Cowgirl Dreaming

The decoration on the Chief’s Tepee exterior is based on Indian ledger drawings.

A while ago, AD Magazine did a story on Ralph Lauren's Colorado Ranch, which I have basically been obsessed with ever since:

The living room of the ranch’s main residence, constructed using local pine logs, is appointed with late-19th-and early-20th-century Indian rugs. An antique pine table from New Mexico and a turn-of-the-century pine farm bench stand on a circa-1890 Navajo rug. A beaded parade saddle by Edward Bohlin straddles the staircase railing, while an original Frederic Remington bronze is displayed by the window. A Plains Indian leather pillow on the sofa is embroidered with an American flag.

Ralph Lauren Home linens mix with antique and vintage bedding on the cabin’s 1870s cannonball bed; a circa-1900 hooked rug and two ’20s Navajo rugs are on the floor.

Overlooking the cabin’s living room is a chandelier made with naturally shed elk antlers; beside the hearth, a woven-twig rocking chair is draped with a vintage Capps Indian-trade blanket, and an antique New Mexico pine table stands atop an early-20th-century Navajo rug.

Antique Navajo rugs decorate the walls of the ranch’s screening room, which features club chairs, wing chairs, ottomans, and velvet curtains, all by Ralph Lauren Home, as well as antique Pendleton and Beacon blankets.

A group of Navajo blankets, circa 1880s–1910, hangs in the entrance to the ranch’s gym; the rug is a circa-1910 Navajo saddle blanket.

The saloon’s porch is furnished with 19th-century Mexican sabino-wood pieces, including a table made from a salvaged door and ox yokes; the tableware and linens are by Ralph Lauren Home.

The San Juan Mountains provide a scenic backdrop for the ranch’s five tepees, built and hand-painted by local artisans; the free-form pool resembles a natural pond.

And looking at these, aren't you?  Tragically, I'm not currently in a position to purchase a similar style ranch in Colorado, but as ever the chief allure for me is the idea of getting the look.  I am convinced that all I need to do is chuck a choice selection of Beacon and Pendleton blankets over my sofa, cover our Algerian rug with some Navajo saddle blankets, and, when it comes to reupholstering anything, focus more on the Trading Post collection from Ralph Lauren Home and less on Colefax & Fowler . . . and hey presto, my Notting Hill flat will be indiscernible from anything you can see above.  (Regarding that Trading Post collection, Vogue recently hosted a party at the South Kensington Ralph Lauren store - part of the Ricky bag world tour. I accidentally spent all night in the basement, pulling out fabric books . . . )

Blackbird Wool Blanket by Ralph Lauren Home

Sacred Mountain Blanket by Ralph Lauren Home

Santa Clara Blanket by Ralph Lauren Home

Are these not total heaven?  Their other joy is that these are pretty easy (though obviously not cheap) to acquire.  It's a matter of picking up a credit card.  Harder are the other things I mentioned - in particular the Navajo saddle rugs and the Beacon blankets - those last are no longer made (Beacon came to an end in 2002) and one wants to get them from a particular period, basically pre-1950 which is when the legendary company - at one point the largest blanket manufacturer in the world - started adding rayon to the cotton.  (It got worse.  By the time they closed, they were making blankets out of acrylic.)  And ideally you want to find one dating from pre-1932, which is when the Navajo Indian tribe failed a complaint - Beacon had been using images of American Indians at looms weaving blankets in their advertising - and the company was ordered to stop using Indian images and to make clear that the blankets were not woven by native Americans.  (Okay, so the pre-1932 ones might not be the last word in political correctness.)

Vintage Beacon blankets

However Pendleton Blankets are still very much in production, and currently at the top of my wish list.  There's a whole collection entitled 'Native American Inspired', and I kind of want all of them, but I also kind of want all their rainbow striped ones, and even all their National Park ones, even though I've never been to a single American National Park (though this will obviously change when Andrew and I get around to doing our road trip across America, with the children. Don't hold your breath.)

