When Home is... Old Plates

It started when we dug up a broken piece of a plate in the back garden late last year. The pale blue floral pattern captivated me and I couldn’t help but wonder which owner it belonged to. It looked old, the pattern delicate, but surely it wasn’t a plate of John and Elizabeth Liddell’s?



Or was it? After all, they had seven children back in the 1890s so I imagine there were many broken plates over the many years they lived here. The kitchen/scullery would have been out the back, near where we dug up this piece of china, but who knows.

It could just as easily been from the owners who lived here in the 1990s and, from what I can work out from old plans, added the back living / kitchen room. After our recent renovation I have realised how many bits of rubbish – nails, screws, cigarette butts – can inadvertently end up buried under the rose bushes and gardenias... Yet, I like to think of this broken plate as a link from the present back to where it all began. The first family who called this house home.

When I found this bit of china I had already been thinking that we needed new dinner plates. Ours were all white and increasingly becoming chipped and crazed. I hadn’t been able to decide on the style of dinner set I wanted but now I knew.

While it was pure fantasy to try and find the exact match for this dug up piece of china, I knew I wanted old, English style plates and serving bowls.



It didn’t take long to start my new collection... finding a couple of blue and white china plates at the markets one weekend, some green ones at the same market another weekend. And once you start a collection it’s hard to stop really, isn’t it?

Collections run in our family and when my mother turned 40 she decided that for her party she would ask everyone to bring a plate. Not a plate of food but a plate. A plate of her friend’s choice, she would display on the lounge room wall. I think some of her friends were dubious, worried about whether they would find one she would like, one that would match the others but that wasn’t the point.

It had to be a plate her friend loved. Perhaps it was one they already owned or one they found at a garage sale or junk shop. That way it would become a plate representing that person. Instead of a wall of photos of her closest friends, she would have a wall of plates.

What none of us anticipated was how much those plates would come to act like photos. It’s amazing what a pattern, colour choice and age of a plate can tell you about someone’s personality. To this day I can stand in front of those plates and know the story behind each one.

It’s these stories behind objects that make them feel so precious. When I brought home a stack of old, slightly crazed, square dessert plates with a faded gold border and little green flowers painted around the sides a few months ago, I washed them and left them to dry on the side of the sink.

While talking to my sister on the phone, I noticed the children kept coming perilously close to them. Our conversation was punctuated with me shouting across the room ‘Watch those plates!’



My sister laughed, wondering how much I had paid for them to make me so nervous.But it wasn’t the fact they cost me $1.50 each (!) that made me nervous. It was the fact that I was already attaching myself to the story behind them; the morning spent fossicking at the market and finding them stacked unlovingly in a plastic tub was just the beginning of our life together. I was already imaging the future meals with friends and family when they would make their appearance. But what about the life they already had?



How did they end up as someone’s rubbish when once they would have looked quite grand? They may have been a part of someone’s wedding china. China only brought out for Christmas or birthdays for a family long, long ago.

A family like the family who first lived here.

And now a family like ours.

When Home is... a Gatehouse, a Palace... no actually a Water Tower

How is it already April, the end of first term, the start of Autumn and the first quarter of the year already gone? And how is it that we will be heading off to the other side of the world before the year is out without having had any thoughts of booking flights or accommodation?

For all these reasons, the last couple of weeks have seen me think very little of ‘home’ here in Sydney and panic about a temporary home in the UK in many months time.

Oh yes; with me it’s always about the accommodation. And knowing me as well as a certain English friend does, it’s not too surprising that she sent me the link to The Landmark Trust website...

We’re in London – rain hail or shine – for a special friend’s wedding. Not the royal wedding, obviously (although her father did tell me recently that my friend is a descendent of King Edward I) and while accommodation is sorted for that weekend, we aren’t flying all that way for two days. So where to stay for a couple of weeks either side?

Well, thanks to the Landmark Trust, I can see a few options.



Wolveton Gatehouse caught my eye first: built during the reign of King Henry VIII. Thomas Hardy came to tea here in 1900 and the towers were thought to have been built during the fourteenth century. The fourteenth century! The Jacobean fireplaces still work; actually they still may be the greatest source of heat with the website suggesting to light the fires and wear an extra layer as the ‘Dorset nobility would have done hundreds of years ago’.

But wait! Where else in the world can you say you stayed in a water tower? After future King Edward VII fell ill with Typhoid in 1871 and his son with the same illness three years later at Sandringham, an investigation into the water supply was ordered. It seemed the castle was built upon numerous cesspools and new waterworks needed to be designed. Part of this design needed to include a service reservoir: this is the 32,000-gallon cast-iron tank that tops the Appleton Water Tower.



