THE ART OF INTERIOR DESIGN Designer Fran Hickman shares her joinery wisdom, plans textiles for seating and gives tips for natural flooring trends

Designer Fran Hickman shares her wisdom on bespoke joinery, upholstered seating and natural flooring

• Homes & Gardens

• 1 Apr 2022

FOR US, good joinery is both practical and beautiful. It helps to reinforce the bones of the building and brings personality into a room.

We design bespoke joinery for all our projects. This is very important as it helps to maximise usable space, and this applies to almost every room. A good recent example is the storage in the bedroom of the young son of a client. He doesn’t need much hanging space so we’ve made a little wardrobe with drawers and a miniature hanging area and we’ve also added three drawers under the bunk bed that we designed.

It can bring feeling and style to a room in a discreet way. If you’ve got oak on the floor, we’ll often use oak for the joinery, too, because it appears to take up less space and that makes it easy on the eye.

Joinery doesn’t have to blend in. We recently designed a wardrobe for a client with wonderful wide doors in a reeded walnut, which are quite bold. A jazzy paint colour can take you miles and can be good when budgets are tight.

When we’ve got slightly higher budgets, we like to line wardrobes in cedar because it’s good for the clothes. I think it keeps them fresh, but it’s also very anti-moth: they hate cedar. Extra budget also allows us to add more details, such as using veneers into the recessed handles of cupboards.

Joinery demands careful planning. In a bedroom for example, if there are two of you, think about when you get dressed in the morning and where you want your things to be. It could be a little bit frustrating if you haven’t thought it through and you find yourself repeatedly walking across the room. →

THERE are a number of exciting natural materials that offer solutions for flooring around the home. Poured concrete is something that we are doing more of, and occasionally cork too, but we are still choosing a lot of timber floors with rugs. I also use a lot of natural fibres, such as hessian and rush.

I really enjoy designing rugs. At the moment, we’re making beautiful mohair rugs. I call them ‘troll rugs’ because of the long goat hair! Those are great in bedrooms and we create them in a variety of colours. I also work on a lot of custom rugs with Christopher Farr.

A lot of the companies that we use are experts in what they do. And so if you go to them with an idea for flooring, and if you have the time and are interested in being part of the process, they will be delighted to help you.

Stone is one of my favourite things, and I especially enjoy visiting stone yards. They’re extraordinary places and the slabs are like works of art. We often use stone for areas such as hallways, because it helps create a feeling of grandeur in a home.