Animal designs on the march: Owls, elephants and monkeys no longer just for the nursery

(Image credit: Holly Frean / hollyfrean.com)

published 23 January 2017

The menagerie of animal-themed decorations on these pages over the festive season was no passing festive fad. Furry and feathery creatures are here to stay, on everything from fabrics and wallpaper to ceramics and cushions. For centuries, a taste for animal forms has ebbed and flowed in interior design, most recently in the 1960s, when Casa Pupo on London’s Pimlico Road (now Linley) fed an appetite for life-size ceramic Afghan hounds. Along with flokati rugs and beaded curtains, they were an essential interiors accessory for those free spirits not wedded to a life of Laura Ashley and Habitat chicken bricks.

The new generation of animal-inspired designs is different — they have a charm and a naïvety more akin to illustrations in children’s picture books than the decoration of a fancy Spanish hacienda.

Examples are everywhere: Beatrix Potter-esque rabbits on textiles at Thornback and Peel, lap dogs on the ceramics of Fenella Smith and scampering hounds and foxes in the work of Country Life’s in-house illustrator Emma McCall.

An animal-inspired artist who is leading the pack (Herd? Pride? Flock?) is Holly Frean, whose simple but highly expressive animal paintings and ceramics have gained her attention around the world, including from the American fashion and interiors giant Anthropologie and Kit Kemp, the creative force behind hotels such as the Ham Yard in London and the Whitby that opens in New York next month.

Most recently, Miss Frean has been commissioned to create a collection of fabrics and wallpapers for Andrew Martin that is populated with lions, tigers, giraffes and elephants. One of the (many) remarkable aspects of her work is that it’s aimed at adult drawing rooms rather than nurseries.

Is there a fashion element to all this? The fact that there is currently a parallel in fashion—namely, Gucci sweaters, Valentino bomber jackets and Marc Jacobs shoes emblazoned with everything from tigers to monkeys—would suggest so.

No doubt, as I write, there’s a breakout area in a trend-forecasting consultancy full of people cooking up catchy new terminology to capture the new mood (‘neo naïve’, ‘menagerie chic’, ‘zoology zeitgeist’) and theories about the fact that it’s a subliminal reaction or response to something or other (the technological revolution, global warming, Brexit).

However, in the meantime, the rest of us can enjoy these designs for what they are: utterly beguiling.

Giles Kime

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Giles Kime is Country Life's Executive and Interiors Editor, an expert in interior design with decades of experience since starting his career at The World of Interiors magazine. Giles joined Country Life in 2016, introducing new weekly interiors features, bridging the gap between our coverage of architecture and gardening. He previously launched a design section in The Telegraph and spent over a decade at Homes & Gardens magazine (launched by Country Life's founder Edward Hudson in 1919). A regular host of events at London Craft Week, Focus, Decorex and the V&A, he has interviewed leading design figures, including Kit Kemp, Tricia Guild, Mary Fox Linton, Chester Jones, Barbara Barry and Lord Snowdon. He has written a number of books on interior design, property and wine, the most recent of which is on the legendary interior designer Nina Campbell who last year celebrated her fiftieth year in business. This Autumn sees the publication of his book on the work of the interior designer, Emma Sims-Hilditch. He has also written widely on wine and at 26, was the youngest ever editor of Decanter Magazine. Having spent ten years restoring an Arts & Crafts house on the banks of the Itchen, he and his wife, Kate, are breathing life into a 16th-century cottage near Alresford that has remained untouched for almost half a century.