“I never really feel comfortable sitting in a room that is absolutely perfect, where everything matches,” says British interior and textile designer Sarah Vanrenen. “It’s got to have a kind of organic feel.” As she says of her own 300-year-old farmhouse in Wiltshire, England, “It’s lived-in, it’s real, it’s colorful.”
The large farmhouse, originally three separate cottages, belonged to her husband’s grandmother. It was the perfect blank slate for Vanrenen’s layered approach to decorating, with rooms cocooned in color, laden with patterned fabrics and wallpaper, with artwork covering every wall. “I crave color. It feeds my soul,” she says. “Color makes rooms feel inviting and warm and comfortable.” There also needs to be visual relief, she notes, some neutral contrast. “I think a house can definitely have too much stuff,” she cautions, “but I don’t think a house can ever have too much art. Art says everything about the person who lives in a house, and when it’s hung well, adds huge character.”
Vanrenen opened up the ceiling of the primary bedroom to the rafters, and wrapped everything in her “Dotty” flower-strewn wallpaper and fabric, adding the canopy bed she’d always coveted.
“When I’m decorating a room, I do it like I’m starting a painting,” she explains, starting with wall color, and then bringing in different patterns and furnishings to see what works best together. “There’s got to be big pattern, small pattern, and then a bit of space around it that lets it breathe.”
Come tour Vanrenen’s warm and welcoming home and see why, she says, “When it’s at its best and my family are here and we’re all sitting around the kitchen table having lunch or supper, it’s the happiest I can ever be.”
Vanrenen in the meadow outside the 300-year-old Wiltshire farmhouse where she and her husband live.
