The design references Benedict Foley has saved on his instagram

Sophia Spring

If you are a keen reader of House & Garden, you will be very familiar with the name Benedict Foley. The multi-talented creative is a designer, tastemaker and font of knowledge when it comes to creating eclectic, characterful spaces. His own flat in London is a lesson in making the most of small spaces. It is these many achievements which in 2023 earned him House & Garden's Rising Star award, and he has gone on to design a room in collaboration with Sanderson for this year's WOW! House installation at Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour.

In an effort to glean inspiration from him, we asked him to take part in our series examining the instagram posts which he has saved, and plans to draw upon later. The results are as interesting as the man himself – from wildflower meadows to 1980s film costumes.

Eartha is a great interiors style point for me; the foil curtain and backing dancers are THE energy! I always think about how I want people to experience a space, and this is how I want to experience a space!

Nancy Lancaster, George Oakes, an over-scale Chinese export lacquer screen, and baked apricot walls - Lancaster and John Fowler were both masterful but never dull, I think it's something that my partner Daniel and I both admire - do it really well but have fun!

Poor Fee – I've asked her endless questions about her shepherd's hut, obsessed with them ever since Cher came out of her gypsy caravan in a 19 foot high wig and yellow fringe dress! I love the possibilities of decorating a small space, if you want to decorate a shepherd's hut my stable door is open!

David Parr's house is an extraordinary thing. It is an unassuming terrace house in Cambridge, but lived in by someone who didn't choose to limit their creative impulses. Parr was a decorative artist who had a hand in many lavish Arts & Crafts interiors, rather than thinking that his work was only for great houses or churches he decorated his own house with the same attention to detail. The stained glass in this otherwise fairly typical sash window shows just how much fun you can have if you don't get too hung up on appropriateness!

I'm a very amateur gardener, so this is a sort of fantasy exegesis - Tania I see as a sort of painter-with-plants. Here, there is the right amount of planning, a broad and deep botanical knowledge, an element of chaos, it all looks so achingly simple and I know it's far from it! I have only achieved the acceptance of chaos, and mostly that's just to excuse my lack of knowledge and planning.

This is another sort of fantasy - I am currently perusing bulb catalogues thinking about the cheering scene I could create next spring. Reality is that our cottage garden is often flooded in the winter, so those bulbs that don't drown have in previous years provided succour to hungry squirrels marooned on our river island.

I've known Rupert since we were about 18. I think in those days we were rather more focused on revelry, but now it seems we were both secretly obsessive detailers! The architectural language developed by Lorrimer fusing both Arts and Crafts and Scottish vernacular influences is one I love. Rupert's varied use of materials, the carefully considered relationship of one detail to the next, the quality of the execution - seeing something newly made done really well is a particular delight.

Glitter gothic meets Archaic Greek Arthurian armour – I lost about three hours of my life googling Robert Addie in Excalibur: time well spent. Interiors are really a sort of story telling at their best, Luke loves a story too, it's giving a green light for a green knight.

Daniel has been working on a Scandinavian country house so we've been down something of a historical wood burning stove rabbit hole - rather than simply heating a room very effectively I love this particular stove for grabbing a full range of ornamental possibilities in the same breath. I admire the freedom of product designers prior to 20th-century modernist rationalism, I do love visual logic, but why settle for achieving only one outcome when you can live comfortably and with black glazed acroteria and an integral mirror, as in the second picture in this carousel?

Metallic threadwork and lacework have both been rumbling obsessions of mine. Lately this has branched over to straw work - technical sophistication transforming a humble material is the sort of creative joy that is hard to match!