorkshire-based Linda Fenwick’s shell work is exquisite.

Sarah Vanrenen, Vanrenen Hanbury: Beardmore supplies the most beautiful architectural ironmongery, from cabinet handles to bespoke front-door furniture. Everything is handmade in the company’s foundry on the Sussex coast and the showroom in Chelsea, SW10, is an absolute treasure trove.

Chloe Willis, Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler: What Edmund Le Brun, Flore de Taisne, Nada Debeaumont and the whole team at Ishkar are doing to support Afghan artisans is so important. They have opened a door to brilliant craftspeople, from rug-makers to glass blowers and now embroiderers. I am probably biased, but my mother, Cecilia Willis, produces beautiful bowls and moon jars, which find their way into every one of my projects. Wonderful colours and strong brushmarks.

Geoffrey Preston: Britain has so many brilliant craftspeople, it is hard to pick just one. Instead, I’ll nominate Heritage Crafts, the national charity for historic skills and a great champion of all manner of traditional crafts.

Hugo Bugg, Harris Bugg: Jeremy Weiss of traditional rural skills training and consultancy Proper Edges in Devon is that rare thing: a practical craftsman who is deeply invested in conservation and teaching. Skilled at hedge-laying, hedge banks, gate-making and scything, he now runs hedge-laying courses, too. A laid hedge is a living fence that keeps stock in as well as feeding and sheltering hedgerow wildlife, all without a yard of wire, and a scythe will out-mow a strimmer in a wildflower meadow with no noise, no fumes and no harm to slow-worms or seedheads.

Greg Tirri, RW Armstrong Group: I am blown away by the quality, precision and depth of the work of Mathew Bray of MBMC Studios, encompassing decorative arts, architectural finishes, joinery and furniture.

Shankar Kothapuram, Tom Stuart-Smith Studio: Thomas Rösler works with large pieces of timber in an almost intuitive way. There is much skill involved in his approach and a real sensitivity to materiality that makes the work feel both considered and instinctive.

Angelica Squire, Studio Squire: Gloucestershire-based furniture and cabinetry specialist Ed Keyser is a long-time collaborator of ours; we adore working with him and his team. His attention to detail and skillset make the process and end result a real pleasure.

Lonika Chande: We are lucky to work with many extraordinary craftspeople. Thinking about wall finishes alone, London-based decorative artist John Harragan creates beautiful finishes with real depth and, in East Sussex, Tess Newall’s incredible murals bring huge charm and individuality to a room.

Ross Sharpe, Yiangou: Geoffrey Preston in Devon is a true artist in plasterwork and plaster decoration and a very nice chap to boot.

Robbie Kerr, ADAM Architecture: London-based sculptor, carver and gilder Clunie Fretton really understands materials and every piece comes to life with extraordinary skill. Decorative-arts specialists Mathew Bray and Matthew Collins of MBMC Studios bring so many wonderful crafts together under one roof, all executed to perfection.

Francis Terry: When we were building the new Tapestry Drawing Room at Castle Howard in North Yorkshire, we were nearing the opening date and needed someone to carve the head of Pluto at speed. The amazing Clunie Fretton managed to carve the piece in the required timeframe and, now installed, it looks convincingly like a piece of genuine Baroque sculpture.

Rupert Cunningham, Ben Pentreath Studio: Matthias Garn is a master mason and carver who learnt his craft in his native Dresden in Germany, before settling in York to study under the great Dick Reid. He now has his own workshop and has established himself as one of the pre-eminent craftsmen in the North of England.

There was, in the 1990s, a counter-cyclical knee-jerk among interior designers against fussiness in its forms. The previous decade had been amazing, but quantity had subsumed quality and, suddenly, most inhabitants of fashionable west London postcodes under-took a dramatic decorating detox, painting their floorboards and hanging cream blinds.

The joy was that the look was cheap. A few litres of white paint are so much less expensive than wallpaper, knicker blinds, paint finishes and acres of beige Wilton. The look sparked a new publishing genre: interior books, all with the word ‘simple’ in the title, featuring simple pictures of simple things and text that offered statements of the blindingly obvious. In the USA, the cult of simplicity got its own magazine, Real Simple, which at its peak sold 7.6 million copies a month.

As part of the reinvention of country houses, a new focus on materiality has seen designers and architects paring back houses to their structural framework, revealing stone, brick and beams that a generation ago would have been plastered or carpeted over.

Spaces have been simplified, too, particularly in smaller houses, where removing a wall, pushing into the eaves or opening up staircases can transform the humblest cottage into something quite light and airy. It’s a look that French architects and builders have always understood, especially in the south, where stone farmhouses lend themselves to being unpicked and unpeeled.

It’s an approach to the look that has become a hallmark of estate houses, cottages and pubs, such as The Wild Rabbit at the Daylesford estate in the Cotswolds, where Lady Bamford has been unwavering in carving out her own aesthetic that seamlessly blends texture with modernity.

Never let anyone persuade you that this rural reductivism is simple; reinventing buildings so that they appeal to a modernist sensibility requires clever design, artful construction, ingenious structural engineers and lots of hidden steel beams.

If the technical aspect of the challenge sounds complex, however, it’s not as hard as the spatial planning and sourcing of materials that will add richness and warmth to rooms that could otherwise look austere. Unlike more layered interiors, there’s no hiding behind colour or clutter, nor strategically placed artworks to cover a multitude of sins.

What is refreshing is its honesty; it is blissfully devoid of the pastiche and nostalgia that have been a mark of country houses for far too long.

There's growing nuance to the burgeoning focus on longevity in interior design. Of course, it’s good, vital even, that furniture doesn’t end up in landfill and a visit to a historic house reveals that well-made furniture should never do so.

Yet the appeal is about more than merely avoiding obsolescence; old furniture improves with time and use, gaining character as it passes from one generation to the next, and, when it needs fixing or refreshing, it’s easily done.

Natural materials, such as wood and stone, age beautifully, improving rather than degrading. Many metals do, too, except for iron, which tends to rust and lose strength. In contrast, copper, brass and bronze develop a deep-blue patina over time, ranging in colour from turquoise to green, a process that can evolve over the course of centuries.

Their surfaces oxidise, most memorably on statues and monuments, such as the magnificent dome of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, echoing its Triumphal Quadriga, four copper horses that were taken during the sack of Constantinople in 1204 and which date from the 2nd and 3rd centuries BC.

In painting, verdigris pigments became highly prized in the Renaissance; artists valued them for their depth and gem-like glow, as demonstrated so beautifully in Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, where the colour demonstrates its supernatural capacity to add both depth and a three-dimensional quality to a one-dimensional representation.

Leonardo da Vinci found it challenging to work with: ‘It loses its beauty like smoke if it is not quickly varnished. It not only goes up in smoke, but if it is washed with a sponge... the verdigris will disappear.’

Because it is the result of an evolutionary process that enhances, protects and improves with age, verdigris has become emblematic of the benefits of timelessness. At this year’s WOW!house (which runs until July 2), it played a key role in the Hector Finch Garden Folly, the façade of which was designed by Adam Architecture’s Darren Price and which featured its sponsor’s new verdigris Zeus lantern.

Given that this highly atmospheric structure came to life in a matter of days, the pervasive sense of permanence is a testament to the combination of classically inspired simplicity and the magical character of this revered finish.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

When interior designer Vanessa Macdonald and her husband James discovered an unmodernised Georgian property they loved at the bottom of a valley in Oxfordshire, they lost out to a higher bidder, but the memory remained imprinted in their minds.

On a whim, a few years later, the couple posted a note through the letterbox explaining that they would be interested in buying, if it ever came back on the market. The timing was perfect; the owners were looking to sell.

‘Since seeing it for the first time, quite a bit of work had taken place,’ explains Vanessa. ‘The kitchen, which had been at the back of the house, had been moved into the drawing room, resulting in a large open-plan kitchen and dining room. I wasn’t sure about it at first, but we pressed ahead with the purchase. Now, it’s the room where we spend all of our time and we love the lovely light and the views up the valley.’

As a decorative starting point for the dining space, she chose curtains made up in Indhira by Le Manach, a Pierre Frey fabric that is inspired by a 20th-century Indian sari. ‘I first encountered it on a project years ago and fell in love with it. It works in so many spaces — in London and the countryside — and brings joy to a room.’

The walls are painted in Farrow & Ball’s Vert de Terre, an easy green that doesn’t shout, but which she feels adds depth to a room.

The chairs are part of her own collection and the table came from a shop in London’s Lillie Road, but was widened to function as a workspace, as well as a dining table. Above hangs an Arts-and-Crafts-era pendant sourced from Christopher Butterworth.

The curtain is made from a Namay Samay fabric, available through Tissus d’Helene Ltd.

Vanessa Macdonald leads interior design practice Melissa Wyndham. For more information call 020–7352 2874 or visit the Melissa Wyndham website.

This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The words ‘interior design’ mean different things to different people, from colour, comfort and curtains to fabrics, finishes and floor plans. Yet a visit to WOW!house that opened its doors last week demonstrates that in the right hands it can actually be a form of alchemy that magically fuses all these elements together to create spaces imbued with soul.

Atmosphere is there from the start in the Hector Finch Garden Folly; the Size Group Façade designed by Darren Price; and the Artorius Faber Entrance Garden by The Gardenists, where the poise and balance of classically inspired form are built on a foundation of handcrafted materials as well as finishes in the form of Hector Finch’s new verdigris that elevates these distinctive spaces with a sense of timelessness.

The alchemy recurs throughout the spaces: the Turnell & Gigon Drawing Room by Albion Nord top lit by a magnificent cupola; the Benjamin Moore Minhwa Salon by Young Huh, inspired by the Millions Room at the Schönbrunn Palace; and the Salvesen Graham The Collection Primary Bedroom, which oozes both classic comfort and transatlantic glamour.

An enduring memory of this year’s WOW!house will be spaces that resonate with a sense of drama, not only in the atmospheric celebration of decoration, as in the Schumacher Dining Room by Max Rollitt, but also where you might least expect them, such as the Ca’Pietra bathroom by De Rosee Sa and the moody half-light of the hidden bar behind the Romo Speakeasy Salon by Studio Duggan

WOW!house is at Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour, until July 2.

When interior designer Bee Osborn bought a derelict two-up-two-down 15th-century cottage in Oxfordshire, she knew immediately that she’d need to add an extension to accommodate her three daughters when they came to stay.

Attached to the rear of the house, the addition doubled the property’s footprint, creating a large, open-plan living area and kitchen with a principal bedroom above.

The lack of arms on the large, bespoke L-shaped sofa creates extra perching space when required and the sofa is covered in a hard-wearing performance fabric called Freeport by Thibault. ‘I love using these types of fabrics as it means that any spillages can be spot cleaned or the whole covers whipped off and sent for professional cleaning.’

The walls are clad in timber from a local yard and painted in Alfie’s Tail, a pale taupe by Fenwick & Tilbrook. ‘I wanted the space to look rustic and informal to sit comfortably with the older part of the cottage, so I deliberately chose not to have a regular shadow gap between the planks,’ explains Bee.

The artwork was sourced by Art Untamed, an art advisory run by her daughter, Hettie. Each work was chosen to create a ‘tonal symphony’ of her favourite hues. ‘I don’t go in for lots of colours and liken my palette to the bark of a London Plane tree with all its mottled olive greens, greys, browns and creams. It results in rooms that are calm — everything gets on well together — and yet never boring.’

Almost all the furniture was designed in-house, including the cubed ottomans, which fit under the table when not needed. In the corner is a round table by Robert Langford with a lamp from British lighting manufacturer Porta Romana.

This feature originally appeared in the June 3, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.'

Given that Sir Alec Issigonis, designer of the Mini, asserted that ‘a camel is a horse designed by a committee’, he’d presumably have taken a dim view of the Pontiac Aztek, which was designed, in 2001, by a focus group (and which was withdrawn after only four years).

Collaboration and consensus might be the buzzwords of our times, but there’s something dispiriting about anything that is the result of head nodding, especially in the world of architecture and design. Truly great buildings tend to be the result of a single vision. Architectural examples of Gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of different disciplines and art forms where the contents were the result of considerable control freakery, range from Robert Adam’s Syon House in west London to Arne Jacobsen’s faintly Orwellian SAS building in Copenhagen, Denmark (he even designed the cutlery).

In between, there were similarly distinctive personal projects, such as Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Kensington home of the Victorian painter Lord Leighton and William Burges’s extraordinary transformation of Cardiff Castle into a Gothic fantasy for the Marquess of Bute.

