Home and Studio Direct

When Osborne and Little launched its Zagazoo collection of wallpaper and
fabrics this summer, a warm, fuzzy feeling came over me. Designed by Quentin
Blake, the collection features all manner of his trademark cheeky
characters: mischievous-looking cockatoos perched on jungle branches, wiry
children flying about on skateboards, and perky farmyard animals that take
me straight back to childhood and my first forays into the rich and magical
world of Roald Dahl’s books.

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Nostalgia is a powerful trend that has come about in the world of interiors in
recent years. Not to be mixed up with ‘retro’ and the revival of 50s or
60s-style fashions, nostalgia is more about a ‘feeling’ than a ‘look’.
Nostalgic designs, in other words, hold meaning to the person who owns them,
helping to conjure up memories of one’s own past – be those from a
much-loved book, a family holiday, mother’s wallpaper or granny’s tassled
lampshades.

Last year, the consumer trends firm, trendwatching.com
identified nostalgia as one of the key trends of 2010, noting: “Storybook
sentiment has got hold of consumers looking to escape their stresses and
find a temporary refuge from adult responsibilities. Nostalgia marketing
holds great appeal in times of uncertainty as it allows consumers to
reminisce, bringing them back to simpler, more carefree times.”

In a post-recession world, looking back and emulating the values of a previous
time provides an escape from current pressures. In today’s world,
cheaply-made furniture with no history and no longevity is symptomatic of a
consumer culture that went wrong. Vintage buys in a market, family
hand-me-downs, or things which have been personalised by hand with love
suddenly seem so much more appealing because they tell a story, and this has
a value which cannot be measured.

Recently, while rifling through the attic at my parents’ home, I discovered a
beautiful red screen, painstakingly decoupaged, it emerged, by my
great-grandmother. The screen shows Hollywood stars such as Grace Kelly and
Audrey Hepburn interspersed with magazine illustrations of London and
fresh-faced cut-outs of a young Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II. On one
panel, Father Christmas, snowmen and 30s children opening presents under a
tree are pasted on, implying that this section was done at a Christmas
period over 70 years ago. The screen is the prized possession of my flat
because it is so striking and expertly done, but also because it is so
highly individual to me and a great-grandmother I never met.

The nostalgic look is “the antithesis of mass market and intensely personal,”
says Marianne Shillingford, Design Director of Dulux Design Service. “A set
of authentic old cake tins and mixing bowls replace slick designer stainless
steel and glass functionality. Meanwhile, patchwork quilts and dress print
curtains from the family home or your first flat combined with home-made
soft furnishings and reclaimed re-painted furniture help you to create a
room that is unique and heartfelt.”

The nostalgia trend is not just evident in our interiors. Across the country
this summer, bookings for campsites, holiday parks, self-catering cottages
and boating breaks were up on years before while popular beach resorts such
as Blackpool, Brighton and Torquay were busier than ever.

Meanwhile, the joys of retro sweets such as Space Raders or Sherbert Fountains
are being rediscovered with the help of sites such as Bah Humbugs or A
Quarter of Old-Fashioned Sweets. Fashion has also succumbed to the nostalgic
mood with Autumn/Winter 2010 collections characterised by quirky prints,
soft palettes and oversized wooly jumpers reminiscent a post-war sartorial
style.

Nostalgia might be defined as escapism in its purest form, but, if it reminds
us of what really has value in life and helps us to see the cheap, throwaway
culture of pre-recession years for what it really was, then I, for one, am
all for it.

Emily Jenkinson is interiors writer for furniture
and interior design website mydeco.com.

If you’ve been putting off decorating because you think you can’t afford it, or the house is feeling a bit cramped for a growing family but you don’t really want to move, perhaps it’s time to think about a small refurbishment. A little refreshing of the current decor. It’s amazing what even a lick of paint can do to transform a room and, if you apply it yourself, it can cost just a few quid. So, with penny-pinching in mind, here are some ideas you can steal for a budget of £50, £500, £5,000 or even for a small remortgage of £50,000.

£50

It’s tight, but not impossible. To start with, you can buy a tin of paint,
although not the labour to apply it. You can just paint one wall – but if
it’s a feature wall then it needs to be pretty spectacular. You can apply
the same rule to wallpaper, but obviously at this price you’ll only get the
paper – not the person to stick it on. Wallpaperdirect has thousands of
papers to choose from, from as little as £5.99 a roll. Or buy some wall
stickers which you can easily put up yourself. Try Supernice for fabulous
trompe l’oeil chandeliers and plants.

