Far from the madding crowd
So what if your colours don’t match? Arabella Youens visits interior designer Penny Morrison’s heavenly house
Some 30 years ago, two happy circumstances collided to bring the South African-born Penny morrison and her art-dealer husband, Guy, to their Regency house on the Welsh borders. Then based in London, but yearning to move to the country, she’d spotted an advert in
Country Life. ‘I used to buy it each week and dream. We weren’t looking at anywhere in particular—it could have been Yorkshire or Devon,’ she explains. ‘I liked the look of the house, but was conscious of how far away it was. The following weekend, we happened to be visiting friends who lived down the road and took a look.’
The property hadn’t been touched since 1910 and had lain empty for two years prior to the morrisons’ arrival. Riddled with dry rot, it required new everything—roofs, windows and floors—as well as comprehensive re-wiring and re-plumbing. ‘It was a mess: if you touched a radiator in the kitchen, it would fall off.’
The project required a year of building before any decorating could begin, but they were blessed with a pool of local talent. ‘It doesn’t matter what you need, be it a mesh fire curtain or wrought ironwork: that area along the Shropshire/welsh border is full of highly skilled artisans.’
Country-house sales and local auction rooms were scoured for furniture and furnishings and boxes of accumulated blueand-white china finally found a home; architectural-salvage yards yielded fireplaces to replace ‘hideous’ Edwardian originals.
‘Country-house sales and local auction rooms were scoured for furniture’
‘I go to endless textile fairs and buy piles of things only to decide later what to do with them. It’s an approach that I often encourage my clients to use,’ explains Penny. ‘If you like something, buy it. Be spontaneous. You’ll find a home for it somewhere.’
For someone famous for her eclectic English country-house look, it’s perhaps surprising that she was brought up in the Southern Hemisphere. She moved to London from Johannesburg in 1976. ‘My mother was creative and took huge pride and interest in her houses. I got used to that and always wanted to live in pretty surroundings. I don’t care how basic things are—it’s not about being surrounded by expensive or grand things, it’s about light and comfort.’
Her first job was as an estate agent selling houses and flats in the late 1970s and early 1980s. When clients said they didn’t have the time to do them up, Penny stepped in and offered to do it for them. The business grew from there. ‘I think I have a creative
‘Mix together what you like. So what if colours don’t match? Don’t be afraid’
urge, but I can’t paint or draw, so my only way to express this creative frustration is by decorating.’
At the outset, she turned her back on conventional approaches, which were, in her eyes, too structured, too perfect and too precise—she wanted the freedom to experiment with colour and fabric. ‘I hate the mixy-matchy finish that looks as if you’ve gone out and bought the contents of one store. I like every room to look as if it’s been thrown together. My upbringing did influence a love of linens and washed-out fabrics rather than anything shiny and urban.’
Both decoratively and architecturally, the house resembles a Scottish lodge, with old, polished wooden floors, white pebbledash walls, stags’ heads and windows looking out over misty, hilly countryside. Each of the rooms in the house has evolved over time; the library was transformed four years ago with Farrow & Ball’s vibrant Arsenic and the walls and furniture in the breakfast room (originally the laundry room, complete with cauldron) were painted pale blue.
Fabrics—on upholstery, at the windows and on the lampshades—are the main stars in the house, most of them supplied by the company Penny set up in 2008. It was a business that grew out of necessity; for 11 years, she was charged with decorating the Isle de France hotel in St Barths and struggled to find the right fabrics: ‘I thought I might as well design my own.’ The collection features hand-printed, artisanal fabrics influenced by traditional Turkish and Indian motifs.
Typical of her approach to decoration is the spare bedroom, whose walls are covered in Begum, a design she adapted from a piece of crewelwork embroidery and then dyed. The bed fabric is another of hers (Killi in duck egg). Both are mixed with a French quilt found at an antique fair, curtains rescued from the flat in London and innumerable Welsh blankets.
Penny is an inveterate rug buyer: ‘You can build a room around them—they act as an anchor.’ Ottomans covered in kilims or ‘an old Peruvian woven thing’ crop up in almost every room (and are used as beds by her Jack Russell).
‘I love big windows, high ceilings and high doorways—if I’m doing a flat in London, I’ll always try to raise them to make the space feel bigger,’ she says. ‘I quite often start with a basic plain palette, then add texture. It’s the dressing that gives a place interest.’
This artful, thrown-together approach has won her a loyal following: she’s decorated three houses in the Caribbean for the Lloyd Webbers as well as others for the Sangsters. Today, she travels a little less, but is by no means slowing down. Having established a new showroom in Langton Street, Chelsea, she’s just completed a flat near Sloane Square, is working on a project in Mayfair and is about to start on a house Wiltshire.
For the rest of us wanting to introduce a touch of Penny Morrison at home, she has advice: ‘Mix together what you like. So what if the colours don’t match? Don’t be afraid.’