11 minute read
PRINTS CHARMING Striking hues and bold choices combine in style at a textile designer’s Shropshire manor house.
ABOVE Setting Plaster for the walls and Sulking Room Pink on woodwork, both by Farrow & Ball, have been combined for a subtle effect in this guest bedroom. Pooky lamps sit on top of antique side tables from Lorfords. The Winter rug is by Willow Crossley at Amy Kent and the rattan and oak Versailles bed is from Feather & Black. Jessica was eager to bring her personality to the interiors but a month after moving in, she discovered she was pregnant with daughter, Lana. “It wasn’t the right time to embark on a project, but I was able to form a bond with the house. I could see the rooms in different lights and at different times of the year, then figure out what I wanted to do,” she says. “I think it would have been quite different if we’d started decorating straight away.
“It was a journey for me, and I came to realise that I wanted this house to be much more colourful than my previous London property,” Jessica continues. “I felt very inspired by the countryside around me and the colours in the garden, so my aim was to bring the outside in. I think the extra time living in the space gave me the confidence to be bolder. Also spending time at our second home in Morocco in recent years has opened my eyes to how colour can transform a room.”
An infusion of warm, inviting hues permeates the house, bright dashes of contrasting colour mingle with subtler, tonal combinations, to create interesting spaces. “I’ve always loved green, pink and blue, in all sorts of different shades. They’re such soothing, happy colours so I carried them through the house,” says Jessica, who has used colour to create a comfortable environment. A favourite technique of hers is to paint walls and ceilings in the same colour for a unified effect. “I love this idea,” she says. “Both the library and blue guest bedroom are now cosy, cocoon-like spaces. It feels like you’re enveloped by the atmosphere of the room.”
Each room in the house has a different personality with a mix of complementary styles. “The schemes are
Wall lights from Jim Lawrence and an antique mirror bring an art deco feel to this bathroom. The underwater themed Secret Garden wallpaper is by Cole & Son and the Victoria console basin is from Heritage Bathrooms.
a marriage of different periods in design,” Jessica explains. “I never want the rooms to feel busy, but I don’t want to stick to one look either.”
Bespoke bookcases and cabinetry, handmade by talented local furniture maker Paul Deakin blend effortlessly with existing features. The library, once the pared-back architectural studio of previous owner Robert Hardwick, now feels like a tongue-in-cheek, feminine version of a gentleman’s smoking room, with mustard yellow chesterfield sofas, panelled walls, and whimsical vintage pieces. A secret door within the bookcase, lined with faux books, leads up to the pink guest suite.
Jessica doesn’t follow rules when decorating, but often builds a room around one favourite piece. An intricately patterned rug was the starting point for the sitting room. “The washed out pink and electric blue in the rug inspired me to combine a decadent Hollywood Regency look with a traditional, laid-back, romantic English feel. I think the result is grown up, relaxed and elegant,” she says. Decorative hand-made tiles that evoke a subtle Moroccan feel were the starting point for the kitchen design. The same mid-blue in the tiles was used on the cabinetry to create a sophisticated tonal palette. Jessica worked with furniture maker Paul Deakin to design a Shaker-style kitchen with lots of storage. An unusual island made up of what appear to be vintage cabinets, was in fact made from scratch by Deakin. “I wanted the island to serve on a practical level, but also to look like a piece of furniture that was reclaimed from an apothecary shop or haberdashery,” she explains.
There is no doubt that country life suits the whole family. Having drawn inspiration from her surroundings to enhance the quirky nature of the house, Jessica’s own eclectic and whimsical decorating style has flourished. It is clear to see the children are thriving, too. “Our children are real country kids,” Jessica says. “They love playing in the woods, making camps and looking for signs of wildlife. Being in this environment fuels their imagination and gives them a real sense of adventure, which is all I could wish for.” n
TOP RIGHT The arched doors in the pink guest bedroom draw the eye up to the beamed ceiling. The Speckled multicoloured glass lamp base by Emsie Sharp is from Vigour and Skills. ABOVE Farrow & Ball’s Oval Room Blue creates a cocooning effect in this guest bedroom. Adding a contrasting splash of pink, the antique chair from Sappho is covered in Ziggy fabric from Parker & Jules. The vintage chest is from the Corn Hall, Cirencester.
The console tables flanking the fireplace in the sitting room were made by Archie Kennedy of AK Designs and the green lampbases are by Penny Morrison. A modern suzani covers the ottoman, whilst the armchair in the foreground is covered in The Boat design by Hare’s Tail Printing.
Prints CHARMING
A faded manor house in Shropshire has been brought back to life by owner Speronella Marsh, who has filled the interiors with her own striking, hand-printed fabric designs
FEATURE SERENA FOKSCHANER PHOTOGRAPHY RACHAEL SMITH
ABOVE The dining area in the kitchen where a set of chairs have been covered in fabric by Hare’s Tail Printing, Speronella’s fabric company. LEFT Speronella block-printed a design onto antique French sheets to create the curtains in the drawing room. To see more of Speronella’s designs, visit harestail.co.uk W hen Speronella Marsh embarked on the restoration of her husband Ben’s family home, a red-brick Shropshire manor embraced by low, forested hills, there was, she sighs, “a great deal to do.” Pipes clanked in the night. Floorboards sagged. The garden was so overgrown that a branch had punched, like a gnarled hand, into a bathroom. There was also the pressing question of curtains. “One of the first things I did was to count the windows,” says Speronella. The total? Ninety four, and all in need of new curtains to replace the sun-scorched chintzes and silks installed by Ben’s grandparents in the 1950s.
