“Decorating is all about aspiring to what something might or can be,” says Flora Soames, speaking of the “scraps of wallpaper, remnants of upholstery” and more that she squirrelled away in a trunk as a child. She described it it as her ‘One Day’ box, which became the title of her recent book on decorating. There was imagined intent behind the contents: “that yellow bench, for a coat-lined hallway, the Rope wallpaper for a chic downstairs loo – crucially with an ebonised loo seat. It was all about conjuring up the house I might one day live in and now, of course, do not,” she continues.
Many of us, growing up, gave ourselves to similar reveries – in artist Phoebe Dickinson’s case, it was applied to a particular, story-book perfect house she’d see while on walks with her parents – and even as adults the fantasy element is prevalent throughout the interiors industry. There are ready-to-go schemes for surprise windfall-enabling extensions of our own houses, and mood boards for unowned elegant Belgravia apartments and make-believe mountain chalets. The concept is not entirely dissimilar from fantasy football (the game in which participants serve as owners and general managers of virtual football teams) except that it’s less regulated, and arguably more useful, for all the evidence suggests that playing can have a positive impact on real-life interiors, too.
Starting with its worth as a training method, fantasy decorating is where many of our greatest interior designers began, besides Flora. Emma Burns, joint managing director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, recounts spending her schooldays working out how best to turn the building, a house on Upper Phillimore Gardens, back into a residence. Philip Hooper, the other managing director at the same firm, remembers “The 1960s Sunday Times Magazine’s glossy images of contemporary interiors together with a Scandinavian ‘lifestyle’ shop in my local town fuelling a desire, aged 10, for a purple and brown Biba bedroom.” And Francis Sultana recalls, as a young child, pouring over copies of House & Garden and Ideal Home (which then came with floor plans), borrowing library books on Philip Johnson and Frank Lloyd Wright, and designing his own houses. He furnished them with David Hicks-inspired palettes, which also had an impact on his bedroom: “it was bamboo and fire-engine red,” he says, adding that research for a fantasy can lead you on, and on.
Notable is that our inspiration landscape has progressed in the years since, with online shopping, and apps that enable us to save images, and organise them into our own version of Flora’s ‘One Day’ box. However, there’s a lot still to be said for analogue: “I’ve got folders of rooms on Instagram, but find in painting them, I better dissect the details,” says SJ Axelby, the artist and author of Interior Portraits and Painted Travels, and founder of the Room Portrait Club, explaining that, for example “you take in the tassels on a cushion and notice that those are what elevates it beyond the ordinary”. Just as Flora explains that “’One Day’ is fantastical – but we can achieve pockets of it,” so SJ has plucked from her paintings, adding “I’ve trimmed the wallpaper in our bedroom, to frame it, which I took from a Kit Kemp hotel bedroom.” Real schemes can also be arrived at by way of a fantasy mash up: “the original pitch for the house was Oscar Wilde by way of a Brazilian bordello c. 1900,” says Max Hurd, of his Victorian terrace that he decorated with Benedict Foley, who added to the list of references: “Verner Panton, John Fowler, Nicky Haslam and a good dose of Marlene Dietrich camp.” Not dissimilarly, SJ is currently designing a shepherd’s hut “which is a complete fantasy project – but it’s becoming real – and I’ve pulled details from elsewhere, including Fee Greening, who has her own shepherd’s hut, and Deetjens Big Sur Inn in California, which I painted.”
Moving on, the total reimagining of our circumstances can pay dividends, as well. Artist Lottie Cole, represented by Long and Ryle, paints the interiors of notional collectors. “In my mind, I’ll be a very successful racehorse owner or jockey, and I’ll have a flat in a Kensington mansion block with a Barbara Hepworth sculpture and some silk stripes – or maybe I’ll live next to Howard Hodgkin’s studio on Museum Street, and I’ll be very interested in archaeology. You can go fantasy shopping for these interiors,” she explains. Occasionally, this will carry through to her own home, “though via a showroom to high street trickledown.” Others find themselves making the items on their fantasy acquisition lists, whether that’s a shell-surround mirror in SJ’s case, artist and designer Bridie Hall’s Sir John Soane’s Museum-inspired intaglio collection, or Patrick O’Donnell’s ‘after’ Vanessa Bell still-life. Fantasy wants can only too easily segue into perceived needs and necessity is the mother of invention, to which end, also see longed for budget-breaking fabrics collected piecemeal on eBay, and eventually installed as the curtains of our dreams.
Then there are means by which fantasies can be explored in miniature, and bequeath lasting impressions. Philip Hooper tells of childhood adventures with Lego, as well as “Bayko, a far more complex 1920s-designed model house building system, that allowed you to build villas and bungalows with all the vernacular details of that period – the love of detailing I got from this has stayed with me.” More in the way of decoration can be achieved via dolls’ housing, which can be “the ultimate place to play out fantasy schemes, because you’re not confined to what’s practical or affordable,” explains Lucy Clayton, who recently turned her passion into the Kensington Dolls House Company. Her model rooms have “definitely impacted on my taste, and the line between fantasy and reality is now very blurry for me,” she says. She mentions the recent impulse purchase of a pair of (full size) “single four poster hand-painted Gothic beds – which are way too much for the room that they’re intended for, but I was besotted with them, even before James Mackie told me they were the Snowdon beds designed for Chatsworth. I’m adding bright silk banners and spotted silk ruffle valances because if you’re already over the top you might as well keep going,” she says – demonstrating how speculative fabrications can push us to go further, to marvellous effect.
Having a dream can “take us away from the humdrum of every day,” says Flora – without trying to translate it into anything practical, or, vitally, having to spend any money. Sometimes the escapism is needed – in the manner of Les Miserable’s Cosette and her castle on a cloud. In other instances, it’s simply that it’s fun to fantasy shop for tableware for a ranch in the American mid-west that, in actuality, we’d never have time to go to, or capriciously swap a coronet-topped canopy for a full four-poster in our unbuilt hunting lodge in the Highlands. Moreover, in our heads we can erect writing rooms on flood plains, open-sided pavilions on stretches of sand that never see winter (or hurricanes), and elaborate palaces that need no staff.
That said, know that the line between such ideas, and the practice of manifesting – which uses the law of attraction to bring about a focussed-on outcome – can be very faint. Life improved significantly for Cosette, and Phoebe Dickinson has, with her husband, famously bought that house she imagined living in as a little girl; happily, the reality has lived up to the fantasy.