Tor Vivian, of Dobson & Vivian, an integrated architecture and design
practice, says: “Paint the walls in a neutral colour, and do the
woodwork in a lighter shade of the same colour. A lighter, brighter shade
will give a clean, updated look and make the space feel bigger.”

If the walls are fine, but the carpet’s a bit tired, think about buying a rug.
Buy the biggest one that you can afford and make it a statement.

Hugo Tugman, founder of Interior Your Home and its sister company Architect
Your Home, suggests spending your £50 on a fabulous lampshade for the
central pendant light. “It’s difficult, but not impossible to make a
change for £50,” he says. “Changing the lighting will make
the whole room feel different. Habitat does some great shades, and you
should choose something that will really make a statement.”

A quick and easy way to change the furniture is to buy a throw to cover up any
stains, or, if you’re OK on that front, think about new cushion covers. For
the practically minded, the designer Lisa Stickley’s book Made at Home
(£16.99, Quadrille) gives practical advice and instructions on how to make
cushions, blinds and simple curtains.

£500

If the carpet has had its day, you can replace it in one room for about this
sum. Or you can rip it up, and sand the boards. It costs around £30 a day to
hire a sanding machine, but you will need another smaller one for the
corners. Then you can varnish them or paint them in a colour of your
choosing and spend any leftovers on a rug.

Your local builder should put up some shelves and paint them for this sort of
price, and good storage will make you feel like you live in a new house.
Consider book and DVD shelves, or perhaps include a cupboard underneath so
the clutter isn’t visible.

Upstairs in the bedroom, think about buying some new hangers for your clothes
and perhaps building shoe storage.

If you’ve got a bunch of posters and postcards that you’ve been meaning to
frame for a while, take them to the local framers and do as many as you can
afford. Vivian suggests framing your own black-and-white prints.

Tugman says at this budget you can think about buying some new furniture. “Dwell
and Ikea have some good solutions at this budget. But you might also be able
to do something like retile the bathroom. Porcelanosa is a really good
source of tiles and you can make a feature out of one wall,” he says.

£5,000

This is where it gets more interesting. Tugman says: “With £5,000, you
can start to think about taking down walls and rearranging the internal
space to get more light, or getting rid of wasted space in hallways.

“You might be able to convert a single door to the garden into French
doors, or change a window into a door. The space under the stairs is often
wasted – think about installing a downstairs loo or making an office area.”

If you have a large master bedroom but have always hankered after an en suite,
now you’re in the ball park. That’s assuming you’re not insisting on gold
taps. Moving internal walls isn’t a big job, and you can easily make one
room a little smaller so you can create a small bathroom. These days, you
can also buy things to fit in a corner, so in a large room you can even box
off a triangle shape and buy a triangular basin, loo and shower. The cost of
this will vary according to the materials you use, but if you stick to basic
white and then add colourful towels to finish it off, you shouldn’t blow the
budget.

If you can’t afford a whole new kitchen, think about replacing the doors as
the cupboard carcasses are probably alright anyway. Homestylekitchens.co.uk
sell new doors from about £15 each. Remember that the drawer fronts, and the
cost of handles mounts up fast too. Use the leftover money for a new
worktop, and any more after that can go towards new accessories.

“You can update the kitchen by painting the cupboard doors and replacing
the worktop. Larger wood worktops from Ikea sell for around £60 for 246cm,”
says Vivian. “You can also change the cupboard handles. B&Q and
Homebase have some lovely ranges, and if you have some money left over then
changing the kitchen taps for something more contemporary is a good way to
update the look.”

Don’t forget the garden. Proper garden makeovers can cost a lot of money, but
for this price you should be able to create a patio and returf the lawn. The
other approach is to install some fabulous garden lighting – just as top
models rely on good lighting to hide imperfections, so some uplighters and
downlighters in your garden can draw attention to the good bits, and vice
versa. Alternatively, splash out on some good garden furniture. If you buy
well, it should last for years.

£50,000

With this kind of budget, you’re entering the realms of being able to add
another room to your property, and this is also where you start to add real
value to your house. A basic loft conversion usually starts from around
£35,000, but you will also have to buy the bathroom fittings with that and
decorate it too. If you need new furniture, then your £50,000 is pretty well
taken care of.

