Making your front room as chic as your wardrobe
Style insiders are moving on to interiors. Carolyn Asome looks at how to get your home Instagram-ready
Step back into the not-sodistant past – an era pre-instagram when interiors were aspirational certainly, but not integral to a style maven’s raison d’être. Those in the know were already buying linen sheets from Zara Home or scuttling to H&M for decent table accessories according to Twig Hutchinson, the founder of the Minford Journal, and the person responsible for styling the very first Toast Home catalogue 11 years ago, making us want to swaddle up in herringbone cashmere.
But all things “home” as a style insider’s serious pursuit? Forget it.
Fast forward a decade and you can’t move for fashion’s bed-hopping with interiors: Alessandro Michele at Gucci careering into Antoinette Poisson prints (the recherché French wallpaper brand that makes individual panels according to 18th-century techniques) at its cruise show a month ago; Preen matching their exuberant, signature ditsy florals to their soft furnishings; and, if not a stampede exactly to Cutter Brooks, the lifestyle emporium peddling the chicest points of country living founded by Amanda Cutter Brooks, a former Barneys buying director, the news on the grapevine is that their £3,500 lily of the valley pots are selling like hot cakes.
Simply looking stylish isn’t enough these days; design savvy-iness as we are constantly reminded through the prism of nine squares and multiple likes on Instagram extends to where we eat, where we holiday, where we shop, signifiers of who we are or more importantly, who’d we like to be.
The choice of
Austrian Carl Auböck candlesticks on your dining table says as much about your (ahead of the curve) fingers up attitude to the glut of floral maxi-length dresses and willingness to embrace a trouser suit at even the smartest bash. It seems we all want homes with a point of view. Partly because it seems a more intelligent way of consuming designer frippery than simply buying yet another dress. But also, because it’s a better longer-term investment, a fact that Matchesfashion.com is the latest to (Provençal) cotton on to.
As of next Monday, the global fashion e-tailer will be launching its homewares studio. Recognising that interiors are now an extension of our personal style, their offering includes Luke Edward Hall ceramics, printed crockery by Gucci, Pendleton blankets by Calvin Klein 205W39NYC, glassware by Campbell-rey and exquisite handmade Italian bed and table linen by Once Milano.
The first wave includes smaller, decorative pieces but bigger items and furniture collaborations are in the pipeline and will be sold from the soon to open, flagship space in Mayfair’s Carlos Place. This selection will be easier to navigate as it is pitched to the taste of six different “muses” the e-tailer has identified: the fashion pioneer, the curator, the purist, the warrior, the androgyne or the romantic.
“The thinking behind this was that if you were comfortable with brands like Preen and Gucci, here was something that you could enjoy in the longer term,” explains Natalie Kingham, Matchesfashion.com’s buying director. It’s a sentiment that plays straight into consumer research about millennials’ preference for lifestyle experiences rather than simply the purchase of products.
“The idea is not that dissimilar to our vacation store,” says Kingham, “varying price points and aesthetics and a way of dipping your toe and having fun without having to redecorate your entire home.” Matchesfashion.com are not alone.
Few would be better placed to parlay a chic lifestyle into a collection of highly desirable objects, the sort found on the pages of glossy interior shoots than Lauren Santo Domingo, the founder of American e-tailer, Moda Operandi. Given Santo Domingo’s love of entertaining, social access and a life filled with soirées and peonies, the Moda Home collection has proved a no-brainer. “It’s funny, my generation was taught to reject anything too house-wifey and domesticated. But I think there’s a way to do interiors that doesn’t feel oldfashioned, but where you can enjoy the design process of making a table look beautiful as a creative statement rather than simply a social one.”
A mix of de Gournay and Once Milano quilts is part of the mix, as are the less spenny Laguna B tumblers and resin bowls by Dinosaur Designs.
“Our personal style is no longer simply about having a statement wardrobe,” says Anna Garner, the ex buying director at Selfridges who founded thegarnered.com, a website cherry-picking the best of craft and design from around the globe.
“Home is where our personalities are most reflected and in this age of sameness, it’s the ideal backdrop for expressing our individuality.”