From Flora Soames’s front garden you can look past sheep grazing the well-tended parkland of the Ferne estate and on to the rolling Wiltshire hills. It’s a quiet spot, tucked away off a private road and nestled in woodland; a place you can imagine whiling away the hours with long walks and lazy lunches. Yet for Flora – one of House & Garden’s top 100 interior designers – this idyllic setting has also been a place of creativity and inspiration where, in 2019, she devised her first collection of fabrics and wallpapers.
Taking cues from her archive of antique textiles, Flora’s creations breathe new life into rare and elaborate patterns, complementing the refined and considered style of her interior-design projects. Her ‘Pavilion’ collection, which launched in July of this year, is a range of simple stripes in bold colours that draws on 1930s samplers. It’s a timeless and versatile print that feels right at home in Flora’s quintessentially English cottage. Made up into tablecloths, cushion covers and parasols, the fabrics set the mood perfectly for a light, relaxed lunch in the late summer sun.
Flora has always been passionate about food, an obsession she inherited from her father with whom she would pore over recipes and plan dinners. Although she has amassed a considerable library of cookbooks, she confesses that “when it actually comes to cooking, I’m not very good at sticking to the rules.” Instead, Flora prefers an instinctive approach, which owes much to formative time spent in Italy. She places an emphasis on good produce, working with whatever she can source locally rather than going to the supermarket. “If you’ve got really good ingredients and you’re keeping it simple, you can’t go wrong.”
