Writing a book is a journey – one where you often don’t quite know the destination when you begin your first step! A lot of time has passed since my first book, English Decoration, written in 2012, with its sequel, English Houses, following four years later. As the sharp-eyed will have noticed, these books centred around the experience of my own homes – a small flat in Great Ormond Street, London – followed by a move to Queen Square which we saw in the second book; and the house I’ve rented for the last 16 years now, The Old Parsonage, in a little hamlet in the far west of Dorset; but they also focussed on themes and ideas of how to put together a home as displayed by many beautiful houses – large, small, grand, humble, traditional, modern – owned by a group of people that I’ve been very happy to call my friends over many years now.
So that was now twelve and eight years ago. In that time, my design studio has grown from 6 or 8 people to somewhere between 40 and 50 – and we are working on projects across the world now, in Australia and New Zealand, in California, Italy, Austria, Switzerland and throughout the UK. The studio has three distinct, inter-related but separate departments – working on country houses, new and old, interior decoration (as distinct from architecture), and – equally close to my heart, master planning projects, where we are designing new towns and housing developments that I hope will benefit from the same degree of care and attention as our individual projects – and in so doing, can prove that everywhere can be made beautiful and meaningful, if you put the right degree of thought into it, whatever the circumstances of budget.
For a long time, therefore, it’s felt like time to talk about our own projects in a book. A few years ago, I was contacted by the marvellous American publisher Rizzoli, who have produced so many distinguished and erudite volumes that sit on my office bookshelves, to see if I might think about writing a new book for them. It was an immediately attractive proposition and I set to putting together a structure and themes. This was back in 2018. The following year, I am sad to remember, both my parents died within a few short weeks of another – and in the resultant period I asked to delay delivery of my material for a year. Then, in 2020, the pandemic struck. The thought of hurtling around Britain with a photographer in tow, visiting projects and houses, seemed inconceivable in those dark days. My patient editor, who at that stage had rather larger problems than the timing of my book, was all too happy to allow a further year’s delay. And then we got going again, only to find that I was so overwhelmed by the realities of work that it was impossible to prioritise the book in the way that I wanted. Again and again, I set aside days to take photographs, only to find that the vagaries of the weather were against me – with dull flat cloud arriving on the long-booked mornings where we needed mist and soft sunrise.
In all this time, two things had emerged. First, I needed to take my own photographs – which sounds like a crazy task, but I realised no-one else would get up in the middle of the night to capture dawn at a housing development in Truro or see the last rays of the dying sun in the far north of Scotland at our new town near Inverness. I taught myself to use a camera and had a brilliant tutor and assistant in the form of the wonderful Peter Dixon, who has worked with so many esteemed photographers over the decades that I’m still surprised he took me on!
Second, if I was ever going to finish, I needed to prioritise the book over all other plans and projects. In new year 2023, I wrote a little ‘sabbatical’ note to all our existing and any new clients in the office – warning them that while I was happy to make a plan in my diary, I was liable to have to change that plan, and reschedule at a moment’s notice, for the most part of that year. Surprisingly, no-one batted an eyelid at such prima-donna-ish behaviour, and so it was that for the whole of last year, I was on a mission to revisit many, many old projects – some completed years before – to capture them for these pages.
An early decision – actually, for which, I have Veere Grenney to be grateful – was to include not just decoration and private houses in the book, but some of the masterplanning projects too. Veere was adamant that this was all a part of what made me, me. And so the warp and weft of text and ideas and themes began to take shape. Now the book has four main sections – Cities, Towns & Townhouses, Country Houses, and Farm & Village – and it opens with some ideas on ‘My Way of Thinking’ – looking at the complex strands that link how we design an individual building, or an interior, or the streets of a new town. It showcases some 30 of our completed projects, of all different scales and types. It’s all, really about the idea of harmonious comfort, visual beauty and about being informed by the best parts of history – but never being afraid of the future.
It's a scary moment, in a way, to place everything in a capsule, and present it to the world – in this task, I was helped immeasurably by the brilliant graphic designer Robert Dalrymple, who I have known since I was a student at Edinburgh University and whose books I have always loved. Robert’s delicate vision and sensibility runs through every page now. I spent a week last autumn at his and Anna’s beautiful farm steading at Broadwoodside, in the borders, putting together each page – and for the last three days we were joined by our fantastic editor, Philip Reeser, who joined up all the dots and made it chime.
