Rizzoli
As a child, I was captivated by a painting that hung in my aunt’s house in Oxfordshire. I had never met my grandfather and was therefore particularly fascinated by this portrait of him as a young man in Cape Town, painted by his brother. It is extraordinarily atmospheric. Of course, I didn’t appreciate then that the chair he sat in was rattan, but now I wonder if those hours spent gazing at Grandpa might have subliminally instilled in me a love of wicker furniture. A little far-fetched maybe, but I am not sure how else I can explain why, in my late teens, I developed such a devotion to rattan.I first became aware of furniture made of plant fiber while in Egypt, and saw not only the extraordinary pieces with which Tutankhamen was buried but also the ubiquitous café chairs and tables made from the date palm. Around the same time, I started buying old pieces of rattan furniture, cluttering up my long-suffering parents’ house and stables with old daybeds, chairs, tables, and baskets. The crowning moment was when I arrived home triumphantly bearing an Edwardian rattan cart with a fabric canopy, designed to carry a child pulled by a large dog or small pony. It was stamped “Dryad,” which I was later to discover was the most important English rattan workshop, founded in 1907 by the Arts and Crafts patron and social reformer Harry Hardy Peach.