In the countryside, a garden and parkland were sometimes part of an even more ambitious masterplan. Although there were plenty of later examples to be found in Arts and Crafts, Art Deco and early Modernism, it’s a tradition that has become rare in the 21st century when the process of creating a house has become a shared endeavour between architect, interior designer and client. Except, that is, in the work of François-Joseph Graf, the French architect, designer and art collector, who designed At Sloane, whose talents were enlisted by the Cadogan Estate and the Parisian hotelier Jean-Louis Costes.

The majority of the building’s contents and structure (except its façade) are Graf’s work, creating a spatial and aesthetic coherence you might not expect in rooms heavily influenced by Thomas Jeckyll, William Morris and Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the same succession of space.

Like a cloistered monastery or riad, the leaded windows obscure the outside, encouraging guests to look in rather than out and to absorb the intimate world he has created. Like Soane, he is also a designer who understands that a little mirror goes a long way. Also like Soane, the result is not unhinged pastiche, but something beguiling and exciting, true to T. S. Eliot’s view that: ‘The past should be altered by the present as much as the present directed by the past.’

This feature originally appeared in the June 3, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The day before we meet, Butter Wakefield has been speaking to Farrow & Ball’s team at their Dorset headquarters about how she uses colour outside. She seems surprised that they’d be interested to hear from ‘little old me’, but there is surely nobody better suited to the job: Butter has, for more than 15 years, been at the helm of her eponymous garden-design studio; before that, she was an interior designer at Colefax & Fowler, a job she landed when she moved to London from her native USA, where she’d worked at Christie’s. She has, in short, spent her career engaging with beautiful, colourful things, figuring out how they work, both inside the house and out.

Her own home in west London’s Ravenscourt Park is a summation of her years of experience, and you feel it before you’ve even walked through the front door — one painted a green so ebulliently vernal that joy seems to emanate from behind before Butter has even unlatched it, open-armed and beaming.

She moved here with her then-husband in 1991, pregnant with their second baby. Working for Colefax & Fowler at the time, ‘I had a real sense of how I wanted things to be done, but we didn’t have the money to do it all in one go.’ It was, she said, actually rather helpful: ‘It made me understand the value of absolutely everything. When we got some cash together, we could do the next step. Drip, drip, drip — redo a bathroom here, paint a room there, that kind of thing.’

She learned to prioritise and very soon realised that at the top of her list was getting rid of the white paint on the Victorian building’s exteriors. ‘Why would anyone paint anything white?’ she asks, genuinely confused. ‘Especially outside, where it stands out like a sore thumb and looks filthy almost immediately.’ Again, working in stages, Butter began with the back of the house, pairing its London stock brickwork with the lead grey of Farrow & Ball’s Downpipe, a choice she remains thrilled with all these years later. ‘It’s like mascara for the windows,’ she says with a smile.

The front of the house wasn’t repainted until later, when ingressing water from a leak forced her hand. ‘I should have perhaps warned my neighbours that I was about to go a little off-piste,’ Butter laughs, ‘but I was just so over the white stucco on our street that I just went for it,’ colourwashing anything not brick in Farrow & Ball’s Hardwick White (a misnomer, really, because it’s more a chalky grey).

These paint choices form part of what Butter calls the house’s ‘colour story’, something she describes as the ‘direct conversation between the interior of a house and its outside.’ Hardwick White, for instance, is the hue she chose for her conservatory too, evidence that Butter is big on the idea that a house should sing as a whole, as well as in parts: ‘You create views internally, linking rooms through motifs or colours or fabrics,’ she explains, ‘and I believe the same principle applies outside. You should look through the window, whether you’re standing inside or out, and be able to see the two spaces in dialogue with one another.’

In her job, Butter is always taking a read on what’s going on in the rooms that overlook the garden, ensuring the colours complement one another. A significant driver of this, she says, is ‘so that you can pick flowers and bring them inside, knowing they’ll work beautifully.’ Butter — sunny, colourful and full of enthusiasm — is unsurprisingly a great believer in having cut flowers indoors: ‘They’re so good for you, creatively. Working with a vase of flowers is just the nicest thing. And if you’ve got a garden full of them, why wouldn’t you want them inside with you? I’m always trying to convince my clients to pick their flowers.’

Also unsurprising is the garden designer’s fixation with the colour green, which appears in ‘absolutely every room’ in some way small or large, and its ability to both soothe and enliven. This is perhaps best in evidence in her bedroom and bathroom, both of which speak to the sympathetic powers of decorating more generally. After Butter’s marriage came to an end in 2016 and her ex-husband moved out, she very sensibly set about redoing — and in the process reclaiming — those two most intimate spaces. Her bedroom, now a confection of softest sage, neutral linen and — for Butter, at least — relatively little pattern, is a haven of the sort that makes you exhale as you step inside, which was ‘the most important thing’ in those stressful, sleep-deprived days. ‘That room has seen me through my lowest moments,’ she says with the utmost sincerity.

Meanwhile, in the bathroom, Butter swapped robust marble and crenellated mouldings for a scheme infinitely prettier and more feminine, in the form of grass-green wooden dado panelling, Blithfield’s blockprinted Medallions wallpaper (green, of course) and ‘a really fantastic tub’ with antique brass fittings. It is — you guessed it — painted green (racing, this time). Now, emerald majolica and shimmering pink Sunderland lustreware join framed botanicals and mirrors in ebony-stained frames to form a gallery of Butter’s favourite things, admired everyday from her evening bath.

These rooms are, like all the others in the house, an alloy of different aspects of Butter’s personality. It is bright, busy and cluttered, but it’s also perfectly put together. Butter’s jostling shelves and walls are not rammed, but rather arranged with a miscellany of things she loves, whether that’s chromatic, garden-focused Modern British-ish paintings by the likes of John Pawle, Kirsty Wither, Vanessa Bowman and Nick Botting, or the cheery cast of Beswick porcelain Beatrix Potter characters that keep their twinkly eyes over the spare room, papered in Nicholas Herbert’s butter-yellow bunny-dotted ‘Toile des Lapins’ and now largely slept in by her grandchildren. She is refreshingly unsnobbish about what makes her happy.

She can afford to be. Butter’s eye is unerring. She owes much of this to her training at a golden period in Colefax’s history, working at the company’s celebrated showroom on Brook Street with the likes of decorating royalty Imogen Taylor, Roger Banks-Pye, Tom Parr and Wendy Nicholls. ‘It was wonderful,’ she says, ‘and it was terrifying. But if you paid attention you could learn so much.’ She credits her stint at Christie’s beforehand — along with her grandmother’s ‘immaculate’ taste — with ‘opening my eyes to beautiful things, from silver to porcelain, rugs and furniture’, but it was on Brook Street she really learned the principles of scale, texture, colour and pattern.

Desiring more flexibility after the birth of her son Kit — and finding ‘the farm girl from rural Maryland in me calling out’ — Butter left Colefax and found gardening, something she calls ‘the third leg of the stool’ in her life. She trained at the English Gardening School in the late 90s and later went on to graduate from the London College of Garden Design, while juggling the running of her own business with the busyness that comes with four children. It has, she says, ‘been such a happy thing for me’. As with her house, Butter’s own garden is a distillation of both her knowledge and her enthusiasms: water features (‘you’ll never regret having one’) and pollinator-friendly planting (‘it’s all of our responsibility’), products made by, where possible, English manufacturers. And — of course — colour. Her latest ‘thing’ is positioning pots in flowerbeds, providing large and concentrated explosions of excitement at eye-height.

In keeping with the rest of the house, Butter’s garden is loose, romantic and vibrant. The influence of the gardens she most admires — Great Dixter, Sissinghurst, Benton End among them — is keenly felt. Though long and relatively narrow, like so many London plots, the rectangular site is far from conventional, spliced down the middle by a slender, metre-wide sliver of wildflower meadow, whose oxeye daisies and Verbena bonariensis frolic in the slightest breeze, thrumming with the bumblebuzz of buglife. The beds, which spill into turfed corridors either side, are generous and painterly; in spring, when I visit, this means frilly tulips in lipstick shades, geums of peach and tangerine and the sunny-skied froth of Brunnera macrophylla, adrift in a sea of greens of every intensity.

Though she was yet to establish her business when she moved here, Butter — surely inspired by her beloved grandfather, a wonderful plantsman — knew there was a gorgeous garden to be made. It was, in fact, what drew her to the house more than anything, the appeal being its west-facing aspect. I’m surprised; surely south-facing is what everybody wants? ‘No! North is better than south, curiously, as it’s not so dry, and in summertime, you get late sun. East is nice for morning light, but west is best: all the light ends up here at the end of the day. For most of us, working during the week and busy at the weekends, that’s the time we spend in our gardens.’

By summer, of course, the garden will feel like a different room entirely, filled with hydrangeas, digitalis and blousy English roses — Wollerton Old Hall, Bathsheba, Roald Dahl, Gertrude Jekyll and Boscobel — and acid shocks of Alchemilla mollis. The same goes for autumn and beyond. No doubt next year there’ll be something new to enjoy and experiment with. Just as the inveterate decorator in Butter knows a house is never really finished, she knows all too well that this verdant patch of west London is her ‘very own Forth Bridge; you get to what you think is the last thing and then you've got to start again,’ she laughs. ‘If you don’t buy into that, well… where’s the joy?’ And, if there’s anything Butter’s home teaches us, it’s that joy is what it’s all about.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person doesn’t realise how inconvenient something is until it’s done better. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our homes. The key that needs jimmying, the door that requires a knack to close, the drawer that demands coaxing: such irritations soon become unfelt. Until, that is, you have a house that works.

The owners of this Victorian house on Warwick Avenue in west London know this better than most. When they bought it, in 1993, the house — spacious, with a beautiful garden and access to an enormous shared private square beyond — made perfect sense. There was enough room for their growing family and fewer stairs than the Hampstead home they were leaving behind. Yes, there were quirks — the windows were leaky, the configuration was a little strange, the spare bedroom was too big and the master had no en-suite — but these were nothing a bit of patience couldn’t counter. And, besides, the handsome property had charm and character.

However, in the late 2010s, a damp problem took hold, creeping ominously through the lower-ground level. The couple, both lawyers, knew the basement was in need of serious attention, ‘and we also knew we weren’t going to put our 25-year-old kitchen back in,’ one of them recalls. They enlisted Marks Barfield, a Clapham-based practice, who are best known for their public projects — the London Eye, Cambridge Central Mosque, Brighton’s i360, the Treetop Walkway at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — but behind the scenes have been quietly building a reputation for their low-waste, regenerative approach to residential ones.

‘The original plan was focused largely on the basement,’ says Julia Barfield, co-founder and director of Marks Barfield, ‘incorporating a study, a mudroom, a gym, some wine storage and a new kitchen extension.’ Receptive to Marks Barfield’s inherent ‘greenness’, the couple also began thinking about installing air-source heat pumps to replace the tiny, cranky combi boiler, but as the practice began examining the building’s performance it became clear that simply replacing the heat source wouldn’t fix the heating problem. As one of the owners puts it, ‘there was absolutely no point in doing half a house.’

Before long, Marks Barfield had engineered an extensive top-to-bottom retrofit that not only addressed the damp ingress, but completely reshaped the building’s thermal performance — something the house was in desperate need of because it had little to no insulation. Under the guidance of practice director Ian Crockford, the team started to install breathable, wood-fibre insulation and lime plaster, fossil-fuel-free air-source heat pumps and mechanical ventilation systems, setting their sights on creating a home that performed to Passivhaus standards.

The course of renovations never did run smooth and as they began to strip things back to the brickwork, the architects came across oddity after oddity, and challenge after challenge. At some point in the house’s history, someone had decided to chop chunks out of the roof purlins, a choice which, combined with the four water tanks, each weighing about three tons and dating to the time the house had been cleaved into flats, means that the external walls had started to bow by 6cm. Meanwhile, a dormer window in the attic was discovered to have no lintel and therefore supporting the entire weight of the roof.

The house is Grade II-listed and sits inside a conservation area, so planning alone took six months, and Marks Barfield were required not just to reinforce the roof, but retain as much as possible of the existing fabric. As an outfit interested in circular building practices, this was, mercifully, preferable. In fact, throughout the house, the architects tried to reuse materials wherever possible, while also designing for deconstruction, ensuring that — as Julia says — ‘anything we’ve done can be taken apart, the materials reused by someone else in the future.’

Underneath the basement extension, Marks Barfield installed stainless-steel screw piles, upon which sits a ground beam made from repurposed rolled steel joists. The window frames and 90% of the brickwork were reused; the extension’s Douglas fir exterior, with its subtle psychedelic grain, came from an old carton factory in Devon. In a neat twist, it originates from the same part of west Canada as one of the owners, likely arriving in the UK about 50 years before her.

