An Early Love Revisited

I can trace my love of design to two key influences from my childhood and teen years: Cotswold Stone and William Morris. And now I’ve found a Second Life designer who shares both my loves – followmeimthe PiedPiper (known as Pip to her friends) who has a wonderful store called Sweetbay Designs on the Sweetbay sim.

My first encounters with Cotswold stone came early. When I was young, periodically we’d travel from our home in the Midlands to my aunt and uncle who lived south of London. Nowadays, that journey can be accomplished in two and a half, maybe three gruelling hours – firstly on the fairly pleasant (as motorways go) M40, followed by the hell of the M25 (rightly described by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett in their wonderful novel Bad Omens as a sigil of the Devil*) followed by the purgatory of local South London traffic.

But when I was young, the journey took most of the day, and was an adventure. We’d break it at Woodstock, and wander around the small town, looking at the cottages and shops in their Cotswold stone. But this would only be one of the many villages we passed or saw on signposts, with traditional English names like Chipping Norton and Long Compton, Great Tew and Shipton-under-Wychwood, and plump cottages with their thatched roofs resting on the stone that glowed honey gold in sunlight.

And, of course, now I live in Oxford, that gleaming golden city on the edge of the Cotswolds, with its ancient colleges that soak up sunlight and reflect it back atcha. And its beauty was one of the reasons I’ve long chosen to make my home here.

So I was delighted to discover a designer who is attempting to capture that in Second Life. You can see it here, perhaps, in Pip’s recreation of the Palladian bridge at Wilton – a lovely, meticulous design in itself to be found in the garden close to her store. But trace it through the day – from night to dawn to day to evening – and see how the colour of the stone changes over time.

Pip doesn’t just use Cotswold stone in her work – as you can see in her lovely copy of Monet’s famous bridge – but she does work with it beautifully – as you can see in her Orangery, both by day and by night. In fact, she has a wide range of Victorian greenhouses and other garden buildings, as you can see on her website: www.sweetbaydesigns.co.uk/

And my second early love? Well, that’s the designer William Morris, whose work I discovered as a teenager. He had a fascinating life, and produced an amazing array of materials of various kinds – including wallpapers, printed books, tapestry, stained glass, furniture, poetry … His passion for craftsmanship was an inspiration to the Art and Crafts movement.

I must say that I’ve been a little surprised not to see more examples of Morris’s work in Second Life. Perhaps I’m just looking in the wrong places; if any of you have come across it, please let me know!

But Pip has been using Morris wallpaper in her lovely Cotswold manor – as you can see here with – and, as is traditional in a certain style of Victorian design that echoes wainscotting, different styles of paper above and below the rail. I’d warn that you can only do that in large rooms – it gets a bit intense in a regular room!

Pip uses Morris designs in other parts of her work as well – do take a trip to Sweetbay Designs and see her take on the standard relaxing rug – it’s quite gorgeous.

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* “Many phenomena — wars, plagues, sudden audits — have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A.”

— from Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

This is because (in the book) the M25 was actually moulded by demonic forces during its planning so as to resemble, from space, a mystic demonic sigil.

from Wikipedia on the M25