Tess's studio sits in the same East Sussex landscape that shaped that history, and its influence has shaped how she sees the world: the hooped border painted along the fireplace in Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell's studio. The imperfect brushwork of Quimper faience. The sun-drenched, earthy palette associated with that period of English decorative painting. These are threads she has studied, absorbed, and reinterpreted over years of her own practice painting murals inside historic buildings, learning how colour shapes atmosphere and how a room becomes a world.
Designed between Tess's East Sussex studio and PORTA in New York, the collection draws inspiration from the history of Charleston Farmhouse and the wider Bloomsbury Group, where Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant let painting escape the frame entirely — spilling across walls, wardrobes, fireplaces, and ceramics. The collection balances Bloomsbury-inspired geometrics with the charm of antique European pottery, the kind of painted majolica, faience, and lustreware that circle collected on their travels and crowded onto tables — a spirit that sits at the heart of what drew Tess to this world, and by extension, at the heart of these pieces.
Hand-painted in Portugal, the collection comprises multi-use plates and bowls in two colorways — Azure and Terracotta — each piece unique. Set together, the collection feels carried down: assembled over years of long lunches, scattered delphiniums, and the occasional overcooked tart. The two palettes are designed to be mixed, matched, and layered across the table — however you lay it, the effect is joyful and unabashedly alive.
A house that never stopped being painted
To understand where this collection finds its inspiration, it helps to picture Charleston as it actually was — not a house preserved behind velvet ropes, but a living, working mess of creativity. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved there in 1916, fleeing London for the flat light and wide skies of the Sussex Downs, and they never really stopped decorating it. Every surface became a canvas: lampshades, bed frames, door panels, the sides of cupboards. If something sat still long enough, someone painted it.
What drove them wasn't aestheticism for its own sake. It was a genuine belief, inherited partly from Roger Fry and the Post-Impressionist wave he'd brought crashing into London just years before, that the division between fine art and applied art was a class fiction — a way of keeping beauty out of ordinary life and locked inside galleries. At Charleston, that boundary simply ceased to exist. Dinner plates were as worthy of attention as oil paintings.
Their letters tell the same story. Writing to Vanessa in April 1926 — scrawled in a hurry, ink blotted — Duncan mentions that Maynard Keynes has offered ballet tickets, that he's gone ahead without her, that he'll be back as soon as he can. He signs off, almost as an afterthought, by telling her: "Do have some supper — there is some wine in the hall." It's a throwaway line, really — but it captures something essential about the Bloomsbury sensibility: the same attentiveness they brought to a canvas, they brought to a table set for one person eating alone. Nothing was too small to be considered. Nothing was purely functional.
An artful way of seeing
That's the inheritance Tess has carried forward — not as pastiche, but as a way of looking at the world that she's made her own. For nearly a decade, she has painted murals inside some of Britain's most extraordinary buildings: an 18th-century orangery in Gloucestershire, a turreted room in the Old War Office overlooking Whitehall. Her work is rooted in research — in the vernacular of folk painting, faience, and the decorated domestic object — and in a conviction that predates Bloomsbury and extends well beyond it: that the visible hand of the maker brings joy in both creation and use, and that an object doesn't need to sit behind glass to be worth making beautifully.
The Ottoline Collection is Tess's own expression of that belief, made not simply to be admired, but to be used, loved, and woven into the rhythm of everyday life.
