Margaret Howell, the designer and director of the timeless British brand of the same name, likes to celebrate her birthday with a swim in the sea. It’s a tradition she’s continued since she was a little girl in 1950s England; now a preternaturally youthful 72, her enthusiasm shows no sign of waning. Since buying her Modernist holiday home on the Suffolk coast, near the small town of Woodbridge, close to 20 years ago, these swims have become more and more frequent. “I’m outdoors here most of the time,” says Howell, whose modest four-bedroom retreat, designed by the Swiss architect Rudy Mock, sits on a narrow lane that meanders for half a mile, all the way down to the beach.
This starkly beautiful escape offers solace from the daily demands of the global brand that Howell established in 1970 with men’s shirts that were quickly sold by Paul Smith and Ralph Lauren. Her precisely tailored, utilitarian clothes for both men and women have found fans in the actor Bill Nighy and the multihyphenate Alexa Chung and continue to make her as popular in Japan (where the brand has over 100 stores) as she is in England. A native of South London — where she is currently in the throes of renovating a new home — Howell instantly connected to the remoteness of Suffolk’s Deben Peninsula, with its arable farmland and unpopulated coast where whole swathes of shoreline have been eroded by the incessant push and pull of the North Sea. “It’s not particularly pretty,” says Howell. “But it felt like home.”
It is here, while drying off after a dip in her favored sheltered bay, or taking a brisk walk along the coastline checkered with Napoleonic-era Martello towers that Howell started spotting tiny treasures among the shingles — and her collection of stones, bones, painted driftwood and seashore ephemera began. “It’s beachcombing really,” she says of the practice, which has resulted in small, artful assemblages of seaside finds that quietly inhabit every corner of every room of her home. On one stretch of her living room’s concrete mantelpiece, beside a vase of foraged horseradish leaves, is the following: a stone resembling a miniscule torso, a tattered red silk child’s shoe atop a hand-shaped wooden stand, a fossil, a flat piece of flint that mimics a fish and a driftwood plinth displaying a row of pebbles. Even the lumps of coal on the hearth found their way into her pockets on a recent coastal trek.
“It’s very hard not to come back with something from the beach,” she says with a glint in her inquisitive green eyes. Just yesterday, she collected a white stone with a purplish stripe that perfectly matches the mauve tone on the Lucienne Day-print curtains in her bedroom, where it’s now positioned on the windowsill. “I started by picking up bits of painted driftwood and playing around with them when I got home,” she explains. “You can get lost in it. I’ll look at my watch and hours will have past.” Her latest compositions, which flank the chimney breast, are made from mustard, kohl and vivid blue blocks of wood — some still complete with protruding nails — salvaged from the upper reaches of the beach.
These tactile configurations (which she meticulously photographs) are one of the ways Howell experiments with new colors, which may — or may not — find their way into her line’s naturalistic palette of muddied browns and greenish grays. “It’s difficult to pinpoint,” she says, when asked how this beachcombing connects to her work. “Things seep into you. I’ve always been attracted to making things out of found objects. I suppose aesthetically it’s about form, color, texture.”
It’s not only about aesthetics. On the low windowsill in her study, which leads into the garden, next to her other collections of Denby and Poole pottery, is a row of beach pebbles. It spells out the name and birth and remembrance dates of her son, Ed, who died in 2011. “Things mean different things at different times,” she says, the long grass casting its shadow on the blind behind the shrine. “I didn’t look for those stones. I just suddenly realized I could make a memorial. It’s amazing what gets revealed as the shingles get washed away.”
