The window of the British interior designer Tamsin Saunders’s childhood bedroom looked out onto the South Downs, the rolling hills that culminate abruptly in steep chalk cliffs along England’s southeast coast. The landscape’s rugged beauty instilled in her an affinity for the patterns and textures of the natural world. She spent her early years in the nearby forests, collecting fossils and gathering fragments of wood to decorate with paint.
Now, at 52, Saunders is just as devoted to such foraged treasures. Home & Found, the studio she established in 2013, specializes in sensitively renovating houses — often those of artists and makers — by building on what she discovers there. She has reimagined a mews house in London’s Kensington district by taking cues from its owner’s library and revived a painter’s Victorian vicarage in South London by developing a new color palette based on her collection of midcentury and contemporary canvases. “It’s about homes rather than design, and stories rather than objects,” says Saunders, who finishes her projects with pieces, such as Gothic Revival oak chairs and Delft ceramics, that she herself has picked up over the years.
Her own London home, which she acquired the year she opened her atelier, has an unusual heritage. The two-story, red brick terrace house was built as public housing in the 1930s, when Ham, the suburb in which it’s situated, was still a semirural village. Accordingly, the property came with an oversize garden — and, more surprising, five sheds. Saunders kept just one of these, at the very back of the yard, using the ramshackle structure for bike and tool storage but dreaming of one day transforming the space into a creative refuge. During the pandemic, when her three children — Jago, 15, Ottilie, 20, and Freya, 22 — and her late partner, Simon Cherry, were living at home, that fantasy became more insistent. With the help of a retired architect friend, Edward Potter, she sketched out a plan for a larger 220-square-foot rectangular building with a main work space, a small adjoining shower room and a storage area on the side. She had in mind the romance of old wooden barns and the sanctuary-like atmosphere of Manitoga, the Modernist home and studio of the American designer Russel Wright in the woodlands of New York’s Hudson Valley.
Though the family still calls the building the Shed, it now looks more like a rustic cottage. Reached via a grass path that winds through densely planted beds of echinacea, aster, nigella and Japanese anemone, it’s clad in unpainted oak planks that Saunders hand-oxidized to create a weathered effect. Inside, two skylights “conjure the feeling of a treehouse,” she says. With assistance from Freya, she’s covered every inch of the walls — painted in earthy browns inspired by the hues of bark and leaves — in decorative potato prints. Their blocky shield motifs reference the Moorish wall carvings at the Alhambra palace complex in Granada, Spain, and geometric forms are a nod to patterns found in the 15th-century rood screens at St. Enodoc, a chapel that was famously buried beneath Cornwall’s sand dunes for more than 300 years. The result, says Saunders, is a space that evokes “the quiet soulfulness of churches.”
The furniture, all antique, is similarly eclectic. Just inside the door is a seating area anchored by a midcentury bobbin-legged French table and a vintage Ercol bench topped with jewel-toned ewe cloth and raffia cushions designed by Saunders. To the right is a 19th-century Black Forest cupboard made from split pine branches atop which she has arranged 1930s Majorcan baskets filled with dried artichokes and thistles. On the west wall, a reclaimed bakery shelf holds ceramic pots and wooden bowls of snowdrop and narcissus bulbs. And by the north wall, a paint-splattered 1840s English wooden desk sits beneath a large casement window. On its sill are the same kinds of curios — sun-bleached shells and hag stones with naturally formed holes — that captivated Saunders as a child.
In the slanting light of early evening, the room, with its tonal palette and natural textures, takes on what the designer calls “an Andrew Wyeth air,” referencing the painter’s intimate depictions of private spaces. Though her daughters have been known to cover the floor with Moroccan cushions for sleepovers, this is largely a place for solitude, an escape from the world. Saunders comes to read and paint; Freya to hand-decorate lamps for her line of housewares. Occasionally, they’ll work in the Shed together, continuing their adornment of its walls. “Even though it feels as if it’s always been here,” says Saunders, “I still don’t think we’ve reached the end.” Like her favorite tide-smoothed pebbles, it will be made more beautiful with time.