Pendleton Blanket

So there we go. Easy peasy ranch style, courtesy of Ralph Lauren and Pendleton.  And, once you've done all this, you can spend your days drifting around in a variety of looks for the modern cowgirl from the Ralph Lauren Spring/ Summer 2011 collection.  (I know, not so helpful of me to tell you now.)

I'm particularly enamoured of the middle look.

And, you can add to it with pieces from Ralph Lauren's very own online vintage store, where he sells the most exquisite items - such as a shawl coat made out of a Beacon blanket.

Oh, and as a total aside but totally relevant (unlike the rest of this post) Ralph Lauren has literally just opened a Polo flagship store on 5th Avenue.  And this little gem is somewhere to be found within it:

Finally, I'd like to share my new favourite expression:  "All hat and no cattle." Which will be me, if I go in for any of the above . . .  (except, perhaps the odd Pendleton blanket or two.)

All photographs of Ralph Lauren's Colorado Ranch are by Bjorn Wallander

www.ralphlaurenhome.com

www.pendleton-usa.com

www.rlvintage.com

Seasonal Denial: Tom Scheerer's Bahamian Idylls

My denial is not absolute - I actually love this time of year - but while every other child in the world seems to have started the new school year (which I know because of Instagram) Sholto's school still hasn't finished being built, so my usual 'ooh it's September' excitement and drive hasn't had a chance.  Days are still consumed with building his lego with one hand, preventing Esmeralda from destroying it with the other, playing Sylvanian Families with her at the same time as expressing an interest in his drawings of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ("Gosh darling - is that Leonardo or Michelangelo?") while all the time wondering how I can disguise broccoli as chicken gujons.  So forgive me when I tell you that my children don't currently figure particularly largely in my dreams of escapism - speaking of which, it's a toss up between being a cow girl in Colorado (based at Ralph Lauren's ranch, obviously) and wanting to move to the Bahamas.  And the main inspiration behind the longing for an island life is this:

The Lyford Cay Club, decorated by Tom Scheerer.  Those palm trees are hand-painted.

I mean, those walls!  The New York Times described the room as setting "a new standard for the vitality and relevance of American aristocratic decorating," while adding that  "Slim Aarons didn't live long enough to shoot this one, but he would have deemed it worthy."  All I know is I want to live in it because, in spite of the grandeur and scale of those trees, it looks supremely comfortable, does it not? "Elegance," Scheerer has been quoted as saying "is really about economy."  

And then I found another house in the Bahamas that Scheerer has decorated - I could so live here.  And India Hicks makes Bahamian life look so especially idyllic . . . .  Which is actually totally relevant because while Scheerer studied architecture at Cooper Union, when it comes to interior design he credits David Hicks, India's father, as a mentor, naming him a master of "fresh, civilised, beautiful, unpretentious spaces."  Which basically describes Scheerer's own style:

To finish, here's another view of those palm trees. 

(Were I a more patient mother I would doubtlessly get the children to paint approximations on the walls at home - in a Matisse cut-out kind of way.  But the Chelsea Textiles cushions still haven't entirely recovered from my "Let's paint Carnival!" idea, enthusiasm born of two days worth of steel bands and sound systems directly outside our house . . .  The paints have been definitively hidden.) FMJ.

All photographs throughout are by Pieter Estersohn

www.tomscheerer.com

Frocks, Fantasy, Faraway Lands and Fabulous Interiors: Horst P. Horst at the V&A

Having spent the entirety of my twenties at Conde Nast, I am happily on familiar terms with the Vogue library, which is situated in the basement of Vogue House and contains all the back issues of every Vogue, ever.  Flicking through them is like discovering that fabled other country of the past - here are glimpses into an era when women dressed for dinner, here are adventures undertaken by Norman Parkinson, here is Her Majesty the Queen as a young girl photographed by Cecil Beaton, and here are couture gowns of the thirties and forties, eternalised by Horst.  (And then your eyes go funny, in the desperate search for the Irving Penn image of the woman having milk splashed in her face/ the Willy Rizzo image of a woman in a hat and net over her face/ any other iconic image by any other iconic photographer that you know is somewhere, in either British/ French/ American/ Italian Vogue, sometime in the 60s, but if it was syndicated, where did it appear first?  AND WHEN WILL ALL THE ARCHIVES ALL BE DIGITALISED?!)

