House Notes #2

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Welcome to the second edition of House Notes, my regular round-up of all sorts of things, from new products to food, shopping, and house updates. Before you dive in I just wanted to give you all a big hug and a heartfelt thank you for subscribing. There’s a lot of pressure on inboxes these days and I don’t take it lightly that you have allowed me to land in yours.

House Notes was born from a desire to write a free-to-read post that would be both a joy to read and a reward for signing up. I want it to feel like a mini monthly magazine that will inform, entertain and inspire over a range of subjects from interior design to clothes, food and books. For that reason it is long but I think also that allows you to dip in and out during the month.

Do let me know if there are other things you would like me to include (did I mention that I have found the perfect matte red lipstick? It’s Power by Merit by the way).

There are more than 12,000 of you now and I thank each and every one of you for signing up. You made a decision to do that and I feel honoured. And on that note, please do like ❤️ and/or restack as that helps others to find this newsletter too. Right on with the post.

This month: India Knight, distinguished journalist, best-selling author and all-round good egg, answers the questions in the My Interior Life interview slot; I direct you to a recipe from fellow Substacker Esther Clark which I have made three times since I read it a month ago; and – get ready for this – I’ve found the perfect white shirt.

HOUSEKEEPING: My month this month

My news. Firstly if you want to join me in Turin in October for the last design retreat of the year, there are two places remaining (three if you want to share a room with a friend). I sent an email out a couple of weeks ago but do get in touch if you want to come. It’s three nights, two full days and a dinner. There will be top-notch restaurants, local trattorias and elegant aperitivi, alongside a full tour of all 21 rooms of the house in Italy, with a chance to rummage about and ask questions. There’s a workshop with renowned colour expert Fiona de Lys, who will help you understand your personal palette and how to bring it into your house and its environment. We will wander around the vintage market of Turin looking for designer bargains (think Alessi, Gio Ponti and Moka for starters) and there will be a chance to see the Agnelli family’s private art collection, which includes important works by Canaletto, Matisse and Picasso. You will stay in a landmark design-led hotel – inside the former Fiat factory – and we will have drinks and dinner on the roof on the night you arrive, with a view of the Alps on one side and the city on the other. The cost - £2,750 – includes all that, plus a 30-minute 1:1 design consultation with me. All you have to do is pay for your flights and grab a taxi from the airport to the hotel – everything else is taken care of.

It's going to be an incredible weekend, you will get to hang out with like-minded people, eat amazing food, explore my house and the elegant city of Turin. I can’t wait to see you there. You will leave with new friends, a clearer understanding of your design style and the knowledge of how to implement it as well as, hopefully, a few vintage bargains for your home. Email me on kate@madaboutthehouse.com to book your place.

In other news, my podcast with Sophie Robinson returns for a four-week mini-series. We will be having our usual lively debates/discussions/disagreements, a great guest, and resolving your interior design dilemmas in our style surgery. You can link to previous episodes here.

Now, it’s August, it’s technically holidays – although I appreciate that’s a moot point if you’re a working parent with school-age children (been there, done that), so here’s an easy recipe for lunch or dinner that I found on Esther Clark’s Substack.

Obviously she’s a cook and she makes her own pastry. I do not. I buy it and that’s fine. I will say that I have made this with both short and flaky pastry and the former is definitely better. Using ready-made pastry makes it pretty quick. The long bit is cooking the onions, but they provide an unctuous barrier between tomatoes and pastry and prevent it going soggy, so if you can bear to it’s worth it. Once you’ve sliced them and stuck them on a low heat they do pretty much look after themselves for 20 minutes.

MY INTERIOR LIFE: India Knight

This regular feature is a short interview with a person of note from the world of interiors (or at least the room next door).

Who are you and what do you do?

I loved India’s latest novel Darling

I’m India Knight, I’ve been a journalist for most of my adult life. I worked all over the place and ended up writing weekly comment pieces for The Sunday Times, and then writing a food column. I currently write a beauty column for Sunday Times Style. When the food column got the boot, about a year ago, I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be lovely, and also extremely liberating, to write freely, from the heart, about the things that really properly interest me, like food and books and interiors and my garden?’

Basically all the supposedly ‘small’ pleasures that disproportionately enhance life. So I started my Substack. Now I feel like my job is Substack, kind of like Ken’s job is Beach. I really love writing my newsletter.

Alongside that, I write novels and non-fiction, all of which are published by Penguin here in the UK. This would actually be the perfect place to tell you about my new book but I’m not allowed to mention it until next year, VERY BORINGLY.

And your top design tip?

