House and Garden May 2020

KATE COULSON | Garden designer Kate’s love for garden design developed when she bought a house on a fellside in the north of England. Having spent her early career at Christie’s, she trained at The English Gardening School and set to work realising her dream of creating a modern English topiary garden. ‘No matter how original, a garden should always sit well within its natural environment,’ she says. This approach is evident in her design for her own hilltop plot in Provence (pages 154-159), in which ashe favoured plants that withstand the extreme weather conditions. She cites the discovery of a ‘whole new lexicon of plants that flourish in arid conditions – and still look good’ as her favourite aspect of working on it. Which plant are you obsessed with at the…

Just a week after we chose the houses to be featured in this May issue, I had the pleasure of sitting next to one of the owners, Speronella Marsh, at a Calico Club supper; she was one of the earliest members. It was a lucky coincidence, as her house – inherited by her husband Ben – also features on the cover, which we were working on at the time. And yet we had never met. This sort of meeting of minds is exactly what we hoped would happen for members when we set up The Calico Club in January. It was especially pleasing that I was reaping the benefits myself. Speronella, an Italian, found herself doing up a big house in deepest Shropshire and needed to be resourceful with her budget.…

For suppliers’ details, see Stockists page…

For suppliers’ details, see Stockists page ANDREA BARTOLUCCIO; JAMES MERRELL; PIXELATE IMAGING…

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Towards the end of 2018, Nina Strochlic, a staff writer for National Geographic magazine, was on assignment with the Swedish photographer Nora Lorek at the Bidibidi refugee camp in northern Uganda – home to a quarter of a million people, many of whom are fleeing civil war in South Sudan. They were there to investigate how the world’s second largest refugee settlement had become a feat of urban planning – it has a 250-mile road network, as well as schools and clinics. But during their time in the camp, the pair also came across a number of beautiful hand-embroidered bedsheets, called milayas, similar to the ones that Nora had photographed on a previous visit to Bidibidi in 2017. Traditionally, these would have been hung up at weddings and funerals, or used…