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Archive Dive: Laura Ashley’s American Style
Welcome to Archive Dive—my new excuse to obsess over the absolute treasures hiding in House Beautiful’s 130-year-old archives. Every month, we’ll dig up a favorite story from the past (epic room makeovers, wildly bold design swings, and style moments that were way ahead of their time) and talk about why they still resonate today. It’s part history lesson, part design deep-dive, and 100 percent a love letter to the iconic taste that’s defined HB for over a century.
—Jo Saltz, House Beautiful Editor-in-Chief
In February 1985, House Beautiful ran the first-ever American home decorated by English textile designer Laura Ashley. Just a few years prior, Ashley published her first home book, The Laura Ashley Book of Home Decorating, and before that, her first home catalog. Ashley’s romantic style, anchored in dainty floral prints and stripes drawn from her rural Welsh upbringing, was gaining global popularity.
When she died unexpectedly just six months after this story was published, according to reporting by the BBC, there were 220 Laura Ashley shops open in 12 countries. The home she created for this lucky American client, a man who gave her free rein on the design, is quintessentially Ashley with striped wallcoverings, antique artifacts, and even a homespun canopy bed that’s pinned to the ceiling.
Decorating at Retail: Laura Ashley’s American Style
When Laura Ashley decorates parlors such as this one she engages in honest-to-goodness homework and comes up with a wealth of new fabric, wallpaper, and furniture designs. “From the outset,” she says, “I’ve been trying to give everyone a chance to furnish a room as if it had been done by an interior designer. What better way than to build my home furnishings collections from the point of view of specific houses?”
In her designs for 1985, this c. 1830 Greek Revival cottage in Sag Harbor, New York, plays a special role—it’s her first American house. Not surprisingly, she and her young client, an art consultant, saw eye-to-eye from the start. He felt that the parlor should strike a balance between period elegance and curl-up-by-the-fire ease. She responded by pairing a bright faux stipple wallpaper with a formal leaf border.
For the curtain fabric, Mrs. Ashley borrowed blooms from a patchwork quilt. For furniture, she adapted a Regency-legged slipper chair and a Second Empire love seat, tempering their formality with more comfortable proportions.
Shopping List
- “Cordelia” floral print (on curtains): $12 per yard
- “Tudor” chair in “Delhi” print: $800
- Love seat in “Cordelia” print: $1,600
- “Stipple” wallpaper in primrose/apricot: $17.50 per roll
- Leaf wallpaper border: $6.50 per roll
“The light, I suppose, is the point where your decorating begins. When you stand in a room, it gives you a feeling for what the colors should be,” says Laura Ashley, who played up the parlor’s afternoon glow with yellow and apricot stippled wallpaper. Even at night the room is wonderfully luminescent, says the owner, who finds it most beautiful by candlelight.
The newly remodeled kitchen basks in another kind of light—the clarity of the morning and midday sun—that floods in through a high fanlight, garden doors, and windows. Since color couldn’t rival the beauty of the ever-changing light, Mrs. Ashley kept the room immaculately white, warming it only with a painted country table and chairs. In the less sunny dining room, the quality Mrs. Ashley focused on was that of light shimmering on beautiful wood.
Since she likes to let the furniture dictate her fabrics and their design, she responded to the formality of the owner’s yew dining table and chairs with a stylized tulip and leaf wallpaper motif borrowed from a 17th-century Italian book cover. Its creamy background makes the dining room a serene visual link between the kitchen and the parlor.
Dining Room Shopping List
- “Tulips” wallpaper: $17.50 per roll
- “Tulips” fabric on festoon window shade: $12 per yard
- “Regatta” fabric on dining chair cushions: $12 per yard
How do you give a bedroom under the eaves a feeling of grandeur? That’s the challenge Laura Ashley faced twice in these mirror-image rooms. In the guest room she used stripes to lead the eye upward, an illusion furthered by the high-posted bed. Carefully measured so that it fits neatly under the ceiling’s slope, it seems, at first glance, to be as tall as a stately four-poster.
In the main bedroom, Mrs. Ashley relied on one bold vertical stroke: a bed canopy ingeniously secured to the ceiling. It’s framed with three valances (actually balloon shades that can be lowered at night) that she stapled to the wood boards fastened to the ceiling. Two sets of corner rods support the end curtains, and the canopy’s “sky” of fabric is shirred on two parallel rods, hooked to the ceiling.
An upholstered headboard completes the cocoon of fabric. “When Mrs. Ashley asked if I wanted a canopy bed, I said, ‘wonderful,’” recalls the owner, but he isn’t sure he would have suggested it. Now suitably masculine in geometric blue and white prints, the canopy is one of his favorite touches in the house.
Guest Room Shopping List
- “Cricket Stripe” wallpaper in terra-cotta/moss/cream: $17.50 per roll
- “Simla” terra-cotta print (on club chair): $12 per yard
Main Bedroom Shopping List
- “Harbor” fabric (on bed curtains and headboard): $12 per yard
- “Kent” chair in “Sea Spray” fabric: about $700
