Seaside-inspired interiors: bring the coastline home from this summer's staycation with the best high street homewares

Barbara Chandler (Insta: @sunnygran) finds the latest coastal-chic homeware

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Barbara Chandler7 August 2020

Bring cool coastal chic to your home for summer with the grey paints that Londoners love — Polished Pebble by Dulux, Paris Grey by Zoffany, French Grey by Little Greene and Purbeck Stone by Farrow & Ball — all hit hashtags on Instagram.

Or make stronger waves with an arty mural, tweaked to fit your wall exactly, from Surface View (surfaceview.co.uk). These digital specialists can access 15 museums and galleries for favourite paintings, travel posters, photo-panoramas and Japanese woodblocks, reinvented as wallpaper, tiles or blinds.

Find coral, crabs, seaweed and more at cult brand Mindthegap (mindtheg.com). Prices from £175 for three wallpaper rolls.

Harlequin has a pretty marine mural for children, in its new decor Book of Little Treasure, while Sanderson and the National Trust are doing prints, embroideries and weaves to celebrate country piles, landscaped gardens and bracing coastlines, as in Swallows at Sea, a linocut design with swooping birds in white on navy, priced £39 per metre (stylelibrary.com).

With waves, boats and gulls on fabrics, wallpaper, tableware and enamelware, Whitby by London’s Mini Moderns is also like a linocut, with new colours coming soon (minimoderns.com).

For fishier business, try Graham & Green, with boutiques in Notting Hill and Primrose Hill, and a flagship in Bayswater, where kitsch turquoise glasses stack into a Koi carp, £34 for four.

You’ll also find ever-popular pottery fish jugs that “gluggle” as you pour, along with seaside stickers that transform plain tiles, priced £10.95 for four shells.

Lamps with a faux coral base are £125, while wave-printed velvet shades start from £79 (grahamandgreen.co.uk).

Cornish artist Emma McClure handprints fish from hand-cut silk screens on to unbleached cotton and linen, for a superb painterly effect, with cushions from £52 —bespoke colours available.

Cream Cornwall web boutique, which also has local shops, does marine motifs on charming china, cushions, furniture and more (creamcornwall.co.uk).

Arty fish are on cushions at The Shop Floor Project, where mother and daughter Denise and Samantha Allan source treasures (theshopfloorproject.com).

But it’s “really weird specimens” that grab Sussex artist Emma O’Brennan-Pizer who’s dived deep into ocean illustrations for the bioluminescent viper, angler and lantern fishes, and a rare octopus, that adorn her Wilful Ink wallpaper at £200 a roll, plus cushions, £79, and mugs, £19 (wilfulink.com).

Linda Fenwick lines out rooms and covers furniture with shells of limpets, cockles, mussels, abalones and sea urchins, mostly recycled from food industries. Commissions come internationally from homeowners and interior decorators.

Now she’s making smaller items to supply nationwide, from photo frames and boxes at £55 to grandiose panels at £4,500 (lindafenwickshellsindesign.com).

Finally, for cheap beach chic, the Coastline edit at Argos and Sainsbury has indigo ombré cushions, £15, a printed platter, £8, a marine-striped tableware set, cutlery and glasses, £36 the lot, and a galvanised fisherman’s lantern (£15).