If you don’t want to go up, then how about out? Single-storey side-return
extensions cost from about £35,000, but you will have to buy flooring and
install a kitchen too, so you will spend all your budget here. Installing a
glass roof or full-width glass doors is increasingly popular, but this will
send the cost soaring so calculate carefully before you get carried away. As
a basic guideline, you can extend up to 3 metres from the rear wall, 3
metres out and 4 metres up within permitted development. Any more than that
will need planning permission. Otherwise, you just need to apply for a
certificate of lawfulness.

Tugman suggests you should always buy the best you can afford, though. “I
recently worked on a house valued at £1.35m. We converted a dressing room
back into a bedroom with an en suite and added some amazing glass-fronted
wardrobes. We spent £60,000 and the house was revalued at £1.7m. That’s a
phenomenal return on the investment and was down to the expensive wardrobes.
Sometimes, spending that little bit extra really makes a difference.”

“I would ban brown buildings,” says the prize-winning children’s author John Burningham. “Brown windows, brown bricks, brown everything. They must make the people who live in them subliminally depressed.” No surprise then that his own house, an elegant Edwardian semi in north London’s leafy Hampstead, couldn’t be more different.

As a designer, illustrator and writer of, among others, the Granpa series of
books, Burningham is known for his witty use of colour. Open one of his
children’s books and you’ll find imaginative use of light and a rich palette
of colours.

John Burningham’s first book, Borka: The Adventures of a Goose with No
Feathers, was published in 1963 and tells the story of a gosling who is born
different, and makes his way to Kew Gardens in London. Since then, with
titles including Granpa and Mr Gumpy’s Outing, the 75-year-old writer and
illustrator has gone on to become an internationally beloved children’s
author.

His wife, Helen Oxenbury, is an award-winning illustrator with a career
spanning 40 years. She has illustrated editions of The Quangle Wangle’s Hat
by Edward Lear, which won the prestigious Kate Greenaway Medal in 1969, and
a 1999 edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

For the first time, the pair have collaborated on a book, There’s Going to be
a Baby, which is released next week. Did they have any creative differences
during the project? “I don’t usually talk to the author much when I’m
illustrating their work, but it was different with John; I know him quite
well, you see,” says Oxenbury.

The couple’s four-storey semi is full of Edwardian features; walking around
it, one could be in an advertisement for gracious living. Built in the first
decade of the 20th century, the main impression of the house is one of
solidity and sturdiness. The previous owner, Lady Mellanby, widow of Sir
Edward Mellanby, an adviser to the government during the Second World War,
lived here for 50 years.

Hampstead’s villagey feel has traditionally been a magnet for certain sections
of London’s intellectual and artistic community. The art historian Kenneth
Clark lived a few streets away in grand Upper Terrace House and Lucian Freud
lived just off the high street. But things have changed; these days there
are a suspicious number of Porsches on show. “It’s the merchant bankers,”
explains

Burningham. “You seldom see any new artists moving in; they can’t afford
to. John le Carré still lives down the road and you sometimes see Alfred
Brendel on the Heath, but they’re the previous generation,” he says.

While the neighbours may have changed over the years, the house itself remains
resolutely Edwardian: it’s all high ceilings, cornices and ample space for
the servants. The ground floor has a large open-plan kitchen/dining room
with floor-to-ceiling windows giving on to the heath-facing sitting room,
with its double-panelled stained-glass doors and parquet floor. Upstairs are
two floors of bedrooms and below, in the old kitchen, is Burningham’s
studio-cum-study.

In the light-filled sitting room with a view of the Heath, a large 1930s EMG
gramophone is something of a centrepiece. One of a pair (the other is in
their second home in France), it is one of the few things in the room that
came from a shop rather than a demolition site.

“In the 1960s when London was being pulled down, we used to live off
demolition sites. I was forever shinning across roof joists in search of
bits and bobs I’d spotted,” says Burningham. A craftsman and artist
himself, he can’t stand the waste of materials when old buildings get
knocked down: “An interesting door, floor or window can please me as
much as a painting or drawing; the applied arts have always appealed to me,”
he says.