Where the architects weren’t able to reuse or recycle, they opted for low-carbon solutions, such as a green roof and heritage-friendly, Fineo sash windows, which use a vacuum between the panes instead of glass to achieve thermal insulation that’s as effective as triple glazing. They also operated a ‘host and donor system’, giving steel reclaimed from this house to another one under the care of Marks Barfield in Stockwell.

These choices reflect Julia’s desire to be ‘a good ancestor’, a term borrowed from the title of Roman Krznaric’s 2020 book about ways in which long-term thinking can benefit future generations. Conscious that the building industry is responsible for 62% of the UK’s waste, she and her practice endeavour to work as responsibly as possible. It’s admirable, but it’s also plain common sense (Julia once saved a client £1.65 million by reusing materials). ‘The driver for us is the planet,’ she says, ‘but it’s enormously reassuring that our principles don’t get in the way for our clients.’

Back in Warwick Avenue, common sense has prevailed in a way it definitely didn’t before. By slicing up the enormous spare room, Marks Barfield has created a spacious ensuite for their clients. They also removed a strange, cupboard-like bathroom that once occupied a nearby half-landing, letting the room’s high window pour extra light into the stairwell. A lot of the work — including the insulation and plastering — is invisible, but no less important. While working on the upper floors, Ian noticed that the joists had been hacked apart to make way for plumbing and reinforced them. ‘It’s a miracle the bathtubs didn’t fall through the ceiling,’ he says. However, where the practice’s handiwork is on show (notably in the basement, which is now a cool and airy enclave with enough space for work, fun and family life) it is undeniably pleasing: comfortable, beautiful, logical.

The logic that Marks Barfield has imposed on this house is what makes it special. ‘We could have stayed here for another 30 years,’ says one of the owners, ‘and it would have been fine. But now it is enjoyable — cool in summer, warm in winter. It’s how a house should be.’

The other one tells me about a window that illuminates the junction between the ground and first floors: large, arched and ‘almost chapel-like’, she says. ‘We lived for decades with its strange mismatch of glass panes. Some were frosted, some were patterned, some were plain.’ Now restored to its original design, the window is a thing of unintrusive, low-key beauty. ‘I didn’t realise how nonsensical it was.’ She is talking about the window, of course, though the observation seems to reach much further.

Visit the Marks Barfield website for more information.

After living in this west London Grade II-listed Georgian townhouse for a few years, the owners decided to undertake a top-to-bottom renovation and enlisted the help of Studio Squire.

The lower floor, which is home to the kitchen and dining room, required a reconfiguration to make it work more efficiently for their family of five. ‘My clients love entertaining and think nothing of having 16 over for lunch on a Saturday,’ explains Studio Squire’s co-founder Angelica Squire, who was introduced to the couple through mutual friends. ‘A big part of the brief was to make this room feel cosy, comfortable and liveable.’

Working with such a generous space, she admits, made decorating ‘easy’. The couple already owned lots of good-looking pieces, but some of the upholstery had been subjected to the wear and tear of young children and pets.

Their mid-century armchairs (above) were re-covered in a green printed linen Pineapple Thread by Soane Britain. An ottoman is now in a warm terracotta velvet and the sofa opposite is in a stripe by Guy Goodfellow. Above the latter is a wall sconce by Fiona McDonald.

‘This room lends itself to the existing layout, and it felt almost sacrilegious to remove everything and start again,’ says Angelica. On the floor is a jute rug by Peter Page.

Together with her client, she sourced the print by Tom Hammick, which hangs over the fireplace. It brings jolts of colour into the room. ‘We didn’t want to hang curtains and simply used the existing shutters instead — it not only keeps the room looking youthful and unfussy, but also helps to frame the garden views and draw in colour from outside.’

This feature originally appeared in the May 13, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

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There are some hotels designed for splendid seclusion with vast televisions for all-day movie marathons, accompanied by room service on repeat. If that kind of luxury is what you’re looking for, well… I hate to break it to you, but the Zetter group’s newest creation — its first in more than a decade — is not for you.

‘We’ve been quite brave,’ says James Thurstan Waterworth, founder of interior design studio Thurstan, which has overseen the redevelopment of six Georgian townhouses into one hotel. ‘We’ve taken out almost all the TVs.’

Such a move is, he admits, ‘a bit of a gamble. I’ve designed everything around the hope that people want to experience their surroundings while they’re here.’ There is, of course, much to see and do in WC1, from gaze at the chocolate-box townhouses of its Georgian squares to visiting its galleries and institutions, the zenith of which is surely the British Museum — mere strides from the Zetter. (In fact, the hotel’s garden wall borders it.)

The museum, home to around eight million objects, has been a lodestar in James’s design process for the hotel. It has been a joy, he explains, to wander its galleries for research — and it’s why the Zetter’s communal spaces and 58 bedrooms and suites are as genuinely eclectic and globally inspired as they are, filled with African and Oceanic pieces, Asian decorative art and more. Cleverly peppered throughout, paintings from the post-war period pay homage to another local inspiration, the late Howard Hodgkin’s studio.

Anyone familiar with Thurstan will know there is a heavy accent on antiques in the studio’s work. Contriving a conversation between historical design and contemporary contexts is, James believes, the most reliable route to genuine atmospheric texture — layering at its most successful. He thinks he has bought more than 1,000 antiques for this project, 2,000 if you count the textiles, sourced all over, from the UK’s rural antiques fairs (Shepton Mallet and Kempton are favourites) to Parma’s Mercanteinfiera by way of auction houses and choice dealers (James cites Will Green among his favourites).

James had already worked with Zetter’s owner (they bought the group in 2021), but this time round was entrusted with overseeing a hotel’s creative direction more broadly, from branding to the website to the entire guest journey. Without the trust and total freedom he has been afforded, James says, ‘all that would have been impossible, not least from a purchasing point of view.’ And it’s easy to see why this is true.

James has been involved with Zetter Bloomsbury from the hard-hat days, almost five years ago, when builders were busy knocking what were two hotels, spread across the six buildings, into one. Even before the rooms themselves had taken shape, he was busy stocking his antiques arsenal, conscious that the auctioneer’s gavel waits for no man. ‘When you see something good, you have to get it,’ he says, ‘even if you’re not quite sure what you’ll do with it.’ Recently, with Thurstan’s 325 square metre storage unit bursting at the seams, the Zetter project was afforded its own depository — and it is only now, as James and his team work towards final installation ahead of opening, that he is working out exactly what will go where.

It’s a process that reminds him of his early days working at Soho House two decades ago, a company for which he would eventually serve as European design director. Working on hotels, they would install instinctively and in situ, a process he found totally ‘invigorating — and a great reminder that overthinking leads to sterility. You have to be able to react to a space, to see how things work, or don’t.’ The idea that you could buy a rug four years in advance and never play with where it might live feels wrong-headed to James, removing spontaneity — and therefore spirit — from the process.

Naturally, with experimentation such as this comes the possibility of disappointment — one of the inherent challenges of sourcing antiques. James is all too familiar with the realisation upon receiving textiles bought at auction that their condition is not quite as described, just as he is with so-called scale fails, recalling the excitement of winning an 18th-century oak chest of drawers that was to become a ‘perfect’ bedside table, only to discover, too late, that it was six inches tall, likely made by an apprentice to showcase their skills. While miniature furniture is destined only for a doll’s house, at least slices of moth-eaten rugs can be salvaged, with a bit of imagination, for cushions and the like.

Such ingenuity is, in fact, a key quality for an antique hunter — and James’s own has served him well in this project. When it came to the bar at Zetter, for instance, James was adamant he wanted something vintage, but after trawling and trawling, he had to admit defeat. Nothing beautiful was big enough. Then he had an idea: why not recreate something? Searching his stores, he lit upon an 18th-century chinoiserie cabinet which he redesigned on a grand scale before taking it to decorative crafts specialists Faberby Studio, who over the course of 18 months painstakingly replicated the original’s craquelured lacquer. Another invention with which James is particularly pleased are the lampshades he fashioned from a 19th-century mosquito net that had been lying around the Thurstan offices ‘with no purpose in mind whatsoever’.

While there is a multiculturalism to Thurstan’s design language, James has also been careful to source lots of English — specifically Georgian — pieces for this project, underscoring the tonal shift that the opening of Zetter Bloomsbury heralds. Where the group’s older hotels in Clerkenwell and Marylebone have a more Victorian design vocabulary (rich colours, heavy drapery, sumptuous upholstery), James has begun to shape a ‘loose Georgian townhouse concept’ for the brand. The emphasis, he explains, is on ‘loose’: he feels strongly that slavishness is to be avoided at all costs, not least as the 18th-century collectors he has held in his mind while dreaming up these schemes ‘would have had pieces from across all eras’.

Crucial to the concept’s success is, James believes, ‘a sense of fun’, but there’s a need for flexibility too; as the interior designer says: ‘Antiques do break’. Happily, his client understands that ‘one or two might fall by wayside’ over time. ‘I don’t mean to be blasé,’ James says simply, ‘just realistic. Things will change.’ Of course much at Zetter Bloomsbury has been designed with practicality in mind, but James’s biggest priority — and challenge — has been to make these considerations feel invisible. ‘We have treated this project exactly as we would someone’s house,’ James says. ‘That’s what makes a room feel truly comfortable.’

Of course there have been friction points — fabrics have to be fire-treated, and for every well-worn beauty there’s a workhorse of a sofa that can handle the weight and wear of ‘ten people a day, 365 days a year’ — but you wouldn’t know, such is the emphasis on individuality that runs through every space. ‘I don’t want people to feel that they’re in just another hotel room,’ James says when asked what he hopes people will feel when they visit. ‘I want the things that surround them to spark a conversation. I want people to know where they are, rooted in place and time.’ It’s a tall order for a hotel, but when each room is a jewel box all its own, it feels possible. Inside each one — part sanctuary, part salon, pure Thurstan — I’m willing to bet you won’t miss those televisions.

Click here to read Will Hosie's full review of The Zetter Bloomsbury.

One of the many joys of collaboration is that the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts. So when Country Life asked the architect, George Saumarez Smith, to design a garden lover’s library at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show, it precipitated a chain reaction.

First, he drew all three elevations by hand, complete with architectural detailing, wallpaper, and artwork on the walls, creating a trompe-l’œil that included a long view through a window to an imaginary folly. The result celebrates his love for both drawing and classical architecture, as well as his fiancée, Jane Kennerley's, passion for plants.

To bring the space to life, he worked with Watts 1874, the furniture brand Munders Skiles and Artorius Faber, the specialist in British stone, who gave shape to his designs for a floor, fireplace and a pair of magnificent obelisks.

If there is a theme that is central to this project — and which George Saumarez Smith expresses so eloquently — it is the creative possibilities of the human hand. Everything in the space was conceived with both pen and pencil, an art form that is becoming increasingly rare with the rise of digital technology.

Drawing is at the heart of his work, both designing new buildings and bringing old buildings to life — as well as recording the grammar of classicism that he explored in Sketchbooks, which was published by Triglyph in 2021. The result is an exciting project that draws together the passions he shares with Country Life as we approach our 130th year.

The Country Life ‘Garden Lover’s Library’, designed by George Saumarez Smith of Adam Architecture, is at stand PW215 at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, May 18–23.

To celebrate, you can buy a year-long subscription for £150 and save more than 40% on the cover price. International offers also available. Until May 31.

The first 200 subscribers at Chelsea will receive a bottle of The Grange Classic Sparkling NV, worth £39. Rated 94 points by Decanter magazine, this premium sparkling wine from Hampshire was described in Country Life as ‘the connoisseur’s choice’. Offer available with subscriptions for UK delivery only.

When American couple Linda and Ory Eshel bought their home near Paris, the kitchen was nothing to write home about with its outdated cabinetry and insufficient storage space. The solution? To bring in Pierre Pensec of Neptune Paris, who created a modern cooking space using custom cabinetry that seamlessly blended in with the historical parts of the property, and with their inherited items of furniture, including an American enamel kitchen table, from the 1920s.

Linda and Ory were keen to colour match their new Neptune Henley cabinets to the original floor tiles which date to 1914, and landed on a warm and buttery shade of yellow called Saffron.

‘We debated a long time about the yellow and were worried it would be too strong for such a small space,’ says Linda. However, almost from the outset, it was clear that they had made the right choice. ‘We love it,’ she says. ‘We especially appreciate the warmth of the colour scheme under the grey skies of the winter months.’

According to Neptune, more and more of their customers are requesting yellow kitchens, something that Pierre, and many other designers, attribute to people using their own homes to feel positive and energised. An antidote to the outside, topsy-turvy world.