Interiors are not my trade, so no trade secrets, but my decorating advice is to surround yourself with objects and colours that resonate emotionally. A room is like a person – you should fall in love with the way it looks and feels. If you have to ‘get used to it’, it’s not working for you – you should feel elated (or soothed or energised or whatever, depending on what you want from the room) from the off. You want to sit there and look around and think ‘I love you’.

Also, always have something questionable in the room. Too much perfection ends up looking like nothing, even if the individual components are amazing. I don’t like things that look too done – it kills the soul of a house.

What would you rush to save if your house was on fire?

My three dogs and a painting of the exact bit of Belgian coast where I spent all my childhood summers. I’d also try and grab a couple of pre-smartphone photo albums of when the children were small. I miss proper physical photo albums. (My three children are grown up and no longer live at home, otherwise obviously I wouldn’t grab the dogs first. I would make the children carry a dog each and then I would carry everybody. I haven’t enjoyed imagining the logistics of this).

What’s your (current) favourite Instagram account?

Sean Anthony Pritchard (@sean_anthony_pritchard) for flowers, Pascale Smets (@pascaledepascale) for lifestyle envy, but benign lifestyle envy – she’s a friend. She has immaculate taste, to an almost bizarre extent, like a superpower. She’s also about to open THE most incredible interiors shop in Norwich. I also like her Insta because it’s real. I can’t bear those carefully styled nonsense images - ‘my pretend life’. No thanks.

If I gave you £150, what would you buy?

At this precise moment in time, a Eurostar ticket to Paris. I was obsessed with the Olympics, partly because once in a blue moon I start passionately loving sport and believe myself to be a world-class authority on it, and partly because I can’t believe the venues. Beach volleyball at the Eiffel Tower! The triathlon coming down the Rue du Bac! It’s so visually dazzling.

Otherwise I would go to Swan House & Garden in Debenham, in Suffolk near where I live – it’s superior brocante plus antiques – and see what treasures Danielle had unearthed.

What’s your favourite style of furniture/decor?

I liked a very relaxed, eclectic, slightly country house style even when I lived in London. It has the advantage of being beyond trends - it never really dates. It’s also quite forgiving of children, dogs, an aversion to dusting, etc. I don’t mean ‘grand country house’ – I mean more scruffy, like the sort of house where a donkey might appear in the kitchen to say hi. But within that I think it’s important to have slightly jarring, modern elements, otherwise it can start looking like you are a hedgehog who lives in Brambly Hedge (which I would quite like, tbh). Lots of art. Colours. Nothing too neat. Very squishy sofas.

That’s to live in. To look at, I admire more minimal, more structured interiors with very restricted colour palettes and tons of negative space. I love a white room with vintage furniture and an art collection. I’m not mad on open-plan in real life but I love it in photographs.

Tell us your most visited interiors websites/stores.

A small selection: Tinsmiths, Lamp Ldn, Pascale’s shop, many makers and antique dealers’ Instagrams including @tradchap.antiques, Willow and Brooks on eBay, The Tolstoy Edit, the interiors bit of Collagerie, The Old Barn in Edinburgh, Baileys Home Store, Retrouvius, Zara Home, Cabana, Pinterest, your Substack (truly), House & Garden, and Flamingo Estate for general daydreaming. I keep an eye on IKEA, Habitat and La Redoute too. I love IKEA.

What’s the best thing you ever bought?

Apart from my house, a top of the range Vi-Spring mattress with a big chunk of my first book advance. That bed changed my life – sleep life, work life, parenting life, everything. The prices kept going up and up, and so I could never afford to replace it – I have had perfectly nice mattresses since, but I still mourn the Vi-Spring OG.

There’s a place I love in Norfolk called The Gunton Arms, and they have unbelievably comfortable mattresses – I think with a lot of horsehair in them – provided by Robert Kime, who designed the rooms there. I investigated and sadly they cost about £5,000. I’m obsessed with mattresses. I’m like the princess and the pea.

Your cocktail of choice?

Botivo and blood orange soda, lots of ice, orange slice.

What’s the soundtrack to your favourite room?

Italian and French pop from the 60s and 70s, ideally re-recorded with a bit of a bossa nova beat. It sounds like summer, puts you in a good mood and you don’t get annoyed if people talk over the lyrics.

Confess – what’s your screen-time total so far this week?

11 hours (it’s Wednesday).

What do you wish you had designed, or could own?

The Bialetti moka pot. Genius design, plus works perfectly. Also – not an original answer – I’d really like a set of Vico Magistretti’s Carimate chairs in red gloss for the kitchen table.

What’s one thing you do for your mental well-being?

I have therapy once a week. I’m also no longer on any social media except for a private Instagram account about flowers and dogs.

What’s the ugly thing in your house that you can’t bring yourself to throw away?

