May 2026
Where to start with this round up of May - it's been quite something - and has seen me spending most of the month in London for reasons that will become apparent.
The month arrived at Inchyra in full glory. Flowers this year seem to have been more abundant than I ever remember: all of them, daffodils, bluebells, apple blossom, seem determined to put on their best display. On an early morning walk on the first day of the month I saw red squirrels (I just caught one in the photo below), a hare, a buzzard, and two roe deer that leapt up from the grass directly in front of me. The fields were full of bouncy new lambs and the highland cows looked so happy as the lush new grass came in. The bluebells were at their absolute peak, and the wild garlic was out in drifts along the estate paths - that clean, sharp scent that means that summer is around the corner. There are moments here that make it quite impossible to imagine being anywhere else.
GETTING MY VIBE ON
Which made it fairly surreal to find myself, a day later, sitting on the train to London vibe-coding business systems on my laptop. If you had told the twenty-something me - starting work just as computers were coming in - that one day you would be able to work interactively on the move, let alone build entire software systems while you travelled, my mind would have been well and truly blown.
I have spent the past year building management systems with Replit that are streamlining the businesses and saving us days of administrative work, and this month I finished an app that automatically uploads, cleans, and maintains our mailing list. What used to take days of painstaking work now simply runs itself. There is so much debate about the use of AI in creative businesses, and I understand the nervousness - but my view now is that a small business can't afford not to use it to improve everyday functions. It also makes possible things that would never otherwise happen. AI has allowed me to render every colourway of every Inchyra linen onto curtains, so that clients can get a really good idea of what our prints will look like in use - you can see these images for any of our larger prints on our website. Before this, we would either have had to make actual curtains or invest heavily in photo editing - neither of which are economically viable for a smaller studio. The creative work, of course, remains entirely ours.
IN THE EVES
I was thrilled to see the results of a collaboration with interior designer Laura Stephens during May and then to see it published in Scheme. Laura had used fabrics, wallpapers and trim from across my Jaujac Collection for her daughter's attic bedroom - a wonderful room for a young person transitioning out of childhood. The wallpaper runs wall to ceiling and into the blind, which is always a strong move with a pattern like that. She added Waverley Stripe linen on the bedhead and a wonderful reading nook covered in Jaujac Rondelle cushions with the seat cushion trimmed in our wide Jaujac Braid. Linen Check Wallcovering lining the bookcase completed the Inchyra contribution to this gorgeous room - a masterclass in mixing prints with a confident, generous hand. Seeing a collection used by someone with Laura's eye is one of the great pleasures of this work. Laura and I took the opportunity for a celebratory London lunch.
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THE MOVE
This month has been dominated by one mammoth project: moving the LineUp showroom - and it's also the reason this month's Diary is a bit late.
LineUp is the multi-line showroom specialising in British brands, on Lots Road, Chelsea, that fellow textile designer Kate Teyssier and I founded in September 2024. We opened in a small one room space on the first floor of Worlds End Studios - always in the hope that we would one day be able to move to a street level space at some point. We expected it might take years for the opportunity to arise until an email arrived on 23rd December last year offering us our new space - much bigger and with a street entrance. Manifesting works!
And so I've been in London for most of May - coinciding with a serious heatwave - while the fitout and decoration took shape. Two weeks ago we closed the original space - a slightly bittersweet moment - and spent the next 10 days setting up our beautiful new space before opening on 1st June.
From the original six brands that were with us in September 2024, we are now the London home to 19 and will reach 22 by our second birthday on 9th September. It's been quite a ride!
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In the middle of all of this, on 21st, we held the annual LineUp Clearance Sale at Chelsea Old Town Hall on the King's Road. It's a madly busy week because it's Chelsea Flower Show - the streets were packed, with the most amazing floral installations up and down the King's Road. We run it for our showroom partners and invited brands, and this year we were joined by Paolo Moschino - rather amazingly doing their first ever sale - alongside the wonderful Volga Linen, Zardi & Zardi, Nile & York, Parker & Jules, Fenella Interiors, Anna Cox Home, Virginia White and Ilala. A real feast for bargain hunters, and a tremendous success. We will be back next year.
