Feeling First

There's a question I used to ask people as a child. If you had your last few pennies in the world, what would you buy — a loaf of bread, or a bunch of flowers? Most people said bread. Sounds like a sensible answer, but I would laugh in their faces. Why would you buy bread when you could buy flowers? My mother still tells this story, fifty years on.

I think now that it wasn't really a question about flowers at all. It was an instinct, fully formed long before I had any language for it. That beauty is not a luxury to be afforded once the practical things are taken care of. It is one of the practical things. Food feeds the body. Flowers feed the soul. I would still buy the flowers.

Around that same age, my father took me to Crete. We stayed in a simple stone house — nothing fancy, no particular comfort to speak of. It was 1975, and Crete then had a rawness, an authenticity, still largely untouched by the outside world. Donkeys were the actual transport, not a tourist photograph. The electricity was unreliable at best, so most evenings we sat by candlelight, my father teaching us to play canasta, the cards lit by a single flickering flame. We hired an old VW Beetle to get around, rattling along dusty tracks with the windows down.

What I remember isn't a single moment but rather a series of sensations. Warm air wafting through open doors, pungent with olive groves, figs, wild thyme. The soothing hum of cicadas all day and into the night. The bray of donkeys, goat bells drifting on the breeze. The smell of my father's retsina, sharp and resinous. The briny fragrance of the sea, the base note underneath everything else. The taste of peppery olive oil, the sweet crunch of fried aubergine dipped in tzatziki. That particular Greek blue — sky and sea following you everywhere, colouring every waking moment. And the lace curtains. Hand-worked Greek lace, the light passing through them and casting these intricate patterns onto the stone floor, shifting as the breeze moved them, like a black and white film being projected in slow motion. I used to lie and watch it for hours.

I didn't have language for what was happening to me at age 7 or 8. But I felt something essential waking up in me. An awareness. Those stone walls against the white lace. The pretty against the austere. The warmth and ease of evenings that simply didn't exist in 1970s London. None of it existed in 1970s London. And I was enchanted by it. I think I have been striving for it ever since.

There is a reason scent does this to us more powerfully than any other sense. It is the only one wired directly into the brain's memory centre, bypassing conscious thought entirely. A sight or a sound has to be processed before it reaches us. A scent simply arrives, and with it, whole years return in an instant.

Elizabeth von Armin understood this sensory impact. In The Enchanted April, her characters arrive at a crumbling Italian castle and are undone almost immediately by the sensory abundance of the place — if you haven’t read it I highly recommend it…

That is what that stone house in Crete was doing to me. Not decorating my childhood. Confirming I was alive in it.

Two memories. One about what we choose to value. The other about how the senses can make us feel part of something larger than ourselves. Between them, they are where everything I do now actually began.

Because feeling comes first. Before you see a room, you feel it. Light, texture, scent — these things reach us before thought does, and they stay with us long after the visual details have faded. I can't tell you the colour of the bedspread in that stone house. I can tell you exactly how the air smelled.

This is why, when Dave and I created our own candle range, we didn't begin with fragrance notes. We began with feelings. Three candles. Three aspects of a life. Three different longings.

The Romantic Minimalist is the English rose in me. The part that grew up reading The Secret Garden and never quite left it. My love for that particular beauty of overgrown English gardens — tumbling, frothy, abundant, generous — and to the poignant edge that beauty always carries with it. There is a Patrick Kavanagh poem, Wet Evening in April, that catches this feeling perfectly. That aching awareness that beautiful things are also passing things. A tangle of sweet pea and peony in a rusty bucket. The smell of wisteria through an open door. Prettiness with an edge. That is what this candle is.

Île de Ré is the part of me that is always, slightly, wanting to be on holiday. That particular feeling — of possibility, of freedom, of creativity unclenched — is something I am always searching for in my interiors and never quite find as completely as I do beside the sea. The French island where Dave and I return again and again gives me back the feeling of that stone house in Crete. The warm breeze on skin. The scent of vegetation on warm air. Salt and orange blossom drifting together in the heat. The contrast of simple whitewashed walls with blue shutters. The same longing, found again decades later on a bicycle on a French island, salt in my hair, going nowhere in particular.

Cabin Fever is Dave. But it is also the wilderness in me — the part that watched Little House on the Prairie and Calamity Jane as a child and never lost the romance of it. Floral dresses and rough sawn wood walls. The smell of a log fire, leather, cedarwood, the expansive freedom of open land. Dave's influence on everything we do together is exactly this — a masculine counterweight, an earthiness, a reminder that beauty needs roughness to sing against. This candle is that. Rustic but never rough. The shelter and the wildness, side by side.

Three scents. Three memories made physical. Three ways of coming home to yourself.

I think now of the girl who chose flowers over bread, and the same girl lying on a stone floor in Crete watching lace shadows move in the breeze. She knew something I have spent the rest of my life trying to build a career around. That beauty is not decoration. It is essential to how we feel, every day, in the spaces we live in.

Feeling first. It is, and has always been, where everything begins.

Atlanta x

White has been the backdrop to all of it. The white lace against the stone floor in Crete. The whitewashed walls of Île de Ré. I fell in love with white on a Greek island at seven years old without knowing it — and I have been working with it ever since. If you want to explore what white can do in your own home, my guide Decorating with White is a good place to begin. You can find it in the link below.

Get Decorating with White here