A Bold Curtain, and the Morris Archive

Every so often a client says the words an interior designer secretly longs for: I want one brave thing in this room. This time it was a dining room, and the brave thing was to be the curtains. Bold, they said. Properly bold. It's a room we only use in the evening and I want it to have some character.

I knew exactly where to start. McKenzie & Willis, and their fabric library, where I could happily be locked in overnight.

There is a particular pleasure in turning the big sample books, the weight of them, the sound the pages make. I worked through Simply Morris, all soft and pretty, and then reached for the one I'd really come for: Morris & Co, Archive IV, The Collector.

If you don't live and breathe this the way I do, a little context. William Morris (1834–1896) founded Morris & Co and was the beating heart of the Arts and Crafts movement, a man who believed, against the whole grain of Victorian industry, that the things in our homes should be made by hand, from honest materials, and drawn from nature. His flat, botanical patterns are the reason a great many of us do what we do.

Archive IV, released in 2018, is a love letter to Morris the collector, the Persian carpets and Eastern textiles he gathered over a lifetime and let seep into his own work. It is richer and more jewelled than the daydream-pretty Morris everyone knows. And in it is a design called Bullerswood, taken from a carpet hand-woven at Morris's own Merton Abbey workshops and shown at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in 1893. Reds and old golds over a deep ground, drawn so tightly you could look at it for a year and still find something.

Reader, it is going on the windows.

Spend the bravery on the curtains. Everything else in the room can stay quiet.

This is the Fareham Interiors side of my life, the one that pays for the clay. But it's all the same instinct really, a good pot, a good pattern, a good long dinner. Made properly, meant to last.