Bare, basic and beautiful

5 April 2012

Living close to RK Alliston, her garden store on the New Kings Road, gives 28-year-old Harriet Scott instant and dangerous access to all of her favourite things. "When I started buying for the shop," she says, "it was sheer self-indulgence. I thought, I'll have five of those for the shop, and one for me."

That is not to say that her two-bedroom flat is full of trugs, nesting boxes and her best-selling oilskin kneelers, because Scott's taste, as regulars of her store and mail-order catalogue know, runs as much to artisan chic as horticultural practicality, and caters for armchair gardeners as well as genuine double diggers.

The chairs made of rush in her living room, on sale in the shop, look as if they've been roughly woven at a Spanish roadside.

Lanterns of handpleated paper adorn the mantelshelf. In France, a craftsman makes Scott heavy stone candlesticks and lamp bases from hunks of recycled balustrade, as well as candelabras chopped from discarded grapevines; these decorate her dining room, but would be just at home on a veranda.

And the pretty glass bauble hanging from her window that encases a living flowerhead - fold the petals, insert with care - sells just as well as the stainless-steel weeding fork to Londoners who have nought but a shallow balcony and a deep, secret yen for a country garden.

Given the choice, Scott would rather live in the country, where she was brought up and where her heart belongs. Her plant nursery, which supplies her other equally successful landscape business, is tended by her mother in her large Surrey garden, originally designed by Gertrude Jekyll, no less. But as Scott needs to be on site, she fills her urban flat with touches that nourish her rural soul.

Buckets of giant hogweed, the countryside vagrant, are her current house flowers of choice, along with more exotic orchids, set in a smooth-cast, concrete bowl on her dining table. A stylish baby greenhouse that nurtures seedlings in spring sits year-round on the window ledge.

The bedroom window box billows with scented herbs and wild flowers, while the one in the living room, by sharp contrast, contains severely tailored wedges of green box hedging (she also, clever girl, sells wild flower seed mix especially for urban window boxes, as well as a linen spray that makes clothes smell of fresh country air).

"Even if I can't have a country garden in my flat," she reasons, speaking for many of us, "I can pretend that I do." Whether designing gardens, choosing merchandise or doing up her home, Scott sums up her style as natural, which means less dressing up, more dressing down. "I love things that are underdesigned, taken back to basics. Basically, I've completely distressed my flat.

"When I moved here two years ago, I ripped up all the awful green carpet, pulled the chipboard off the walls, concealed the brown and turquoise Victorian tiles around the fireplace with blackboard paint and painted everything in shades of cream.

"By knocking back to neutrals, I can add colour I like and be more flexible."

More importantly, keeping to natural tones - buff, cream, vanilla - enables Scott to focus on textures, a great love of hers, which explains the rawlinen-coverlet on her antique French bed topped with thick-knitted wool cushions that look like they've been knitted on giant needles, the rush chairs and plaited sisal floor cushions, the linen curtains with raffia tiebacks.

In her unfitted kitchen, as she calls it, the floor mats are coarse banana fibre and all the white goods are concealed under improvised curtains of hessian, like cut-up mailbags. You'd almost expect her to have pebbles underfoot instead of the stripped and painted floorboards through the flat.

Recycling is important to Scott and it runs like a creative seam through her work as well as her home. In her living room, an upturned fruit crate serves as a TV base, a vintage picnic rug enlivens the simple, cream calico sofa, and an ornamental light, shaped like a bunch of grapes, is made of recycled glass, a novel new line from Syria for the autumn catalogue. Several outsize wooden seed markers that might once have labelled rows of lupins in the Fifties now decorate the wall in her hallway, and look rather like primitive tribal spears.

And although re-using old car tyres conjures up visions of messy organic gardens, Scott has managed to make them chic and commercial, giving them fresh life as saddle-stitched, black weeding buckets, planters and soap dishes.

Her great-grandmother's battered old leather trunk - the one she took when fleeing from France in the war - makes an ideal coffee table. "My great-grandfather never forgave her because she took so long to pack he got caught and became a prisoner of war."

Personal touches, Scott maintains, are what give a home soul, a spirit: "I love things that are old, that have been used and loved."

On her living room wall are a set of pastels of the Provençal village Bagnols-en-Foret, drawn by her much-loved grandfather, an artist whose name was Rex Kingham Alliston, and who died just before Scott opened her first shop a few doors down from the present one, six years ago. He was, she says, her inspiration, hence the name of her business.

Despite Scott's love of rusticity, her flat has a sophisticated contemporary edge.

"You need strong elements, too, just as you do in a garden, to anchor a space. For instance, the livingroom shelves are made of MDF, but they're faced at the front to make them really chunky, which makes all the difference.

"There has to be a balance. I don't want everything olde worlde."

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