The engineer responsible for the design realised the tower would command superb views and the second floor room was made for the royal family and their guests ‘when shooting parties or picnickers required a base during the day’.

Today not only this room, but the whole tower is available for a family of four – and I think Louis could squeeze into a bed with either Lily or Ned too.

But if we really want to feel what it was like to be royalty, why not stay in a palace? Why not, indeed, when Hampton Court Palace offers a two bedroom apartment for rent?

Well to be truthful, it wasn’t ever an apartment that King Henry VIII visited. It was actually built for the Officers of the Pastry and lies in the service wing of the Tudor palace.



It was enlarged, though, by Henry VIII who enjoyed entertaining lavishly and even had extra kitchens built, one solely for the baking of pies.

Imagine, a kitchen just for pies... I think I’m leaning towards a few nights here.

Suddenly I don’t mind the year running away from me.

All pictures © The Landmark Trust website

When Home is... an Australian in England

What happens when you move overseas only to feel more ‘at home’ than you do in the country of your birth?

Louise Craig moved to England at the age of 26 and from the moment she stepped off the plane, felt she was home. Here she writes about the experience of falling in love with another country...

‘It’s nearly 12 years since I left the place where I was born; six years since I left the country where I grew up. I’ve lived in four cities and 12 houses. Every move’s been for a good reason, another step along in life. But now I’m ready to stop for a while – not because I’m tired, but because I finally feel content.

The odd thing, or so my friends tell me, is that I feel content in a place that isn’t home. I’m an Australian living in London. I’m supposed to be here for a ‘working holiday’, experiencing life abroad before I go back home to settle down.

But what if I never get around to going home?

I grew up not so much feeling that I didn’t want to be in Australia, but rather that there was a wonderland out there, far, far away, called England, and that I was destined to be there. It was a place of good manners, proper tea and sturdy cakes, E-types and plummy accents, tweed and pinstripes and Liberty prints. It was green of hill and cool of weather, and as far from humid, big-country-town-like Brisbane, where I was born, as I could get.



The trouble was, I’d never actually been to England. But I couldn’t rest until I discovered whether my fantasy world was real. At 26, when I finally organised myself to travel there, it wasn’t for a holiday – it was to live. I left my job, sold what little I owned and banked heavily on the fact that I’d like what I found.

Friends and family wished me well, but also that I should find what I was looking for. What was that? Proof? A place to satisfy my Anglophilia? My spiritual home?

The proof came the moment I arrived. It was real – what a relief! And the satisfaction arrived very soon after. Every building, every street, every garden square transported me to other times in history and connected me with thousands of characters who once occupied the same space. Even now, with childlike wonder, I’ll break into a spontaneous smile as I walk along the street – I’m really here, really part of this other world.



I’ve fallen in love. In central London, where I live, I don’t get mad on the Tube or upset at the grime; I relish the cold and the grey; I’m at peace with the gaudy neon advertising signs that tower over Piccadilly Circus. Rather, as the Gallagher brothers would say, it’s the little things that make me so happy: the old-fashioned curve of a street lamp, the red of a pillar box, the whirr of an electric milk float early in the morning.



I make a game of picking out Margo Leadbetter types doing their weekly shop in Waitrose, and I’m the only person I know who, when it rains or snows, opens the window and pokes her head out to enjoy it.



Eventually I took my first holiday back to Australia – in the July two and half years after I left. Friends and colleagues in London gasped that I’d left it so long (not to mention remind me, in astonishment, that it was winter ‘down there’).

Naturally, friends and family in Australia asked when I would be home – for good, they meant. My instinctive reaction was to reply that I’d be going home at the end of this holiday. A perceptive aunt tut-tutted and reminded me that I meant I’d be going ‘back’ not ‘home’. Suddenly, I didn’t know what I meant.

She asked, too, whether I felt as if I’d been to England before. Gosh – yes. There is a chilling, yet reassuring, sense of familiarity about the place. But why? Is it because I spent the 26 years before arriving subconsciously swotting up, watching thousands of hours of BBC television and reading mountains of Tatler and British Vogue magazines?



Is it that my head has lived in England all my life, but the rest of me in Australia? It would certainly explain why I could explain what Quaglinos, an OAP and a double-yellow line were before I’d even stepped foot on English soil.



But during that holiday ‘home’, I watched an Australian travel program on television in which they provided advice on visiting London. Tellingly, a lump rose in my throat as I watched the images of where I now live and work and play. I missed it and felt homesick.



I couldn’t understand why because, in London, I had the same, more understandable, reaction when the ‘So where the bloody hell are you?’ advertisements for Australia appeared on television. It occurred to me, painfully, that I wasn’t at all sure where the bloody hell home was.