Helen Bennett, 1939  © Condé Nast/Horst Estate

But all that is an aside; this is about Horst, who is the subject of a new exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum - who call it "the definitive retrospective exhibition of the work of master photographer Horst P. Horst (1906-1999) - one of the leading photographers of the 20th Century" - which opens this weekend, and I would urge anybody to go, whether or not they have an interest in frocks.  For while the exhibition explores his collaborations and friendships with such luminaries as Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli - and Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward and Salvador Dali - it also shows Horst's other work.  His nude studies (there's a particularly exquisite Odalisque), his patterns created from natural forms (these didn't actually do much for me, though there were a few which I thought could become rather exquisite Luke Irwin rugs) and his travel photography from the Middle East, which is amazing, and all the more fascinating because, these days, even the most intrepid traveller can't readily reach places that he visited.  In this instance, the past really is another country.

View of ruins at the palace of Persepolis, Persia, 1949. © Condé Nast/Horst Estate

Patterns from Nature Photographic Collage, about 1945. © Condé Nast/Horst Estate

Not Horst.  One of Luke Irwin's rugs from his Tarantella collection.  I'm still dreaming of a Luke Irwin rug. 

And Horst photographed interiors, too.  He was published in House & Garden as well as Vogue, and it was he that is responsible for that incredibly famous image of Diana Vreeland, then Editor of American Vogue, in her drawing room which she arranged to be red, 'like a garden in hell'.  The picture isn't actually in the exhibition, but here it is:

Diana Vreeland, at home.  There's a wonderful letter from Vreeland to Horst in the exhibition:  "Dear Horst," she writes.  "I cannot tell you how perfectly beautiful I think your pictures of Persia are . . . "

(Incidentally, I am currently obsessed with red.  Obsessed.  I'm going to have a chair upholstered in this amazing fabric - Snow Tree by Colefax & Fowler - it was inspired by a paper from Drottningholm Court Theatre in Sweden, a piece of which was given to Nancy Lancaster, who was then owner of Colefax & Fowler, by the King of Sweden.  Is it not heaven?)

Snow Tree in red, by Colefax & Fowler

And Horst photographed Nancy Lancaster's house, too.  Obviously.  For after all she was one of the greatest influences on interior decoration and garden design in Great Britain and America in the second half of the 20th Century.  Those images, too, aren't in the exhibition, but many others are, including one of the apartment that Horst lived in in Paris, which was published in British Vogue in 1931, and which - unlike my house - is a masterclass in serenity.  (He also photographed Karl Lagerfeld's Art Deco apartment, and Yves Saint Laurent at home, but I bumped into my friend Deep, who is Fashion Director of Tatler, before I got to the final room . . .  and we were discussing jean shopping for the New York shows which she's about to fly out for, and the changing fonts on the the covers of Vogues of yesteryear - there's a great collection of covers with some seriously great fonts . . . . and then I remembered I had a lunch.  I have to go back.)  

So go.  It chronicles an era (rather like this post, colour appears half way through) and has moments of beauty that touch on the sublime.  FMJ.

Horst is at the V&A until the 4th January (and, while you're there, you could always pop into the Disobedient Objects, too . . . )

www.lukeirwin.com

www.colefax.com

A Garden is a Lovesome Thing . . .

I've spent rather a lot of time thinking about gardens recently.  Firstly, there was the Chelsea Flower Show, which may seem forever ago now but one particular garden - namely The Topiarist Garden - seems to have become imprinted on the cornea of my mind's eye in such a manner that I literally can't stop seeing it, and therefore dreaming about it.

I just want a bit of room to practice some topiary and grow some box hedges of my own, and that is not going to happen on my balcony.

