Enduring style - The English Country Home

This morning I could hear the wind making the house creak before I opened my eyes and large droplets of rain were tapping against the windowpane like morse code for stay in bed. I retrieved my laptop from the kitchen, made a cup of tea and quickly scurried back under the covers for an extra half hour of warmth. With my feline secretary by my side I checked my emails, glanced at the world news and inevitably yet tentatively opened Instagram.
Internet platforms such as Instagram provide us with a visual avalanche of covetable interiors. An inexorable parade of the homes of others which appear so much more appealing and inspired than our own. Every day a new image catches your eye and prompts you to spend the next 24 hours reimagining your own house decorated in a similar style. You spend the day ruminating on the perfect shade of emerald green for the tiles that will transform your small south facing bathroom into that plant and light filled Rajasthani bathhouse that you saw on Instagram at breakfast and the following morning the next great decorating idea arrives on your screen.
Whilst this digital river of images is exciting and inspiring I find it equally unsettling and discouraging - I often feel that I am drowning in a raging current of aesthetic flux. Increasingly I am finding myself drawn to the classical and enduring styles of the past - tried and true interiors that do not fall in and out of vogue but remain relevant because they address and satisfy the essential human needs of everyday life without losing sight of beauty.
The English country home is a great example of an interior style that is just as relevant today as it was in the past. It is a style crafted by the passage of centuries and influenced by man’s relationship to the farmland and forests surrounding him. Large Chinese export porcelain lamps brighten the gloom of the living room, the fringed yellow silk cushions strewn across the feather filled settee scream Colefax and Fowler, the oak of the time worn Chippendale dresser glows in the soft light and the collection of family photographs is displayed higgledy piggledy on the Georgian loo table in the corner. Muddied wellingtons sit in a line by the front door and damp dogs are warming themselves beside the fire.
The style of the English country home blends grandeur with rusticity and speaks of a continuum of lives lived over generations, it taps into a domesticity that feels eternal and creates a home that is familiar, nurturing and meaningful. It suggests a permanence that is dependable which the capricious and fleeting nature of contemporary fashion does not.
This beautiful, turn of the century Chippendale style dresser epitomises the timeless chic of the English Country home.