Testaments to Burningham’s passion are in evidence all around the house. A
Gothic-revival fireplace in Portland stone that dominates the sitting room
was salvaged from a property in Egham, Surrey; a belfry, originally from a
church in the Finchley Road, looms over the back-garden lawn; and a window
seat from Lillie Langtry’s house in Swiss Cottage now has pride of place in
the large family kitchen. “It’s interesting to think who may have been
lying on it with her…” says Burningham. And Oxenbury’s favourite
object? “Definitely the Aga. Wonderful for leaning on in the winter.”

In contrast to the cosiness of the upper storeys, Burningham’s studio is more
spartan. It stretches across the entire lower floor, and light from the
myriad tall windows floods in. It has off-white walls and an assortment of
furniture, each piece coming with its own story. The low, elegant Dryad
chair in painted wicker was “made by soldiers blinded in the First
World War”. The 16-foot table Burningham works on was rescued from a
débutantes club in Chelsea. The chaise longue in the corridor is called the
Burningham chaise and was a present from the designer Robert Kay.

Adjacent to the studio is the library: floor-to-ceiling bookshelves line the
walls with brightly coloured books wedged into every available space. From
Oxenbury’s version of Alice in Wonderland, to an original of her husband’s
first Granpa book, the couple’s entire oeuvre is here. Burningham alone has
produced some 50 books and Helen only marginally fewer.

Burningham’s work in particular proved to be the first flowerings of a new
type of children’s book. He eschewed the more swaddled notions of childhood
left over from the Victorians and pioneered a style which sought to
reconnect children to their animal instincts. The books became instant
bestsellers, though they offended some sensibilities. After one of his books
featured a dog urinating into a flower bed, he received an outraged letter
from a woman in Surrey. “She wrote me this long letter telling me how
obscene my book was. She ended it: ‘And if this is what you do when you
include dogs, heaven knows what you would have rabbits getting up to.’ ”

Today, neither will be drawn on whether they have further books in the
pipeline, but it’s clear that for Burningham the main project is the house
itself. He points to a couple of Gothic-revival doors waiting to be hung. “I
love fiddling around with the place,” he explains. One can’t help but
suspect that he is the real driving force, the person pushing the tinkering,
changing and reorganising.

“I always say John has the ability to make a silk purses out of a sow’s
ears; he can just see the possibilities in objects,” says Oxenbury.

‘There’s Going to Be a Baby’ is published on Monday by Walker Books, £12.99

Traditionally used for packaging, and often associated with the homeless, in
recent years cardboard has climbed the ranks to sit alongside more
traditional materials, such as wood, glass or plastic, as a respectable
substance from which to create innovative design for the home and office.

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At 100% Design last week, cardboard designs were cropping up all over the
place. One cardboard exhibitor, the Creative Trust, scooped the Best Stand
Design award in the Blueprint Awards at 100% Design for its cardboard room
exhibit, which was crammed full of illustrated cardboard furniture. The
Creative Trust started working with cardboard following a commission from a
company in Canada. “We had to use something that we could ship, which was
light and which would suit our illustration style,” says Jason Hoyle, a
designer for the Creative Trust. “There’s something about cardboard that
brings a smile to people’s faces.”

It is the surprising nature of the cardboard furniture collection at the
Creative Trust that helps to make people smile. From the cardboard chaise
longue or the suitcase-style cardboard drawers to the cardboard tray,
complete with a cooked breakfast drawn onto the surface in black marker pen,
these designs confound our expectations of what furniture is and should be
by combining an unusual material with an irreverent illustrative style.

This furniture might make a unique design statement, but does it stand up to
scrutiny when used in the same way as other household furniture? “It is
possible to do a chair or table that will last,” says Hoyle, who likens
cardboard to a “natural MDF.” At the Creative Trust, all cardboard is
recycled. Much of this is sourced from Dufaylite, a company specialising in
a highly cost effective board made from recycled paper and cardboard. Using
a unique ‘honeycomb’ structure, Dufaylite is able to create a range of
thicknesses, which can cater to a huge variety of applications and withstand
impact or heavy loads while remaining lightweight with exceptional
cushioning properties due to its inner cellular structure.

It is, in many ways, the perfect material – and it must be easy to work with
too, I suggest. No, says Hoyle, “it’s actually quite a hard product to work
with. It has a grain almost like wood, so that you can’t cut it in certain
ways. It’s not as easy as it seems, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a
nice product. I think quite a few things were mocked up in cardboard
originally, but now you can use the cardboard as the project itself.”

