A very short while ago – time being relative, it feels like last week but was probably nearer a month ago – on a sunny Saturday in January, my other half and I went to a Vintage Jumble Sale. I bought three things, all of them textiles, which I find hard to resist. One was an oblong cushion cover. One was a bright blue tablecloth with happy spring tulips. When I got home, I placed the items on the long table in our “conservatory”.
I put “conservatory” in inverted commas because although that is what we call it, the estate agent's particulars originally described it as a “brick-built out-house”. Back then, it had a flat felt roof, a blank wooden door to the garden, and a concrete floor. It made the kitchen to which it was attached dark and gloomy. The previous owners' taste for sludge green and an entire wall of dark prussian-blue tiles in the kitchen didn't exactly lift the mood either. But we could see it could get better.
My Other Half spent the first winter re-fitting the kitchen with sleek cabinets and white speckled Italian tiles and several heat-wave weeks the following summer turning the flat roof transparent and pitching it several feet higher. We changed the back door to the garden for one with multiple panes of glass and a cat-flap in the wooden bit at the bottom. The result was light and bright and each summer I grow herbs, chillies, and tomatoes there. I do still feel a little pretentious calling it a conservatory – it is hardly Amdega, after all, - but it is mostly glass, with long table for summer dining, and is definitely no longer a “brick-built out-house”!
That brings me to my third purchase. It was a piece of vintage Sanderson fabric.
The chairs round our long table in the conservatory were stacked up, just waiting for me outside a charity chop, some twenty years ago. They were about as unprepossessing as the original decor in the kitchen. They are a simple design of curved chromed tubing with a simple seat and a separate backrest and are each held together with eight large chromed screws. The upholstery was brown corduroy. I expect they were very much the thing in the late 60's/early 70's. I liked the chairs but I hated the colour. As a further expression of our house's previous owners' taste for the dull things in life, the living room, hall, stairs, and landing were carpeted in that same brown. It was a colour to suck the joy out of life.
Mind you, in its favour, during the couple of years we lived with that carpet we spilt glasses of red wine and upset cups of coffee over it, tramped mud and soot across it, and once dropped an entire casserole on it and after a quick mop-up the marks never showed! It was such good quality that we even passed it on to someone else when we were able to replace it. I couldn't have lived with it a moment longer than we did, and yet I bought four chairs in that very same colour!
I bought them because I loved the curving shape of the chrome tubing. I re-covered them in black and white striped ticking, which I happened to have lots of. They looked smart and I was pleased. I have actually used them twice to dress (stage) houses belonging to other people to help them sell.
I must explain, my house evolves – often without proper consultation with me. It just presents an area that I was previously quite happy with in a new light and I know it will have to be changed. In this way the main bedroom turned from pastel blues to shades of cream and the palest of eau de nil and then began to ease itself into faded florals almost without my consent. Now the conservatory is on the move again.
One of the tall cupboards that hide our clutter and make the room usable as a summer dining room, children's craft area, and a work space, has a red door. I liked the red door. It made a splash of bold colour, broke up the white of the other doors, and went well with the black tiled floor and the striped ticking chairs. I introduced other small red elements to complement it. Lately I notice there are no longer red elements elsewhere in the room. It is as though I have eliminated them subconsciously. Instead, shades of green have crept in quite apart from the green of the plants. That small pot on the sill, the frame of a picture, and now a piece of fabric. The black and white ticking has gone. It had, admittedly, been made very grubby by small hands (and large, to be fair), and identifiable paws of the furry kind coming in from the garden. I took an unpicker to the seams on the backs and a flat-head screwdriver and a pair of pliers to the staples underneath the seats a week ago.
Two of the seats have now been re-covered in the new, albeit vintage, fabric. The pattern is called Peony Tree. A slender woody stem with leaves of soft green weaves its way up the cream fabric sprouting large pink and blue and smaller dark yellow flowers, while airy sprays of the shrub fill the corners. It is wonderful. The colours are perfect. It is not a very big piece, but two seats are done and with determination and a bit of extra sewing, I will manage to cover the front of the backs of the two chairs I have begun on and will have a little fabric left over. The other two chairs are to be covered in a sage-green polka dot fabric. To tie the contrasting fabrics together, the left-over Peony Tree fabric will be used at the back of the backs of the polka dot chairs (stay with me on this!), and two pieces of polka dot fabric at the back of the backs of the Peony Tree chairs. (Do you see where I'm going with this?) I've taken some photos. I will be taking some more. Thanks for keeping up!
And the red door? I have a plan. I have used a Laura Ashley wallpaper inside the glass panelled doors of the white cupboards (Ikea's Birkeland) on either side of the red door and inside similar doors of a cabinet in another room. I love the look of the glass of doors but not so much of the clutter inside. In a more ordered household there would probably be a neatly displayed selection of fine objects on the shelves behind the glass. But we are not that household. So the wallpaper, Laura Ashley's Oriental Garden in charcoal, does the job of enhancing the doors from within and hiding that which needs to be hidden. Traditionally, fabric is used for this but I happened to have wallpaper. My plan now is to wallpaper the outside of the red door in that paper. With the polka dots and meandering Peony Tree of the chairs, the meandering pattern of the dark Oriental Garden paper will look gorgeous.
I have really fallen in love with pattern recently, especially trailing and overblown florals. When I have figured out quite why, I will let you know.
Gillian