‘Yellow feels particularly relevant at the moment because people are looking for interiors that feel uplifting and optimistic,’ says Hattie Hansard, interior designer at Joanna Wood. ‘There’s also something inherently nostalgic about yellow — it has a familiarity that feels both comforting and joyful, but also quite brave.’

You don’t need oodles of space for your good-feeling cocoon. In fact, small spaces are often the perfect places in which to make bold decisions, according to interior designer Nicola Harding. ‘A small space demands you get especially creative, to give it personality and purpose beyond the sum of its footprint,’ she says. ‘Yellow prompts us to smile in a space that might otherwise be dull.’

However, yellow should be used with care. Pierre recommends opting for softer, richer yellow, instead of anything too bright or acidic. ‘Shades like saffron, ochre or muted buttery tones work beautifully because they add warmth without overwhelming the room,’ he says. ‘They also respond well to natural light, creating a cocooning effect rather than making the space feel stark or overly vibrant.’

Balance is also key and Hattie suggests pairing yellow with neutral materials such as woods, linens and stone to temper it. ‘Lighting should always be considered carefully as yellow can shift quite dramatically depending on whether it’s seen in natural or artificial light,’ she adds.

And on the topic of light, yellows work particularly well in darker rooms by helping to life the light levels, as seen in the pantry of this barn project, by the multi-disciplinary architecture and design practice HollandGreen.

‘We wanted the pantry to be an unexpected and joyful moment,’ says the firm’s interior design lead, Tori Young. ‘The key was finding the perfect shade; Hay by Farrow & Ball is a gentle yellow that works in harmony with the historic timber beams, adding character without being overwhelming.’

The interior designer and antique dealer Max Rollitt is a fan of yellow in bijou bathrooms: ‘‘They’re especially good when combined with sparkly or shiny elements, like nickel and mirrors. It’s so dependent on the setting and the light in a room that we don’t have a “go-to” yellow as such, but Sudbury Yellow and India Yellow, both from Farrow & Ball, are wonderful colours.’

Yellow, of course, isn’t your only option. When a small room comes with added complications such as sloped ceilings or wonky corners, interior designer Christian Bense goes by the mantra that a single colour wash is always best. He drenched this guest cloakroom, in a country cottage project, in a vibrant pea green. ‘The room always feels fresh and bright, even on the rainiest of Somerset days,’ he says.

And, if you want a pop of sunshine as opposed to a full-on glare, Ruth Mottershead, creative director at Little Greene, suggests working with wallpapers with subtle elements of yellow — or using yellow as a colour highlight on woodwork, a door or skirting boards. 

‘Heritage craft’ suggests a bucolic mix of rural skills; corn dollies alongside, perhaps, saddle making, with a touch of blacksmithing; these skills are certainly important, but much heritage craft in fact takes place in cities. Surprisingly, it is here that they are especially under threat, partly due to a decline in available workshops and the spiralling costs of those that do exist.

So what constitutes heritage craft and is it by definition harking back to the past? ‘It's about the making, rather than the object that's produced,’ explains Mary Lewis, head of craft sustainability at the Heritage Crafts Association. ‘It’s about the living heritage of the skills, where they've come from, what they mean to our cultural identity, rather than the objects themselves.’

Once the thwack of a hand-stitched leather cricket ball on willow heralded the onset of summer, yet today there is no one making hand-stitched balls left in the UK. It, along with lacrosse stick making and mouth-blown glass making, is now extinct. On the Red List of Endangered Crafts, published by the Heritage Crafts Association (the only UK UNESCO-accredited NGO working primarily in the domain of traditional craftsmanship,) 72 crafts including horse-collar making, glove making, oak-bark tanning, pleat making, piano making, silver spinning and watch making, are critically endangered, with a further 100 crafts endangered.

The criteria are based on the likelihood that the crafts could continue to the next generation. Most of them are in the hands of individuals, who have for one reason or another been unable to make provision to pass them on. Many are practised in families handed down from father to son, mother to daughter. If there is a next generation, they are not keen to take on hard, often poorly paid work and given the public’s lack of awareness that such skills exist, few potential recruits realise that they offer a possible source of employment.

Young people are often actively discouraged from working with their hands. As a visual arts journalist and curator, I have lost count of the number of times I have heard the comment, ‘people who make aren’t really very bright, and that’s why they work with their hands.’ It infuriates me. Making involves intellectual rigour, skill, knowledge of materials and often powerful stories. As AI reduces job opportunities, one of the few areas likely to be immune to redundancies is making and hand skills.

London Craft Week offers the opportunity to see some of these skills in action and to talk to the craftspeople who practise them. In an increasingly digital world, we have a deep need to relate to the world through touch and practical engagement.

Does one endangered skill matter? According to researcher and traditional ‘West-End hand sewn shoemaker’ (cordwainer), Deborah Carré of Carréducker, it does. ‘None of us work in isolation. We’re all part of specialist networks. In our case farmers, tanneries, last makers, tool makers, box makers, material sources. As crafts shrink, so, too, do those networks, causing pinch points in access and supply — making the craft economy even more precarious. In the other direction, this affects pathways for apprentices and practitioners continuing their career. Often, these are family-run businesses, so there is a wider impact on the economy and local communities.’

We now appreciate ecological systems in nature, but they also exist in making. Those lost skills might also be used in new directions. One reason major British brands in ceramics, glass and textiles declined was that they failed to invest in both design and traditional skills. They failed to support the ecosystem and now have no skills to draw on. A classic example is mould making in ceramics. Only six mould makers exist, because British companies didn’t invest in training.

There has been a stronger tradition of supporting tangible heritage—building skills that help preserve buildings and national monuments. However, heritage craft is about more than being merely instrumental in preserving that heritage. It’s about cultural heritage and cultural identity. ‘It’s more a safeguarding angle rather than a preservation angle,’ says Mary. ‘How do we continue it? How is it relevant for the modern day? How are we continuing this cultural heritage? It's not about just focusing on preserving the past. It's a much more active and future focused, future facing process.’

That includes not only traditional British crafts, but those that represent the diverse nature of Britain’s population. ‘We have lots of different communities with different heritages, and we should recognise those as well,’ Mary adds. ‘Our list includes Ukrainian pysanka and petrykivka, because they're under threat in Ukraine. Cultural erasure in its home country.’

Meanwhile, explains Deborah, ‘cordwaining is an amazing craft heritage. A lot of it has gone and, because it hasn't been invested in, it hasn't been looked after and people haven't been exposed to it, so they don't see it as something that's relevant to them or that they could do.’

That was once true for rattan weaving. In 2010, there were only two craftspeople left weaving rattan in England. When their employer closed, Lulu Lytle of Soane Britain realised that these skills would vanish from the UK and took the bold step of opening her own rattan workshop, now employing 19 rattan weavers.

With little Government support to take on apprentices, training new recruits is complicated and expensive. Couture milliner Giulia Mio, an Italian who moved to the UK, makes hats, but specialises in the spectacular flowers that adorn them. She worries about how to pass on her skill. ‘Being a one-woman band based in Leicester, it is not viable for my business to take somebody on permanently, even if only for a short term. There’s too much bureaucracy, too many complications involved.’

Yet heritage craft skills are relevant now and in the future. ‘Heritage crafts people are entrepreneurial and creative,’ says Deborah. ‘Small workshops stress test materiality, shape, structure and scalability, stuff commercial companies don’t do.’ A point taken to heart by passementerie maker Jessica Light. She learnt her craft (a tradition dating back to the Huguenots), in the East End from Wendy Cushing. Jessica established her own business in 2008, focussing on hand-woven trims, braids, fringes and tassels for interiors and fashion, She is now one of just four individual passementerie makers in Britain and the last left in the East End — its traditional centre. ‘A lot of people don't take it seriously. People are quite rude about it, because it's fancy, it doesn't have a function. If I was an artist using it, people would look at it differently, but I just think I will change your mind. I don't do reproduction at all. My thing is to do passementerie differently. I’m taking techniques from the 16th century and moving them on. That's what they always did. They always evolved and changed.’

Making skills are creative and central to the development of our economy. They can be adapted to ensure a relevant sector for the future. Like plants, once extinct, they cannot be re-established. We need that mixed ecosystem for future prosperity.

Visit the London Craft Week website for more information, the full list of partners and the programme of talks, workshop, exhibitions and more.

The best way to get to know George Saumarez Smith is to look at his work. ‘In a way, every time I design a house for somebody else, I'm sort of slightly designing it for myself. With any creative thing there's always a piece of you in it,’ the architect says.

When I look at George’s design for the Country Life stand at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show, it is easy to see parts of him in there.

His love of tradition is reflected in the white and blue colourway, reminiscent of delftware; his predilection for the wacky in the eclectic collection of vintage gardening books that will line the stand’s shelves; his slight neuroses in the neat lines that run through the design as a whole.

George has been a director of ADAM Architecture since 2004 and has worked on everything from country houses to more urban designs.

His grandfather was the leading Classical architect Raymond Erith, who was chosen to rebuild 10 and 11, Downing Street after they had been bombed in the war.

George has passed his love of drawing on to his two sons (the eldest of which is studying architecture) who he shares with his ex-wife. His fiancée Jane Kennerley is similarly creative — he has roped her in to attend to the plants on the Country Life stand.

The couple live apart, but are planning to move in together soon, which may prove difficult as George’s house is hardly sparsely decorated.

His Winchester home demands to be looked at. Black-beige wallpaper in a botanical print serves as the backdrop to a wide-ranging art collection. Silver and gold candlesticks holding slender orange and pink candles fight for space on the large living room table with an army of different papers and books. For reasons entirely unclear to me, he boils his kettle on the floor.

George’s mother was a tapestry designer. His bookseller father also had a big impact on him growing up (hence the many books set to line the shelves of the Country Life stand, and the even larger collection in George’s own home).

‘​​I wanted it to have a sort of antique feel about it. So the rule is the books have to be a minimum of 40 years old. So 1986 is the cut off,’ he says. I pick one up at random. It’s a beautiful gardening book, but somehow it has snuck through the cracks; the publication date is 1994. ‘We can’t have that,’ says George, aghast. I joke that I am sure no one will notice, but he is adamant, ejecting it from the pile with vigour.

George had one older brother, Joe, who died last year ‘much too young’ from a rare form of cancer, aged 53. It has affected him greatly. ‘You just assume that your sibling will always be there,’ he says. At one point when we are discussing Joe he looks as though he might cry. He considers whether this is on or off the record before ultimately deciding ‘it might help to sort of add something interesting to the piece’.

His pain is clearly still incredibly fresh, and his brother's memory is everywhere, but George is throwing himself into Chelsea preparations headfirst. That’s always what his brother used to do with things he loved, George says.

Your aesthetic hero

In England, there's an architect called Andrea Palladio, who is particularly influential — Palladian architecture comes from Palladio. There's a near-contemporary of Palladio called Michele Sanmicheli, who came from Verona, and I think he's my architectural hero. Every building I've seen of his has got that stamp of confidence and quality about it, and he designed a very wide range of buildings. He's my real hero, and I would go quite a long way out of my way to go and see buildings of his.

A book you’ve found inspiring

A book called Venice, by Jan Morris. I think it’s the best travel book ever written. I have my grandfather's copy and the opening two pages of it actually move me to tears. The writing is just extraordinary.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

I don't go to exhibitions as much as I would like, but Jane and I went to an exhibition last year at the Design Museum, and it was all about the Blitz Club. It was amazing.

The last podcast you listened to

I listened to a podcast that's called About Buildings + Cities. There are two hosts, Luke Jones and George Gingelland. They have a very sort of down-the-line, architecture school view on everything, and so I quite like listening to it, because often I will disagree with what they're saying, and I think that it's good to listen to that, because it kind of gives you a sense of balance.

The person that would play you in a film of your life

What I actually thought was, nobody's going to make a film about my life, because it would just be lots of really, really boring close ups of me doing unbelievably slow, painstaking drawings. It would make a terrible film. I don't know who would play me. I don't know enough actors to be able to answer.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I collect lino cuts and cardboard prints by an artist called Sheila Robinson. I recently bought another. Her mastery of the printing technique is just incredible. This is from a spice market in Istanbul. She did a few prints in Istanbul. I think I'm probably the biggest private collector, I've got about 35 of her pieces.