More and more designers are using cardboard as their material of choice. Giles
Miller, another exhibitor at 100% Design, has a fantastic selection of
cardboard home accessories and furniture, including the Flute table light,
available from Bouf.com. This is made in the UK from sustainable corrugated
cardboard with angles in the corrugation alternated to form a beautiful
floral pattern in the surface of the shade.

The company Paperself also designs with cardboard. Its transformer cardboard
coffee table is flat pack and recyclable, with users able to assemble units
by themselves and print or sketch on the surface.

The potential of cardboard doesn’t stop at furniture or home accessories.
Earlier this year, London-based interior design consultancy, Studio DB
designed a permanent shop in Brixton Village, with fittings completely
constructed from cardboard, glue and string.

Meanwhile, last year, Dutch designers Joost van Bleiswijk and Alrik Koudenburg
created an entirely cardboard office for Amsterdam-based advertising agency,
Nothing, where staff urge visitors to treat brown walls as a blank canvas.

Cardboard is affordable, colourful, safe, environmentally friendly and can be
easily folded away making it a great material for children’s furniture. At
Kroom, all furniture is made from reinforced cardboard recyclable material
with a dedicated ‘Kids’ range for children’s rooms and play areas. Other
companies such as Cardboard Toys or Paperboard are similarly dedicated to
the benefits of cardboard products for children. Parents, meanwhile, must be
relieved to let youngsters have free rein drawing on inexpensive cardboard
children’s furniture as opposed to the newly painted walls.

Cardboard might make fine boxes when moving home, or seem to make a
comfortable bed when faced with a cold pavement, but its real potential as
an eco-friendly, cost-effective design material is only just beginning to be
realised.

Emily Jenkinson is interiors writer for furniture
and interior design website mydeco.com.

When nowadays we ascribe messianic significance to the arrival of the latest smartphone, it’s easy to forget the simpler products in life. Such is the pleasure of Tools for Living: A Sourcebook of Iconic Designs for the Home by Charlotte and Peter Fiell. A flagship title for the husband-and-wife team’s publishing house, it’s a hall of fame for those household objects we could not live without, showcasing “ultimate” examples of everything from beds and baths to staplers and salad servers.

So what are the measures of an “ultimate” design, exactly? Elegance
and functionality, of course, but above all it’s a matter of durability, as
Peter explains. “The book was really predicated on one maxim: ‘If you
buy cheap, you buy twice.’ Patently, products that are intended to last a
lifetime give you better value for money, but you’re also likely to derive
greater joy through their use. And then the undisputed fact is that if you
double the life cycle of any product, you halve its net environmental
impact, which is the only way we’re going to achieve sustainability in terms
of consumption.”

Running to 768 pages, Tools for Living is a dizzyingly comprehensive tome, and
few could have been better qualified to assemble it than the couple, leading
authorities on contemporary design for the past 20 years. “A lot of the
stuff we own ourselves and we use on a daily basis,” Peter says. “And
[many other products] we already had the full story on, from the initial
concept to seeing them evolve to the final product coming out in the
manufacturer’s facility.”

Still, the two years they spent researching the book found them wading into
less familiar territory: spending days getting their heads around the
relative merits of secateurs, for instance. “We had to become a little
OCD,” Peter notes wryly.

Just as interesting as the products themselves was their provenance. “[Take
the] ultimate ice-cream scoop, which is called Zeroll – it’s made in the US
by this ‘mom and pop’ business, which is three generations old, and it’s all
they make. Even if you go to the best gelateria in Rome, that’s what they’re
using.”

Historical import aside, the book serves as a bountiful font of furnishing
inspiration, whatever the depth of your pockets. “Cost was not one of
our criteria,” Peter explains. “If people do some research, they
will find our selections tend towards the highest end of the price range.
But it was important to us to include things that, even though they’re the
best of their kind, are still very [financially] accessible.” So for
every multi-thousand-pound fridge, there’s items such as the Le Parfait
Super jars (see right), which you can buy from your average homeware store
with change from a fiver.

And if Tools for Living is predicated on a second maxim, it’s that no object
is too trivial to forgo caring about. “There’s a potato peeler we
included that you might think is pretty banal, but actually it appears on a
stamp in Switzerland,” says Peter. “As Charlotte says, she uses a
potato peeler practically every day and by god you know when you’ve got a
crap one – it’s a misery. But when you’ve a got a good one, it brings a
little ray of sunshine into your life.”

‘Tools for Living’ is published by Fiell, priced £29.95