Emily Tobin

London

Deputy Editor at The World of Interiors

Creative Director of The Calico Club & Arts Editor at House & Garden, Condé Nast UK @_houseandgarden. Instagram: @emily.k.tobin

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Articles

Emily Tobin introduces the May 2025 issue

3 weeks ago | worldofinteriors.com | Emily Tobin

The monthly ritual of writing this editor’s letter still feels new. I hope you will forgive me for admitting that every four weeks it creeps up on me; a surprise that really shouldn’t be one. Each month I take myself off to the same café, order a black coffee and orbit around the single question that underpins much of my work. What should I choose to focus on?
Emily Tobin introduces the April 2025 issue

1 month ago | worldofinteriors.com | Emily Tobin

Those of us who live in the UK are, like it or not, bound to one another on a cellular level by a shared obsession with the weather. I cannot in good conscience start our April issue without making a nod or two to brightening days, hopeful bulbs and a softening in the air. Up and down the country scarves and gloves are being left at home with the gleeful abandon of a person going for a skinny dip. Recently, over curry with friends, the subject of Radio 4’s shipping forecast came up.
Emily Tobin introduces the March 2025 issue

2 months ago | worldofinteriors.com | Emily Tobin

A few years ago I asked Hamish Bowles, our creative director at large, if he had any pictures of himself as a student. The reason we needed these now escapes me but the pictures he texted were fantastic. ‘I’m madly zooming in on all of them,’ I typed. ‘Especially the one of you wearing pearls and swinging striped hatboxes, with a feather in your hair.’ He responded nonchalantly: ‘A charity performance at the Fridge in Brixton.
A tiny Cotswold barn filled with treasures by Christopher Howe

Jan 21, 2025 | houseandgarden.co.uk | Emily Tobin

Paul MasseyYou would be hard pressed to find a more idyllic setting for a bolt-hole than a wildflower meadow in Gloucestershire complete with a babbling brook, grazing sheep and a resident horse. Nestled on the edge of one such field is a tawny-coloured stone barn; it is a tiny thing comprising a sitting room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom with two large glass doors opening to reveal its cross section, like an oversize rural doll's house.
Emily Tobin introduces the February 2025 issue

Jan 8, 2025 | worldofinteriors.com | Emily Tobin

One of the quirks of WoI’s printing schedule is that our February issue hits the news stands in early January. The holidays are over, the decorations packed away and we are looking down the barrel of a new year: 365 blank days in the calendar and that startling realisation that time has tumbled on at such a lick we’re somehow a quarter of the way through the century.
Now you too can live like Lorenzo Castillo. Si, si, Señor…!

Nov 15, 2024 | worldofinteriors.com | Emily Tobin

Last summer we published a house belonging to antiquarian, art historian and interior designer Lorenzo Castillo. Set amid the mountains of northern Spain, it was characteristically joyful and ornate. ‘I wanted to give the space a certain eccentricity, the feel of a “folly”, almost – as if it was the house of some English traveller who’s just returned from his Grand Tour and has assembled his souvenirs in his country home,’ explained Castillo.
Mary’s mothers: Mary Cassatt’s paintings of women at work showcased in a new exhibition

Aug 21, 2024 | worldofinteriors.com | Emily Tobin

In the years since Mary Cassatt died, she has undergone several inevitable rounds of revaluation. As the centenary of her death approaches, so too do several exhibitions and books about her life, each endeavouring to shed new light on an artist whose work has long been sidelined as too domestic and too pretty to be taken seriously.
X Marks the Spot

May 9, 2024 | worldofinteriors.com | Emily Tobin

‘What are you looking for?’ It’s a perfectly sensible question that is often posed to our editors, though of course the answer is far from straightforward. We’re looking for spaces that surprise and delight us; we’re looking for stories that haven’t been told; we’re looking for something unexpected, something personal, something completely singular. But such a thing rarely reveals itself all at once.
An assiduous collector’s charming antiques-filled Elizabethan abode

Jan 20, 2024 | worldofinteriors.com | Emily Tobin

Why do we collect things? Does the act somehow pacify our existential worries? Do our stamp sets, our shelves of ceramics and our walls lined with pictures provide a sense of security? Do we accumulate objects in the hope we might somehow be imbued with the essence of their previous owner? Do we do it simply for the joy of acquisition, for the thrill of novelty, for that electrifying buzz of beating someone to the punch?
Dutch flower paintings may possess a secret language

Jul 24, 2023 | worldofinteriors.com | Sarah Hyde |Emily Tobin |Caroline Roux |Elizabeth Joseph

The question of how much of a hidden floral ‘syntax’ is present in these works will always remain a mystery (one can only wonder what future generations will project onto one of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings). But as flower painting expert Fred G. Meijer explained to me, it is not so much that there is a secret language, more that there is a lost language associated with these artworks. At the time the still-lifes were made, the meanings attached to elements in them were common knowledge.