On 2 February interior designer Emma Burns and gallerist Tobias Vernon joined design journalist, and Friends of Kettle’s Yard events committee member, Aimee Farrell for an evening conversation in the Kettle’s Yard house.
Titled The Art of Interiors, the conversation considered the influence of founder Jim Ede on the modern interior, and explored the role of art in creating a home. Burns has described the dining nook, downstairs in the Kettle’s Yard house, with its American elm table, as “one of the best dining rooms ever.”
I like to keep very quiet in a room, and to have it always still; for this reason I want it to be orderly. It is to me as if it were a pool of silence, and just as a pool when stirred loses its transparency, so a room is stirred by movement. Most people’s rooms are like hurricanes.
– Jim Ede in A Way of Life
As an Art History student at Cambridge University, Vernon was a beneficiary of Kettle’s Yard’s Student Picture Loan Scheme, hanging a simple sketch of a fishing trawler by St Ives artist Bryan Pearce on the wall of his college rooms. Ede’s aesthetic went on to inform Vernon’s harmonious yet eclectic approach to curation at 8 Holland Street, the design gallery and practice he founded in 2018, which now has locations in London and Bath.
“Quiet beauty is the perfect description of Kettle’s Yard,” says Burns, who is known for her warm, timeless and art-led English style. “Everything is so considered.” Joint managing director of Sibyl Colefax & Fowler – England’s longest running decorating firm – Burns is currently working on projects from Paris to Palm Beach. “I try to make the home a background for the people who live there,” she says. “You can paint a picture of people.”
Part of a series of events exploring the wider influence of the Kettle’s Yard beyond the art world featuring Paul Smith to Jonathan Anderson, this was first to consider interior design. “Kettle’s Yard isn’t just an inspiration to artists,” agrees Kettle’s Yard Director Andrew Nairne. “It’s an inspiration to a wider circle of people from across the creative industries.”