The music that you work to

I think I've got quite eclectic musical tastes, as most people do in the days of Spotify. When I was at school, the art master used to play music over the speakers in the art studio, and so we had no choice over the music that was playing, and he was a big Leonard Cohen fan. It seemed very grown up when we were at school, these songs that were about grown-up subjects sung by a man with a very low, gravelly voice. I really then developed a love for him, and so if I need to really concentrate, it is definitely his music.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

I said earlier about how much I love lino cuts. I used to do them at school, and I now collect them, and one of the things I'm always thinking to myself is, it would be fun to do more lino cuts. And that never happens, because as an architect, there's always a lot happening, and so things that you think you've got time for, you don't. So, on a desert island, what I'd really like is lots of lino cutting tools, ink and an Albion press, which is like a big, massive cast iron press. I could make lino cuts of palm trees.

Your favourite painting

It's a difficult question to answer, because my favourite painting probably is going to be a different one today from if you'd asked me a week ago, but I have always loved this painting. I was at university in Edinburgh and it's in the National Gallery of Scotland, so I often used to go and look at it. It's The Virgin and Child with Saints Jerome, Peter, Francis and an Unidentified Female Saint by Lorenzo Lotto. It is such an amazing picture. There's something about the kind of architectural nature of it with the layer behind them, and the scene in front, which seems to be sort of part of it, but somehow separate too. I love the painting, because for me it's about Venetian painting, but it's also about memories of living in Edinburgh.

The thing that gets you up in the morning

I mean, honestly, I feel lucky to do a job that I love, so I don't really ever have any problems with motivation. I think that it's an incredible gift and privilege to end up doing a job where you never have to even think about getting out of bed.

The items you collect

Sheila Robinson prints, lino cuts in particular, lustre ware jugs, lot of books obviously — and recently, gardening books.

A hotel you could go back and back to

Years ago, I designed a house in New Delhi, and I used to be put up by the clients in the Imperial Hotel, and I really loved it. It's just the most well run, incredible hotel.

A possession you would never sell

My sketchbooks. In 1986 I had two friends called Francis and Jane (not my fiancée Jane) and we thought it would be fun to go on a trip around country houses in England. So we each went and bought a sketchbook, mine was made by Cinelli in Paris, but I bought it from a shop in Russell Street in London. I drew a plan with dimensions on it of all the buildings on our trip. My friend said I should name the sketchbook, because one day I might have loads of them. And so, because we'd just been to Kedleston Hall, and it's a particularly Roman building, I wrote the name of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, on the spine of the book. The sketchbooks are now full of measured drawings of buildings from all over the world.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

So unlike my brother — he was a real foodie, he would literally go to the other side of the city just to visit a cheese shop — I am not as into food as he was. And I mean, memorable meals for me tend to be the people around the table as much as the food. And we've had lots of family meals over the years around this table. It's nice because it's by candlelight. Slightly unexpectedly, given my furniture tastes, this dining room table is actually steel. The children and I used to play ping pong on it.

The best present you’ve ever received

There's a little family tradition that we make cards for each other at Christmas and for birthdays, and both of my children have inherited a love of drawing, and so one is at Camberwell School of Art at the moment, and the other is at the Glasgow School of Art, so getting handmade cards from them is my favourite thing.

The Country Life ‘Garden Lover’s Library’, designed by George Saumarez Smith of Adam Architecture, is at stand PW215 at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, May 18–23.

To celebrate, you can buy a year-long subscription for £150 and save more than 40% on the cover price. International offers also available. Until May 31.

The first 200 subscribers at Chelsea will receive a bottle of The Grange Classic Sparkling NV, worth £39. Rated 94 points by Decanter magazine, this premium sparkling wine from Hampshire was described in Country Life as ‘the connoisseur’s choice’. Offer available with subscriptions for UK delivery only.

As the plainer cousins of the beloved butterfly, moths are frequently disregarded, passed off as dull or drab. But when the late Lee Alexander McQueen set up the Sarabande Foundation in 2006, it was a moth he chose as its emblem. When asked why, Trino Verkade, McQueen’s very first employee and now the charity’s director, answers succinctly: ‘A moth is a tenacious creature. Ever-evolving. Constantly growing. It will always fly towards the light.’

Such characteristics are exactly those Sarabande seeks to support in its work, providing emerging artists of all sorts with the means to realise their vision without restrictions. Offering its annual intake access to affordable studio spaces, mentorship opportunities, chances to exhibit, scholarship programmes and many more initiatives designed to support their future successes, the charity emerged out of McQueen’s desire to democratise access to the Arts (he himself had been born into a working-class East London family in 1969 before achieving stratospheric success).

‘They don’t have to be young, they don’t even have to have gone to art school,’ Trino says of the Sarabande cohort. ‘We just want our artists — whether they be painters, sculptors, milliners, fashion designers, animators or jewellers — to be at a pivotal point in their career.’ Alumni include Molly Goddard, Michaela Yearwood-Dan and John Skelton. She is adamant that Sarabande is not an incubator, but an accelerator. ‘Our artists aren’t babies. They’re not here to work things out. They’re here because they’ve got talent and something to say.’

Since its establishment 20 years ago, Sarabande — whose august ambassadors include the artists Marina Abramović and Sam Taylor-Johnson, the photographer Nick Knight and the costume designer Sandy Powell — has opened two blocks of studios in London, letting them to artists at almost unheard-of rates, subsidising monthly rents to just £1 per square metre, ensuring they can invest instead in their ambitious projects. The first Sarabande site was in Haggerston, the second in Tottenham. ‘We have always gone to the places where we feel exciting things are happening,’ says Trino. ‘We go to artists, rather than asking them to come to us.’

In true Sarabande style, however, the home of the foundation is metamorphosing. While the charity’s headquarters will remain in its Victorian stableblock in Haggerston, in Tottenham, Sarabande will, in May, move from its current location within a pair of Grade II-listed townhouses on the High Road to another set of two, this time Grade II*-listed, just a few doors down.

Such a sentence doesn’t do justice to the immensity of this endeavour. The buildings the charity has taken on — known as Holly House and Prudhoe House — were constructed in around 1715 to 1725 for Sir Hugh Smithson, Duke of Northumberland and a local MP. Thought to be the first semi-detached buildings in the country, the houses are perfectly symmetrical — paradigms of the Georgian ideal, with handsome Queen Anne façades, half-hipped roofs and a dentilled parapet cornice made of brick. Each with its own coach house, they were built to lure wealthy merchants to Tottenham, at the time a well-heeled rural enclave on the road to Cambridge from London. But by the time Trino first looked round the buildings in 2017, they were, to put it mildly, in need of love.

Prudhoe House, though used, had lost much of its charm; Holly House, meanwhile, was in a state of total disrepair. Tottenham Hotspur FC, which had bought the buildings a few decades previously, had managed to slow the decay with a new roof, but the situation was getting desperate. Trino remembers walking around the top floor when on her initial visit; three years later, it was too unsafe. While negotiations with the football club took many years, Trino says she knew Tottenham believed Sarabande could help them save the buildings. She recalls a conversation with Daniel Levy in 2020, then the club’s chairman. ‘He just totally understood what we were doing with Sarabande. Spurs do a huge amount of development in the area and they knew they needed someone with proper vision to take on the tenancy,’ she says. Together, they applied for National Lottery Heritage Funding — and eventually secured it, though it was 2023 before the decision was finalised and work could begin.

Tottenham Hotspur FC had already worked with F3 Architects, which made deciding on their involvement straightforward as did the practice’s experience of the adaptive reuse of historic buildings. What F3 have achieved here — especially in the more tumbledown Holly House — is quite spectacular. It is what they refer to as ‘arrested decay’; that is, a true kind of preservation. Across the 14 studios that now occupy the majority of the building, there must be a fragment of decorative history from almost every era on display. Layer upon scraped layer of paint has been left, as have the palimpsest of wallpapers, revealed when the rotten plaster was removed; there are patches of wall sprouting tufts of horsehair between extant Georgian laths, trippy violet walls, and doors daubed with 300 years’ worth of brushstrokes, as thick as an Auerbach canvas.

Unless something was dangerous or needed removing, F3 have left it. As Trino explains, ‘the idea is that the houses continue to live — and we continue to add to their stories. By patching everything up, you make it fake.’ Naturally, with this approach comes a degree of acceptance that, in the future, things will need mending, crumbling areas will crumble more. ‘And we’re happy with that. That is the life cycle of a building. We’ll fix it when it needs fixing,’ says Trino. ‘What’s important is that these houses are being used.’

The only particularly noticeable interventions are the plywood boxes superimposed on the studios’ walls, providing artists with pinboard space, or the fire-safe lino floors installed in the upper rooms, which are reserved for jewellers and their soldering tools. Next door, Prudhoe House, which had been lived in for 20 odd years, required much less work, though F3 and Sarabande have still placed the building’s historic fabric at the forefront throughout. With their six-over-six sash windows and generous proportions, the studios in here, now properly heated, must still be among the finest in the country, even without the extraordinary material history that survives next door.

One of the stipulations of the Lottery’s Heritage Fund is that any project it supports must meaningfully increase public access to and engagement with the heritage asset in question. Here, that has meant the creation of a gallery space in the basement, which Sarabande artists, who are also encouraged to participate in group shows, can avail themselves of whenever they have a suitable body of work. As Trino says, ‘having a gallery that will show your work is a great impetus for an artist.’

There is also the House of Bandits, a café, its name a nod to the anarchic ‘Sarabandits’ the charity supports, housed within the former coach yard of Holly House. Just as in the house, the building’s preserved historic fabric is integral to its character, only now enriched by the addition of site-specific artworks, including carved flagstones and a bar, created by Sarabande alumni Jo Grogan, Tom Hemingway, Castro Smith, Yijia Wu and George Richardson. ‘Once a Sarabande artist, always a Sarabande artist,’ says Trino.

The Sarabande Foundation takes its name from Alexander McQueen's Spring/Summer 2007 collection (above), a poetic meditation on fragility, decay and grandeur. There is something fitting, then, about the charity making its home in buildings that have themselves been in metamorphosis for three centuries; here, disintegration and creation are not in tension. These houses have known splendour and neglect in equal measure. Now, housing artists, they are becoming — like the moth — something else entirely.

When the Country Life stand at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show is unveiled, it will shine a spotlight on our home-grown stone. For the ‘Garden Lover’s Library’, architect George Saumarez Smith of ADAM Architecture has conceived a classically inspired domestic interior. As part of the stand, he commissioned Somerset-based English stone specialists Artorius Faber to create a fireplace carved from fossil limestone in mid-grey from Derbyshire and a geometric floor featuring hexagons of blue-black limestone from southern Ireland and triangles of grey-cream limestone from Derbyshire. Completing the stonework on display is a pair of bespoke decorative obelisks displayed on the mantelpiece. These are made from Cloam English agglomerate.

Not many visitors to the show will instantly recognise the stones. Those typically associated with this country are building stones, such as those from Portland, which were used to build large parts of Georgian London, alongside the honey-coloured stone of the Cotswolds and the sandstones of the North. Few British limestones have been embraced for interiors, although with an eye on environmental impact and a desire to use more native materials, that is changing.

Edward Smith, co-founder of the family-run firm, is just back from a trip to the southern American states of Alabama and Tennessee. The American South is a growing market for their products, he explains. It’s where homeowners are particularly interested in the idea of using British stones for their house projects.

Significantly, none of the samples that Smith was demonstrating to his American clients replicates the classic look of stones typically used in high-end interiors. That landscape has been heavily dominated by Carrara, Arabescato and Statuario marbles in the past few decades. ‘White marbles are unique to Italy and Greece and we don’t have a similar very pale or white hard-wearing replica,’ Smith explains. ‘The marble-like stones we do have in this country come in browns, greys and pinks.’

Part of the somewhat limited market for British stone comes down to scale. Anyone driving north from the airport in Verona can’t fail to notice a vast tract of hillside bearing the scars of large-scale quarrying, feeding the hungry appetites for book-matched Rosso Verona, a distinctive, durable red or pink ammonitic limestone from the Lessini mountains. The Apuan Alps in the northernmost tip of Tuscany have been quarried since Roman times. There, Carrara, Arabescato and Statuario marble is cut out of the face of the quarry in large chunks.

English stones are dug out in smaller quantities and most British quarries exist to create aggregate. Only about 10% of what gets extracted ends up cut and polished — the other 90% is typically used in construction for roads, concrete and other uses. ‘Purbeck Marble was used extensively as decorative details for churches, but never received the immense and sustained patronage that Italian marble benefited from,’ says Smith.

The family behind Artorius Faber began working in the early 1990s when the appetite for hard flooring was growing in the UK. Chinese slate and Spanish terracotta captivated the market at the time, but the company spotted a gap serving a desire for matching or tying in stones within existing country house floors, such as flagstones.

