People often wonder if I spend a lot of time poring over fabric and wallpaper samples picking designs for their beauty and preparing mood boards. Nothing could be further from the truth. The driving force for me is always the garden, the landscape outside and the views beyond. Bringing the healing, calming and restorative beauty of nature gently inside is at the heart of my design practice and my philosophy of creating a home. To design your home whilst neglecting your garden is to deprive oneself of the gorgeous richness, vitality, quiet generosity and incredible beauty of nature.
As I write, I look out onto our garden. It is gently fading - autumn is here. What was once a long, barren strip covered in crazy paving is now a gentle tangle of slowly melded colours in a framework of maturing trees. It is full of beauty and of life. It is a view which is constantly changing. The textures now are thinning, the grasses changing from green to bronze, silver and gold. On warm days I spot the occasional butterfly and can hear the drone of bees hovering above the lingering cosmos and verbena, a last flurry of roses in the hedge and seedheads sway in the precious golden autumnal light. Inside too things are shifting - responding quietly to what’s happening in the garden outside. Soon our home will feel completely different. With the arrival of winter, each room will once again quietly shift and evolve in harmony with the more muted but no less beautiful colour palette.
For what a room looks out onto, what you see, feel, hear and touch shapes and moulds your experience, determines your emotional response to a place. Japanese aristocrats in the Heian period commissioned the design and construction of the garden first and then the house. The building and its rooms were designed to ensure the best views of the garden, maximise the movement of air in summer, ensuring that the house had space to breathe and that it felt open and alive.
When working on a home I plan the structure of both the garden and a building’s interior in careful consideration of the other. I always advise people to plant, or better still keep, trees near to the house and you’ll not only be grateful for their shade in summer but in winter the shadow of leaves playing against the walls or on the floor inside will give you precious moments to pause. The first rays of the day falling one by one on the leaves of the fig tree at the foot of the garden, the excited nervous chatter of starlings feasting on grapes and figs in autumn; the quiet ephemeral beauty of grasses and evergreens frozen in the first frost; seed heads captured in the low rays of winter sunshine, the first snowdrops emerging in spring – all these sustain and nourish me and fill me with hope.
Long before you start decorating, consider first the layout and footprint of your house. There’s no rush to gut and strip - first work out how best to use the space. If you are planning on extending do you really need that much internal space? Would your house not feel more generous, more open, looking onto a larger garden? If windows are the art on the walls, then the garden is the painting seen through their frame, so consider what will you see, hear and smell and how that will make you feel when you walk through the front door or look out of the window. Weaving a home into the fabric of the landscape isn’t just confined to those privileged enough to live in a large house in the countryside. In an urban environment you can plan the view from one room to the next, considering the positioning not just of furniture but the planting of trees, climbers and plants outside.
Inside my own house, each room was designed to allow unfettered views of the garden, its gently cascading natural stream and the woodland beyond. Avoiding solid blocks of colour and all things new or shiny I chose paint colours, fabrics, wallpaper, art and furnishings with texture craftsmanship and an attention to detail.
Overly heavy curtains were jettisoned and in their place elegant linen blinds, printed in gentle tones of silver, jade and lilac now meet the fragrant tendrils of the wisteria tapping on the other side of the original window panes. In the kitchen my designs for joinery and paint colours were chosen and mixed to complement and enhance the warm honey toned sandstone walls, the flint outbuildings and the soft billowing grasses seen through a huge arched window framing the garden beyond. Upstairs, sunlight streams through tall large paned windows which offer views of the hills and ancient woodlands beyond, and in celebration of them I have kept the future modest, antique and mismatched. It is a lesson in the art of ‘less is always more’.
Josef Frank said that ‘If you want something to feel alive you must start with what’s living.’ It is that dialogue between what’s inside and out that inspires me. As the year progresses the gaps in the garden will gradually start to fill. The ground under the fruit trees which we planted when we first moved here will be covered first with wood anemones and corydalis, then tulips, euphorbia, forget me nots and honesty - lifting my spirits with a welcome injection of oh so longed for vibrant colour. They will transform the feeling of our home by drawing attention to different colours and textures in paintings, fabrics and furniture inside. Witch hazel and magnolia will come into flower followed by the blossom of cherry, apple and plum trees - the house feel fresher, lighter, brighter. Clematis will bloom in time for one of my daughter’s birthdays and pockets of roses will appear through the branches of the arbutus – the garden gradually filling with colour and texture and a feeling of abundance and generosity. A reassuring constancy and normality that survives the transformation of whatever has happened in the intervening year.
