Country English style combines with Early American decorating, in an Old American House

good afternoon from Hopalong hollow we're inside this old house today and we're starting out with a cup of tea because this is November and because today's topic is very English so today's a venue is inside what would have been the parlor in this old house this is a turn-of-the-century house and I finally tracked down when this house was actually built it was the year the Titanic sank in 1912 I don't know about you but I'm always curious to see how other people decorate and I have had a few requests by some of you asking to see some of these rooms in this house I have done the bathroom but that's about the only room I have recorded on video in this house so today I thought I would show you what my style is and how I achieve it so the style that I'm showing you today is a style that I actually really didn't even know the name of it's just the way that I have decorated for as long as I can remember using a lot of rich fabrics textiles combinations a juxtaposition of colors patterns and layer upon layer of rich rich color it wasn't until recently that I realized that my style of decorating it's very English and I guess that makes sense because I have a very long English heritage mix that in with a little bit of Dutch and of course my America side so I would call this style English married to early American and I'm going to go through the room and just talk about a few things and how I think you can achieve this look if it's something you like it's a very warm and cozy look and I think that's what we're looking for for our families we're looking for coziness and beauty in our rooms the number one component of doing an english-style room is comfort so that's where we're going to start so number one being comfort we want a really cozy inn and welcoming atmosphere in an English style room and one way to do that is with ample helpings of pillows and cushions and quilts and blankets and textiles and Afghans just piled on really overstuffed couches and chairs and if you don't have overstuffed chairs you still want some padding on your chairs these sitting surface should either have a pad or a pillow so you've got a lot of cushions a lot of pillows a lot of places to sit and another component that really adds a lot to your room would be soft lighting soft romantic lighting I love lamps they're almost like sitting under a candle because they only light one section of your room so you might need six or seven lamps in a room but even if you have six or seven lamps in a room you're still getting that really warm and lovely and intervai ting and the ants that you can only get with labs you just cannot get it with overhead lights the way to bring comfort into a room and coziness into a room with this English style is by layering your rugs so instead of laying rug side-by-side you're actually lying them on top of each other you could lay one rug to rug three rugs one on top of the other Criss crossing the pattern so that each pattern shows and really giving it a really wonderful feel under your feet very very lush and comfortable and then of course you want a little bit of bare wood to show because you get that beautiful patina of your floor and mixing that with all these different patterns which we're going to talk about in a minute mixing patterns like crazy another way of layering would be on your windows and your window treatments so you could do one two three layers of curtains and drapes all in the same window and I guess I didn't mention color before which I guess I should have started with color but in this room basically got three major colors and that would be the Reds which are so oh so warm and I've got sort of a deep blue and then I added this yellow this splash of yellow because it really needed something to brighten it up a little bit the walls I think I've mentioned this before I don't like white walls I don't like stark white walls so these walls or more of an antique white but they're not just white because they've been stenciled all the way up to the ceiling and therefore they are also decorated walls making that very much of an American look combined with the English that leads us to another component and that is visually charged interiors and you achieve that by combining all kinds of beautiful vibrance lush rich patterns and textures and fibers all in one room now what ties these together and makes it so that it doesn't really clash because these really do not clash and they don't clash because you can see that what is bringing these together and harmonizing these are the colors so even though I've got several different patterns here I'm glad florals here I've got kind of rich tapestry red here deep red another botannical here on the couch and then lo and behold I'm using a completely different thing I'm using an American braided rug here early American braided rug next to a Belgium carpet but they all go together in an absolutely lovely tapestry of color at least I think so now if you mix that with something else which is very English a penchant for dark woods those dark woods really really bring out your colors no matter what you are using no matter what colors you're using if you are putting them against dark woods you really are going to make those colors pop so a couple of the areas in this room that have dark woods one of my darkest pieces here is a really wonderful old American piece and this is a walnut corner covered about 1840s super dark wood painted the interior yellow just so that these things would show otherwise they would not even show because it was so dark in there but here we have collections which is something else that we're going to talk about probably in part two of this video so the neat thing about visually charged interiors is that you cannot take in the room in one glance I mean you're always seeing something different you're always looking at another corner and you're noticing something you didn't see before and here's a perfect example of mixing patterns completely mixing patterns because here we've got the plaid and then we've got the colonial American pineapple motif which was actually a welcomed motif very popular during the colonial times and of course who were Colonials in America they were British people so these go really great together simply because I've tied the colors together and I've done it once again over here with the lampshade and I've done it down here a completely different pattern but look at this rich tapestry pattern and then we