The act of making is fundamental to every edition of The World of Interiors. There are, of course, the many people who go into creating an issue: photographers, writers, editors, designers and so forth. But for every room we show there might also be a furniture designer, a bookbinder, a plasterer, an embroiderer, a painter, a gilder, a darner, a metalworker, a basket weaver, a ceramicist, a printmaker – the list goes on and on. The skill and untold hours of graft poured into these pages by every single artisan are extraordinary and something to be celebrated, not just for the final product but for the knowledge and experience gained along the way.
As is always the way with our October issue, our biggest of the year, we push creativity to its outer limits, firstly by featuring the work of interior designers and decorators and secondly, as our cover attests, with our supersized showcase – 27 pages long in this instance – of the latest fabric collections. This year, Ruth Sleightholme and her comrades have magicked up a puppet show in collaboration with London’s Little Angel Theatre. The production tells the tale of Aschenputtel by the Brothers Grimm, which has also been reinterpreted for The World of Interiors in verse by poet and playwright Simon Armitage. Each puppet was hand-carved and -painted for us, every stitch of clothing handmade, propelled by countless brilliant brains and bodies, from costume crafters to calligraphers. Keep an eye out, too, for the first chapter of a short film we made capturing the puppets in motion, narrated by the actor Anne-Marie Duff.
This mammoth issue has too many stories to touch upon every one. There’s the wonderful Lore Archive, a ‘collection of more than 2,000 garments and objects of outsider material culture includ[ing] dried Inuit parkas, 100-year-old Transylvanian waistcoats and sakiori fishermen’s vests’; and the series of projects undertaken by people in France in the aftermath of grief or separation, or in their retirement – beautiful, strange worlds often formed from salvaged materials and recorded by photographer Francis David. Across the Channel, Tom Hunter’s images of London’s squatting community in the 1980s and 90s are accompanied by words from Nathalie Olah, who charts the ‘romance, heartbreak, love, depression, anger, euphoria’ that these spaces soaked up. Meanwhile, Marella Caracciolo Chia marvels at the new porcelain gallery in the Capodimonte museum in Naples, which has been given a recent facelift by nonagenarian designer Federico Forquet.
Now for a whistlestop tour of our featured houses, each a testament to the power of craft. We call on Carolina Irving at her jewel box of a flat in Paris, a delightful set of rooms filled with all manner of lovely things. Nauticalia reigns at the home of Katie Fontana, co-founder of Plain English, who lives with her partner Greg Powlesland in a converted boathouse by a Cornish creek; Ruth Guilding tells their tale. In London, Thomas Dane – he of the eponymous gallery – retires to a house that is suitably packed with a who’s who of contemporary artists. Meanwhile, Meryl and Jerry Butler (aka Jerry the Bed, referencing his line in fine four-posters) flew the coop to Morocco, where they created a wonderfully whimsical house just outside Tangier.
Back in England, Elizabeth Metcalfe visits Sophie Conran at her ‘handsome bow-fronted house’ in the bucolic Marlborough Downs. An even more dramatic landscape surrounds an isolated farm in Bhutan’s Black Mountains, where, as Sonam Ongmo explains, Phub Lham has beautified the house she inherited from her mother. Designer Tommaso Franchi’s Venetian apartment is a different kettle of fish altogether; discover its Marco Polo-inspired mythos. Next, David Jacob Kramer reports on the pioneering work of Bob McKee, the California craftsman who ‘was a crucial link between the land and the hippies’ and defined a distinctive architectural style in Humboldt County. Another landmark moment in design history is embodied by the Roman apartment shaped by Italy’s Postmodernist pioneers; Marella Caracciolo Chia explains how. Finally, Oskar Proctor’s ghostly images capture the spirit of the Château de Saulières, an 18th-century Palladian house in Burgundy that is slowly returning to life.
One more thing I’d like to bring to your attention before the close of this letter is a project I’ve been working on with Furnishing Futures, a fantastic charity that creates trauma-informed spaces for women and children placed in empty social housing after escaping domestic abuse. These tenancies come unfurnished, often without flooring, curtains or even painted walls. Visit furnishingfutures.org and there you can peruse a selection of furniture and homewares curated by me; all proceeds will support the organisation in its mission to provide healing homes. Please consider helping in whatever way you can.
A version of this article appears in the October 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
