Shepherds Hut,
Kit Kemp

In the far corner of Kit and Tim Kemp's New Forest garden, shaded by silver birch trees and overlooking a small pond, there is a shepherd's hut made from oak by a local forester called John Harman. It sits on oak wheels, has a thatched roof designed to match the nearby hobbit hutch summerhouse, and when Kit invited me to paint its interior I spent what I can only describe as a glorious week on site doing exactly that. I was supervised throughout by Rupert, Kit's King Charles Spaniel, whose standards are high.

The Interior

The brief was American folk art: the naïve, painterly confidence of early eighteenth-century interiors, where the hand is fully present and the world depicted is a storybook ideal of the one outside. An enchanted, pastoral version of the landscape.

The walls are divided by a dado rail. Above it, a continuous scene: palaces, red-roofed houses, blue waters with white-sailed boats, friendly lions, trees dripping with pears, stylised clouds. Below it, jolly red cartouches containing prancing horses, painted with a deliberate, informal fluidity that mirrors the character of the original folk-art tradition. The curved, planked ceiling is deep blue, spangled with golden stars and a crescent moon.

Kit furnished the hut in her signature, fearless approach to pattern and texture: an eighteenth-century country oak writing desk, a faux-marble tabletop, fabrics from the Andrew Martin collaboration (Friendly Folk) and Molly Mahon's Oak. The painted world and the furnished world are in conversation throughout, which is what you want from a commission like this.

The Architecture

The Shepherd's Hut sits at an interesting junction in my practice. It draws on the same research into the painter-stainer tradition that produced the Shakespeare's Birthplace cloths and the Stiffkey Old Hall commission: the same understanding of how Elizabethan and vernacular painters thought about walls, how they built a scene, how they used the architecture of the room as the structure for the design. But it applies that knowledge entirely in the present, in service of a world that is joyful and immediate and unambiguously of our time.

It is also a reminder that the work does not stop at wallpaper and canvas. A three-dimensional structure, planked, curved, with a door and windows and a ceiling that follows the line of the roof: every surface is a different problem, and I find I am most interested in the projects where the architecture makes demands.

The hut was featured in The World of Interiors in May 2019, in Homes & Gardens in June 2021, and in Kit Kemp's book Design Thread, published by Hardie Grant in 2019. Photography throughout by Simon Brown.

I specialise in developing studio-led decorative schemes that can be meticulously tailored to these intimate spaces, allowing the architecture to become its own self-contained world. If you are thinking about such a commission, I welcome a conversation.