The monthly ritual of writing this editor’s letter still feels new. I hope you will forgive me for admitting that every four weeks it creeps up on me; a surprise that really shouldn’t be one. Each month I take myself off to the same café, order a black coffee and orbit around the single question that underpins much of my work. What should I choose to focus on? There is a quote from an essay in the New Yorker by Zadie Smith that I am going to take wildly out of context but which I believe can be applied in this instance: ‘Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?’ To me, this sums up much of what it is to be an editor (drawing circles) and what it is to be a reader (visiting other people’s).
Earlier this month, I interviewed designer Faye Toogood at the Design Centre in London and together we traversed a number of knotty issues – but one topic that came up again and again was the relationship between attention, imagination and creativity. How do we preserve these powerful instincts in a world that feels increasingly designed to chip away at them? It was heartening to hear that many members of the audience were grappling with the same conundrum.
In the case of this letter, the process of distillation has, of course, started long before I put pen to paper. We have, through group endeavour and good old-fashioned human work, produced something from nothing: we have selected stories, pored over images, summoned words and restructured sentences. We have drawn our circle and decided what should exist within it.
This issue marks the second iteration of The World of Interiors Writing Competition, created in partnership with Montblanc. Last year’s inaugural one was a great success, with almost 1,000 applicants sending entries our way. Once again, we are calling on budding writers to craft a short, 500-word story – this time, about their most prized possession. As our announcement has it: ‘Whatever you pick, the story should reveal something larger, and lasting, about yourself.’ What will you choose to turn your attention to? Wherever your focus lands, I urge you above all to write like nobody’s reading and enter the competition. Who knows where it might lead you.
We also say farewell this May to our Table section, which has now run for three years. A joint effort between photographer Tessa Traeger – who set out to take ‘pictures of food that would reflect the themes of the magazine so that you might not at first see that it was food at all’ – and writer Daisy Garnett, who has joyfully and expertly guided us through the seasons with her practical tips and personal tales. Tessa’s pictures and Daisy’s words have been a heady combination, and one that has greatly enriched our pages.
Early on in the edition you will find an essay written by Alec Finlay about his father, Ian Hamilton Finlay (or IHF, as he was known). We asked Alec to write this essay to mark the centenary of IHF’s birth, and I am delighted with the results. Personal and probing, Alec’s piece examines his father’s relationship with the sustaining power of words. ‘He experienced language as a Heraclitan and oracular medium,’ he writes. ‘To him, the poem was an exemplary device that had a gift for revealing the metamorphoses words contain.’ IHF appears to us in his telling as someone who understood exactly what to focus his attention on. In the late 1950s, as his agoraphobia descended, the garden he made at Stonypath became ‘not a plan, or a whim, but a necessity, and a world’. He drew his circle and existed within it. When life proves challenging and the world beyond our front door becomes increasingly precarious, don’t our homes become just that? A world, a universe – a circle within which we feel reassuringly contained.
This issue we return, as we do every May, to the subject of kitchens and bathrooms, with a special section dedicated to the very best in class – from a public loo on New Zealand’s North Island to an outdoor kitchen replete with panoramic views and another in a Swedish castle, with walls painted to mirror its priceless porcelain collection.
Elsewhere, we visit interior designer Marianna Kennedy in her pad in Spitalfields; we witness life in motion for a Mongolian family and their ger; we delight in the inspired decorating of David Hicks and his acolytes; we marvel at groovy, glossy short-term lets in Paris’s Oberkampf neighbourhood; we pay homage to an Edwardian pleasure palace in Norfolk; we gape at a 1980s house encrusted in thousands upon thousands of shells in Brittany and, respectively we tell the story of not one but two interiors in the Italian village of Este.
I hope the words hereafter will transport you momentarily out of your own circles into those of others. To far-flung places where you might just discover something new.
A version of this article also appeared in the May 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Never miss an issue by subscribing