Everything they do is bespoke and the team work on anything from flooring to staircases, architraves, fireplaces, stone basins, terraces and steps. One of their landmark projects includes the Weston Tower in Westminster Abbey. Constructed in 2018 and designed by Ptolemy Dean, it is a square lift shaft encased in 16 different stone types representing all the stones found at the abbey. Others include the reclaimed stone terrace at Annabel’s, designed by Martin Brudnizki Design Studio. They also made the black-and-white paving of the terrace at recently renovated Monmouth House in London’s Hyde Park Gate based on evidence of the garden terracing designed by Edwin Lutyens for the house in 1928.

Artorius Faber owns a quarry on the Isle of Purbeck near Swanage in Dorset. Here, the limestone has 17 layers, each of which has a different colour and application. As the layers were created at different times with different minerals and sea animals, each one performs differently from the next. For example, some will be frost-proof, others not; some will have lots of fossils, while others will be plainer. They also buy blocks from more than 60 others located in all parts of the British Isles, including limestone from southern Ireland through to sandstone from Yorkshire and Lancashire.

Embracing British stone, rather than reaching for popular European marbles, requires a change in mindset, Smith believes. ‘British Stone has a kind of less-is-more style, it’s the classic understatement and more designers are using the hard British stones instead of white marbles due to their uniqueness.’ Rather than creating whole marble bathrooms, it’s about having a simple bath surround or a vanity top on top of an antique washstand. ‘It also has a sense of belonging, thanks to its colour texture and the fact that it’s an integral part of this landscape.’

Furthermore, natural British stone doesn’t date. ‘While cheap imports of travertine, which were fashionable in the 1990s, are now being taken out, we’ve never had to replace a floor that a client has become tired of in 36 years of owning the business. In a world hooked on speed and disposability, stone is a fixed element and, with the right care, will last forever. Clients understand this — they consider the legacy of what they are passing on.’

There are other benefits, too. Compared with marbles from further afield, the carbon footprint of British stone is light. It’s quarried, cut and polished with minimal additives and, more importantly, blocks are selected and cut for specific projects with very little wastage.

Anyone considering using British stone in a significant way, such as a floor of the type on display at the Country Life stand, needs to design it in at the earliest stages. ‘That’s why we like architects and designers to come to the workshop to see the materials and design from the ground up with that element in place from the beginning — not as an afterthought,’ says Smith. ‘A stone floor should be designed for the space; it’s part of the architecture, not a transient covering.’

To ensure someone is on hand to help, visits to the Artorius Faber showroom in Yeovil, Somerset, are by appointment only from Monday to Friday, 7am – 5pm. Contact the team on 01935 847333 or fill in a form here.

The Country Life ‘Garden Lover’s Library’, designed by George Saumarez Smith of Adam Architecture, is at stand PW215 at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, May 18–23.

The Country Life ‘Garden Lover’s Library’, designed by George Saumarez Smith of Adam Architecture, is at stand PW215 at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, May 18–23.

To celebrate, you can buy a year-long subscription for £150 and save more than 40% on the cover price. International offers also available. Until May 31.

The first 200 subscribers at Chelsea will receive a bottle of The Grange Classic Sparkling NV, worth £39. Rated 94 points by Decanter magazine, this premium sparkling wine from Hampshire was described in Country Life as ‘the connoisseur’s choice’. Offer available with subscriptions for UK delivery only.

My childhood was spent among books and architectural drawings. The latter were those of my grandfather, the Classical architect Raymond Erith, and the former were those of my father, who was a bookseller, so it is perhaps no surprise that I now live surrounded by both.

This house is in Winchester, where I moved 15 years ago to become a director of ADAM Architecture. At first, the house was rather empty and simply decorated in muted colours. To make it a bit more homely, I started buying furniture at local auction houses, mainly from Andrew Smith at Itchen Stoke near Winchester, Woolley & Wallis in Salisbury and Bellmans in Winchester.

I found, to my surprise, that it was possible to buy late-Georgian tables and chairs very cheaply and my house soon filled up with brown furniture.

The next things I started to collect were pictures. I had made linocuts at school and had a couple of large architectural linocuts by Quinlan Terry, who had taken over my grandfather’s practice and in whose office I had trained when I left university.

I also love the work of a group of linocut artists in Great Bardfield in Essex, perhaps the best known of whom was Edward Bawden. I was very lucky to find several linocuts by Sheila Robinson, a pupil and later a close friend of Bawden’s, which I bought from her daughter Chloë Cheese about 10 years ago.

As well as linocuts, I have collected engravings with a connection to Winchester, particularly views of the cathedral and the college. There is a lovely print shop that I walk past on my way to and from work every day and which I often drop into at weekends.

I have also bought a few works by younger artists who have been inspired by the Great Bardfield artists, such as Emily Sutton, Ed Kluz and Michael Kirkman.

Although most of my architectural work is in England, there are occasional exceptions and, in 2010, I was commissioned to design a house in New Delhi. I had never been to India before and my visits offered an amazing opportunity to find out more about Indian architecture and culture. The experience also gave me a taste for Indian textiles and my house is now full of cushions, tablecloths and bedspreads in a wide range of beautiful hand-blocked fabrics.

The house is also full of my own work. A few years ago, I joined forces with my friends Francis Terry and Ben Pentreath to put on an exhibition at the RIBA in London that we called ‘Three Classicists’. We produced some large presentation drawings for it, most of which now hang in my office at work.

A few years later, I approached the RIBA about doing a show on my own called ‘Measure Draw Build’, which was held in 2017. After the exhibition, the drawings came back to Winchester and, to ensure they were in a safe place, I hung them all in my small study, which also has an old oak plan chest and a mahogany architect’s desk.

As well as drawings, the study is also usually full of books. It has become a kind of halfway house for books intended for either upstairs or downstairs and, every now and then, I have a big tidy up and they find their way onto shelves. But I find piles of books are a good thing to have around anyway, so there is always something close at hand to read. Many were from my father’s shop, Heywood Hill in Mayfair, and others have been gifts over the years. I also buy books from a stall in the cathedral close that is run by a friend, Miranda Bennett, and which raises money for the cathedral choristers.

As the house has filled up with furniture, pictures and books, I have begun to run out of space. For this reason, I have, more recently, been collecting smaller objects such as glass and china. Over the years, I have collected quite a bit of mochaware and lustreware, although I probably have enough of both now.

One of my most recent purchases were two lots of English Delftware plates, which I have hung on the wall — it seems like the best way to display them, although I’m aware it might seem old-fashioned.

Less old-fashioned is my kitchen, the central workbench of which was made by Bulthaup. I cook on an Aga, which is great for most of the year, but does make the kitchen rather warm in summer. Around the edge of the kitchen are cabinets that I designed to hide appliances and provide lots of storage.

Having painted most of the walls in tasteful blues, greens and greys when I first moved in, I have tried to be a bit more adventurous about colour and pattern in recent years. The house was built in the 1860s, so it seemed appropriate to use a bold wallpaper in the dining room. After much searching, I found a paper called Indian, produced by Morris and Co and designed by the architect George Gilbert Scott. It has a bold, graphic quality that goes well with the textiles and linocuts elsewhere in the house.

One of the bedrooms has been wallpapered in a pattern named Monkeys and Birds, designed by Sheila Robinson and re-issued by St Judes Gallery. I am currently looking at more wallpapers for other rooms in the house, but I don’t feel any great hurry to do this — it will simply happen when I find the right thing.

This is the same approach, I suppose, that I have taken to the whole house; it might be called Slow Decorating.

I have tried to make the house more comfortable over the years. Architects often seem to be happy living in quite Spartan conditions, but, influenced by my fiancée, Jane, and my teenage children, I have tried to create lots of places that are comfortable places to sit and relax for a chat or to curl up with a good book.

Every year, I go to Rome to teach measured drawing to American students and, if I have any spare time, I look out for small Grand Tour souvenirs in the antique shops around the Via dei Coronari. Recently, I found some marble obelisks and a pair of small bronze urns on pedestals. I also purchased a plaster bust of Ariadne, a cast of a Roman bust in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, from an auction house in West Sussex.

I have never really wanted to design a house for myself; I generally find it much easier to make decisions for other people. Perhaps one day, a client will commission me to completely design and decorate their house, which I would love to do — but only if they like bold wallpapers, Indian fabrics and lots of books.

Decorating is probably a job best left to professionals — and I have worked with many amazing decorators over the years — but I do think there is much to be said for decorating slowly and allowing layers to build up gradually. Homes are most interesting, after all, when they reflect the lives of their owners.

This feature originally appeared in the April 1, 2020, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

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Frogspawn grasscloth wallcovering in Soft Sage and White is hand-drawn by Ottoline de Vries and digitally printed on sisal grasscloth on a non-woven backing, £575 for an extra-wide 6m roll.

Neptune

Nettle is an uplifting green paint, shown here with woodwork in Moss to complete the fresh effect. The pots cost from £48 for 2.5L emulsion from Neptune.

Fanny Shorter

Fanny Shorter’s Circe’s Garden wallpaper is inspired by the gardens of Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland, where the mild microclimate enables Mediterranean and exotic plants to grow in abundance.

‘As you walk through this near-tropical foliage, you are watched by scores of statues of animals and mythical beasts, hiding in the bracken or bracing a terrace,’ she says. ‘I was captivated and inspired.’

The wallpaper in Stubbs Brown costs £190 per 10m roll, available also as hand screen-printed linen, £195 per m.

G. P. & J. Baker

The joyful spirit of celebrated interior designer Kit Kemp is captured in her latest collaboration with fabric and wallpaper brand G. P. & J. Baker.

Cloudline wallpaper costs £149 per 10m roll, its blue and green hues echoed in matching fabric, £110 per m, and Forest Flower fabric, £98 per m, on the headboard.

Mylands

Garden designer Jinny Blom has created a collection of 12 colours in partnership with paint manufacturer Mylands. Rain, shown here, is a soft blue that pairs well with natural lime mortar. It costs £42 for 1L multi-surface eggshell.

This feature originally appeared in the April 22, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Interior decorator and natural-paint manufacturer Edward Bulmer has teamed up with Laura Cavendish, Countess of Burlington, to produce 24 new colours inspired by Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. They range from Chatsworth Cream, which has long been used throughout the house, to Delft, a nod to the collection commissioned by the 1st Duke of Devonshire.

Having already led renovations of family-owned properties, including Bolton Abbey in North Yorkshire and Lismore Castle in Co Waterford, she was familiar with the paint, which is plastic free and made from natural, plant-based and mineral raw materials.

‘We started by walking around the house and my heart sank as I couldn’t see any standout wall colours,’ explains Edward. ‘I then spotted a contender on some kitchen joinery and another in a passageway chosen by Deborah, 11th Duchess of Devonshire. What emerged was a palette of colours, some obvious and others less so.’

The colours are evocations of the house, rather than lifted from the state rooms. For example, Enfilade is an earthy chestnut brown, inspired by the oak door cases that lead down the Long Gallery into a royal apartment. Sekhmet, a black, was inspired by a statue of the Egyptian Goddess Sekhmet. ‘There are lots of usable colours, alongside some more special tones that we’ve plucked out of 19th-century flock paper or an amazing cyanotype in the collection.’

The interior decorator John Fowler was one of the first to focus on historically accurate paint colours. He was familiar with the pigments available in the 18th and 19th centuries and helped precipitate the modern vogue of sensitive restoration.

When decorating a historic country house, there’s a desire not to put a foot wrong by choosing an inappropriate colour, but Edward is adamant that there’s no need to ape the precise shade used when the house was first built. ‘Conservationists are fixated on colour, but when we think of historic colours, they have aged with time. Before the introduction of chemical paints, all oil paints were made with linseed oil, which goes yellow as it ages.’

Historically, the choice of colours was influenced by the cost of the ingredients. Below stairs, paints were typically made with cheaper pigments and the more expensive used in the main entertaining spaces. Over time, these colours have been reimagined. Joa Studholme, Farrow & Ball’s colour curator believes that fashions for colours come and go. ‘Biscuit, a dark cream, is a good example,’ she explains. ‘It was one of Tom Helme’s [a co-founder of the firm] original colours, but over time it became too green and lost favour, so we re-created something with more red in it. Historical colours read a bit green for the modern market, but trying to understand why is like analysing why stonewashed jeans fall in and out of favour or how the mini skirt goes up and down.’

Joa says that yellow, another historic colour, is having a moment in the sun. ‘I think it’s something to do with nostalgia after all the grey. First, we had an appetite for warm clay tones, and now it’s yellow again.’ She favours more restrained and muted hues of Hay and Sudbury Yellow for a been-there-forever look. Another colour that has woven in and out of fashion is brown. It was celebrated in the 1960s by David Hicks, who lacquered the walls of his Chelsea home in a deep, glossy brown. ‘I’m seeing a lot of interest in brown, especially in kitchens,’ says Joa. ‘Again, it taps into something nostalgic — it’s not showy and shouty.’

