Artist, embroiderer, costumier, interior designer – they are just some of the hats that Joyce Conwy Evans has worn in the course of her long life. They are also vocations that are woven into the very fabric of her home, sometimes literally. Although she hasn’t worked entirely in the shadows – she was far too successful for that – much of her professional life is insufficiently illuminated, as is so often the way with women who started their careers in the 1950s.
Joyce got her break thanks to a small embroidered lamb of God, symbol of Middle Temple in London, created for her final year at Bromley Art College. It was a homage to her grandfather and great-grandfather, both of whom worked at the inn of court, and was displayed at the Ministry of Education, where it caught the eye of the architect Sir Hugh Casson. He then offered her a job at his South Kensington practice. As for the lamb, it now hangs in her bedroom, alongside other objects.
At first glance, it appears that Joyce’s flat might also be insufficiently illuminated. She is not a fan of the ‘big light’, favouring instead a profusion of strategically placed antique lamps, each emitting a warm glow (unsurprisingly there’s not a single bleak energy-saving bulb in sight). After some adjustments and switch-clicking, these come to life, shadows settle into the corners and her treasures slowly emerge from the gloom. The effect is part Wunderkammer, part Dickensian interior. ‘My whole world really is built around lovely fabrics,’ she says. That much is evident from the swathes of fabric hanging in every nook of her home.
Her hallway is decorated with Osborne & Little stripes and many of her sketches from her days as a costume designer for institutions such as Glyndebourne and Charterhouse. When creating a costume, Joyce was always careful not to be too exacting and produce overly faithful reproductions of historical clothing: ‘We added the extra bit here and there, and so we had fun with them as well as being reasonably accurate – but not to the degree of getting boring,’ she says.
Scattered across various side tables are photograph albums documenting her time working on the interiors of the Little Inn at Washington, Virginia, a luxury hotel owned by the American chef Patrick O’Connell. When it comes to interior design, Joyce has a very particular process that begins with careful research into the history of the space. ‘Then I break all the rules and go off in my own direction!’ Take the bedrooms at the Little Inn. Recognising that guests would spend a good deal of their time in bed staring at the ceiling, she decided they may as well be fun. That wasn’t her first foray into interior design across the Atlantic. In fact, thanks to Sir Hugh Casson, she was also responsible for the interiors of the Mississippi Queen steamboat, another un-minimalist project she oversaw while working for the architect. ‘I don't like gaps and spaces – I like everything crowded in,’ she says with a laugh.
One glance at her living room confirms this. And yet, while it’s tricky to find a surface on which to rest your teacup, it feels both purposeful and inviting rather than overwhelming and chaotic. Each item here comes with its own story. Many are rescues, such as the portrait above the fireplace. When Joyce first set eyes on the unclaimed, unnamed painting at her local framer’s, she offered to buy it there and then; the principled business owner refused, however, declaring that it wasn’t his to sell. Unperturbed, she asked if he might change his mind if it was still there a year later and he agreed. ‘I went home and put a date in my diary to go and collect it,’ she says. Having eventually claimed the portrait, it was only right that she then provide the subject with an identity. ‘I don't know what his name was, but I call him Toby Cavendish.’ And so, all these years later, Toby Cavendish sits above the fireplace looking over Joyce and her many treasures and mementos. ‘He’s found, I hope, what he considers a good home,’ she says.
Another framed gem hangs in Joyce’s bedroom: a waistcoat that she excavated from her grandmother’s attic. ‘She had wonderful attics, granny,’ Joyce recalls, triggering a strong suspicion that perhaps these attics were the origin of her love for joyfully jumbled spaces. The waistcoat, Joyce suspects, belonged to an ancestor, and dates to around 1780. ‘I put it in the frame to protect it and because I thought it was too good to put away,’ she explains. It hangs flanked by two small embroidered bags, belonging to her grandmother and great grandmother respectively. ‘Things are made to be enjoyed,’ she says, ‘so they live on my bedroom wall, and I enjoy them every day.’
This maximalist sensibility extends to the kitchen, which is similarly filled to the brim with trinkets, though there isn’t much by way of apparatus – just a single hotplate and a microwave. ‘I'm not a cook at all,’ she says. Opening a tin, I find quite easy; I open tins in a big way’. She smiles. You’d be hard-pressed to think of anything she does in a small way.
Read more about Joyce Conwy Evans and her studio here.
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