Written by Natalie Aldridge.
Beauty has been on my mind lately. As an interior designer myself, I spend much of my life not only designing beautiful spaces but considering why it matters, why we seek it out, and why certain things stay with us long after we first notice them. A room, a garden, a beautiful object, even a particular scent can lodge itself somewhere in the back of the mind for years without us even realizing it. The desire for beauty, in one form or another, is intrinsic to the human experience.
Few people understand this more than Charlotte Moss. Over her forty-year career, Charlotte has built a world that extends well beyond decorating. Her work encompasses gardens, antiquities, entertaining, travel, and a general curiosity about how we live.
In her latest book, Charlotte Moss: At Home in Virginia, Charlotte takes us inside the Charlottesville home and garden she created with architect Stan Dixon, landscape designer John Howard, and a remarkable group of craftspeople. The result is a true testament to the importance of beauty. But this is not simply another book about interiors. It is the story of how a lifetime of collecting, looking, and refining one’s eye eventually becomes a home.
Charlotte begins with a wonderfully simple declaration: “Every house tells a story.” For her, this house is also a homecoming, a return to Virginia, family, familiar landscapes, and the memories of growing up there. After forty-seven years in New York, Charlotte has returned to her roots and wanted a home that fostered the spontaneity of family dinners, Saturday morning coffee, shooting pool, a trip to the cinema, or simply being close. “A home is about family,” she writes.
There is something particularly interesting about seeing a designer of Charlotte’s experience design a home for herself. After decades spent interpreting the lives of clients, what does she choose to surround herself with?
“Designing a house is an act of optimism,” Charlotte writes. She describes the places we have seen and, importantly, felt, the people with whom we experienced them, and the books we have accumulated as forming a personal “storehouse of information,” waiting for its moment to be called upon.
I love this idea because, as designers, so much of what we do is simply look and collect thousands of visual snippets. We travel to see houses, wander through museums, photograph a cornice, save a scrap of fabric, try to encapsulate a particular color we saw in a film, or become completely fixated on some tiny detail no one else seems to notice. Most of the time there is no immediate purpose to any of it. Something has caught our eye, so we tuck it away for future use.
Ideas gathered over a lifetime find their way into the house in unexpected ways. The faux sandstone Charlotte once admired at Hillsborough Castle inspired the entrance hall, while the color of the living room came from the antique ivory bracelets she wears on her wrist. For years, she had also kept a folder of images for the house she might one day build, rather wonderfully titled “Butterflies in the Living Room.” When that house finally came to be, those collected references helped shape not only its rooms, but the feeling Charlotte wanted them to possess: “informality, ease, and joy.”
And I must say how much I love these interiors. They are simply stunning, beautifully thought through without ever feeling overworked. More than anything, you can tell that Charlotte has poured her soul into this house. It feels deeply personal, filled with the things she loves and the ideas she has carried with her over a lifetime.
Perhaps that is part of the answer to the question I began with. Beauty matters because we carry it with us. We rarely know, when we first encounter something, why it has affected us or where it might eventually lead. Charlotte’s At Home in Virginia is a rather wonderful reminder of that.
For on going inspiration, be certain to follow @charmossny on Instagram and be certain to take a peek at Charlotte’s work here. And of course, make sure to purchase your copy of the book here.
x Natalie
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Follow Natalie on Instagram: @natalieealdridge
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