Emma Vans Agnew is a woman on a mission. She’s been putting the style into Sussex homes – and the interiors industry – for the last 24 years and is determined to make country living chic not just in the county but around the world.
The founder of F & P Interiors, which offers traditional designer wallpapers, fabrics and furniture with a contemporary twist, has worked on prestigious projects for well-known clients throughout her career including Claridge’s Hotel, London, Charlie Chaplin’s lakeside retreat near Montreux, in Switzerland, and the refurbishment of Princess Diana’s family home Althorp House for her father John Spencer, the late Viscount Althorp and his wife Raine Spencer.
They were ‘fantastic times’ she concedes but Emma finds just as much, if not more, enjoyment bringing to life a vision for a more down-to-earth client who wants to refresh or totally change the look of their home.
‘I love interior design,’ she says. ‘I’m passionate about pulling schemes together. I’m still very hands on and work hard to interpret what a client wants for their home and won’t finish until it looks amazing.
‘That’s why we now make bespoke furniture for our clients because we couldn’t always find the right piece that was the right size or shape. Now we can adapt everything to fit any nook or cranny in a client’s home so we can ensure it looks perfect and will last.’
But then Emma’s always had an eye on the future and the next big thing – in design and business. It’s why she started her company in a spider-filled old stable at the bottom of the garden in her West Sussex home while raising three young children, Charity, Charlie and Jamie.
She’d just moved to the county in 2000 after a career in London working for Colefax and Fowler, an international designer and distributor of luxury wallpapers and furnishing fabrics.
‘I’d always had a close connection with Sussex as my grandparents lived near Chichester and I had memories of lovely summers spent here growing up,’ Emma, 64, says. ‘But when we moved here even though I had three very small children I didn’t want to be sat twiddling my thumbs.
‘My husband Mark suggested I open a shop but then we thought about the internet and realised there were no other e-commerce companies focussing on the designer homes and interiors market. It was new territory – a gap I wanted to fill before anyone else spotted it. I contacted a lot of fabric and wallpaper suppliers, and they were initially against it as they couldn’t understand how it would work.
‘But I knew it would. Customers would be able to see and buy a huge range of interior products without having to leave their home or go to a showroom, which was unheard of. It was an experiment, but I didn’t doubt that it would be a success even though it was a lot of hard work and a very slow process.’
Emma got a dial up connection to a computer in a dilapidated stable which was originally destined to be her children’s playroom, which is why she had painted the ceiling blue to represent the sky complete with white fluffy clouds. ‘But it was so cold in there they refused to use it,’ she laughs, ‘and so I went in there with the spiders and little mice running up the walls.
‘I did everything,’ Emma says. ‘I was doing 20 hour days but I loved it. From the start we offered designer wallpaper, curtain and upholstery fabrics and lighting. I dealt with the suppliers, the clients, the orders, the packaging, the designing, customer service, putting everything online. My children used to tease me because I knew every code for every fabric and wallpaper off by heart.
‘Our collections were quite small back then. It was quite a jump for our retailers to embrace the internet but they could see I believed in it, and so they decided to believe in me, I suppose.’
It was five years before the business, then called fabricsandpapers.com, began to get any real traction but eventually Emma could afford to employ an assistant and finally it became so successful they moved to new premises – and the rest, as they say, is history.
The rebranded F & P Interiors – ‘we added the interiors so that our name encompasses everything we do’ – moved to new premises in 2011 with a large showroom in a converted barn in rural Woodmancote, near Henfield, while she lives in a 17th century farm house which she has decorated to look ‘contemporary cosy’ using many of the 15,000 fabrics, wallpapers and home furnishings from her online design library.
‘I curate absolutely everything we sell,’ Emma says, ‘so if I don’t like it then it won’t go on the website. Obviously, we note, and try to stay ahead, of the trends, but it doesn’t mean we slavishly follow them.
‘I like very traditional with a contemporary twist. I enjoy seeing everything beautifully crafted and we now offer a range of furniture that is built to last.
‘It also has to be fully adaptable, so if you are very tall we can add depth to the sofa or if have a bad back, for example, we can make our sofa back higher. Our sofas are all hand made with a hard wood frame in Sussex and that frame comes with a 25-year guarantee.
Everything should have longevity. If you buy one of our sofas then your children should inherit it, and their children, too. We don’t want it to be used and then chucked out in a couple of years.’
That’s not to say that the designer fabric and wallpaper collections, which features William Morris, Christian Lacroix, and Ralph Lauren, aren’t expanding all the time – especially with modern Sussex-based artists’ work. Emma finds Sussex designers such as Molly Mahon, Fiona Howard, and Mimi Pickard who offer something ‘different and exciting – I love finding and representing local talent.’
Currently florals, birds, pinks and green designs are popular as are murals which can be featured over an entire room or just on one wall. ‘These are pieces of art as much as they are wallpaper,’ Emma says. ‘They’re not cheap but they are hand painted and made to scale to fit a room or wall, and they are absolutely exquisite.’
Names like renowned interior designers Kit Kemp, Andrew Martin, and Spanish design house Coordonne trip off her tongue while she states that Americans love the quintessentially English fabrics, and the work the company did with Charleston House a few years ago. She would love to do more such projects.
For now though, Emma is focussing on creating a new, small fabrics collection they are calling Follies based on the ones in Brightling built by MP ‘Mad’ Jack Fuller – a wealthy landowner – under her own brand Mad Jack Design House. ‘We are still working on it, but I think we will be launching this year. It’s totally Sussex inspired and very exciting.’
Emma loves living and working in the county. ‘Every morning when I get out of the car, I have a wonderful view of the South Downs with a variety of shades and colours,’ she says. ‘Whatever your mood it is totally uplifting and inspiring for the day ahead.’
As well as curating the collections, Emma and her team offer an interior design service to help clients create homes that they want to live in for years to come. Whether that’s a single room makeover or an entire home, they use their extensive design knowledge and relationships with the very best design houses to create a modern take on a traditional country house style while taking in the personality and needs of individual clients.
Recent projects include taking a seaside apartment that was a blank canvas and creating a sophisticated but relaxing environment for the client to enjoy and entertain in at weekends. ‘Another was a full makeover of a country house,’ Emma says, ‘where we worked closely with the client to deliver a project that complemented the property’s heritage and setting.’
She still sometimes finds it incredible to see how far she’s come from her humble beginnings in the stable. ‘I never imagined I would still be working on it now and that this website would be so successful,’ she says. ‘I’m so proud of it, but I never forget where I started.
‘When I was working for Colefax and Fowler, I remember going to a flat in Cadogan Square in Knightsbridge, London, with a designer called David who I was thrilled to be working with. He had done an amazing job and it looked beautiful. The client was coming to see it and David looked at me and said: “Emma – hoover.” It wasn’t quite what I signed up for but now I realise everything has to be done before the client walks in. So, I still do the vacuuming before showing the client the finished house. I want it to be perfect.’
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