Printed matters

Throughout the house, Speronella’s designs, block-printed onto antique sheets, have brought new life to inherited furniture and proved economical as curtains. A modern suzani was used to make the ottoman, with a scattering of red-and-white cushions made from blanket material from The Cloth Shop.

There’s nothing like a budget to quicken the creative pulse, as Speronella Marsh well knows. Faced with the task of restoring her home, a red-brick manor framed by low-forested Shropshire hills, which used to belong to her husband Ben’s parents, one of the first things she did was count the windows. There are 94 – and all of them needed new curtains to replace the sun-scorched chintzes and silks that had been installed by Ben’s grandparents in the 1950s.

Designer fabrics were out of the question. So Speronella decided to make her own. ‘For years I’d been hoarding antique French sheets that I’d found in markets. I realised they’d make ideal curtain material,’ she says. The texture of the linen, she explains, lent itself to block-printing, which she mastered by enrolling on a workshop at the Chelsea Physic Garden. The dining table became a workbench strewn with sketchpads and brushes. As the prints emerged, friends took note of the painterly designs – acorns, fluttering seaweed – in clear, fresh colours. Orders trickled in and a business began.

‘Necessity is a good thing because it forces you to be creative. We had so much work to do that I had to be economical,’ she says. It is a theme that runs throughout their home. Jolly, junk-shop oils, accumulated since her 20s when a dealer allowed her to pay in instalments, jostle for space in corridors where the restored parquet floors glow in spring sunshine. No two rooms are alike… one is powder blue, another luminous yellow, and toiles collide with stripes in a joyful pot pourri of old and new.

In her previous career, Speronella worked for garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith and she has an instinct for colour and form. Creating a moodboard wasn’t for this resourceful Italian. The look here is artistic and expressive: ‘There’s always one thing that inspires me and then everything falls into place,’ she says.

‘Handsome, not beautiful’ is how she describes the property that Ben, an entrepreneur, inherited in 2013. Dating from 1840, the gables and stone-framed bays give it t