Discovers how 2012 is embracing the look of Coronation Britain

Suddenly, the Fifties look is the coolest, sleekest and smartest way to style your home. It blows away Victorian fussiness, Thirties drab, and Seventies floral, and it connects beautifully with our current love of clean, modern lines. As Princess Elizabeth prepared for her Coronation, a storm of ideas and colours was gusting through kitchens and drawing rooms. Now we are falling in love with them all over again. Is it Diamond Jubilee fever? Are we chiming with a previous age of austerity? Or is it just that we all watch Mad Men? What was then high-end and hardto-get-hold-of is readily accessible now. Marks & Spencer (marksandspencer.com) has invited the old lion of the period, Sir Terence Conran, to design a collection using British materials and craftsmen, just as he and his cohorts wanted to do in the early Fifties. So young then, their work had a whiff of student idealism. Sixty years on, the look has become much more sophisticated. The large Conran Amis sofa (from £899) is as pert and well-fed as a prize greyhound in your open-plan living room, wrapped in pure wool, available in cream, teal or grey. The Chaucer Armchair (£499-£599) is an office creature in a domestic skin, with raked back and solid wooden legs. It comes in ochre, which actually means deliciously sharp mustard. You can even buy Fifties style bookshelves, to use as room dividers. The oak Brindley Shelving Unit (£399) is designed to look like stacked, skewed boxes. And there are splay-legged coffee tables, pedestal lamps with scallop-shaped oak bases, and white fabric shades. The design studio at John Lewis (johnlewis.com), never knowingly left behind, has been working on its own retro designs for the past year and a half. It has gone back to Ercol, makers of the iconic bentwood tables and chairs of the Fifties, and asked them to recreate their classics (Chiltern chair, £199, table £499). “It’s so exciting to see it come alive again. We’re proud that it’s British,” says Jason Wilary-attew, head of furniture buying at John Lewis. “There was a real belief then that the future was bright, and we’re harking back to that positivity.” Matthew Hilton has also produced designs for the store, with a weighty mid-century feel (Case Metropolis sofa range, £499-£1,300). Jason says these are distinguished by their “solid wood, proper joints, and expert craftsmanship”. Why all the charcoal and cream, when all the colours of a child’s crayon set burst open during the Fifties? Neutral colours on big items open up choice for customers, apparently. “You can drop in oranges or acid greens on cushions, then when you’re tired of them, you change them but keep the stylish furniture,” Jason says. The 1950s kitchen is characterised by formica, cream gloss paint where sticky fingers might go, herbs and