have this floral motif but it's picking up the Reds and the different shades of gold and slight greens in the pattern on the pillow and then I'm repeating this plaid again so this is not as easy as it would be as if you were just decorating a room in in whites and solid colors no this is a bit of a challenge to decorate this way but it's fun it's um it's a beautiful way to learn how to design and your room will never be boring because there's always something really intriguing or interesting to see in this room there's another example of picking up colors and textures and putting them together so this transfer where the red I'm following that red threw in in the room and then using a woven Runner table runner and then I'm picking up some blue here and this American stoneware salt glazed stoneware lamp jug and there's the red again with the lampshade and there you have that lovely soft lighting also little vignettes make a room very very cozy books flower pots vases of dried flowers and of course tea sets interesting thing about English style is that even in the smallest of rooms you've got to pack a lot of furniture into that room and this is a fairly small room but there are so many places to sit in this one room even though the furniture is packed in it still has a cohesiveness and it doesn't look too strange but one thing I love to do and I think this is something that everybody should learn to do is you do not have to put your furniture flat up against a wall you can caddy corner things I've que corner this cupboard I've caddy cornered this loveseat and behind that loveseat is a table on which I'm able to put these collections of things so you don't see the table behind it but all the associates there and now speaking of furniture in every room let's talk about something like this chair this is a Windsor chair and the Windsor chair has a very interesting history the story goes that King George the second in order to escape a rainstorm took refuge in a peasant cottage and was asked to sit at a very spindly chair with lots of little spindles but the chair was very comfortable and so he decided to have his furniture makers build him some chairs like this the town was a Windsor in which the peasants cottage was and therefore this chair became called the Windsor chair now this is more of an American version because the Americans really refined the chair in the 1740s and these Windsor chairs are very popular in colonial America for example Thomas Jefferson Ben Franklin George Washington Adams's all had Windsor chairs in their homes this one was the most standard it's a bow back Windsor and once again there's that dark wood so I would consider this an American and an English style and here is a fan back one sermon once again cushions and paths on all the seating areas another thing about the English style is that you can take all that furniture in your room and turn it into almost like separate little garden rooms so your compartmentalizing the room by adding separate little areas such as this area here where you can sit and have tea lunch so right here next to the couch is another compartmentalised area like the little garden rooms I was talking about with a small desk which opens up then there are books and all sorts of things inside this is simply an old you know I don't know I love it yeah I love it cuz it's dark red it's got a lock on it and then the top lifts up I believe this is just an old-school desk that's dark dark red oak but what ties it together on top the arrangements are all needle working items twists pins needles books and a needlework in the process and behind that another grouping of pictures very carefully arranged all needlework some of them were pieces that I did yes I did that in 1982 and some of them I'm a very old like this once 1910 from Holland and that one I did back in then mm-hmm 1980s I think so here another example of densely packed pictures on the wall for that beautiful Old English style now there's one thing for certain about this style of decorating if you are a minimalist you would not this look at all and that really is especially true when you look at the walls because you want your walls to be covered for example when it comes to hanging pictures on a wall with this style it's not less is more it's more is more you want to pack those pictures on the wall of course there is an art to hanging pictures and that's something you can learn to do if you're not familiar with hanging pictures there's just a few basic rules to follow first thing to know is that you do not have to have identical frames every single frame on this wall is different from the other one what they have in common is that most of them are old or antique frames but the main thing you have to keep in mind is that the subject matter inside the frame should be similar and in this case the first four pictures going up the stairs are all needlework so here's a miniature quilt and then we have some punched needle more punched needle and then a small piece cross stitch there on the end I'm going up a stairway there is an art to staggering those pictures up the wall and making them look balanced it's just something you really have to practice it could take hours it does take hours sometimes to hang pictures but once you've got them up and you like the arrangement then you don't have to move in for years except to clean the glass and kept picking up the colors above all those pictures are three little antique doll houses so you can see already that collecting things is a huge part of the English style up here at the top of the steps the frames once again are all different but the subject matter inside the frames is Sharon cheetah or paper-cutting as you would call it in German and I have cut many of these myself and I've also just collected these from other paper cutters this large one is what a mine this large payment paper cutting which is actually print of a paper cutting that one is mine as well but in between you can see the stenciling because the stenciling goes all the way up to the very tall ceiling oh that was such a scary job I'm just glad it was a wall paper although there is a bit of wall paper in here too at the top of the stairs and this is a wall which is fading fading fading it started out red and now it's just fading to a sepia sepia color I don't actually don't have any pictures on that wall because I want to see the wallpaper out so you can see how these pictures have been densely packed all the way down the stairway could used stair treads but I'm always afraid