Like all good British childhoods, mine was littered with afternoons in the wendy house, trips to heritage properties for a picnic in a National Trust car park, or running around a walled kitchen garden, whatever the weather. And perhaps it was here that my love for both “playing house" and British heritage interiors was formed.
I remember being as fascinated with the ‘upstairs’ living spaces as I was with the ‘downstairs’ working spaces of these iconic British estates. As a small girl, the grand staterooms with their opulent brocaded drapery and silk-lined walls (and chairs with pine cones neatly arranged to stop small bottoms from sitting on them!) would inspire awe and wonder. The curiosities acquired from long-ago ‘grand tours’ and the ornate detailing on display, still there often hundreds of years later, showed off the craftsmanship of every object within the room. The ‘downstairs’, behind-the-scenes spaces with their tiled-wall labyrinths of sculleries, kitchens, and pantries delighted me equally. I was captivated by the rows of wooden pegs for the hung livery, the tall shaker-framed cabinets and dressers which housed extensive crockery collections, and even the simple form of a Wycombe chair beside the fireplace, on which I imagined Cook would take a pause from turning out all those intricate copper jelly moulds. This early visual education, gleaned in these grand heritage homes across the UK, laid the foundation for my love of design, which followed me through my years studying architecture and ultimately led to my work as an interior designer.
For nearly twenty years, I have had the joy of working as a designer and art director with homeware brands and print houses here in the UK. Through all of that, I’ve been intrigued by what makes a home, room, or design scheme look and feel recognisably ‘British’. I’ve also explored how the once ‘below-stairs’ style has now become an aspirational, heritage-inspired look in our homes.
My love for the rhythm and pace of heritage buildings, the design principles of the grand staterooms, and both the up and downstairs interiors has set a pattern in my work, developing my own look and style. I love to try and bring the two worlds from those grand properties together, often by creating a nostalgic combination of eccentric pattern play inspired by the screen-printed botanicals and brocades of the opulent staterooms, set against the physical forms of the simple utilitarian design of the working spaces below. This clash of aesthetics, both grounded firmly in British historical properties, has enabled me to define a style I’ve had the enormous privilege of emulating with household brands and home retailers for nearly two decades.
In 2023, I launched The House of Abigail, initially as an Instagram account to showcase my portfolio and the work of my team. Showcasing what one dear friend called ‘the Abigail Aesthetic’, it was the first time friends and family had really been able to view my work. The stories and posts behind how I and the team assembled whole schemes for projects across the UK and with various brands quickly brought with them a lot of requests for help, over coffees, dinners, and even during a child’s birthday party.
The pleas for help or ideas for friends’ own homes came thick and fast, which, for the record, I relished. Permission to have an opinion? Brilliant! However, over time I became increasingly frustrated that my friends (and later followers) would ask how they could get my look on their budget, or in their much-loved-but-not-palatial home. And my answer would often fall short of the solution they needed and deserved.
This was especially evident in my own home, a smart but very much new build in a village near Bath, Somerset. Returning home after designing stunning lifestyle shoots or creating marketing imagery for some of the biggest names in British homeware retail, I would look at my perfectly lovely (but definitely not worthy of brown and oak leaf signage) home and feel the frustration that the style of interiors I loved, and was good at designing, felt beyond my own reach.
I realised that if the look I was promoting, and which my work proved many of us had a nostalgic and almost patriotic affinity to, felt out of reach for me, the designer, then it must feel out of reach for many others too. And that was wrong. The aspirational look of our collective history seemed as though it was still only for those with ‘upstairs’ budgets and staterooms.
Most heritage-inspired print scales are not optimised for the smaller window apertures or lower ceilings of modern British new builds. They often create oversized pattern repeats and exaggerate the smaller proportions of the room. And even if you’re lucky enough to have heritage proportions, the curated aesthetic of pattern play and layered prints and plains often requires an exhausting search for the perfect pattern-clashed cloths and colour-perfect papers. You’d probably need to pay an interior designer to help assemble a balanced scheme, which could take the project to a more ‘upstairs’ budget than many of us could aspire to. So, I took a deep breath and dared to consider how I might be able to help solve this problem.
"How can the aspirational British interior scheme be made attainable, both at price point and in process?" That was the question. The answer, quite unexpectedly, came from piles of meeting notebooks filled with sketches, where there ought to have been important meeting notes. As a perpetual doodler and sketcher (in a distracted and inattentive way, not a romantic, pained artist way), I had filled these notebooks, totally unaware that in doing so I’d spent nearly twenty years designing a collection of patterns and motifs that were my own interpretations of all the prints I had soaked up over the years. Using these as my foundation, I started to design a range of cloths and papers that would enable all of us to find a new way to play house.
The House of Abigail as a print house was born.
These collections of heritage-inspired prints are all scaled to work in a range of property proportions and are colour-calibrated with our unique colourways. They allow you to create your own perfectly pattern-played scheme and bring a slice of British heritage interiors into your own castle, however grand it is (or isn’t). Because decorating your home should be fun, playful, and joyful, and, crucially, accessible to everyone.
