SHORTS CANINE DESIGN
DESIGNER DOGS
These owners don’t subscribe to the “not on the furniture” school of discipline. There are dogs on velvet sofas, dogs on antique settles, dogs in baskets, on beds, on terracotta tiles, next to Agas, in shepherd’s huts and on lawns. They even turn up as motifs on fabric, china and in paintings. As Campbell herself puts it: “Dogs seem to be an integral part of design – after all, they combine the most incredible designs themselves. And much like creating a room, sometimes the most surprising mixture delivers the most interesting result.” Renowned for her stylish boutique hotels, Kit Kemp (pictured, right, with her cavalier King Charles spaniels making themselves at home on her four-poster bed), says she views her New Forest weekend home as open house to anyone who crosses the threshold, be they on two legs or four. Kit and Tim Kemp host Sunday lunches in the kitchen, where “there can be seven or eight dogs sitting in a semicircle around Tim, watching him carve the meat and waiting for a bit of roast to fall on the floor”. Christopher Howe’s converted Gloucestershire stone barn often plays host to a Jack Russell terrier and Maltipoo belonging to two members of his Pimlico Road store “family” – where the dogs' “principal duties include greeting customers at the shops”. As a “doting godparent”, Howe is always ready to welcome the dogs to his country home: “The sofa here is designed to take the muddy paws. I covered it in an old army tent canvas and a worn Persian carpet. It is self-cleaning,” he declares. One of the book’s accidental delights is learning the names of the dogs: they range from pop star iconic (Grace Jones) to seriously grand (Tristan Peregrine Sebastian d’Arundel) to downright surreal (Apollo Slimline Hipster). All of them, though, look thoroughly at home in their perfectly designed surroundings. As Sophie Conran says of her lurcher, Mouse: “She is truly the lady of the manor.” "At Home in the English Countryside: Designers and Their Dogs" is out now, published by Rizzoli
A new coffee table book celebrates two of our favourite things: beautiful houses and characterful canines Words by Gill Morgan
As interior design grande dame Nina Campbell declares in the foreword to the charming new book At Home in the English Countryside: Designers and Their Dogs , “Somehow an English country house is not a home without a dog.” And this lavishly photographed coffee-table opus sets out to prove the point. The pet project (no pun intended) of American design writer Susanna Salk, who in 2017 published a predecessor volume celebrating her home country’s design stars and their canine companions, the book is like a doggy special issue of World of Interiors, as some of our most prominent design names (Kit Kemp, Sophie Conran, Anouska Hempel, Christopher Howe, Susie Atkinson, Edward Bulmer, Bunny Guinness and many more) show off their quintessentially English country houses and gardens, replete with heritage paint colours, stone floors, sun-faded fabrics, walls of pictures and books galore, elegantly squidgy furniture… and dogs, everywhere.
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Above: a plate from Nina Campbell's collection. Right: designer and hotelier Kit Kemp with Impy, Paddington, Button, Pixie and Rupert
