‘Nostalgia’ has apparently been having a moment. Defined as “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past,” it’s been cited as the impetus behind such recent movements as cottagecore and homesteading, the reason for the revival of chair skirts and fitted carpet – and the motivation behind our binge-watching Rivals. Certainly, it was delightful to see a garden party’s worth of guests spontaneously breaking into the Birdie dance without one person picking up a phone to Instagram the occasion, but what's interesting is the tendency to present these backward glances as a trend. There’s even a collective term, ‘nostalgiacore’, which implies that one day we’ll switch to futurecore, or dystopiacore, instead. (Maybe let’s not, on the latter.)
But when it comes to decorating, nostalgia’s impact is often more nuanced, going deeper than hanging gingham curtains at our kitchen windows, and lasting longer than pickling the pears from our organic delivery box or setting our soundtrack to Robert Palmer. Nor is it new: as the late architectural historian John Cornforth says in his 1985-published book The Inspiration of the Past, “for centuries there has been a streak in the English creative character that has been backward-looking.”
Take cottagecore, typically expressed through such flourishes as bobbin-legged furniture, Falconware, sink skirts, short curtains, frills, Staffordshire pottery, the previously mentioned gingham, and florals, whose use “creates a feeling of comfort due to the familiarity of the pattern for us all,” as Nicole Salvesen and Mary Graham of Salvesen Graham explain. The most recent wave of cottage fetishisation crested during lockdown, when, crucially, we had time to bake our own bread. But it's nothing new: Marie Antoinette’s Versailles cottages date from the 18th century, and in the late 19th century, the new middle-classes went crazy for chocolate box-worthy paintings of cottage interiors, depicting the ‘simple life’ they’d left behind. Of course, Marie Antoinette and the Victorians conveniently forgot the reality of what it would have been like to live in a cottage in those times – these were the dwellings of the poor, generally accompanied by freezing damp and a dearth of food. Nostalgia often presents as an idealisation, particularly when it comes to what we feel are lacking from our current lives, such as connection to nature, or leisure time. We romanticise collecting eggs and digging for potatoes in a pink and white rose-strewn pinafore, or approach a Cath Kidston polka-dotted ironing board as a pretend 1950s housewife, trying to forget the work emails pinging in on our phones.
It’s a similar story (and timeline) for Eastern European and Russian folk designs; Emma Burns, joint managing director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler mentions the allure of Nathalie Farman-Farma’s “ravishing” Décors Barbares fabrics. And it’s the same again for homesteading, which has its beginnings in America’s original pioneers, before it became a fantasy for every child who fell in love with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books, published in 1930s and 1940s.
For childhood is another catalyst for nostalgia, and has an undeniable impact on taste. Sister Parish spoke of the “first memory of some house, some room, a vivid picture that will remain deep down in one forever.” It’s worth remembering that the word nostalgia derives from the ancient Greek nostos meaning ‘return home’, and algos, ‘pain’. It explains why sometimes we’ll find a lump in our throat when we unexpectedly come across the scent of floor polish mixed with narcissi, or a chest of drawers that looks identical to a set we once knew.
And so, in search of a ‘feeling’, nostalgia can inform the style of abode we live in (or aspire to live in) and it is no coincidence that fitted carpet, bed canopies, elaborate curtain treatments, decorative paint finishes and the matchy-matchy look are currently being installed in the homes of those who were raised in the 1980s. There are, of course, variations: artist Michael Craig-Martin’s modernist-furnished Barbican flat is a product of his New York childhood and the designs he saw then, and textile and homeware designer Eva Sonaike’s interior reflects the West African Yoruba culture and traditions that she grew up with.
At the same time, we carry furniture, paintings and objects from our past into our future. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” wrote T.S. Eliot wrote in The Wasteland. “The importance of the sentimental should not be underestimated,” says Beata Heuman, who lives in London among objects from hers and her husband’s family homes, which at once “makes me feel more connected to my house in London and also to my home in Sweden where I grew up.” And as Billy Baldwin memorably pointed out, “it’s the personal that breathes the life into a space.” It’s also the personal that carries stories, and contributes to the layering that is fundamental to so many of our interiors.
Indeed, John Cornforth’s point about “the English creative character” being “backward-looking” relates to how much value we place on the preservation of old houses. Our most enduringly popular manner of decorating, English country house style, is surely perpetuated by our collective pastime of visiting National Trust houses. It’s a look whose past continuously feeds the present: Emma Burns speaks of “glorious and unexpected colour schemes remembered long distance – John Fowler’s colour boards from the 1950s and 60s, the deep green mohair at Lord Berners’ Faringdon House – which inspired the walls in a Moscow drawing room, and fabrics drawn from old documents. The continuum pleases.”
And, regardless of the twist you put on country house style (farmhouse, contemporary, maximalist) and whether you execute it in Hampshire or a Hammersmith flat, it's an aesthetic that inevitably hints at pre-war grandeur and post-war revival, combining the glamour of the Bright Young Things with ‘make do and mend’ resilience, which appeals to the eye, the ego, and the heart. Moreover, it comes with a sense of reassurance: if a 19th century tallboy (inherited, or bought) can stand impassively through air raids, the Cuban missile crisis and more, then we might infer that we too can survive whatever life throws at us, including the current cost-of-living crisis (which could involve pickling.)
Arguably, it’s impossible to furnish a room without nostalgia – for it seeps in, even subconsciously, an integral element of the idea of ‘home’. But that’s not to say that the more fleeting stratifications aren’t also worth paying attention to, for nostalgia tells us something about ourselves. And in the appeal of cottagecore, or homesteading – or frills and fitted carpet – there’s opportunity to identify life-enhancing changes that extend beyond decorating style.
