There is a fireplace at Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex — the Sussex home famously inhabited by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant of the Bloomsbury Group, who painted every surface over the course of half a century — where a hooped border runs along the surround. It was painted without a ruler, and without restraint.
It was this detail, among many, that set decorative artist Tess Newall on the path toward The Ottoline Collection, PORTA's debut dinnerware collaboration with Tess, developed between her studio in East Sussex and our team in New York. Tess has spent nearly a decade painting murals inside extraordinary buildings — an 18th-century orangery in Gloucestershire, a turreted room in the Old War Office overlooking Whitehall. Her work is rooted in the history of wherever she finds herself, in the vernacular of folk painting, faience, and the decorated domestic object. Charleston, which sits a stone's throw from her studio, has long been a personal touchstone for her.
We sat down with Tess to talk about how the collection came together — and what it means to make things that are beautiful precisely because they're used.
Your work is deeply rooted in research and historical traditions. Are there particular periods or styles you keep returning to?
I love 19th-century European decorative painting — the richly ornamented timber farmhouses of Hälsingland in Sweden, or the art of Kalocsa in Hungary, where vibrant flowers cover clothing, table linens and wall paintings. This kind of decoration is rooted in belonging. It's about regional traditions being passed through generations, the idea that domestic spaces and functional objects should carry a beauty and a humanity to them — with the visible hand of the maker, bringing joy in both creation and use.
I have a book I return to constantly: Folk Art of Europe by Helmuth Bossert. It's out of print, and it catalogues hundreds of artefacts by type — ceramics, embroideries, gloves — across time and place. It's organised similarly to the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford, with its famous democracy of things. I had my undergraduate tutorials there when I was reading Archaeology and Anthropology, and I love noticing how certain patterns and motifs recur across place and time. A motif from a Hungarian plate in the 1840s turning up in a Portuguese tile from the 1780s — there's something fascinating about that.
What was the starting point for the Ottoline designs specifically?
The Ottoline Collection references patterns found across centuries of European folk art, with a series of repeated motifs anchored in fluid mark-making. We also looked to the freedom of line of the Bloomsbury Group – the simple hooped border, for example, echoes the decoration framing the walls of the garden room at Charleston Farmhouse. It's a decoration which appears within their own collection of ceramics, which they gathered on their travels: Italian majolica jugs sit alongside French faience plates and Spanish lustreware. They were drawn to the irregular brushwork of these pieces, the palpable humanity in something painted by hand. Our designs grew from a dialogue between these influences — the Bloomsbury source material, the broader tradition of European folk ceramics, and the PORTA aesthetic.
How did you arrive at the colour palette?
The Azure colourway is reminiscent of sun-drenched Mediterranean evenings — the blue-and-white tradition which runs from Delft through to Quimper through to the painted fishermen's houses of the Algarve. The Terracotta colourway carries the earthier, interior spirit of the Bloomsbury Group: the ochres and warm browns that recur throughout Charleston's rooms. Brown and blue together is one of my favourite pairings — it's ancient and modern at the same time, and endlessly versatile at a table.
The colourways are designed to be used alongside one another. A plate from each. The conversation that results is part of the intention.
You actually worked on Charleston itself — as a set, during your film career.
Yes — I worked on Vita & Virginia, a biopic following the love affair between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. We recreated Charleston Farmhouse in rural Ireland: painting every wall of the location house, every piece of sourced furniture. We made book covers for the library shelves, invitations for the mantelpiece. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant's decoration permeated their whole world, so ours had to as well. That project taught me a great deal about how to create an atmosphere, how to transport people to another place and time entirely.
Set design gave me tools I still use. A successful mural works in the same way — it has the power to alter how a space feels. What I love now is that my work is lived in and used. . When a mural or an object becomes a background layer to daily life, that's when the magic happens.
Do you think there's a meaningful distinction between art made to be looked at and art made to be lived with?
I think that domestic objects should be beautiful as well as useful. Functional pieces can be works of art in their own right. The Bloomsbury Group believed this profoundly — that art should dress the minutiae of everyday life, with no hierarchy between a canvas on a wall or the glaze on a cup. Art in whatever form should alter how you feel. If a plate on a table makes lunch more joyful, it has done its work.
How do your own ceramics live at home?
I don't believe in saving things for best — so they're very much part of everyday life. The ritual of a morning coffee in a favorite mug. That said, my most precious and fragile pieces are on display on the kitchen dresser, or hung on the wall. I love decorating with plates — particularly in a bathroom, where the occasional splash does no harm. They bring character to the room, much like a painting does.
Objects gather over time in my house rather than being collected in any deliberate way. I treasure my great-grandmother's sketchbooks full of wildflowers from the west coast of Scotland, nineteenth-century copper jelly molds, Quimper ceramics from Brittany. A house becomes a home when that layer of knickknacks — the ones that tell a story about the people who live there — organically evolves. That's what we were trying to create with this collection: pieces that could belong to that layer. That feel found rather than bought.
If you could paint one mural inside any building in the world — your Sistine Chapel — where would it be?
The Victoria and Albert Museum, without question. I could spend hours in the ceramics gallery on level four, looking at the Delft tiles and the Majolicaware. To paint something inside those walls, in conversation with all of that history — that would be the dream.
