Nina Campbell on the Art of Summer Dining

Image Credit: Create Academy

Nina Campbell on the Art of Summer Dining

In Scotland once with a friend and our families, we drove for two hours to get to one of those wonderful beaches on the West Coast with pink sand. As we drove the sun was out and we kept saying: “Who are those idiotic people who go to Turkey when we have pink sand and sun here?” But as we lay on the beach, I felt a drop on my head which at first, I thought was a bird poo, but it was in fact a huge, fat raindrop and within five minutes we were drenched to the skin. So that put paid to my idea of a summer picnic.

Similarly, I find if I lay the table outside at home, it just invites the rain, so I tend to leave the doors open and sit outside for drinks and come in to eat in the summer.

I have a cupboard full of tablecloths, including Lisa Corti’s insanely colourful ones which work well for the summer.

Then I have about 60 napkins that she does all in organza, so everyone gets their own different colour – all through the pinks, and the blues and the yellows. We could talk for a couple of days on tablecloths and napkins, they just accumulate. I had a great friend who was brilliant at tables, who always said “your rooms are your cupboards” when it comes to laying the table. So, she might have had a collection of blue and white porcelain in the middle of the table, and then that whole table would be blue and white with the china and napkins. She had an expression “shop the house,” which I think is quite fun.

For my book club I once chose a book about a Chinese dancer called Mao’s Last Dancer by Li Cunxin, so I went and found a whole lot of Chinese things from around the house for the table and we had a Chinese dinner that night.

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Not being frightfully good at flowers, I bought these 19th century glass ice buckets which are quite easy because you just gather a huge bunch of something and then shove them in. Elsie De Wolfe [revered as America’s first interior designer] said low, low, low rather than high, high, high and I think that’s absolutely true when it comes to flowers – there’s nothing worse than somebody hearing half the conversation on the other side of a flower arrangement. John Carter is my serious, wonderful florist who I adore and does the really special things – I’ve worked with him for God knows how many years now, since we were starting out, and he just always gets it.

Image Credit: Create Academy

In my dining room is a huge mirror-fronted cupboard that was built for me by William Yeoward with an N on the top to house all my china and glasses. Inside everything is lined up like soldiers which makes laying the table very easy. I don’t like saving things for best. Amongst my collection are wonderful plates I bought from a shop in Porto Heli in Greece, as well as antique ones that have little blue and white flowers on them. They’ve inspired my Marguerite Collection with flowers decorating the border of the bone china, a design which makes you think of summer and the English garden.

I don’t mind china being mixed, because you just have to buy the bits when you see them, rather than waiting for a whole set.

There can be something rather nostalgic about it. We had Luneville china for breakfast and lunch at home when I was growing up and funnily enough, I was in a flea market in Paris when I spotted exactly that, but it was black and white without the flowers and I suspect it must have been a second and they’d just abandoned it. It conjured up my childhood and I bought up masses of it – it’s just that wonderful shape that the French do. As it’s black and white only, you can put an underplate in a different colour. You can either use it with bright colours, or sometimes I use it with my black tablecloth when I make it rather sultry with candles and proper silver.

The British can be quite tame when it comes to laying the table. My first job was doing the wedding lists at The General Trading Company when I was only about 17 years old. These brides would come in and go for the white and gold lines, and I was always trying to persuade them to choose something more exciting for pudding plates or cheese and telling them that they didn’t have to be the same. My absolute thing I hate most is matching side plates. I’m not a cook, so instead my creativity goes into laying the table.

Images taken from A Definitive Guide to Decorating by Nina Campbell available from Create Academy.
https://www.createacademy.com/online-courses/interior-design/nina-campbell/a-definitive-guide-to-decorating