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London, as ever, offers such a change of scene. As you may remember from April's diary, I have been training for a walking trip in Slovenia - fifteen kilometres a day is the target - and the difference between walking in Perthshire and walking in London is stark. The wildlife I encountered on my London training walks ran to grey squirrels and, for the first time I can remember, a large rat in a flower bed in Kensington Gardens. Not quite the same.
In between the building works and the training mishaps, I visited the National Portrait Gallery with both our daughters, who live in London, to see the Lucian Freud exhibition Drawing Into Painting. It is a remarkable body of work. You would not want to sit for him if you were in any way vain - he had a way of finding every imperfection, every fold and vulnerability in his subjects - but somehow he made all of it beautiful. An embrace of humanity exactly as it is. The photograph of the interior of his London home is an artwork in itself.
Serendipitously, I discovered that Schuyler Samperton, an American designer who is represented in many of the same US showrooms as Inchyra, was in town. We had never met in person but, as is so often the case, on Instagram. We had a wonderfully chatty summer evening in the beautiful gardens of the Chelsea Arts Club - it felt like it might be the first of many. The Arts Club was wearing one of its customary costumes - which you can see in the top image of this month's Diary.
AND WE ARE OPEN!
And what a week to end on. I am starting to write this month's Diary on the train back to Scotland, after the most extraordinary first week at the new LineUp showroom. The opening has been a tremendous success - better, honestly, than we had dared hope. New collections have joined us, the space is looking beautiful, and the energy has been everything we wanted when we imagined a ground-floor room with real footfall and real light.
The timing really could not have been better. The opening week coincided perfectly with WOW!house at the Design Centre, Chelsea Harbour - now in its fifth year and one of the most anticipated events on the design calendar. Twenty-two full-sized rooms, each created by a different designer in collaboration with an international brand, drawing people from across the industry into the area for the whole of June. I thought the standard this year across the board was higher than ever but, of course, there were a few rooms that stood out for me.
We had a particular connection this year - our LineUp brand Zardi & Zardi were collaborating with interior designer Sean Symington - who is having a major moment and understandably so - on the Withdrawing Room, which made the whole thing feel wonderfully close to home. I managed to get round and was completely bowled over by Sean's room, naturally, and Max Rollitt's Schumacher Dining Room - built around a magnificent 12-seater table adapted from an antique base, imagined at late afternoon with the candles lit - was the kind of room that makes you want to cancel all your plans and simply sit down. Salvesen Graham's Primary Bedroom was joyous - pattern and colour used with that particular confidence that makes it look effortless - and the Turnell & Gigon Drawing Room by Albion Nord was beautifully layered and intimate. A really good WOW!house - open until the end of June - visit if you can!
A few highlights, left to right below: Salvesen Graham's beautiful bedroom, immaculate fabric walling in Max Rollitt's dining room and the impeccable layering of Sean Symington's Withdrawing Room.
In next month's Diary I will show you images of our exciting new space - including a fabulous opening party we threw for our LineUp partners. For now, I'm back at home in Scotland and concentrating on a big project that will take me to New York at the end of the month. The lambs are bigger and the everything has grown about 2 feet!
In next month's Diary I will show you images of our exciting new space - including a fabulous opening party we threw for our LineUp partners. For now, I've arrived back at home in Scotland and I'm concentrating on a big project that will take me to New York at the end of the month. The lambs are bigger and the everything has grown about 2 feet!
Much love
ALSO ON MY RADAR THIS MONTH
Cabaret - a family trip to this stunning production - hugely recommended - a real experience
The Design Emporium, Chelsea Harbour - an expanded Emporium with lots of new brands and collections
BigLive Dracula - this company is bringing ballet to the masses - sold out run in London but catch it if you can elsewhere