Is there anything more gleeful than picking out a fantasy home when you’re watching a TV show or reading a book? Imagining what it would be like to tap away at an email from Meg Ryan’s cosy lamp-lit apartment in You’ve Got Mail, or make a coffee in the glass-walled minimalist kitchen from Ex Machina. Who didn’t want to run around the imposing and slightly spooky house from The Secret Garden when they read it as a child? Imagining peeking behind tapestries to find secret doors and drawing curtains on four-poster beds. And come Christmas time, everyone wants to spend a few days holed up in Kate Winslet’s matchbox-sized cottage from The Holiday.
Whether they’re pure fantasy (the charming tree stump homes illustrated in the Brambly Hedge books seem to be a universal favourite) or they genuinely inform the way you decorate; fictional interiors can be deeply inspiring and nostalgic. They make you yearn for a home you’ve never been to but remember fondly from films or books, because you’ve already seen the way the light moves, or how the house could feel at a family dinner.
We asked a handful of imaginative people in the interiors world to share the fictional homes they would happily move into.
Hannah Weiland, fashion designer and Shrimps founder
Recently I have found myself getting interior inspiration (and envy!) from my 4 year old son's bedtime stories. Whenever I read him Gorilla by Anthony Browne, I find myself pausing to admire his beautiful interior illustrations. From the floral wallpaper, the patchwork quilt on Hannah's wrought iron bed and the baby blue kitchen with a checkerboard floor. I also love Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown for a similar reason, but a very different interiors fix. It is quite a wild, Bauhaus inspired bedroom, almost like Ettore Sottsass or the Memphis Group in style. Not the most relaxing atmosphere to sleep in, but it seems ok for the bunny in his striped pyjamas.
Nina Litchfield, interior designer
The fictional interior I’d most like to live in would be something similar to a treehouse. Maybe Wes Anderson’s version of Fantastic Mr. Fox. It’s cosy, surrounded by nature and has a log cabin feel about it. I like to feel embraced by natural materials and I’m obsessed by trees, so I’d love to live in one!
Tess Newall, decorative artist
Before painting murals, I designed and painted sets for films. I love how an atmosphere can be created by an interior, and how details can allude to what might happen in the film. Ari Aster’s Midsommar is shocking but the set is beautiful. It’s filmed in Hälsingland in Sweden, an area full of 19th-century wooden farmhouses decorated in a naive style by travelling groups of artists. Midsommar’s dormitory room was built for the film and is decorated in a very similar way. It’s covered in murals based on traditional Hälsinge folklore; flowers symbolising fertility and rebirth, to reflect May Day celebrations, as well as darker rituals which have been fictionalised for the film. I love how miniature scenes are surrounded by multiple borders which run around the room, leading the eye as though reading an illuminated manuscript. The murals can actually be seen as a cartoon version of the film script. If I lived there, I would paint over the more sinister panels, but the dormitory from the film would make a glorious open-plan house, in the middle of Swedish woodland!
Kate Cox, interior designer at HÁM Interiors
I'm drawn to homes filled with comfort and warmth. In Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, the modest home of the March family encompasses the sense of cosiness that my designs emulate. In Greta Gerwig's film adaptation, the simple clapboard exterior of the American Colonial style gives way to a home full of familial charm, adorned with hand-stitched quilts, well-worn rugs, Shaker chairs, and patina-rich antiques laden with books and collected treasures. It abounds with New England folksy charm.
Alice Wawrik, founder of By Alice and antiques dealer
I’d love to live in the New York apartment described in ‘Auntie Mame’ – it’s one of my favourite books and I aspire to be like her. When Patrick and his caretaker Norah arrive at Mame’s apartment for the first time, they’re a little startled by the ‘unique’ hallway decor. Norah remarks that the hallway resembles “The ladies’ room at the Oriental theater” and when they ring the doorbell, steam shoots out of the dragon’s nostrils and the eyes move. Patrick’s bedroom is called The Marie Antoinette Room and Mame takes him to the dining room, where a buffet has been set up behind an ornate set of metal doors. Norah complains that in the 14 days they’ve been living there, Mame has thrown 13 parties. Auntie Mame is a lover of art and theatre, with a quick wit and a disdain for snobbish society. The character is divine and the film sets are magnificent. The apartment Mame lives in takes on a completely new and different look every few years, based on her theatrical personality. During the film version of the book, viewers get to see six separate and completely different designs, and to quote Jonathan Adler, “Watching Auntie Mame is a right of passage for every aspiring decorator”.
