Using colour comes easily to Rosie Copeland, an artist with a knack for pigment-suffused landscapes and still lives. But when it came to doing up her home, a rambling, rus in urbe Victorian former vicarage in south London, her confidence faltered. ‘I can spend all morning mixing a palette of paints, yet there’s something about the permanence of colour in a room that I find daunting,’ she says. ‘So when we first moved here I played it safe and stuck to neutrals and left it at that.’
Twenty years on it was time to re-think the home she shares with her husband and three children. ‘The way we use the house has also changed,’ adds Rosie. So she turned to Tamsin Saunders, an interior designer with an artist’s eye for colour and composition. Tamsin’s task was to redesign and refurnish the interior, and ‘de-greige’ its neutral palette, as well as designing a studio for Rosie in the garden.
This was a meeting of minds and tastes. Both client and designer (who do life drawing classes together) like the same things: artisanal textiles and antiques, ceramics, art, piles of books – all the elements which Tamsin uses to bring an always-there aesthetic to her work.
Chris Horwood
They began by looking at Rosie’s art collection. ‘I remember saying to Rosie, “You love colour… you’d never paint an all-grey picture. So why should your home be any different?”. I referred her to the colours in the paintings on her walls and in the garden outside to encourage her to be more adventurous,’ says Tamsin. Rosie agrees: ‘Neutral colours are not me. But when the children were younger I had no time to experiment.’
One of her favourite paintings, a portrait by contemporary artist Arthur Neal, was the starting point for the snug, its warm tones echoed in a flecked pink tweed which Tamsin chose to upholster a new bespoke sofa, and complemented by the ‘gentle’ blues and greens in a vintage Swedish rug. Upstairs, a spare bedroom now doubles as a study. A sofa bed upholstered in a lagoon blue linen sings out against dark plum walls. A 1950s abstract hangs above the original 19th century chimneypiece painted an earthy, mustard and a long desk, painted a warm red, was designed to tuck under the window. Nothing matches, but everything coheres.
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