Bo rah! I loved it. Might not want to live in it every day, but definitely visit it! That flora dining room . . . be still my horticultural heart!

Sigh, my husband would kill me if I brought a hint of that style into our home. He might dig the library where they all posed though . . .

Love it! Interesting that all the designers but one are wearing neutral-toned clothing.

Oh, hello, pink & tartan. I was trying to get this posted for days and gave up and have just now seen your replies. My apologies for not being here sooner- Houzz drives me batty sometime.

I love the exuberance in those interiors. And I am especially keen on botanical themes as well!

tartan, you're right about the designer dress code ;-)

Thank you for alerting us “lovers of all things English” to this article; I can’t wait to dive in!

Cherrio

Oops, just noticed the designer in an emerald green suit!

It is all so ENGLISH! Flamboyant English. A little like Graham N (can't spell his last name), but he's Irish lol.

Wow....nobody on House Hunters is going to buy THAT!! It is cozy, but a bit too pink overall for me....

I love the exuberance of it all as well. And the pink. I'm a sucker for pink. Mostly, I love the idea of patterns and all those layered details. Feels as if it would take days to discover them all. On the other hand, I'm also terribly drawn to minimalist interiors. (They look so easy to clean.) Maybe one style is for my looking and the other for living?

I am incapable of minimalism. I lived in a boarding house in Washington, DC once. My immigration papers were not all sorted out for me to work, so I could not get paid for a few months. I had a very minimal amount of money and somehow that little room filled up with Dover Classics $1 books, posters from Amnesty International, a bowl filled found things like pinecones, cute branches, rocks, a collage I made from flyers and on and on. I was utterly amazed at what I managed to accumulate with hardly a dollar to spend.

I do like a minimal kitchen though.

Yeah I thought it was kind of funny how the photo shot of all of the designers together was in a room very different from their style, as were their clothing choices! Not sure if it was a joke, or if it was due to the fact that a human face would get lost in the jumble of patterns in the actual designed rooms.

The amount of layering in those rooms was over the top even for me, it's as if they tried to push the envelope and see how far they could go with that dining room and sitting room. But to me that was the whole point of the fun, and why not have fun in a dining room in a private club! In my own life, I'm always struggling to find that sweet spot between too much and just the right amount of stuff. A lot of it has to do with what it is. Can you layer too much expensive hand made details into a room? At what point have you become a hoarder? I'm being overly dramatic, but I'm always struggling for maximum function and comfort in my decorating, so I have to figure in things like maintenance, cleaning and does it "spark joy" or just feel futzy.

I envy folks like my former landlady who had a ginormous basement and garage and could change out the look of her tiny apartment easily from stuff she had in storage. And most of it was lovely stuff she gleaned from thrift stores and garage sales. She had her routes and that was her hobby plus she was born with naturally good taste and an eye for design. She has the knack for that layered look too.

Thanks for posting this, Rita. I had read this last week but didn't have any kindred spirits to share it with : ) . That attic room is just lovely.

Here's the Ben Pentreath-designed kitchen with the orange range and green cabinets.

I very much like the writer's phrases, "brightly colored cheekiness" and "magpie English design", to describe this style. And this very good advice,

To be a proper modern maximalist, you have to have some things, and not just ones you pick up at a nice shop — they must be pieces you are attached to, despite their oddness or age. “In this country, we have rarely done what Americans do,” Konig says. “We don’t call up a decorator and chuck out everything we have, see something on Pinterest and overnight become something new. We keep that wretched thing your grandmother gave you and make it fantastic.”

FYI, Rifat Ozbek sells some seriously gorgeous pillows.

Holy mackerel, that's some nice stuff, becky. Ben Pentreath's interiors are timeless. Never got the impression I could ever achieve that style on my teeny-tiny budget. And it's not that colourful when you examine it. Neutral walls for most rooms. Except that purple library. *swoons*

tartan, it's possible to find a lot of similar textiles through etsy or ebay, and "brown" furniture (or "brown stuff") is available very cheaply nowadays. If you're in the US, you can find nice lampshades from places like Cruel Mountain on Etsy.

Call me kooky : ) but that purple in the library would pretty much function as a neutral...

Ah...you're a kindred spirit, becky. I treat purple as a neutral as well. :D Have it in both my kitchen and living room.

I have it on my front door and I love it!

I would love it too, I'm sure. I've seen a purple garage door around here (okay, a municipality or two over) but never a purple door. If colour requires kookiness to adopt, we need more kookiness around here. :)

I probably qualify for kooky -- most of our new house has yellow walls (more full-throated Nancy Lancaster yellow than cream), and several rooms are mossy green (pantry, laundry room, main floor bathroom), with lots of prints and other colors. I love ikat, suzani, block prints, Persian/tribal rugs, and English transferware.