Fortunately, some (very) bright spark has come up with the idea of a new sort of 'garden' show:  Grow London, a garden show for people who don't have gardens.  That spark is Will Ramsay, who also founded the Affordable Art Fair (bringing original art to the walls of the masses); he's now aiming to 'democratise' gardening for people who only have access to window boxes, i.e. me.   It's on all weekend, in Hampstead (you can get the overground to Hampstead Heath) and I thoroughly recommend it.  (And, should you wish to make a whole day of it, the utterly amazing 2 Willow Road, Erno Goldfinger's former modernist home, is just around the corner.)  The only problem is that your longing for a garden won't necessarily decrease having been . . .

But how could it, having seen foxgloves like these?  I'd forgotten just how perfectly exquisite foxgloves are.

And look!  Olive trees and lavender, the most perfect combination ever.  Cleverly, everything here is in pots, so you really can conjure up a Mediterranean-style garden on a tiny concrete balcony (though perhaps not if your balcony is quite as tiny as mine.)

There were also a whole host of garden-type accessories:

I desperately want an Edwardian sun shelter from Deckchair Stripes.  Desperately.  Again, however, it's not going to fit on my balcony . . . 

I can, however, buy deckchair canvas by the metre.  Not that I'm immediately sure what I'll do with it, but oh my goodness the colours!

And check out their bobble trim.  Did you ever see anything so heavenly?  Seriously, when I do have a garden, I'm going to know exactly how to accessorise it.

The other stand I fell for, totally hopelessly head over heels, was Rush Matters, which is a company owned by Felicity Irons, and I hope (crossed fingers) that we're going to be able to stock her products on English Abode.

Here is Felicity harvesting the rush.

Then she turns the rush into the most insanely comfortable cushions, as per this image, and rush rugs and mats etc.  Did you know that you need to occasionally water a rush rug?  Because I didn't.  One of the things that she makes is rush bath mats; a bathroom, she explained, being absolutely the ideal place for rush to live because it gets watered on a regular basis.

And then she makes these utterly amazing rush shoes.  When I have a garden, these are all I shall wear in them.

For now though, the garden is still far off - however long I spend reading gardening books and reviewing them on English Abode.  But speaking of English Abode, we have got some rather amazing gardening pieces for people-who-don't-have-gardens, ourselves:

These Foodie Garden growing kits, for instance.  Ready prepared trays for tomatoes, peppers, basil and more are all available (they take about a week to start germinating) and I've just ordered the lot.  I'm very keen that Sholto and Esmeralda should have a chance to grow there own something this summer, and I'm hoping that the experience is going to go some way to stopping me buying an old Citroen van and setting off around England selling hydrangea and lavender from the back of it.

Because that's basically all I want to do at this precise moment in time.  And looking at this, don't you?!

Grow London - www.growlondon.com - continues through Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 6pm at the Lower Fairground Site, East Heath Road, Hampstead.  Go.

www.deckchairstripes.com

For everything else, there's www.englishabode.com

Self Service

Any regular readers (and I still don't really believe that means anyone aside from Grandfather, my friends Kim and Simon and my sisters, but the statistics say otherwise) will have noticed that I don't seem to have written much recently.  There is one overwhelming reason why, and that is that I have been focusing on getting English Abode live, English Abode being the online magazine and shopping platform which I've set up, with a little (i.e. a massive amount of invaluable) help from my friends Emma M-T and Christopher T-R.  I'm delighted to be able to inform you that, from us, you can now buy everything from antiques to contemporary design, via cushions (obviously), wallpaper, fabric, Potichomania lamps, silk ikat lampshades, Rajhastani dhurries, antique Venetian mirrors, and some of the prettiest laundry baskets I've ever seen.  I'm actually having a hard time resisting buying all the stock myself - fortunately we've got more coming soon.

Susan Deliss silk ikat cushions and lampshade

Rose de Borman hand-printed silkscreen cushion.  See how hard it is for me?!

Anyway, this isn't meant to be all about English Abode, this post is actually about the night we launched when I finally left the office for the first time in what felt like months (but obviously wasn't) and went to Linley on the Pimlico Road for an exhibition celebrating 'British Design, Craftsmanship, Engineering and Innovation,' which is on until mid-March.  