Expensive fabrics would have skewered the renovation budget, so Speronella decided to make her own. “For years I’d been hoarding antique French
sheets I’d found in markets. I realised they’d make ideal curtain material. The texture of the linen,” she explains, “lends itself to block printing, which I mastered by enrolling on a workshop at the Chelsea Physic Garden.”
The dining table became Speronella’s work bench, strewn with sketchpads and brushes, and as her prints emerged, friends took note of the painterly designs in clear, fresh colours. Orders trickled in and a business, Hare’s Tail Printing, was born. “Necessity is a good thing because it forces you to be creative,” she says. This is an observation that applies to other areas of this home. Jolly, junk-shop oil paintings jostle for space in corridors where the restored parquet floors glow in the summer sunshine.
In her previous career, Speronella worked for leading garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith and has an instinct for colour and form. No two rooms are alike. One is powder blue, another luminous yellow. Toiles collide with stripes in a joyful potpourri of old and new. “There’s always one thing – a rug, a painting – which inspires me, and then everything falls into
ABOVE Speronella worked with local building firm Thackway & Cadwallader to design the kitchen, including the striking dresser. Reclaimed lights and blinds made from tablecloths complete the look.
A once shut-up bedroom has been revived with Speronella’s collection of antique fabrics, hoarded over the years, and prints found at Battersea Antiques Fair in London. The top bedcover fabric is hand-printed in The Zigzag design by Hare’s Tail Printing.
place,” she says. Not the agonised-over mood board for this resourceful Italian. The look here is artistic and expressive.
“Handsome, not beautiful” is how Speronella describes the property which Ben, an entrepreneur, inherited in 2013. Dating from 1840, the house was bought in 1950 by Ben’s grandfather, managing director of Marsh & Baxter, a Midlands firm oncefamed for its sausages and pork pies. Ben’s father, who moved here in the mid 1990s, spent his latter years here alone. The two-storey house has 27 rooms, “so, sensibly, he lived the life of an English country gentleman in three rooms,” Speronella explains. During this period, the house slid into a state of benign neglect. “Our task was to make it a lively family home again,” says Speronella.
For the couple, who have four children between them from previous marriages, it was important that that the house had a relaxed, communal living space. With input from an architect, they began by tackling the warren of staff quarters on the ground floor, removing walls to create a bright open-plan kitchen, dining and sitting area where rangy sofas flank the fireplace.
The catalyst for the kitchen design was nearby Ironbridge, crucible of the Industrial Revolution. “I wanted this space to have a utilitarian, factory- like feel,” says Speronella, who worked with local builders, Thackway & Cadwallader, to design it.
ABOVE The rear of the house has views of a large expanse of lawn framed by wavy yew hedges. RIGHT Speronella has turned a former bedroom into a bathroom, choosing the vivid Citron by Farrow & Ball to bring light to the dark room. She has covered a once-tatty chair using a bedspread she had amongst her stash of fabrics.
In the main bedroom, the four-poster bed was a present from Ben to Speronella, who has added an antique pelmet, printed on the reverse with her own design, to adorn it. The bedcover is handprinted in The Boat design by Hare’s Tail Printing.
Upon entering the kitchen, the eye is immediately drawn to floor-to-ceiling tomato-red dresser, which Speronella says “was a feat of engineering” with its tall glazed metal doors, perfect for displaying Speronella’s collection of china and glassware. Elsewhere in the house, thrift prevails. A set of “boring” dining chairs was reinvented with Hare’s Tail Printing covers, and the bar stools are a street stall steal. “Much to my daughter’s embarrassment, I bargained the price down,” says Speronella.
Tailed by Iris the Sealyham terrier, Speronella heads upstairs. In Ben’s childhood there were 12 bedrooms, two bathrooms “and lots of kettles bubbling on the Aga,” she says. That typically English imbalance has been redressed and there are now six bathrooms, each with its own character. One is painted a vivid yellow gloss: “It was a dark room, now it glows,” Speronella says. Heirlooms have been revived too: one armchair has been re-clad in a bedspread. “It’s a lesson I’ve tried to teach my children. Spend on important things, cheat on the rest. ‘Junk shop’ crops up lots in my conversation.”
Which brings us back to the subject of those antique fabrics, stashed in drawers for years, now reborn as headboards and valances. Her ‘local’ heroes, Ludlow Curtains, whipped up blinds from tablecloths and made curtains from blankets bought at The Cloth Shop in London. Inevitably, the house has become a laboratory for Speronella’s own designs, which are all named after close friends. Nowadays, she works from a converted outhouse in the garden, where freshly printed fabrics are pegged up to dry on long washing lines. Hare’s Tail Printing is thriving. As well as producing place mats for William Yeoward, Speronella also works for interior designers who use her fabrics for everything from blinds to upholstery, but she is happy that this is still a highly ‘personal’ business. “People can visit to discuss ideas and colours with me,” she says. “That’s the wonderful thing about doing things yourself. You can have whatever you want.” n
ABOVE LEFT Next to the master bedroom, a new bathroom has been created with a bath tucked into the recess of the bay window. The wall lights came from an old cinema, the wallpaper is by Molly Mahon and the rug is from The Cloth Shop. ABOVE RIGHT Prints found at The Decorative Antiques & Textiles Fair in Battersea parade across the guest bedroom where the headboard is covered in an antique suzani.