Arriving back in London at the end of that holiday, the plane’s wheels hit the tarmac at Heathrow and two things happened: a huge grin cracked across my face and a light bulb went on in my head. I was home again. I’d just given myself permission to have more than one.



Some might say I’m naïve to the realities of living on this expensive, overcrowded island. Whatever it seems, this England affords me an overwhelming feeling of contentment and a place to rest my spirit. I’m learning that home is wherever you choose it to be: where you are happy, where you feel an affinity, where you have people you love, where you’ve been for so long you can’t remember being anywhere else.

So, have I found what I’m looking for? It’s a question I hardly dare ask myself; except to say I don’t feel as if I’m living away from anywhere. I just feel at home.’

All images © Louise Craig

At Home with… Interior Designer Anita Kaushal

I have very few interior decorating books. I have flipped through many but find they end up being more about styling or architecture rather than stories about making a home. Magazines have long-filled my need for stories. I love looking at pictures of houses but love it more when I can also read about the people who live there.

Recently, thanks to Anita Kaushal, I have changed my mind. With 15 years experience in interiors, Anita has designed products, transformed homes, written for The Observer, The Guardian, Junior, Cookie and London Magazine, and authored and styled books that have been translated into five languages. It is her interiors book Family Lifestyle Home, that has been the first such book to spark my imagination; a book that I keep wanting to return to.



As Anita says in the book’s introduction, ‘There have been countless books on raising children and on decorating, but here I consider both together. It is a kind of manual or recipe book, a collection of ideas based on the heartfelt philosophy that it is possible to create a home that is both beautiful and nurturing.’

So how did she come to write such a book?

‘From as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed playing around with the space I have lived in and take great pride in making it look good for me. As a couple my husband and I moved each time our careers progressed. Then in 1999, I decided to leave a very successful career in sales to start my own mail-order business based around mixing interior finds from the international designer and the local artisan; from products for a couple of pounds next to those for thousands.’

‘At the time it was quite groundbreaking and well received because I then went on-line and opened a flagship store in London’s Westbourne Grove. It was here I began to get interior commissions.’

‘The birth of my second child and more interiors projects changed my focus so I sold off the mail-order business and at the same time decided to write a book on stylish, comfortable family living and design homes with a heartbeat.’



It was after having children that Anita felt her home was ‘more alive because of mixing the children’s style with my own.’ She felt her design choices had widened rather than disappeared. ‘My hand blown lamp next to my daughter’s brightly coloured plastic ponies just worked.’



It was such realisations that led to the idea behind Family Lifestyle Home. ‘In my book I wanted to show that we don’t need to treat the home as them and us, but to enjoy the process of seeing the family as a unified whole. I think as well as the clever design ideas in the book, what makes it different is my true belief that home is not simply about how we decorate but how we choose to live in that space; reading, music, shared meals; a sense of lightness of being.’



Anita has lived in all sorts of homes: large, small, modern, traditional and she says, ‘each has felt a certain way partly because of its innate energy field and partly because of where I have been in my life at the point in time.’

She has also designed and consulted on many more. ‘What unifies them has nothing to do with geography or size and everything to do with the sense of comfort and happiness that comes from the people who share them and how they feel about themselves and their homes.’



Has she a favourite? ‘My flat in Westbourne Grove has been my favorite because although it was a small flat, it was a very happy time in my life – I had my business, my baby, fell pregnant and the area has such a village feel and good vibe – life just felt good.’

‘From an aesthetic prospective, it was great making a smaller space as impactful as a larger one. We then moved to the suburbs into the most stunning Victorian house and whilst it looked perfect, it was always dark and cold.’

‘The home I live in now is right where I want to be and that is partly the energy and light and partly my own understanding of what makes a house a home. It is a beautiful space and one that is all the better for sharing with family.’



Since having a family of her own, Anita still surrounds herself with the beautiful things she did pre-children, the only change being ‘I do have to spend more time tidying up!’

But, she has also happily learnt ‘to live in the house and really enjoy the space regardless of breakages and spills. It’s there to be enjoyed. It’s a home not a museum and it needs to work for you long after the guests have gone – I don’t worry about impressing others – if I like it, I will just do it.’

Most liberating has been getting her children involved with the decorating decisions so the family lives in ‘a home that resonates with our personalities… I don’t suppose it would have occurred to me to have a swing in my kitchen had it not been for the children, but the house is so much better for having it and all the other children’s things.’



It’s no surprise then that Anita’s kitchen is her favourite room in the house, ‘it is where family and friends come together and it is a very happy place which looks out onto the garden. First thing in the morning when everyone is asleep I go down to the kitchen, make a fresh coffee and plan my day. It is heavenly to start the morning without any noise.’



For more information about Anita Kaushal, visit her website here.

All photos © Anita Kaushal