"Fairy tales have transfixed readers for thousands of years, and for many reasons; one of the most compelling is the promise of a magical home," say Kate and Andrew Bernheimer in their book Fairy Tale Architecture. Take the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel, a cottage in the Bavarian forest “built entirely from bread with a roof made of cake, and windows made of clear sugar,” which (in the dark original by the Brothers Grimm) promised salvation from the children's hunger. In Snow White, our heroine finds shelter from her evil stepmother with seven charming miners in a rustic cottage where “everything was small, but so neat and clean that no one could say otherwise. There was a little table with a white tablecloth and seven little plates, and each plate had a spoon, and there were seven knives and forks and seven mugs as well. Against the wall there were seven little beds, all standing in a row and covered with snow-white sheets.” Dark and disturbing as the original stories are, the narratives require us to find the houses bewitching. More modern examples, like the whimsical burrows in Beatrix Potter's illustrated stories or Winnie the Pooh's clapboard hut built into the root of a tree, offer us similarly enchanting images of bucolic living.
We are inevitably influenced by the pictures of houses we are offered as children, and the ones we imagine. Luke Edward Hall and Duncan Campbell have spoken of the appeal of their rented Cotswold cottage as lying in its resemblance to the houses we draw as children. “It’s a super simple little cottage,” says Duncan. “I always think it looks like a kid’s drawing of a house with a door, two windows upstairs and two windows downstairs”. Writer Olivia Laing makes the same point about her Georgian house in Suffolk: “from the outside, it looked absurdly beguiling, like a child’s drawing, with three neat rows of sash windows and enormous Madame Alfred Carrière roses either side of the front door.” And we love this anecdote from the owner of a rather magical house on Dartmoor, which comes complete with stone mullioned windows and roof peaked with gables. Its owner was utterly delighted when a visiting child shyly asked her, “Is this a school for witches?”
The archetypal wonky cottages of storybook illustrations seem to have a universal appeal – one of the most popular images ever to have emerged from the pages of House & Garden is the exterior of Caroline Holdaway's country cottage. With the lights shining in the windows, it looks just like the kind of place that would tempt you in from a dangerous forest – only to find a wolf masquerading as your grandmother.
Like the amalgamated and adapted stories that emerged from the oral tradition of fairy tales, there is no ‘one’ storybook look, but ask anyone to describe the fairytale aesthetic and they will probably imagine something inspired by Bavarian vernacular architecture, American log cabins, chintzy English upholstery and a healthy injection of the natural world. The magical mix of idyllic interiors, childhood nostalgia and the promise of protection makes storybook interiors unparalleled in their transportive powers. And since we're living through those oft-cited difficult political times, we're perhaps more than ever drawn to nostalgia in the way we live. Is it any wonder we're all emulating what Remodelista has dubbed the ‘Three Bears’ or ‘homey populism’ look in our houses and gardens? It goes beyond the aesthetic though, as children's tales are where we learn morals and valuable life lessons, so going back to them in any way can be seen as an effort to recentre ourselves.
Children’s illustrator Lauren Child suggests that the contemporary move towards rustic rural design is “unsurprising when one considers the uncertainty of our times: the environmental anxiety and the political volatility surrounding us.” Our desire to escape into fantasy, particularly one that involves charming interiors and harmony with wildlife, is as unsurprising today as it was during the periods of famine that inspired Hansel and Gretel, or the repression that engendered Victorian fairy stories. “I think when things become overwhelming we often yearn for simplicity and cosiness, placing more value on the handcrafted, and wanting to create a sense of a safe retreat,” adds Lauren. Robert Young, a specialist in folk and naive antiques and the designer of this charming house in Northamptonshire, agrees that today’s fascination with folk-inspired interiors is “related to the wider 'slow living' principle, which is increasingly recognised in small scale food production, organic vegetables, hand-reared meat, artisan cheeses, small scale bakeries and even craft beers and biodynamic wines.” The return to a quainter style is, for Robert, tied into a more rudimentary way of living. “It is the same with hardback books, and the joy of writing with a fountain pen,” he explains, “These things which were the necessity of previous generations have become luxuries to us now.”
Many of us dream of retiring to a thatched cottage to achieve Lauren’s idea of a “safe retreat”, but Robert believes that “interiors inspired by, or related to, fairytales and or folk stories can be created in any interior space, it is simply a question of materials, careful paint colour and fabric selection and the scale, surface and patination of the furniture.” In fact, he says, "primitive antique pieces bring their character and individuality with them and lend a lived-in and sometimes a “quirky” character to formulaic contemporary spaces. They have a sculptural quality that is immediately appealing and juxtaposes well with sleek contemporary spaces and materials like glass, and concrete.” No cottage? No problem.
For Robert, much of this feel comes from the furniture and fittings: deep, stone farmhouse sinks, Welsh blankets and rudimentary wooden furniture with blocky legs. "'Folk' furniture does what it says on the tin,” he explains, “You can see the marks of the man who made it, there are no veneers to hide the joints and no artifice to decorate them. They are made to serve a purpose, made to last and most of all just to do a job. When they have survived several generations of use, they further develop an individuality and most importantly a texture which we appreciate and value today.” Cricket tables, stick chairs and oak cupboards made in the UK between the 17th and 20th century are the mainstays of the ‘Wibbly’ folk furniture or primitive antique aesthetic, explains our features editor Elizabeth Metcalfe in her ode to the primitive country vernacular.
This type of furniture also had a big resurgence during the Brutalist movement of the mid-20th century, with designers refocusing on basic ways of creating organic, rustic furniture that would be ‘just right’ in any children’s storybook. "Each individual piece has an unspoken narrative," says Robert, “if it has character to its form we think we can read a story in it. This is like all magnificent things, an ancient tree trunk, a weathered stone wall or smoke tarred fireplace mantel, you just know they have history and a story to tell. Sometimes you can just look at a person the same way and know from their skin and their clothes that there is an interesting history to them. No period defines this, its just the way things evolve.”
The illustrations in 19th- and early 20th-century storybooks have much else to offer us in terms of interiors inspiration. Think about brass beds piled high with patterned eiderdowns, which remind us of the way our grandmothers used to make beds – along with patchwork quilts, they're undoubtedly having a comeback. Rustic kitchens hung with gleaming copper pans and aged Delft tiles fit into the aesthetic, as do the sprawling, beguiling rustic patterns of a William Morris wallpaper.
Just as the furniture and characters in a children's story are imbued with narratives and history, Andrew and Kate believe that "houses in fairy tales are never just houses; they always contain secrets and dreams." Fairy tale-inspired design, with houses full of items rich in stories and inherited or collected from around the world, contain both history and an optimistic look to the future, making it a timeless and comforting aesthetic, regardless of the time we live in. After all, is there any simpler time in our lives than when we were children? There are myriad ways people seek to recapture the innocence of youth and returning to the books we were brought up on is one of the strongest ways we can do that.
