How Flora Soames decorates her family home in Norfolk for Christmas

Helen Cathcart

Christmas celebrations start in the centre of the house, in the large gallery hall, a wonderfully generous place to welcome guests. “There's this wonderful, opulent, yet cumbersome mantelpiece,” explains Flora, “which is the obvious canvas to decorate. We light the fire and load the mantelpiece with branches cut from the garden, paperwhites forced from weeks previously, and frankly, anything we can forage in the weeks before Christmas.” With a beautiful garden and wider fields and hedgerows beyond the house, much of the decoration revolves around the idea of bringing the outside in – and this also has the advantage of being both easy and affordable. “I definitely like to decorate in the most low maintenance way possible. I know that's difficult to believe when you look at the scale of the foliage we've done, but actually it's quite undemanding. There's no uprightness to it. I like to think there's a sense of personality, there's a sense of ease. And I like to think that sets the tone for the type of time you're going to have in this room.”

Helen Cathcart

In the sitting room, the Christmas tree provides an opportunity for the ‘more is more’ approach that Flora enjoys. “I do think with a Christmas tree, you can really go to town." Although she has become wary of 'vastly expensive vintage baubles that your child promptly tramples on", the tree is still a feast for the eyes, draped in metallic ribbons from a vintage fabric dealer and twinkling with lights, though “coloured lights and flashing lights are a bit of a no no.” The baubles are a combination of nostalgic wooden illustrated cutouts by Elizabeth Harbour, sparklier, kitsch ornaments, and other elements which remind Flora of various aspects of her life. “I love that each of the decorations on the tree mean something to me, and the idea of that collection being added to year after year is definitely something that I've inherited from my mother. I feel like it's the beginning of a conversation that I'm having with my children about their childhood Christmases, which will hopefully shape the way that they decorate their tree one day.”

Helen Cathcart

Christmas lunch, meanwhile, centres around the kitchen, a large and busy space with a long table at one end. “The kitchen table is rather thrown together last minute, and it's an accumulation of things that have caught my eye on my travels and been brought home. There's that hint of Christmas, that hint of colour, but it's slotting in around all these lovely old things that are reappearing year after year, such as a set of napkins I bought from a dealer years ago, all dyed in jewel colours and tied together with a wonderful, gaudy metallic ribbon. More is more on the table for me, gives it that real sense of the feast that you're going to have. I like candles at different heights, flowers at different heights, and plenty of fruit on the table – it's an abundant, easy, inexpensive way to decorate.”

Much of the joy of Christmas for Flora lies in the noise, the messiness and the sense of relaxation. “As we all know, all the effort to get it all looking wonderful and inviting is undone pretty quickly. And I think that's part of the magic of it. It's the strewn wrapping paper. It's the strewn crackers after lunch. It's the unfolded napkins, rather than the napkins perfectly placed on your place mat. So go about setting your table by envisaging the time that people are going to have sitting around it, the sense of generosity and the sense of fun.”