Maximalism – the path to eclectic interiors

One thing I love about country house interiors is that they are jam packed with things. Not carefully selected things purchased specifically to reflect a certain design style or colour scheme, but weird and wonderful things, amassed over many years, generations even, and all reflecting the travels and collecting interests of the various occupants.

Porcelain collections, hunting, shooting and fishing paraphernalia, tennis rackets, riding boots, curious natural history items, piles of old books, old family photographs, drinks tables crammed with old crystal decanters, random bits of statuary, plasterwork and ticking clocks. Walls dripping with eclectic mixes of artworks; ancient and modern, old, gilded mirrors, their silvered backs blistering with age, and, if you’re lucky, the odd seventeenth century tapestry, now a little threadbare because of the moths.  These items are ubiquitous in country houses the length and breadth of the British Isles if not across Europe. It’s as if someone, at some time, had said in a ‘how to make a country house’ design book or almanac that these were the items that needed to be included.

But of course, that isn’t the case. What really happened is that these grand houses evolved, and the similarity in the types of objects found within them represent the social habits, interests and pursuits of the people that lived in them, along with what had been left by generations of ancestors before them. Every object and collection has a story behind it. A trip to the far east, a particular sporting prowess, a clergyman particularly interested in tracery carvings, amateur naturalists, archaeologists and avid historic researchers. The families who resided in country houses up until the turn of the century, had time on their hands and the resources to literally scour the world to satisfy their often-insatiable appetite for bringing weird, wonderful, exotic and beautiful objects home, and once installed, these items became conversation pieces.

Moving house; a regular occurrence today, was relatively rare with country house owners, unless some financial disaster befell the inheriting family. In such dire situations it was usual for the entire contents of a house to be auctioned off. This is often how items that once graced the many halls of our country houses became available to the general populous through the development of antique shops.  

Ah antique shops, my favourite haunt.

Having been made aware of the term ‘Maximalist’ relatively recently, I found myself looking it up. I found definitions that spoke of ‘More is More’ and ‘Curated Chaos’. But essentially this term is about personal storytelling and its origin lies in the eclectic interiors of our country houses. Maximalism is about showing off where you have been, what interests you have and who you and your family are. It isn’t about choosing decorative items to fit in with your room scheme; it is about making the room scheme fit around your decorative items. It is a design philosophy that doesn’t have rules, other than everything and anything goes, as long as it has personal meaning.

One of my own personal pet-hates are the grey interiors of the twenty-tens. The pinnacle of which saw previously magnolia trade emulsion paint turn grey. Resulting in every show home on every new housing development, being decorated in fifty shades of grey. Soulless and bland, these interiors left personalities at the door.

But maximalism as an interior style is not just the domain of period homes. My mother and father’s home was a modernist affair, stuffed with nineteen-fifties furniture and sculpture and other items reflecting their enthusiasm for design and more specifically, the Festival of Britain. I still have their original catalogue. And, there were bits and pieces from Germany, where my mother was from. Everything else was either handmade by my mother or created by some other family member. Books were everywhere and copies of Terence Conran’s Habitat magazine lay in piles on the floor of the south-facing, glazed living room, further evidence of their 20^th century design awareness. Broom House, the house where I grew up, paid homage to maximalism within a modern architectural space. 

Here at Teindside in our Georgian/Victorian home, I am attempting to emulate the maximalism of country house style, right down to the faded grandeur. I am lucky to have access to many beautiful, sometimes suitably shabby or weird, antique and artisan-made decorative objects. Some of them I have accumulated over time, for instance I have a beautiful, Scottish-studio pottery collection, picked up on numerous family holidays. Other items are found objects, and some have been sourced through our antiques and salvage business over many years scouring auction rooms and the outbuildings of country houses, in true ‘Salvage Hunter’ style.  

As a consequence, dressing our rooms is the most pleasurable of occupations. It isn’t done quickly; the room has to be allowed to develop its personality, selecting items from our hoard as a curator would choose from a museum’s storerooms. So, employing the ‘no rules’ mantra of maximalism, I have happily married a collection of sculptural, polished wood, antique plumbing ballcocks with Georgian tea caddies and inlaid Sri Lankan trinket boxes because the materials of their construction talk to each other. A huge antique Indian copper water pot sits in one rooms’ window whilst opposite, a tooled leather camel seat, known as a Mahawi in Arabic, sits in the other. And facing these, a collection of Liberty pewter ware is juxtaposed with a modern composite bust of Buddha sitting on an antique marble column who is often seen sneakily smoking a jostick. Eclectic positioning yes, but together the objects express a cohesive design language. This is the curation part of the ‘curated chaos’ mentioned previously.  

But after all the design analysis, essentially maximalist interiors are joyous places that shout about their inhabitants and the interests they have, with exuberance.

The moral of this blog is, that I’d love to inspire more would-be room-designers to ditch the sterile interiors of good-taste minimalism and take the plunge into the happy accumulation and display of quirky, weird and wonderful objects that bring delight to all who admire them and hear their stories.