The entrance was kind of fabulous.  Check out the JCBs.  

Anyway, inside was packed, not least with Elizabeth Hurley holding court next to Gladstone Motorcycles (admittedly her date for the evening was Henry Cole, CEO of said motorcycles) - incidentally, just to illustrate how busy I've been, I hadn't even realised that she and Shane Warne had broken up for good, i.e. I haven't even had time to keep up with the Daily Mail sidebar - but also because every stand was so worth looking at properly.   They weren't just presenting wares, but were showing exactly what goes into everything.  For instance, my friend Bettina who was there with her quite stunningly amazing bespoke handbags was accompanied by Ruth, who actually makes the handbags, and things like a length of ostrich skin, to demonstrate how little of each can actually be used (I never knew that it wasn't all spotty).  There was stationery (Smythson's have got competition), millinery, guns (I genuinely know somebody who was given a pair of Purdeys as a confirmation present), cars, luggage (OMG I love Globetrotter so much - I actually travelled all across Russia, Mongolia, China and then flew to Vanuatu accompanied by nothing but a single ancient Globetrotter one summer, a million years ago) - indeed everything, almost. (There were no cushions.)

You should totally go and see it.  But you should especially go and see Bettina's handbags, because they are both beautifully crafted (we're talking Hermes standard) and immensely practical:  the straps are reinforced to make sure that they don't stretch, they're just the right length to carry over your arm comfortably - in fact she offers two sets of straps so that you can change how you wear the bag - travel bag straps are non slip(!), there are all the pockets and pull-outs you could dream of, and they actually stay looking pristine for a mega long time because Bettina has found some wonder coat-er which protects the suede and the leather.  Oh, and because they're bespoke, you can actually change whatever you like.  

This gives an indication of the different sizes.

Different colours - though actually any colour is possible - but gosh I would like the caramel coloured one on the left . . . 

What's included:  spare straps, detachable wallet with inside pockets for different currency etc.

Tragically (for me) Bettina's bags are, as to be expected, quite expensive - though in comparison to other brands (I'm whispering Hermes) insanely good value - so I can't afford one, yet.  However, if enough people buy enough on English Abode, I might be able to, soon.

The title of this post ought to make sense now.

www.englishabode.com
www.bvs-design.com
The exhibition is at Linley Belgravia, 60 Pimlico Road, London SW1W 8LP until the 14th March

Wallpaper OBSESSION

So, fantasising about a bigger house, I started browsing Prime Location.  Tragically, it transpires that I can't yet quite afford a white stuccoed number in Maida Vale.  In fact, it seems I can't afford an actual house anywhere I think I want to live (remembering I am spoilt from years of living in Kensington followed by Chelsea followed by Notting Hill) and so we are destined to remain in our tiny flat forever.

No matter.  I discovered The Great Interior Design Challenge, and have convinced myself that, given three days, I could totally transform our house.  I have become obsessed with wallpaper, you see, and figure that if we're going to be here for a while (or at least until I've made enough for a little mews house nearby, a snip at around £3million) I may as well carry out my design dreams within our present abode - there's no point in mood boards featuring Hermes wallpaper for a dining room that I might never have. (Although I will have it, one day.  It is as certain as eggs are eggs.)

First up, my bedroom.  It's currently painted pale pink, with a pink and green quilt and a vintage pink and yellow and white Welsh blanket, the curtains are blue and pink with ornamental pheasants (I love them, my mother just produced them from a box when I explained I needed some) and there's something of a wealth of cushions:  Chelsea Textiles, Yastik pink and green ikat spots, Neisha Crosland pineapples on a lemon curd background, not to mention the most beautiful bedside lamp in the world by Cressida Bell.  This is a very longwinded way of explaining that there is already quite a lot of pattern - but there are two plain cream jacquard bedroom armchairs should one's eye need a rest, and anyway it's me who spends the most amount of time in my bedroom and I love pattern, so I'm tossing up between the following:

 

Colefax & Fowler, Alderney.  I love it.  Love it. 