My husband, who came into our marriage 25 years ago with very conservative ideas about what patterns go together, has learned to live with all of this : ) .

If the place where you live doesn't have warmth and coziness, and doesn't have beautiful and interesting things in it, then where else do you find those things? In most people's lives the answer is nowhere, and the only question that remains is whether those things are important to you. I suspect it's more important to people who have experienced different things, have traveled and have a certain level of formal and/or informal education because you can't appreciate what you don't know. The English in the past, with their colonizing impulses, have been exposed to many different influences and that's what makes their traditional interiors so fascinating and multifaceted. They're also much more comfortable than French, Spanish or Italian period homes, and it's that blend of the exotic, the valuable and the cozy that has captured my heart.

I bet your home looks as fabulous as it sounds, becky!

If the place where you live doesn't have warmth and coziness, and doesn't have beautiful and interesting things in it, then where else do you find those things?

ingrid, what an interesting and thoughtful post. Thank you!

tartanmeup, thank you -- it's getting there : ) . We moved into the new house (which we built ourselves) last summer and we're just about there. Right now I'm in the hanging curtains and pictures stage.

Like so many people in the past few months, I watched the Marie Kondo series on Netflix. For several reasons, much of it doesn't work for me, though I've adopted some of the folding techniques (which are fabulous) -- moving to our new house helped me tremendously in the decluttering department, but the other thing is that just about everything we do have sparks joy. Like Rita, I'm not a minimalist, and everything from my transferware to my block print cushion covers to our books makes us happy. We bought very little for the new house, and I've hung on to most of the furnishings I've acquired (some of which were my late parents') since graduating from university in the mid-eighties. Half the fun has been figuring out how to put everything together in this new house, and because my taste has been pretty consistent over the years and because I'm pretty loosey-goosey in the color and pattern department : ) , it all works together pretty well.

I agree with Ingrid, having a house filled with beauty is a tremendous comfort.

WRT to the Rita Konig comment about chucking everything and wanting the new, new thing, starting from scratch, I am always puzzled by this impulse. I appreciate the American belief in reinvention; it allows for so many possibilities and growth. Gatsby breaks my heart every single time.

But if your house has no connection to your past, then what makes it different from a hotel, or somebody else's house? Where do you see yourself reflected? By turning over the question of taste and interior design over to the marketing pros we are more likely to not know our own thinking and constantly chase the next look, spending too much on a reno, while taking Xanax to mask the tension we create for ourselves.

PS Thank you so much for the links to Ben Pentreath's kitchen and Rifat Ozbek's pillows, beckysharp. Love it all.

Oh and as for purple as a neutral, yes, please! Plus it's not really neutrality that matters, it's whether or not the color is a suitable background for your goals. I'll take Nancy Lancaster yellow and moody purple, chocolate brown and chartreuse as backgrounds over gray any day. (Mind you all the walls in my house are painted exciting shades of white ;-)

WRT to the Rita Konig comment about chucking everything and wanting the new, new thing, starting from scratch, I am always puzzled by this impulse.

I was amazed by the number of people we know who assumed (or hoped, I suppose lol), just as we were finishing building the new house, that we would get rid of all our old furniture and buy everything new. I also don't understand the GW/Houzz posts about furnishings that suit one house but not another.

Then again, this is the American impulse that makes TJ Maxx, Winners, and HomeGoods -- not to mention affiliate linking -- possible. When I look around my house, there's not much that I could affiliate link to, for better or worse : ) .

I was amazed by the number of people we know who assumed (or hoped, I suppose lol), just as we were finishing building the new house, that we would get rid of all our old furniture and buy everything new.

Bright, shiny and new barely impresses me in cars, none-the-less home furnishings.

I just found out that there are more pictures of the Ben Pentreath kitchen here on his IG, which he posted in response to the article,

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt0MkCKgNj2/

I moved across the country with very little. I did bring artwork, some books and some photos. Everything else I needed to buy. It took a whle to make this little place "mine" but I think I managed to do. It's been a little over two years and as I look around, it feels so "right". (And some stuff is from the equivalent of Home goods. But that's mine too). At 55 it is much easier to fully know what I like and what I want.

Louise, I was thinking of those who accessorize the house every season with one big TJ Maxx shopping spree of disposable, trendy items : ) . And the criteria isn't knowing what they like, but finding out on Pinterest and IG what's in -- like chevron or Greek key, sigh.

Becky I know what you are talking about. I did like the chevron thing, my daughter told me to stay away lol. I taught her well.

Louise, it drives me crazy when something I like suddenly becomes trendy, and this is generally the only way I do anything trendy -- by accident lol.

