Nicky was recently interviewed by Charlotte Sinclair for the Financial Times weekend supplement ‘How To Spend It’.

If you missed it, don’t worry, you can click here to read the interview in full.

Stop, in the name of burnt orange.

So it wasn’t long, after a glorious sunrise of pink and violet, that the Kodachrome oranges kicked in…

and Group of Seven aside….it really is a wonderful colour…in fact it could be a new favorite. I’m beginning to see it as a neutral.

and juxtaposed with white a la Leigh Bowery its too sumptuous for words.

…or a la Anthony Gormley!

so chic with our Canadian rustics.

and if there was any hesitation left (there wasn’t), the velvet lined interior of Ken the fiddlers divine violin case had Nicky and I swooning.

Back from spending five glorious days in 80 degree heat with throbbing blue skies in Toronto and the Canadian Lakes I find the great Freize is upon us. It has become even more enormous and on the opening night it was thronged to bursting. Only trouble is it somehow feels like being on a boat, the levels change and the flooring seems slightly sick-making, as ‘being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned’ to quote Dr Johnson. One gets the feeling of being all-at-sea (which indeed I am in the art works department) and that one is on a boat that is never going to dock and I kept looking around for the gang planks to the shore.

Showing at the same time, at Ben Brown’s gallery at Brooks Mews is Nabil Nahas. This artist’s work also seems to have a nautical flavour, as he is obsessed with starfish, indeed one canvas about 5 foot by 3 is simply scarlet starfish layered on top of one another, and strikingly beautiful. Another of his pieces, shown here, is more like a 3D vision of plankton shimmering under sunlight water.

Looking at it, I thought to myself ‘I’ve seen something like that before’ and of course then I realised, that I have in my flat in Chelsea, something very like it that I picked up for a song-or indeed less than a song- some years ago.

Could my artwork possibly be by Nahas I wondered? Well, no it couldn’t, really because it is simply a piece of carpet underlay I found lying around the office and had framed. Even so some dealers who have seen it were fooled into thinking gen-u-ine masterpiece.

Nicky visits for Thanksgiving, and of course the first thing we dish up is a spectacular show of violet and pink…

As part of Decorex, Tatler magazine offered one of their myriad readers the opportunity to visit the show and get inspiration for their own home whilst in the company with myself and Colette van der Thillart.

Jan Scott-Collier was the plucky prize-winner and we whiled away a couple of hours with colours and chintz’s and chat on a decorative scheme for her drawing room.

We loved spending time with Jan who was charming company and went away with plenty of ideas and hopefully grand schemes to transform her drawing room.