Alice's Wonderland

Bohemian, Romantic And Whimsical By Turns, Star Designer Alice Temperley’s Edwardian Country House Is An English Idyll Steeped In Her Distinctively Ethereal, Glamorous.

- Serena Fokschaner

You don’t need directions to find Alice Temperley’s home. Just ask for the house with the disco balls and you’ll find it: a handsome, Edwardian mansion with sash windows, stone portico on fat columns and, yes, a pair of glittering dancefloor orbs. This Somerset-meets-Studio-54 touch is quintessentially Alice. Glamorous and bohemian, it’s a prelude to what the fashion designer calls her ‘wedding cake’ of a home filled with icing-sugar colours, decorative paint finishes and hand-worked textiles dashed over antique furniture. ‘It’s romantic and wildly impractical, which is why I love it, of course,’ says Alice.

It’s also a peaceful place to work. Lately, she’s been spending time in her studio, which opens on to the garden, painting and drawing designs for a new, hush-hush range, which will be launched later this year. ‘All I can say at the moment is that it’s an area of design that I’ve always experimented with, so I am really excited,’ says Alice. Temperley London’s main HQ, with its Union Jack-painted façade, is still in London, where she also has a West End shop. But two years ago, when the brand was ‘being restructured’ as she puts it, Alice decided it was time to redress her work-life balance by spending more of her week in Somerset. ‘London is about the team – here I have the space to think.’