I'm gonna catch my heel and go tumbling headfirst down these steps because it happened to me once so I just don't want to do that anymore here by the window at the bottom of the stairs is a repeat of that pineapple motif which is across the room also but this time I mixed it with blue and white ticking which is really versatile wonderful old fabric I picked up the blue in there and something else I didn't mention as far as the stenciling goes this pattern I bought it years ago and I think it was a Ralph Lauren pattern yeah it was called Old Glory and you can see why it was called no glory but also when you look at parts of this design you can see right here it really is very much repeated in the designs right here on this pineapple fabric I mentioned earlier that with this style of decor you basically are taking up every shelf and every space and every little nook and cranny and it is never boring to look around in a room like this because there's always something to catch your eye and there's one thing about collections and that's the way you arrange them you don't want them to look like a large pod mess and and really to the untrained eye that might be the case you might think that this is just thrown together but really it was very carefully planned because we don't want it to turn into a muddle but we do want it to have some rhyme reason and purpose and it actually does this is I showed this collection before when I did it series on collecting teapots but you can see how everything just sort of goes together you know in my garden I am I love perfectly imperfect in my house I'm just a little more perfectionist I like things to be just so spinning wheels they're old spinning wheels and I'm a very lousy spinner and that's just because I've not really had time to learn but I wouldn't want to learn how to spin on these old wheels because they're pretty rickety this one's about 200 years old and then it's always good to have like a showpiece in your room I think this is my showpiece here which I've also shown you before this is my thatched house for Pipitea Trimble that I built it's really I don't have an antique a huge antique dollhouse an old English dollhouse but I certainly do have this building is called Trimble Manor for my little mouse tippity Trimble and usually there's a chair here so this would be another separate area where you could come and you could open up this drawer and I could actually work on some of the little items that I'm trying to make for this house I have little kits inside the drawer and wallpapers and all sorts of things I just pulled this out from the wall and I can get into the back of the dollhouse I should say the mouse house did this cupboard to show you that although these three shelves of collections look like they don't have anything to do with one another let's just take a look and see how they do starting on the bottom shelf this is the way that you can really figure out how to display things and you've got to really think about this so here we have this beautiful old pattern on this quilt pull the blues you can see some old baskets you can see one of these never cut the knee with this bowl I shouldn't really shouldn't have forgotten cuz I have a lot of ACE but you can see the blue band on that ball miss crock and here we have a goose decoy and old books in the back great set of American history books from the 1900s I love to read those and then we have some chairs silhouettes so what does anything on this shelf have to do with the one above it well plenty so on the second shelf we have the red coverlet we have the chairs repeated from the silhouettes we have several old baskets and we also have in the corners some little silhouettes in both corners and then traveling up to the third shelf with picking up that blue color from that quilt again with salt glazed stoneware this is american-made and on the very top shelf you can see some decoys these are carved wooden decoys and so really everything in this cupboard is connected in one way or another and very carefully put together I could not do this video about English style without showing you this French tapestry this French tapestry which actually goes quite well with an English style this is a 60 year old weaving but the originals were from the 15th century there was a set of six they will call the lady in the unicorn and they were rediscovered in a castle in a castle in France in 1841 and each one has a lady with a unicorn on one side and a lion on the other side and each one represents one of the five senses this one represents hearing and the colors just couldn't be better for what I'm trying to pick up in this room but it's just something I mean when I bought it I thought this is just really weird for me to buy this where am I going to put it turns out it looks great in this room and it really is a very cool sorry for the length of this video it's just been so long since I made one and in the last videos over the summer in the spring I was able to do a bouquet every time we did a video we had a bouquet so this time we're gonna do something different a new labor of tea with each video and this is my very favorite winter tea if you like really spicy sweet cinnamon tea and clovie tasting tea this is Harney and the sun's the best cinnamon spice tea I've ever had it's really strong of course you got to add a little sweetener to it if that's what you like and it is so delicious and you can buy this at Hardy and Sons online we can also get it on Amazon and it is one of the best cheese I've ever had and when you open the can it is so so delightful great winter tea so give that a try and another thing I'd like to say is that for some of you this may have been a seemed like a really dark room and that's because this is on a weird side of the house we are it's on the north side of the house it's got um I've been filming this video in the evening so the room is dark anyway it's a dark outside but we do have a room upstairs which is much more bright and cheerful english-style room and we'll do that one some other time so your room doesn't have to be as dark is's actually I kind of like dark rooms but I also like bright rooms so until next time thanks for putting up with me in this very very long video this is Jerry and we'll see you next time from Hopalong hollow bye

Channel: Jeri Landers of Hopalong Hollow

Views: 87,367

Rating: 4.9311399 out of 5

Keywords: nature, farm, garden, animals

Id: 1TjErQXrIi4

Length: 28min 26sec (1706 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 06 2019