Eye on Design: August

10 lovely things I have seen this month that you might like to liven up your own homes – and as always, styling advice on how to use them to make the most of your investment.

I remember very clearly moving to Cheltenham (a mid-sized English town) as a teenager. Before that I’d always lived in small villages - hell, hamlets - with no way of reaching shops or cafés without a car. I had what many people now regard as the childhood of dreams – long bicycle rides out into the countryside, equipped only with a packet of biscuits and a flask of orange juice. But we all want what we can’t have, and after a few early teen years spent hanging round the bus stop (it was a school bus stop so there was nothing to ride on and nowhere to go) drinking cider and wondering whether to take up smoking, I was bored with country life.

So when my divorced mother eventually announced that we were finally leaving my grandmother’s house to move into town, I was ecstatic. I remember holidays (I was at boarding school) as endless days of putting on my favourite outfits and strolling down to the shops to gaze at the windows, occasionally venturing inside and buying nothing (I had no pocket money or allowance in those days), but making endless mental lists of what I might acquire if I had the money.

Eventually I worked out that while my mother would buy me no more than essential clothes, she could usually be persuaded to part with the funds for some fabric if I was prepared to make my own. This was usually one outfit per holiday. The rest of the time I plundered my grandmother’s house for old curtains (made a great pair of trousers that literally turned to threads the first time they came out of the washing machine) tablecloths (designed and created a fabulous red linen dress, but never could get the Marmite stain out) and raided her button tin to customise cardigans and slippers.

Now everyone’s childhood takes them to different places as adults. But perhaps this all explains why I’ve been left with an abiding love of shopping – new, vintage, materials with with to make stuff, books, moisturiser. All of it. And if I can’t actually buy it, I’ll still happily research it.

We also moved house fairly regularly – six times by the time I left school at 18. And I was at boarding school from the age of nine, so I’m great at packing, love train stations and am comfortable in airports. I have a theory that many interior designers had peripatetic childhoods, and anecdotal research bears me out on this: Nicola Harding, Sophie Ashby, Kelly Hoppen, to name but three. We all feel strongly about the importance of home and want other people to feel it too.

So I’m as happy shopping for clothes as I am for cushions. I have always said, since the early days of my blog, that I would buy everything I recommend, given an infinite budget and elastic walls. I’m just as happy looking for things for you to buy as I am buying them for myself.

All of which is a very personal way (rather loving Substack for this) of introducing August’s 10 Things. (From this month, you’ll see it rebranded as Eye on Design, as I think that better describes its purpose.)

The summer holidays are here and while you might be away now, you’re going to come back and it will be the beginning of the school year – yes, even when your kids are 21 and 23, you’re going to want something new and lovely to mark the moment, because you probably won’t be buying a pencil case this time around.

So this month it’s about small and beautiful things that will cheer you up as you return to the grindstone, but that won’t break the bank. I have tried to include pieces from the EU and US, as well as some places that ship worldwide because we are global here at Substack.