Feasts for the Eyes
As the urge to hibernate kicks in and I find myself firmly attached to the sofa underneath various blankets, there are two beautiful new interiors books I want to recommend to you, to get lost in on a chilly night.
Full disclosure, I may be a little biased about Abi Dare's The Soft Minimalist Home (2024, published by Ryland Peters & Small and with photography by Benjamin Edwards), as I am one of the fifteen homes featured. But my own entry aside, it really is a wonderful compilation of real homes who eschew clutter but not at the expense of warmth and personality.
Abi is a blogger and writer, you can find her over at These Four Walls, and she has long championed a minimalist lifestyle, partly because of her synesthesia filling her head with colour. I've followed her for a long time, and she's been extremely influential on my approach to my own home. I used to understand minimalism as many people do, white box living with nothing on surfaces and lots of empty space and hard lines, but this book proves it can exist otherwise. That calm doesn't have to mean empty, that you can have a minimalist home which says a lot about you and what you value. The Morris quote, "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful" is fairly overused, but the message rings true. These soft minimalist homes are full of beautiful objects, carefully chosen and placed to compliment the wider rooms. Minimalism is not about having nothing, but about having nothing unnecessary.
One of my favourite things about Abi's book is in the tagline, "calm, cozy decor for real lives and spaces." As evidenced by the inclusion of my own very small, rented two-bed terrace, the homes featured in this book represent a uniquely wide range, from apartments to houses,. The inspiration lies in its evident real-life application. Traditionally books like this are aspirational to the point where they're out of reach to many, but Abi's collection bucks that trend in a very refreshing way.
A while ago I described myself to my friend as a "minimalist magpie" - I've long battled with my love of stuff, and tactility has been at the centre of what appeals to me. Touch and texture become as important as the aesthetic, and in fact can often enhance it. The homes featured in this collection prove that - there is actually very little white, and in one example an explosion of expertly handled colour, but minimalism is not the enemy of maximalism - they can exist together, in a balance. I think this is proved by how much I've enjoyed Elizabeth Metcalfe's book New English Interiors (2024, published by Frances Lincoln and with photography by Dean Hearne).
Elizabeth is a writer for House & Garden, and has collected together twenty-two beautiful, unique homes to celebrate all the wonderful eccentricity of the English interior. Each home is full of colour and pattern and no two are alike, and often perfectly illustrate the points I made extolling the use of artworks in my first post here. Whenever I go into anyone's house, I want it to tell me about them and their life and their interests, I want to see a visual representation of their personality.
The book includes the homes of design A-listers such as Lucinda Chambers and Cath Kidson, but my personal favourite in this collection, or perhaps I should say the home I was most keen to immediately move into, was illustrator Fee Greening's cottage in Dorset. Full of earthy greens and yellows and shocks of deep red, wonderfully characterful antique furniture and a beautiful array of artworks, I think it speaks incredibly eloquently of how well collections can work. The space, as in many of the homes included, speaks volumes of its owner, but also of itself.
Across both of these books, a message that comes across clearly is that whilst trends are inevitable, monthly and ever-changing, what is most important to interior design is that prevailing individual sense of style. Whether your home and your sense of your own style are brand new, constantly evolving, or firmly established, the personality within that style is what makes the biggest impression.
