Anglo Klaxon

An electric eel in a pond of catfish was how the writer Edith Sitwell described herself in the book English Eccentrics. She was referencing not just an isolated instance of electric-shock-inducing insanity, but a phenomenon: a group of people who had the leisure, the resources and the inclination to be different; she was just one of many. This is an effect to which England, with its inbuilt class system, is particularly prone. Being an early innovator of capitalism, it necessarily has a self-conscious catfish class against which to react, and, because it maintained its nobility, an assured avant-garde of aristocrats and artists to do the reacting.

Like Sitwell, many of the 22 subjects – designers, decorators, creatives all – in New English Interiors by Elizabeth Metcalfe, have been described as eccentric. Yet their houses share a commonality of style; a peculiarity that verges on paradox. But all eels partake in similar characteristics – this is what creates a species; and the arduously wrought examples of the style in this book lifts each interior from in-group to individual expression. After all, if it’s not too far-fetched to reach for epistemology in the context of interiors, every experience, as TS Eliot observed, is a paradox ‘in that it somehow always goes beyond itself while never escaping itself’.

What, then, are the absolutes to which these new English interiors aspire? Interestingly, there is agreement on the antecedents; many of the book’s subjects reference similar inspiration: the greats of 20th-century English decoration, from John Fowler to David Hicks. To my mind, the most succinct summary of the style is Bloomsbury Group by way of Ben Pentreath. For it was Pentreath (who isn’t featured in the book, but certainly could have been) whose interiors synthesised the classic look of the English country house with a Pop art palette into a credible statement for 21st-century living. ‘Neon-classical’, if you will.

Rooms ‘rooted in tradition but with a forward-thinking contemporary twist’ (Mary Graham); pictures, patterns and prints that ‘bridge between contemporary and traditional’ (Cath Kidston); a ‘bridge’ between ‘the minimal [and] the traditional route’ (Mark Homewood): these rooms exemplify ‘classic with a twist’ writ large. Most of the houses, indeed, are old – Victorian and Edwardian terraces in London, 16th- and 17th-century piles in the countryside. But inside, from the life-sized Lego heads in Annie Morris and Idris Khan’s West Sussex cottage to the ‘Beware of the bull’ sign propped on a wooden beam in Tess and Alfred Newall’s East Sussex home, the historicism is not an albatross.

At play here is the familiar tension between the fashionable and the timeless. In her introduction, Metcalfe suggests that this style, based on layers and evocation of their owners’ personalities, may be a ‘reaction against the uncertain times we live in’ and against the anaemic minimalism of early 2000s interiors. All quite true. Yet this is not how these houses’ owners approached the process of decorating their spaces. ‘I’m quite aware,’ explains Max Hurd, ‘that treating an interior like a seasonable wardrobe would be illogical’; while Lucinda Chambers, rather than looking to trends, is ‘more interested in working out [her] relationship with style’.

These are spaces that aspire, if not to the eternal, then to something more long-lasting than next season’s trend report. ‘Slow decoration’ is Carlos Garcia’s phrase for it, a sentiment echoed throughout homes that are more assembled than designed. For the professional decorators especially, it was important to ditch the mood boards: ‘We didn’t want this to feel like a job,’ Duncan Campbell says of the Gloucestershire cottage he shares with his husband, Luke Edward Hall. These are interiors which, whether consciously or not, are as timely as they are timeless.

Perhaps this is why the idea of the country house resonates throughout. Whether it’s a ‘zingy take on country house style’ (Morris and Khan), a ‘country house in London’ (Ariadne and Olympia Irving), or ‘the posterboy of English country house style’ himself (Garcia), seemingly everyone has been pulling out their Pevsners before plunging into these projects. The country house provides a model by which the dichotomies previously explored begin to make sense: while appetites ebb and fancies flow, it remains a stable backdrop for their landed and titled inhabitants against the clutter of ages. It also salvages what is ordinarily mundane: go big or go home – and this is a bit of both.

Thus, while he lives with his partner Benedict Foley in a small cottage in Constable countryside, Daniel Slowik has filled it with outsized furniture worthy of the real country-house clients of his Colefax & Fowler decorating days. It ‘actually gives the sense that the space is larger’, he explains. Conversely, in his small sitting room, James Mackie’s ‘jaunty, oversized scagliola column feels less Grand Tour.’ Yet it speaks to a physical and metaphysical expansiveness echoed in many of these houses, aiming above the actualities of the scale and the time slice they exist in.

These moments of harmony are heightened by the fascinating web of connections that weave their way through the book: Gavin Houghton lent his decorating expertise to Morris and Khan’s cottage; Max Hurd’s home was decorated by Benedict Foley; Luke Edward Hall cut his decorating teeth in the design studio of Ben Pentreath, with whom George Saumarez Smith worked on an exhibition and book on measured drawing. Metcalfe’s is less a book of new English interiors than the homes of England’s decorating glitterati. Interestingly, with just one exception, none of the houses lie north of the Watford Gap.

Aside from the areas of aesthetic agreement, what is most charming about the selection of homes covered here are the smaller human touches. Fee Greening’s slime-green utility room, for instance, which just so happens to be the same colour as her partner’s hair at the time of writing; or Tobias Vernon’s effacing embarrassment at the assemblage of objects in his bedroom, which he has kept with him since he was a teenager. And it is a pleasure to behold such a collection of first-rate interiors, decorated by a creative coterie evidently abundant with ambition. The pond may be small, but the fish are big; indeed, they are eels – and electric eels at that!

New English Interiors: At Home with Today’s Creatives

A deep-dive into the homes of 22 of England’s most exciting creatives, with interiors writer Elizabeth Metcalfe and photographer Dean Hearne.

£28 at Waterstones

‘New English Interiors: At Home with Today's Creatives’, by Elizabeth Metcalfe, photography by Dean Hearne, is published by Frances Lincoln, rrp £28

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