Anna Haines, interior designer
I would be very happy in the layered and unfailingly charming interior of the mansion house in The Royal Tenenbaums, the film directed by Wes Anderson. Antique Turkish rugs adorn the floors of most of the rooms, often one overlapping another, with books spilling out of every bookshelf. Oak panelling and raspberry pink wallpaper line the staircase. Margot’s bedroom has the now-iconic Scalamandre wallpaper – which features zebras running across a rich red base colour, and the bed is rather cleverly partitioned behind muslin curtains to create a calm retreat. It is all so distinctive but not remotely over-styled. Every space exudes creativity but also reflects the eclecticism of this family’s life. Yes please!
George Bronwin, potter
I grew up on a diet of BBC period drama in the nineties and noughties, so naturally all my delusional dreaming of aspirational houses stems from that. The staple was Pride and Prejudice (the Colin Firth version, obviously), and in my more grandiose days, I’d imagine setting myself up at Pemberley. I’d also love Lyra’s Oxford, minus the oppressive regime. All that sandy warm stone, spires, old fashioned views with no cars. But nowadays I think I’d be delighted with the Weasley family’s bucolic idyll - a favourite from Harry Potter.
Georgia Spray, founder of Partnership Editions
My dream place to live would be the house from The Talented Mr Ripley, especially if I can tag on the amazing classic boat from the film as well. I love all the details – from the beautiful freestanding bath, the art collection and the stack of jazz records. I’m stuck in London not able to travel overseas this summer because I’m waiting for my baby to arrive, so I’m dreaming of being transported to this Italian Island off the coast of Naples.
Tom Morris, interior designer and founder of Morrisstudio
It would have to be Colin Firth’s home in A Single Man. It’s the Schaffer Residence in California, designed by John Lautner. All dark woods, devoid of any pattern, anthropological finds stuffed onto shelves, tropical gardens and Julianne Moore coming over for cocktails. It’s an extraordinary home anyway, but it takes on an extra layer of beauty seen through Tom Ford’s eyes – case in point the scene with Colin on the WC. I’d also love The Flintstone’s home for its desert modernism or Emma Thompson’s character’s flat from The Children Act. Also, of course, Edina Monsoon’s Ab Fab house in its minimalist John Pawson-y incarnation, with the distressed turquoise and stainless steel kitchen, and, inevitably, the champagne fridge.
Holly Howe, design manager at Howe London
When I’m reading Where The Wild Things Are to my little boy, I find myself as much in love with Max’s bedroom now (as it becomes a jungle) as I was 30 years ago. A four-poster tree canopy bed, what could be better?
Tamsin Saunders, interior designer and founder of Home & Found
The fictional house I would most like to live in would be the one you can’t really see in Winifred Nicholson’s painting ‘The Isle of Man from St Bees’. I imagine it as a simply furnished, modest cottage, but the view, the view! Reached by a cobbled track through a secret garden filled with wild roses, crocosmia and agapanthus, the house is a creative retreat and filled with natural light. Every window offers a daily changing perspective of the huge skies and open views of the surrounding landscape. The gentle colours and soothing textures of nature seen in the painting are echoed inside. Modestly furnished, there’s a single painting or ceramic as the only decoration in each room, comfortable seating, vintage textiles, a little lamp, books, a table, a record player, a slightly bish-boshed and basic but functional kitchen, a monastic light filled bathroom and a few found treasures - the real joy comes from the incredible views outside, the ever changing play of light shaping the space and smells and sounds of the sea and the natural world outside.
Francesca Gentilli, textiles dealer
When I was young I always wanted to live in the jungle, it was a strange obsession of mine. When I watched Swiss Family Robinson and saw them build their treehouse after they were shipwrecked I knew it was ‘the one’. My jungle obsession has died down a bit now but I will always have a soft spot for their tree house. The idea of going back to basics with my own private beach – complete with monkeys, ostriches and elephants – sounds like a pretty perfect place to escape to.
