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1 month ago | 
worldofinteriors.com | Ruth Guilding |Lesley Lau
‘I’m a magpie. It’s even on my business card,’ says Farang Wren as I rotate on my heel, taking in the visual Sensurround that is her kitchen. She came to this high-ceilinged residence in Hackney 12 years ago with her husband and two small children. Also making themselves known are two lively black-and-white collies, rescued from a puppy farmer. We discuss this urge to save stuff when comparing notes on the things we own and why.
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2 months ago | 
worldofinteriors.com | Ruth Guilding |Ollie Tomlinson
In the tin-mining town of St Just, just north of Land’s End, there is a characterful little shop that seemed to spring up in the night like a mushroom just over a decade ago, the many-paned window of what had once been an old hardware shop suddenly filled with a treasure trove of curiosities, maritime salvage, painted sailor’s chests, sea shells and antique telescopes.
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2 months ago | 
worldofinteriors.com | Ruth Guilding
When I was 19 I stayed with my boyfriend’s mother for a summer, high up under a small mountain in Snowdonia. In an extraordinary old house and garden called Plas Brondanw on the scarp slope of the valley below we visited a friend of his grandmother’s, a venerable lady in a chignon, full skirts and wool stockings, who scrutinised us kindly.
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Jan 2, 2025 | 
worldofinteriors.com | Ruth Guilding
When the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West created a garden at Sissinghurst in Kent, she excluded all plants that she thought socially common. Azaleas were ‘Ascot, Sunningdale sort of plants’; rhododendrons were like ‘fat stockbrokers, whom we do not want to have to dinner’. She despised the middle classes – whom she called ‘bedints’ – with their dahlias and tidy lawns, while the proletariat was redeemed only by working the land in time-honoured agricultural fashion.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
houseandgarden.co.uk | Ruth Guilding
Phillip Hooper's Georgian house in Somerset has a bed – made to Philip’s design for his previous house and adapted with a scallop-edged canopy to suit the proportions of its new home – painted in Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler’s ‘Bark’ from Fenwick & Tilbrook. Paul MasseyBeds have been important heirloom items ever since furniture was invented: William Shakespeare notoriously bequeathed only his ‘second-best bed’ to his wife.
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Sep 28, 2024 | 
worldofinteriors.com | Ruth Guilding
‘Can’t you just say “nestled in the hills of West Dorset” and be very, very cryptic about it?’ asks Kate Harris. We are standing in the long kitchen/dining room of the farmhouse that this family rents from the local estate.
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Aug 11, 2024 | 
worldofinteriors.com | Ruth Guilding
You turn off Kensington Church Street, following a side-street downhill. It narrows and then debouches into a little green cul de sac of low, stock-brick terraces with an almost cottagey feel. Near the bottom is the house where Gretchen Andersen lived for 62 years and raised her three children. Everything she says is enthralling. When she arrived, she recalls, this street was full of extraordinarily interesting old people. ‘The lady next door had kept a pig in the back yard during the war.
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Jan 9, 2024 | 
theartnewspaper.com | Ruth Guilding
London’s British Museum is a child of the Enlightenment. Sculptures in its Grecian pediment announce it as the temple of Lord Elgin’s Parthenon marbles, arguably its greatest treasures, which it acquired in 1816. But before Elgin, there was an earlier British Museum and another sculpture hall, purpose-built at the beginning of the 19th century for a group of classical sculptures that were originally far more famous.
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Aug 23, 2023 | 
worldofinteriors.com | Ruth Guilding |Elfreda Pownall |Donna Salek |Alice Inggs
I spotted the Barmouth Sailors’ Institute early one morning two summers ago. In the dim, aqueous light of a wet Welsh morning, I looked through shining windows into a long rectangular room, neat as a pin, with newspapers folded on a table and a mass of framed portrait photographs jostling edge to edge on pale blue tongue-and-groove walls. When I returned the next year, Janet Griffith was painting the windowsills, getting the first coat on between showers.
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Aug 23, 2023 | worldofinteriors.com | Ruth Guilding |Elfreda Pownall |Donna Salek |Alice Inggs
I spotted the Barmouth Sailors’ Institute early one morning two summers ago. In the dim, aqueous light of a wet Welsh morning, I looked through shining windows into a long rectangular room, neat as a pin, with newspapers folded on a table and a mass of framed portrait photographs jostling edge to edge on pale blue tongue-and-groove walls. When I returned the next year, Janet Griffith was painting the windowsills, getting the first coat on between showers.