The Glam Pad blog has a tribute post to Lee Radziwill's "Timeless Interiors", which includes this quote (originally in AD),

“You see, my design philosophy is essentially European,” she says. “I abhor the American idea of starting with a tabula rasa every few years and getting rid of everything. When I buy something, I do so with the intention of keeping it forever. I’m constantly falling in love with objects, and they follow me around the world."

also,

“Much as I love New York, I didn't want a typical Manhattan interior. So many of them are as cold and slick as a hotel suite. I wanted to indicate that an individual lives here, a person with strong feelings about things. When I began, I was in my white period, so I painted everything accordingly. I was never so miserable in my life! So I went off in the opposite direction, as you can see.” She indicates the walls, which are covered in raspberry velvet.

One more Lee Radziwill quote, from AD's appreciation by Mitchell Owens,

“A house should be a scrapbook,” Lee once said. “Even if not every memory is a particularly pleasant one.”

Absolute eye candy! I wouldn't want to live with most of it, but can appreciate the artistic flair with which it was carefully created. I do love Ben Pentreath's work most of all though, and have long been a fan of his. The man magically makes spaces so cozy and inviting -- like there's a sweet-and-artsy little Gran who is just waiting for you there with a piping-hot cup of tea and a freshly-baked biscuit as you rush in on a cold, rainy day. Sublime.

beckysharp, thank you so much for pulling quotations for us all the time. It is one of the many wonderful public services you perform for us on GW. I am off to read the AD tribute to Radziwill.

To Louise M.'s point, a "curated" style of decorating requires a certain amount of maturity and also a certain amount of stability. My spaces up until recently were often decorated with a lot of stuff I bought at lower end dept. stores because I could not afford nicer things and because I also could not afford to carefully pack and unpack valuable items every time I moved. There was a time in my life when I never stayed more than five years anywhere, and more often than not I was moving on average of 2-3 years. Then there is the issue of: do you have the time and/or means to care for and clean all of your stuff? Also: can you afford the space to display it? I had to purge my last house because I just didn't have time to clean it and the house was so tiny, I could ill afford to devote too much space to pure display. My husband and I are struggling with this now, we've collected or inherited enough stuff for a large elegant home, (like my mother had, who I inherited much of this stuff from) but we struggle financially and time wise to maintain it between both of us working all the time. I think that's why the trend went away from built in details in homes, because then the ornamentation could be easily changed. I can imagine at some point getting sick of seeing the same decorations every day in those elaborate rooms, and having the money to redo them considering the expense and care of those details, is beyond most people's reach. All the lovely Victorian high-end homes in my town are falling into permanent disrepair for that reason. They require a level of finesse to repair and restore that is extremely rare nowdays.

Rita, it's always fun in my wanderings (online as well as printed books and magazines) when I come across something that relates to a GW discussion.

pink, I certainly understand. It definitely helps that the nicer things we have, valuable and not, are just our everyday things, so storage hasn't been a problem; plus I try to stick to the "one in, one out" philosophy. I've had a set of Spode Blue Italian dishes which I bought long before I met my husband, and it's been my/our everyday china for about 30 years now. We still use (and I love) the Laura Ashley floral shower curtain I bought in NYC in 1990; as I've written in other threads, for better or worse my tastes have been very consistent since my late teens lol.

When I was clearing out my late parents' home, a friend who was helping was shocked that I didn't want my mother's Royal Doulton Yorktown service, but to borrow from KonMarie, the pattern didn't "spark joy" for me and I already had a Spode Blue Italian set which did. So off they went to the Housing Works thrift store to spark joy for someone else : ) , though I did save one cup and saucer, and they on the window sill with my houseplants.

Your comment about moving often reminds me of some of my favorite souvenirs -- several hand-decorated, blown kraslice Easter eggs I bought in Prague while visiting there over the holiday in the mid-eighties. I packed them in a small box in toilet paper, and carried them on trains around Europe and finally back to the US, where they survived a few moves up and down the east coast, and finally made the trip to western Canada. And then survived three curious little kids! Every spring I take them out for Easter and marvel that they're all still in one piece lol.

Pink, I absolutely know what it's like to have circumstances dictate how much of your precious things you can afford to have. It's very frustrating for those of us who value objects (or the dreaded "stuff" everybody complains about.)

Finally got around to the AD Radziwill piece. Wow, just wow, she is still being copied today (I'm looking at you Tory Burch's bedroom, for example.)

Interesting to read Radziwill's taste in clothing was minimalistic (Ralph Rucci was a fave), which may seem like a juxtaposition with the chintz, but traditional clothing is usually pared back, so it makes sense.

The NYT noted she refused to have anything monogrammed and would not wear Hermes. Both these choices make her a style hero for me.

[Apologies for going so far OT. I don't have anyone else to talk about things like this with.]