I ♥ Heart Home

So, you’re looking for some inspiration for your home… you’ve bought your copies of Elle Decoration and Livingetc, pinned images to Pinterest and made a moodboard at mydeco.com but that is still not quite enough.

Thankfully Heart Home magazine is here to help, launching September this year it will be packed full of British interiors inspiration, food, fashion, flowers and a London Design Festival guide.

Okay, you guessed it… I am a co-founder of this new magazine alongside Editor’s-in-chief, Arianna from Arianna Interiors and Carole from Dear Designer‘s Blog. With so many fantastic digital magazines popping up worldwide we really felt this was the perfect time to launch a magazine with a quintessentially British feel to it.

So, pop over to the Heart Home blog to stay in touch with the project and get ready for a new way to find inspiration for the home.

Design for dementia

I originally came across Gregor Timlin and Nic Rysenbry’s work on the fantastic Confessions of a Design Geek who interviewed Nic on this work he had worked on in association with Helen Hamlyn Centre and Bupa to improve the quality of dining for people with dementia.

“The importance lies in designing for those who have a need and a desire for a better quality of life than their current environment allows. When it comes to diseases like dementia, where people can be scared and frustrated, little attention has been paid to anything other than the most basic function of an object.

The interventions that can be made to better a person’s quality of life are often simple common sense and / or putting yourself in the position of a person with dementia.” Nic Rysenbry

“Inclusive design is very important because it does exactly what it says on the tin – it promotes design for everybody. Most design for people limits who can use it because the design is based around a set of average standards. Not everyone is average and so people can be excluded from being able use products, services and buildings.”

“Good design is innovative, it’s environmental, it’s functional but most importantly it is individual. Of course it’s individual to the designer, but more than that, good design is individual to the user.”

To read the full interview, do head over to Confessions of a Design Geek and get your great design fix!

William Lamb’s Conduit

Lamb’s Conduit Street in central London is home to many unique, individual shops. Along with some rather surprisingly bad shops selling not very much lurks some of London’s finest treasures.

Located in Bloomsbury on the west end of the city, Lamb’s Conduit Street is dripping with history. The street was named after William Lamb in recognition of the £1,500 he gave for the rebuilding of the Holborn water conduit in 1564 underneath the street.

There is a rather quaint pub also, The Lamb, which was refurbished in the Victorian era and is one of the few remaining pubs with ‘snob screens’ which prevented the well to do drinker having to see the common man drinking in the bar, and vice versa. Charles Dickens who lived locally is reputed to have frequented the Lamb.

Now it is home to some fab shops, such as the concept store Darkroom, Architectural feature collector Ben Pentreath and of course Maggie Owen who has taken up home at the location of London’s very first dairy.

Other great places are menswear shop Folk clothing and the now famous People’s Supermarket, but those don’t make the press for me today.

Monocle produced a much better video than I could of this street, even if it is a little out of date now.

Smythson Featherweight

I thought long and hard before deciding to talk about Smythson… I am a fan for sure and my wedding stationery came from this Bond Street mecca but it is almost ubiquitous amongst stationery articles. But this is probably because they cannot be beaten and that should be celebrated.

In 1916, a man named Frank Smythson created a paper that was so thin and light yet still able to take a fountain pen ink that he copyrighted this paper and included it within his stationery.

Since then many have imitated the Smythson style and quality but none have succeeded. As early as 1942 Smythson went as far as the House of Lords to defend itself against counterfeiting.

Featherweight paper is half the thickness and weight (50 grams per square metre) of normal paper so a great many pages can be contained in a very slim, light book. Normally such thin paper is not appropriate for use with a fountain pen but Featherweight paper is tested rigorously to ensure that it is strong and opaque enough to be used with fountain pens without bleed.

Featherweight is made in the trademark Smythson pale blue in colour and watermarked with a distinctive globe and feather design, which appears at least once on each page and can be used to ensure the book is not an imitation. Creating a watermark in a paper this light is difficult, so the paper has to be made at a specialist mill in England that produces international security and bank note paper.

All Smythson books containing Featherweight paper have a distinctive, strong and hardwearing ‘floppy leather’ binding that is virtually unchanged since the 1890s. Called the ‘Panama hat’ of books the Featherweight Panama can be rolled up and squashed and will improve with age. The bindings of traditional grained lambskin are handmade with stitched spines and gilt-edged pages.

For all the above reasons Smythson Featherweight books are internationally popular with many distinguished writers, journalists, travellers and explorers. Used by ‘the great and the good’ over many generations they have been called a ‘secret social passport’. I am always so proud of my Smythson notebooks and almost daren’t use them for day-to-day writing. They have some very cute titles for their books, including the cheeky ‘Little black book’ although I am less fond of the modern colours and titles, so let’s not go there.

The Smythson museum at Bond Street shows some of the Featherweight paper’s rich history as well as archive exhibits belonging to Queen Victoria, Princess Diana, Sigmund Freud and Grace Kelly to name but a few.

Do pop by there and head straight to the back of the shop, towards the bespoke stationery area and turn right to enter the grandest tiny museum and be in awe of stationery porn!