As a rule, she advocates using historic colours, but stops short of slavishly re-creating a historic scheme, lest the results end up being too dreary. Instead, she advises tapping into the spirit of a house. ‘I used to think a lot in terms of Georgian colours or Victorian colours, but, although that might be useful if restoring a Regency palace, it’s all a bit meaningless if you’re working on your own home — use the colours you like instead.’

Patrick Baty, an expert on the history of architectural paint, agrees. ‘For a house that’s open to the public, where the purpose is to tell the story of family history, it’s vital that the right colours are employed.’ Patrick recalls his work on reinstating the state rooms at Stowe House in Buckinghamshire to about 1800 — the time of the 1st Marquess of Buckingham, ‘a heyday, before everything started to unravel’ — as an example where accuracy is fundamental.

The next category is when there’s no specific story to tell, but a house is open to the public. ‘Then it’s wise to follow, albeit loosely, the decorative convention of the time, but only up to a point.’

It can backfire if you are too strict. He cites a time when the Georgian Group decorated their headquarters in a period-correct fashion, but then couldn’t make money renting the space for events — the scheme didn’t appeal to modern tastes. ‘We took a less scholastic approach and decorated it in a more neo-Georgian fashion, suggestive of the late 18th century, but not beholden to it — and it worked.’ When painting a home, however, Patrick believes the interior palette should be up to the owner’s own tastes. ‘It’s the exterior of the house that should be painted in colours that are sympathetic to the setting and the period.’

However, Tom Balch, director of Rose of Jericho, which makes a range of heritage paints, is passionate about their relevance, even today. ‘Using authentic historic colours when redecorating historic houses isn’t merely about being “correct” for the sake of it — it fundamentally affects how a building looks, feels, ages and is understood.’

He argues that modern colours lack the subtle tonality and soft beauty of traditional palettes. ‘Modern paint can blur or flatten architectural detail, whereas historic colours were chosen to accentuate mouldings, profiles, separate planes and enhance depth and proportion.’ For those planning a significant restoration programme on a listed house, he adds a practical consideration, too: ‘Listed building consent is easier when the colours are justified and conservation officers tend to respond better to researched schemes.’

This feature originally appeared in the April 8, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Inspiration for Tasha and Barney Green’s business, Weaver Green, struck when they were sitting on a wall in a Turkish port 20 years ago, watching a fisherman cut plastic bottles into a long spiral to make a rudimentary rope to tether his boat. It sparked the idea of transforming plastic bottles into soft yarn that can be hand-loomed into rugs, throws, cushions and other home accessories. Today, the couple’s handful of businesses also includes The Unnatural Flooring Company, which makes flooring that looks convincingly natural, but is made from vinyl, polyamide and polypropylene with all the performance benefits they offer.

For the past 25 years, their home has been in south Devon, near where Tasha grew up. ‘We initially bought some cottages on the edge of a beautiful old estate. Later, parts of the estate were broken off and put up for sale, including a Victorian cricket pavilion that stood a short walk through the woods at the end of our garden. We jumped at the chance to buy it.’

The single-storey wooden structure had been built in about 1850 and used as overflow accommodation for the main house. Inside was a basic kitchen and bathroom, as well as a loo and a septic tank, but no electricity. The walls were riddled with woodworm. ‘Still, we were thrilled. It really came into its own during the early days of the pandemic, when we were operating at what I can only describe as an unsustainable level of hospitality — there were 11 of us living under our roof and it felt like cooking for a dinner party every night. Barney and I would use it as an escape pod, living cheek-by-jowl with the mice and woodworm, but we didn’t mind; when you get there, it feels as if you’re somewhere else entirely with starlit skies and owls. We relished the peace and quiet.’

Another attraction was the chance to escape the constant connectivity of modern-day living; there was no television, no Wi-Fi and no mobile-phone connection because of a hill that blocks signals reaching the nearest mast.

Three years ago, however, a strong storm tore off the roof and brought down several trees. Left with only the frame of the building, they decided that the time was ripe for a full restoration. ‘What we didn’t want to do was anything that affected the charm of the original building. It was never a grand structure — these heavily wooded Devon valleys render formal games of cricket almost impossible in any case — but the position is magical.’

Giving a new purpose to an old building that might otherwise have been reclaimed by nature has been a source of huge pleasure for the couple. The layout is simple, with a large living room, a galley kitchen, a main bedroom, a bathroom and a bunkroom. Electricity is delivered via a nearby storage shed. The couple used wood from trees that had fallen in the storm, including oak, ash and beech. For the floor of the large porch, they used reclaimed Delabole slate laid in a herringbone pattern sourced from a local yard. Oak provided planks for a new floor and kitchen cabinetry, which is simply designed with the original butler’s sink and a stone worktop. They clad the walls and ceilings with tongue-and-groove panelling.

‘When the weather is nice, what we love to do is throw open the doors so that the division between the inside and the outside almost disappears.’ To that end, the bathroom has a tin bath by the doors, which can be pinned back on cabin hooks, and the main bedroom has a built-up bed so you can lie with tea and toast, take in the views or listen to the nearby river. Weaver Green products, including indoor/outdoor kilims and rugs, which can be thrown in a washing machine, are much in evidence.

‘I realise we are extremely fortunate to have this space and it’s not an option for everyone, but I love having somewhere that we can escape everything and everyone and just switch off,’ says Tasha. ‘It’s also where I find lots of inspiration for new designs that I think would be useful to have in the pavilion.’ One such initiative, which took five years to come to fruition, is the Babylon collection of cushions made of recycled plastic yarn that looks and feels like natural linen. These can be left on the garden furniture if it rains, avoiding the need for mad dashes outside in the wet.

During the day, the Greens like to fish in the nearby river. ‘I see fishing as a sort of aquatic tai chi,’ says Tasha. ‘Your brain empties and there’s very little to do except take in the wildlife and the surroundings. It’s the perfect respite to everyday life, where we are surrounded by incessant noise and in constant communication. Being able to switch off and go off grid is the greatest gift ever.’

This feature originally appeared in the April 8, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

On March 24, Country Life hosted a panel discussion at Heritage Barn at Daylesford, in the Cotswolds, that featured: Jonathan Dinnewell of Smallwood Architects; interior designer Sean Symington; Joanna Cocking, head of the Hamptons Private Office; stone expert Edward Smith of Artorius Faber; and Tim Moulding, an eighth-generation builder who leads Moulding, a specialist in restoration and construction.

Subjects ranged from managing the planning process to longevity, spatial planning and sustainability.

It was followed by a question-and-answer session and a barbecue lunch on the terrace.

The Heritage Barn, which has recently been brought to life with an extensive programme of restoration and sensitive intervention, offers a perfect example of how historic buildings can be reinvented.

For further information on private events at Heritage House, please telephone 01608 731700 or visit www.daylesfordstays.com

There are many things to note about Ashington Manor in Somerset, not least that, in the 16th century, it was the home of Ursula St Barbe, wife of Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth I’s chief fixer, whose machinations precipitated the gruesome end of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Although she primped it up with a fancy new façade and oriel windows, it had mixed fortunes in the following centuries until it was stumbled upon by Isabel and Julian Bannerman. The couple are makers of magical gardens, who have cast their spell for The King, Sting and Trudie Styler, Jasper Conran and Keith Tyson, as well as further afield, including in Lower Manhattan, New York, where a garden they designed commemorates the British and Commonwealth victims of the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001.

However, what is remarkable on a crisp morning beneath the mullioned windows of Ashington’s double-height great hall is that it is almost toastily warm, in a way that could never be achieved by even the most generously proportioned hearth.

Most people who spend time in leaky, historic piles resign themselves to the fact that if they want to enjoy the heady smell of old oak, the texture of worn stone and the gentle creak of mortise and tenon joints tapped together three or four centuries ago, the price they must pay is wearing thick socks and a gilet all day (and night). They cling to the Aga like a limpet and feel pathetically grateful when handed a hot-water bottle or find, to their delight, that someone has remembered to flick the switch on one of the world’s least expensive luxuries — an electric blanket.

All the while, however, they summon all their pragmatism to square this discomfort with the fact that they’re in a house that has remained pretty much untouched since it was built, save for some woefully inadequate central heating. It’s the contract you make with authenticity.

Ashington Manor is different, thanks to an 8kW Daikin heat pump powered by 27 solar panels in a field behind the house, which together provide a constant source of heat that gently seeps into the house via the original Blue Lias floors revealed in the restoration. Where possible, insulation is provided by Glapor, made from recycled glass and Lime-crete, which creates breathable floors. Encouragement was provided by one of the Bannermans’ sons, Rex, an academic who specialises in quantum physics at Southampton University. Ashington joins other recently restored historic houses, such as Athelhampton in Dorset and Tottenham House in Wiltshire (where there are plans for a 40-acre solar farm), as an example of how thermal efficiency and sympathetic restoration can sit quite happily side by side.

Once the Bannermans had completed the painstaking task of restoring the structure to one that St Barbe would recognise, Gilbert, their antique-dealer son, helped them track down pieces that would make it their own. Their approach to interiors is unburdened by weighty historicism; in the couple’s bedroom, a vivid mix of green and raspberry-red bed hangings, crewel work, cheery chintz and a poster or two reminds you that you aren’t in a museum. They have no fear of scale or quantity, but understand that both require an artful balance to ensure they don’t overwhelm.

In the kitchen are classical reliefs, a plasterwork of Sir Richard Grenville (the explorer whose father captained Mary Rose) and enough antique china to stock a shop or two. The result, like their gardens, is romantic and playful, rather than po-faced. They also understand creature comforts; new elm floors and carefully planned bathrooms ensure that there are no compromises.

The Bannermans have a reputation for being flighty buyers and sellers of a succession of houses. In fact, they have owned only four (excluding a non-starter) since 1982, making them bang on the national average of a move every 10 years. Average isn’t a name that can be used to describe their homes; the first was the Ivy, a Grade I-listed Baroque masterpiece in Chippenham, Wiltshire, followed by Hanham Court on the eastern extremes of Bristol. There, they got into their stride, fighting their way through leylandii and copper beeches to reveal a gem of a house and garden that dated back to, or possibly before, the Norman Conquest, on which most subsequent centuries had left their mark, including magnificent gates that were added during the Tudor period.

A veil is discreetly drawn over the next in Norfolk (there is usually an architectural lost cause buried in the past of anyone with a track record of restoration). Attention then turned to the magnificent Trematon, a motte-and-bailey castle near Saltash in Cornwall that is thought to have been built on the site of a Roman fort and has a commanding position over the Tamar valley.

Each of this succession of houses offered different challenges, but Ashington was perhaps the greatest; ravaged by a fire in the early 19th century, it became the architectural equivalent of a cut-and-shut car, simultaneously saved and savaged by the addition of a new floor that stunted the height of the great hall. What had earlier been an expression of St Barbe’s social elevation became a functional — and compromised — farmhouse, but the Bannermans’ patient unpicking of the house and harnessing of natural resources has brought it to life in a way that offers a blueprint for restoration in the 21st century.

This article first appeared in the April 8 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Gilbert Bannerman will be on stand E16 at the Spring Fair, Battersea Park, London SW11, from May 12–17

Last month, Dorothy Draper, the most influential US interior designer of the 20th century (her column was syndicated to 70 newspapers) was the subject of a Country Life panel discussion at London Design Week. She had a crisp, direct style that conveyed what she meant (‘if it looks right, it is right’, ‘too much of anything is the beginning of a mess’, ‘eating is really one of your indoor sports; you play three times a day, and it’s well worthwhile to make the game as pleasant as possible’).

Communicating with clarity about design has become a rare skill in the 21st century. When I mentioned in an Instagram post recently the growing ubiquity of imprecise words used to describe interiors, I was showered with additional suggestions. Here are some helpful definitions for the most unhelpful terms.

• Artisanal (adj) Describes anything from gilding to grinding coffee beans.
• Character (noun) If invited to a characterful house, you might want to pack your North Face to wear over your pyjamas.
• Considered (adj) There’s a shadow gap between the walls and the floors and a bespoke iron stair rail.
• Craft (verb) See artisanal.
• Curate (verb) To arrange with minute precision your collection of studio ceramics on a floating shelf.
• Custodian (noun) You are uncomfortable with the fact that you live in Grade I*-listed Palladian splendour, so describe yourself as a ‘custodian’ rather than an ‘owner’.
• Elevate (verb) To invest in a new stone floor, discreet lighting and some Russell Pinch furniture.

