I imagine it as a simply furnished, modest cottage, but the view, the view! Reached by a cobbled track through a secret garden filled with wild roses, crocosmia and agapanthus, the house is a creative retreat and filled with natural light. The fictional house I would most like to live in would be the one you can’t really see in Winifred Nicholson’s painting ‘The Isle of Man from St Bees’. During the film version of the book, viewers get to see six separate and completely different designs, and to quote Jonathan Adler, “Watching Auntie Mame is a right of passage for every aspiring decorator”. The apartment Mame lives in takes on a completely new and different look every few years, based on her theatrical personality. The character is divine and the film sets are magnificent. Auntie Mame is a lover of art and theatre, with a quick wit and a disdain for snobbish society. Norah complains that in the 14 days they’ve been living there, Mame has thrown 13 parties. Patrick’s bedroom is called The Marie Antoinette Room and Mame takes him to the dining room, where a buffet has been set up behind an ornate set of metal doors. Norah remarks that the hallway resembles “The ladies’ room at the Oriental theater” and when they ring the doorbell, steam shoots out of the dragon’s nostrils and the eyes move. When Patrick and his caretaker Norah arrive at Mame’s apartment for the first time, they’re a little startled by the ‘unique’ hallway decor. I’d love to live in the New York apartment described in ‘Auntie Mame’ – it’s one of my favourite books and I aspire to be like her. If I lived there, I would paint over the more sinister panels, but the dormitory from the film would make a glorious open-plan house, in the middle of Swedish woodland! Kate Cox, interior designer at HÁM InteriorsĪuntie Mame, dir. The murals can actually be seen as a cartoon version of the film script. I love how miniature scenes are surrounded by multiple borders which run around the room, leading the eye as though reading an illuminated manuscript. It’s covered in murals based on traditional Hälsinge folklore flowers symbolising fertility and rebirth, to reflect May Day celebrations, as well as darker rituals which have been fictionalised for the film. Midsommar’s dormitory room was built for the film and is decorated in a very similar way. It’s filmed in Hälsingland in Sweden, an area full of 19th-century wooden farmhouses decorated in a naive style by travelling groups of artists. Ari Aster’s Midsommar is shocking but the set is beautiful. I love how an atmosphere can be created by an interior, and how details can allude to what might happen in the film. LANDMARK MEDIA / Alamy Stock Photoīefore painting murals, I designed and painted sets for films. The murals on the ceiling of the farmhouse from Midsommar, dir. We asked a handful of imaginative people in the interiors world to share the fictional homes they would happily move into. They make you yearn for a home you’ve never been to but remember fondly from films or books, because you’ve already seen the way the light moves, or how the house could feel at a family dinner. Whether they’re pure fantasy (the charming tree stump homes illustrated in the Brambly Hedge books seem to be a universal favourite) or they genuinely inform the way you decorate fictional interiors can be deeply inspiring and nostalgic. And come Christmas time, everyone wants to spend a few days holed up in Kate Winslet’s matchbox-sized cottage from The Holiday. Who didn’t want to run around the imposing and slightly spooky house from The Secret Garden when they read it as a child? Imagining peeking behind tapestries to find secret doors and drawing curtains on four-poster beds. Is there anything more gleeful than picking out a fantasy home when you’re watching a TV show or reading a book? Imagining what it would be like to tap away at an email from Meg Ryan’s cosy lamp-lit apartment in You’ve Got Mail, or make a coffee in the glass-walled minimalist kitchen from Ex Machina.
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