Camilla Guinness and the Importance of Not Being Earnest
From troll dolls to the queen, the interior designer blends Old World elegance and British charm.
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/camilla-guinness-style-profile/?em_pos=medium&emc=edit_tz_20150814&nl=t-magazine&nlid=66671639&ref=headline&_r=0
In her own happily twisted way, Camilla Guinness is at home with tradition. Her aesthetic is a clear reflection of the life she’s made for herself: aristocratic English coziness braided with sun-bleached Italian languor. She splits her time between London and the Tuscan countryside, where her heart firmly resides, and where she raised two daughters with her late husband, the bon vivant garden designer Jasper Guinness, grandson of Diana Mitford. Of her approach to design, “I like things to have a bit of theater and glamour,” she says. “A bit like a film set, preferably.” She created the wonderfully idiosyncratic interiors of the London flat of Isabella Blow, whose energy, Guinness says, was “like being in a rocket and breaking the sound barrier.” In Italy, she has designed for an inner circle of bohemian Brits, including Ned Lambton, Lord Durham, whose ancestral property Villa Cetinale — singled out in Edith Wharton’s “Italian Villas and Their Gardens” — she restored to its former glory. She and Jasper, who died in 2011, also designed the interior and gardens at their own home Arniano, where her 26-year-old daughter, Amber, now runs a painting school. Lately, Guinness — inspired in part by her own mother, who in the 1960s designed a mod mother-and-daughter fashion line from the family’s Georgian country house — is creating objects, commissioning Italian craftsmen to develop beds and lighting and designing a line of dressing gowns that reflect her elegant, off-kilter approach. Style, she says, “is an insouciant thing. It’s not about money. It’s about not caring what other people think.”
In her own happily twisted way, Camilla Guinness is at home with tradition. Her aesthetic is a clear reflection of the life she’s made for herself: aristocratic English coziness braided with sun-bleached Italian languor. She splits her time between London and the Tuscan countryside, where her heart firmly resides, and where she raised two daughters with her late husband, the bon vivant garden designer Jasper Guinness, grandson of Diana Mitford. Of her approach to design, “I like things to have a bit of theater and glamour,” she says. “A bit like a film set, preferably.” She created the wonderfully idiosyncratic interiors of the London flat of Isabella Blow, whose energy, Guinness says, was “like being in a rocket and breaking the sound barrier.” In Italy, she has designed for an inner circle of bohemian Brits, including Ned Lambton, Lord Durham, whose ancestral property Villa Cetinale — singled out in Edith Wharton’s “Italian Villas and Their Gardens” — she restored to its former glory. She and Jasper, who died in 2011, also designed the interior and gardens at their own home Arniano, where her 26-year-old daughter, Amber, now runs a painting school. Lately, Guinness — inspired in part by her own mother, who in the 1960s designed a mod mother-and-daughter fashion line from the family’s Georgian country house — is creating objects, commissioning Italian craftsmen to develop beds and lighting and designing a line of dressing gowns that reflect her elegant, off-kilter approach. Style, she says, “is an insouciant thing. It’s not about money. It’s about not caring what other people think.”