Barneby Gates, Honey Bees.  I also love this, but the more I think about it the more I think I'll save it for a spare bedroom in a future house - there's a fabric that matches, so I could do curtains and valances in the same, and even, maybe, explore the possibility of a tented room? (I've always wanted a tented room.)

This is one of the bedrooms at Kingston Lacey.  Now try and tell me that you wouldn't also like a tented bedroom.

But back to my house:  the children's bedroom is simple, and actually there isn't too much pattern going on in there, except for their own Chelsea Textiles cushions of course, and a blue and white dhurrie and the tent I made Sholto that matches his quilt and some other cushions (positively restrained, see?!), and would potentially come down to budget:

Either Celia Birtwell, Beasties

Or Brunschwig et Fils, Bengali, in Periwinkle (I've got a feeling Celia might be cheaper . . .  But oh my goodness I love it.  It's definitely got to find somewhere to live in the next house.)

The bathroom is more complex, because we half got around to doing it up last year in shades of grey, pink and white, with an amazing Neisha Crosland floor - seriously, if anyone is looking for tiling, stop spending hours going backwards and forwards from Fired Earth with different samples, and go to John Lewis and buy these:

They're both insanely practical, and genuinely not even a bit bankrupting.  

But the walls are still just painted (except the ones that are tiled in totally plain white matt tiles from the aforementioned Fired Earth), and now I either want to give it the Hermes treatment (in the absence of a dining room) or this:

Brunschwig et Fils, Shell Toile, blue on pineapple.  But it's just not going to go with anything else. Except perhaps monogrammed towels that I've thus far only ordered in my head.

Barneby Gates, English Robin.  My friend Kitty's bathroom is done in this.  And, get this, her husband did it for her as a surprise!  I can't think of anything more romantic.

Or of course my original Hermes obsession.  Which actually wouldn't screw up the colour scheme too much, I don't think.  Seriously.  Oh I love it so much.

Downstairs is more problematic.  It's currently painted pale grey, i.e Farrow & Ball Cornforth White.  But suddenly nearly every house I go into is pale grey.  It's become the new Magnolia.  And I long for something - oh I don't know - I do actually really like the colour of our walls downstairs.  But there is a bit of me that wants this:

Barneby Gates, Horse Trellis, acid on grey - but it totally wouldn't go with my Chelsea Textiles blinds, which are one of my greatest loves.

Then there's this:

Manuel Canovas, Bengale.  Like, seriously, how amazing?!  How amazing?!  Obviously it's not going to go with the Chelsea Textiles blinds either - or indeed anything else in the whole room, except perhaps for the Psalt Design bench which I've also thus far only ordered in my head, but one day, in one house, I will have this . . . 

This, however, would kind of go:  Jane Churchill, Bruton Damask.  I like the fact that it's quite subdued, too - it wouldn't overwhelm the room at all.  I've still got to sort out the accidental tie-dye sofa, I thinking of undying it, and then redying it a sort of old rose, which would look quite pretty with this, I feel.  But it might look too pretty pretty.

What's certain is that there's lots to think about. And I'm probably going to have a while to mull it over, as when I suggested to Andrew that he took the children to visit his parents for a few days over half-term, thus enabling me to 'do a little work on the house' in his absence (I'd like to paint the floors, too, and a couple of bookcases) he basically refused to leave.  So I'm going to have to wait until he's not expecting it, and re-suggest it, this time without mentioning wallpaper.  It'll also give me time to save up:  On The Great Interior Design Challenge they get £1000 each for the house transformation, and I've got a feeling that I'm rather seriously over budget . . .. 

www.colefax.com - they stock their own line, plus Jane Churchill and Manuel Canovas

www.barnebygates.com - their papers are going to be stocked on www.englishabode.com seriously soon - and I mean seriously, we are days away from going live

www.celiabirtwell.com

www.johnlewis.com

www.brunschwig.com