Have you ever wondered why one room can linger in the imagination, inviting us to revisit the details again and again, while another is as forgettable as the lyrics of a bad musical? Imagination and ingenuity, wit or a bravura use of colour (pistachio green against potted-shrimp pink, raspberry-pink cushions on a lemon-yellow sofa) all count. But the real reason why we find certain interiors so compelling is because they radiate soul. They feel lived in, personal.
This has nothing to do with a particular style or era. The mid-century setting with its spiky-legged tables or space-age lamps can pulsate with as much life as the maximalist sitting room, strewn with chintz and heaped with knick-knacks. It is the details, however everyday – the overfilled log basket, the slouchy, underfilled cushion – which give a home heart. And let’s not forget books. As the novelist Anthony Powell put it, ‘books do furnish a room’ (although ideally not bought by the metre). These things are the signs of life.
More than that, it is about juxtapositions; a handmade pot perching on a classical column, a fringed slipper chair next to a Cubist painting. The artisanal and the man-made meets the precious and the ordinary. Just as writing needs friction to ensnare the reader, it is contrast that animates a home. This adds to what Chester Jones has called ‘the charged atmosphere of the personalised space’.
The late Geoffrey Bennison summed this up when he said, ‘something ordinary put next to something beautiful creates a fusion: objects should be at different levels of emotion to avoid rivalry’. In this way, he wrote, ‘the ordinary can be elevated and the beautiful made more accessible’. This is what Bennison and his equally influential peers did so well. Robert Kime, Christopher Gibbs or Jaime Parladé were proponents of the life-infused, non-conformist mix. Spontaneity was their art form.
Parladé once painted the beams of an ancient French chateau in shocking pink. It is said that when the former US First Lady Nancy Reagan first saw one of Robert Kime’s rooms she exclaimed: ‘it’s marvellous, nothing matches’. Kime, who had the chutzpah to turn an old tea towel in to a cushion for a duke (at Swangrove in Gloucestershire) liked to call himself an ‘assembler of rooms’ rather than a decorator. His predecessor, the Virginian Nancy Lancaster, held similar opinions. ‘I’m ‘agin decorating,’ she once declared (I like to imagine her saying this in a gravelly drawl) describing her schemes as a ‘salad.’ To modern eyes, this is what makes her rooms feel ageless, warm.
The lively, inhabited interior is what a new cohort of designers aspires to. Decorating, like fashion, moves in a circle. A more personal room is an inevitable response to previous decades. The boutique-hotel look with its matchy-matchy lamps like sentinels and wall to wall, impersonal glossiness and the glass-and-concrete hauteur of noughties modernism prompted a return to more human-centric interiors imprinted with the presence of their owners.
Social media also has its limitations. ‘Instagram should be a tool for originality but over-saturation can have the opposite effect,’ says James Mackie, who counsels clients not to tumble down social media rabbit holes. For the designer, who began his career at Sotheby’s, everything begins with atmosphere. ‘I’m always thinking, will the objects I put in a room make it feel comfortable, personal?’. The final effect is ‘a summation of a 100 different design decisions.’ The side table, the rug, the standard lamp: ‘everything you put in a space is connected by gossamer threads. There’s a dynamic between objects – the way one shape contrasts with another – that adds up to a mood.’
Octavia Dickinson agrees. For her, placement is key. Once a floor plan is done, she will always smuggle in a few extras. Side tables, hanging bookcases, brackets, pieces in ‘unexpected places’ will make a room appear lived in. She also breaks with convention when it comes to lighting. Leaving a few unlit areas (albeit not in practical spaces), she says, adds intrigue; a whisper of romance.
When it comes to upholstery, Brandon Schubert has developed his own rule of thumb. It is not simply about style but texture. ‘The materials in a room matter greatly, even before I think about furniture. It is about creating a feeling of layered harmony,’ he says singling out a few favourites. Knobbly épingle velvet, a glimmer of silk or a heavy weave will add to the feeling that a room has evolved. Antique fabrics, made into cushions or displayed as artworks, are another secret weapon. ‘It’s about creating the impression that pieces were acquired for their standalone beauty.’
Tamsyn Mason is equally wary of ‘the overly designed’ interior. For her, character resides in ‘the wonk… things that are slightly off centre.’ Her short cuts to soulfulness includes antique fireplaces or the reclaimed elm floorboards, painstakingly ‘stripped, stained and patched’ laid in a Georgian rectory. She seeks out fabrics from Soane Britain, Bennison or Michael S Smith. The archival prints on soft, muted backgrounds impart a sheen of antiquity. So too does an architrave skirting board painted in a ‘buff’ colour: Farrow & Ball’s ‘Matchstick’ and Edward Bulmer’s ‘Mummy’ are perennial favourites. Woodwork, she argues, is often overlooked; ‘it can transform the effect of the paint on a wall, adding depth.’
Charlotte Boundy, whose childhood was spent immersed in decorating magazines, strives for the ‘higgledy-piggledy’ air of old houses. ‘Those really personal spaces are not perfectly tasteful, but filled with integrity and beauty.’ Her own London kitchen is a case in point; a set of Gordon Watson tiles are hand-painted with the farm animals which capture her rus in urbe yearnings, while the antique dresser jostles with ceramics and souvenirs. ‘I could have filled the wall with cupboards – but this is much more me,’ she says.
Adroit designers know how to bring life to a home using your things. Not just the ancestral Old Master but more lowly treasures: the ashtray your parents pilfered from a 1980s nightclub, the tatty bit of Batik weave which has followed you around since student days – personal signifiers. ‘It’s a bit like creating a 3-D picture that you want to walk in to. A home should be a portrait of its owner that draws together their interests and belongings,’ says Tamsin Saunders of Home & Found. For her, soul resides in the gently worn chairs, or the wine-splashed table: the happenstance of random finds. She cites two of her favourite interiors – Barbara Hepworth’s plant-filled, whitewashed studio in St Ives and the Bloomsbury set’s Charleston – as her touchstones for creativity. ‘You respond to these places because of their humanity. What their occupants have left behind,’ she says.
As the 20th-century German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin put it: ‘The interior is not only the universe, but also the sheath of the private man. To inhabit means to leave traces.’