I have a very wide assortment of fleeces in really ugly colours. I particularly love my giant fleece poncho (beige, hooded) because it means I can have tea outside in my nightie even when it’s chilly.

Plan B. If this wasn’t your job, what would you be doing?

My skill set is extremely limited, so God only knows. Maybe teaching?

DESIGN DISCOVERY: A Dictionary of Colour Combinations

This spot is reserved for a shop you may not know about, a design hack that I might have come across or, perhaps, as this month, a great book that I think you might love and need and want.

I came across this book on someone’s Twitter (do I have to call it X?) feed the other day and was immediately intrigued. It’s a little book (handbag sized) collated from an original six-volume work by Haishoku Soukan that was published between 1933 and 1934. There are 348 combinations, and I love flicking through and discovering new ideas. It’s also quite liberating when you can’t read the words as it really allows you to focus on the colours, although they have been given names - Plumbeous, Benzol Green and Pale Burnt Lake to name but three. A must for anyone who loves putting colours together - and works for outfits as well as rooms.

TRADE SECRETS: Pattern clashing and mixing

If you want to mix patterns and don’t know how, then first visit your nearest department store and take a trip to clothing floor. Look at the dresses and blouses and take notes of the colours used together. Make a list of your preferred combinations - three, five, seven or more. Choose a couple of plains, a large floral that includes as many of your choices as possible, add a small ditsy floral to contrast. Thow in a bold stripe to cut through the florals. Consider a disruptor to bring it all to life - chartreuse, cobalt blue, schiaparelli pink - that’s your seasoning, the rest are the ingredients. Simply arrange on the plate/sofa/room.

BEDTIME READING….

Coming to you this month from the beach rather than the bed. Years of holidaying with small children meant that I always needed a book I could put down and pick up quickly and easily. Something that grips and rolls effortlessly along without being too much of a literary lesson. For years I have taken a Kindle to the beach - I love my Kindle and I won’t hear a word against it. And here’s why: if I get deep into a series, then I can just buy the next book at the flick of a switch and keep going. So this month, ongoing series that I love:

Donna Leon Commissario Brunetti - set in Venice

Deborah Harkness All Souls Series

Kate Mosse The Joubert Family Chronicles

Elly Griffiths The Ruth Galloway Mysteries

ON MY RADAR… Colours of Arley

I used Colours of Arley for all my shower curtains in the house in Italy as their bold stripes - customisable from dozens of colours were the perfect foil to the heavily patterned tiles. Since then they have expanded to include a range of fabulous cushions, lampshades, lamps and bags. I really could have one of everything.

ANOTHER DESIGN DISCOVERY: The Victorian washstand by Devol

I’m showing you because it’s a gorgeous picture. It’s also £4,000, which is a lot, but it does include the basin, taps, waste and trap – and as anyone who has bought all these things separately, as well as a vanity unit or stand, will know, they mount up. So maybe this is in your budget.

One thing you can do to save bathroom money (if you wanted this stand more than life itself) is to forgo a glass shower screen – always expensive – in favour of a curtain, which is much cheaper. I use standard shower curtains and made a pretty fabric one to hang outside. This also adds weight which stops the billow.

You can also save by using standard square white builder’s tiles or classic metro or subway. Both of those will save money. And I am basically of the opinion that a loo is a loo. If you do want to jazz it up a little, just add a wooden seat.

Right, have we justified the £4,000 washstand yet? I am nothing if not an enabler! But I’m also a very good rationaliser so, you know, swings and roundabouts.

I’m also duty-bound to point out that you could look for a vintage table on eBay – with or without a marble top – add a counter top basin and buy your own taps to create your own version.

AND A REALLY GREAT… White Shirt

I don’t know about you, but I’m from a generation which really looked to magazines for instructions on life. Hence being told every month that such and such was great for a “day to night” look. I don’t think I’ve ever needed a “day to night” look. Whose life is that? Do let us know if it’s yours.

The other item that has taken up miles of column inches is the white shirt. Every year we are told about the best one. Now I have dutifully bought six white shirts over the years and never worn any of them. Until now. Suddenly I’m in my white shirt era. Maybe it’s an age thing. Anyway, turns out actually none of them are at all perfect. And then I found this. I bought it first in black (that’s another item I never thought I would wear until my 50s but here we are) so when I saw it in white, I grabbed it. Perfect as a beach cover up, for a holiday evening out - with the hint of see-through and great with jeans at any time of year. The other day I wore it to lunch with a very chic friend who mistook it for vintage Italian linen. It’s actually £39.50 from Marks & Spencer. I sized up twice. You can thank me later.

I hope you have enjoyed this post. Please drop a ❤️ to like or share/restack this post which massively increases reach and visibility. And a huge thank you to all my paid subscribers whose support allows me to continue writing here.