• Formal (adj) The planners wouldn’t let you knock down the wall between the kitchen and the drawing room, so you tell everyone that it’s great to have a grown-up space to entertain (but only at Christmas).
• Good bones (noun) The structural elements of an old house of which an interior designer approves, but isn’t entirely sure what they are — or how they hang together.
• Historic (adj) Old.
• Honed (adj) A pared-back interior that was overthought, over-schedule and over-budget.
• Informal (adj) Lots of open-plan space — and your cleaner has been poached by your neighbour.
• Ironic (adj) An item that is expensive, but in poor taste. Often acquired after a glass (or three) of Sancerre in Bruton. The free tote bag was a bonus, however.
• Palimpsest (noun) A tired property, untouched for 50 years, that has been moodily photographed by the fashionable estate agent to look like something from the pages of The World of Interiors. Ruinously expensive to restore.

• Pared back (adj) No curtains. Or, indeed, much else.
• Playful (adj) Like ironic, but akin to something you’d find in a nursery.
• Soulful (adj) A pot made by someone who took up ceramics after a midlife crisis.
• Storied (adj) A US import used as an alternative to ‘old’. Adopted by PRs and copywriters to describe hotels and restaurants more than 50 years old without much of a story.
• Sympathetic (adj) Sombre paint colours, brown furniture and a Ziegler rug.
• Thoughtful (adj) See ‘considered’, but add reclaimed materials.
• Vintage (adj) Bought at a car-boot sale.

This feature originally appeared in the April 8, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

When decorative artist Tess Newall and her husband, Alfred, a furniture-maker, were restoring their cottage in the South Downs, they rented another on the nearby Firle estate.

In the garden was an old wagon used as overflow accommodation and for entertaining. ‘It was falling apart, but our three children loved it — and we did, too. We asked if we could take it on,’ says Alfred.

The wagon has since been both a labour of love and a source of creative inspiration for his new collection of furniture, Caravan, and their shared interest in folk art.

The first challenge was to track down a wheelwright who could move the wagon and embark on a process of repair — no mean feat, as there’s a dwindling number of artisans capable of working in such a wide range of timbers; elm on the hub that connects the axles, ash on the legs that create stability and oak on the felloes, the outer rim of the wheel.

Today, so-called ‘vardo art and living wagon crafts’ are listed as ‘endangered’ on the Heritage Crafts red list. Once these were fixed, there was still the question of the body of the wagon, which was in poor condition. For help, the couple enlisted the wagon dealer, restorer and cabin-maker Rollo Dunford Wood.

The restoration of the structure took a few years and then it was time to make it their own. ‘We both felt that we didn’t want to directly copy any Romany gipsy wagons — we wanted to use our own designs,’ explains Tess. ‘I love the research element to decorative painting. I’m inspired by the humanity in folk art — it was always carried out by people who were self-taught, rather than professional artists, whose tools included pine cones, sponges or potatoes. There’s a lovely simplicity to the designs, which isn’t overthought. It was painted to live with rather than to impress and the approach feels very pure.’

The limited palette is part of the tradition and the Newalls used a supplier that specialises in paints for canal barges. For decorative inspiration, Tess looked at European and Scandinavian folk art. ‘I love painted armoires from Dalarna, Sweden, which I reference a lot in my work, as well as Swedish Mora clocks. They are painted with simple motifs repeated. The overall effect looks beautiful.’

A set of Transylvanian plates displayed in the wagon also inspired some of the decorative paintwork. Nothing was done with too much caution, so flicks of brush hair and smudges are visible. ‘It’s a wagon made largely of wood, which deteriorates quickly in the elements, so it needs a certain amount of upkeep,’ explains Alfred, ‘but it’s not a question of keeping it shipshape. When things look perfect, it feels out of kilter with the romance.’ Neither sees the product of their labours as something that will stand still in time: scratches will be made and further layers of paint and design will gradually be added. ‘Traditionally, those who lived in these wagons would paint them every few years as part of the upkeep. When a wagon changes hands, a new story begins. We see ourselves as custodians until the wagon’s next chapter,’ he adds.

The photographer Simon Brown boasts an encyclopaedic knowledge of the world of wagons. Much like the Newalls, his introduction to the subject happened by chance, when he spotted a small ad in the back of The Observer.

His wagon is a Thomas of Gloucester ‘Burton’ style, painted in a rich, glossy red. It was built in about 1890 and is known as the ‘Cody Wagon’ because it is reputed to have formed part of the entourage of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, which toured the UK and Europe eight times.

Inside, there is a sleeping area and on the left is a tiled wood-burning stove, positioned so the chimney above is less likely to be damaged by low-hanging branches when on the move. The wagon is decorated with simple motifs and pastel fabrics by the historic USA textile brand Rose Cumming and, like the Newalls’ wagon, it required a not inconsiderable amount of work to keep in shape over the decades.

Sadly, for those keen to explore the history of wagons, historical documentation is sparse; Simon recommends The English Gypsy Caravan, written in 1973 by C. H. Ward-Jackson and Denis Harvey, as the only authoritative book.

‘In the last half of the 19th century, there was a number of these colourful horse-drawn wagons built by travelling people who made their money by taking goods and trades around the countryside,’ explains Simon. ‘Whatever extra they earned, they would often put back into the wagons. This period was very short, however. Once petrol and traction engines came along, everything got bigger, and they weren’t as decorative.’

Interior designer and creative director of Firmdale Hotels Kit Kemp is another accidental wagon owner. ‘One of my daughters was doing a dry-stone walling course in Dorset and I had stopped at a reclamation yard on my way to visit her just to see what was on offer. It was a fateful decision. The wagon was almost waiting for me, complete with a patterned carpet and velvet curtains. I paid for it there and then and remember leaving thinking I was probably going out of my mind.’

It now stands in the garden of her home in Hampshire and has become a playhouse for her grandchildren. ‘The end of the garden has become something of an encampment: when I’m ancient, I’m going to move in with a biscuit tin and a kettle,’ she says.

Throughout her career, Kit has been a champion of folk art and craft, which she believes gives enormous visual and emotional pleasure. ‘There’s something about the old journeyman idea that really appeals to me. They would travel the country and paint on the spot, leaving blotches of paint and smudges along the way. I’ve always been attracted to folk art, be it from India, Eastern Europe or Guatemala and prefer things to look handmade.’

The artistic expression embedded in the designs of a traditional wagon — the ornate carvings and colours that are not only decorative, but also often represent a family’s identity and heritage — is endlessly fascinating to Kit. ‘It’s a physical form of family storytelling which these old wagons do so well.’

This feature originally appeared in the April 8, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Set in the heart of Burgundy, with origins dating back to the 12th century, this historic château has recently been revitalised by its new owners.

‘They wanted to give the property a new lease of life,’ explains Rémi Fiacchetti of Neptune Paris, who was commissioned to create the new kitchen.

The space had previously been divided into two, with a stud wall added in the 1970s to accommodate a bathroom. As the owners enjoy cooking and entertaining, they envisioned a generous kitchen with a central island. ‘It made sense to remove the stud wall and open up the space,’ explains Rémi, who positioned a statement range cooker by La Cornue where the bathroom once stood.

It is beneath a bespoke chimney in the style of a traditional French fireplace, used here to conceal an extractor.

‘In the 1970s, some of the beautiful old Burgundian limestone flooring was removed to make way for the bathroom, so sourcing antique tiles to replace it was a painstaking process,’ he says.

The owners chose Neptune’s Chichester cabinetry, inspired by classic English country-house design, to complement the architecture of the château. Made to bespoke dimensions to suit the grand height and scale of the room, it is painted in Driftwood, a warm neutral, chosen to provide a paler contrast with the oak beams.

The island is finished in Constable Green to anchor the design and add a darker element. Softly illuminated glazed cupboards break up the tall cabinetry and provide space to display the owners’ collection of copper pots and apothecary jars.

‘This is a practical room with modern appliances and hardwearing surfaces, but it is also carefully designed with a timeless feel — as if it might always have belonged to the château,’ notes Rémi.

At this event, interior designers Rigby, as well as rug specialist Jennifer Manners and Charlie Porter, founder of Tat London, chose female figures whose careers and work they found inspiring. Those discussed included Eileen Gray, Dorothy Draper, Charlotte Perriand and Gretchen Andersen. All had shown faith in their own instincts to innovate across many design areas — often at a time when it was rare for women to establish their own businesses. Hosted by Hector Finch at the showroom of his eponymous luxury lighting brand, it took place on the first morning of London Design Week, which this year saw the unveiling of The Design Emporium Collective on Fifth, a new resource for visitors offering a range of furniture, fabrics, wallpaper and accessories.

The Hector Finch showroom 301, Design Centre East, Lots Road, London SW10 0XF — 020–7731 8886, www.hectorfinch.com

Each year, the Country Life Top 100 names the very finest country house architects, interior designers, landscapers, garden designers and craftspeople in Britain. It's one of the magazine's undisputed highlights of the year, with our interiors expert Giles Kime spending months alongside experts from across the country to produce the final list.

We're delighted, then, that Giles joins James Fisher on the Country Life Podcast this week to talk about the 2026 list, to explain how it's evolved and developed for its latest iteration.

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This year, the most striking change is in the number of artists, craftspeople and artisans who've earned recognition. Giles explains to James why that is, why craft is so important and becoming ever more so, and highlighting some of the wonderful people who are in this year's Top 100.

You can see the full Country Life Top 100 here; and to see Giles in person you can book a ticket for his conversation with Kit Kemp — a designer on the Top 100 list — at the Winchester Book Festival in April.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Giles Kime

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Frederic Leighton worshipped beauty, so he built himself a shrine to it. In 1877, he had commissioned his ‘little addition’, as he called his Arab Hall with exquisite understatement, ‘for the sake of something beautiful to look at once in a while’. ‘Not for library, not for reception hall, not for cosey sanctum, was it made,’ wrote a palpably astonished Virginia Butler in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1893: instead, its entire raison d’etre was to please the eye. By 1894, it had become ‘one of the most famous rooms in England’, according to The Illustrated American.

A newly opened exhibition at Leighton House, London W14 — accompanied by a book by Islamic art scholar Melanie Gibson, The Arab Hall, Frederic Leighton: Traveller and Collector — charts the Arab Hall’s development and explores its enduring influence through a short film and three installations by contemporary artists.

In 1864, Leighton bought a plot of land near Holland Park — an area increasingly popular with London’s art circles — and commissioned a house and studio from architect George Aitchison. The artist moved there in 1866, but, writes Dr Gibson, the house’s ‘construction and decoration were a continuous project on which he lavished attention and money throughout his life’. Leighton and Aitchison’s biggest undertaking was the Arab Hall, (which, incidentally, also proved rather more expensive, at more than £7,000, than the house had cost to build from scratch).

Inspired by the architecture they had seen on their travels — down to the crescent on the outside of the gilded dome, which echoed those on mosques in Egypt or Syria — the new room housed the collection the artist amassed during his time in southern Europe and the Middle East. The interior was encrusted with more than 1,000 tiles, primarily from Persia, Damascus and Iznik, which were either acquired by Leighton himself or by his friends for him. Among others, Caspar Purdon Clarke, who would later become director of the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A), secured two panels with grape motifs.

Leighton and Aitchison also called on ceramicist William De Morgan to repair broken tiles, make replicas to fill gaps and, later, create new designs for the house’s Narcissus Hall and staircase. Illustrator Walter Crane was commissioned to create a gold mosaic frieze based on a photograph of the one in La Zisa in Palermo, Italy, one of the room’s most significant design inspirations. ‘I did not realise till many years afterwards, when I visited Palermo, how closely the plan and proportions of the old palace hall had been followed,’ he noted years later.

The Arab Hall’s floor mosaics harked back, at least in part, to those of Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, but, in the centre, Leighton and Aitchison cut a shallow fountain of the kind often seen in houses in Cairo. Beautiful as it was, however, it could also be a hazard for guests: ‘After a dinner party at which Sir E. Burne-Jones, Mr. Whistler, Mr. Albert Moore, and many others were present, I recollect how, when we were smoking and drinking coffee in this hall, somebody, excitedly discoursing, stepped unaware right into the fountain,’ wrote architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell in Ernest Rhys’s Frederic Lord Leighton: An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work.

‘Two large Japanese gold tench, whose somnolent existence was now for the first time made interesting, dashed about looking for an exit, and there was a general noise of splashing and laughter. The dark, apparently fathomless pool was rather a mistake. Mishaps like that just mentioned occurred, I believe, more than once.’ Rumour has it that, despite the rope encircling it, the fountain still claims the odd visitor to this day.

The Arab Hall: Past and Present' is at Leighton House and is available to visit until October 4.

This feature originally appeared in the March 25, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.