Influencer Edits

The Little Plantation Takeover: Tumeric Iced Tea

Just in time for summer, green food blogger The Little Plantation brings us her refreshing yet fiery recipe for Turmeric Ice Tea. For her latest shoot, Kimberly brings brings together a few of our favourite dishes and glassware including the Moroccan Dinnerware range, Mervyn Gers black bowls and the Carats hi Ball glass. Contrasting monochrome tableware with the bright burst of turmeric iced tea, this recipe is ideal for sunny Saturday mornings or in for picnics in the park with friends and don't forget to try the child friendly version as described below for your little ones. Shop Dining Turmeric Ice Tea Preparation Time: 10 minutes Serves: 2 Ingredients: 1 teaspoon of freshly grated turmeric or turmeric powder 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated ginger or ginger powder 1 tablespoon of honey or liquid sweetener of your choice 2 cups/480ml of cinnamon tea a pinch of pepper ice cubes Instructions: Prepare your cinnamon tea by boiling water and letting the tea infuse for about 5-10 minutes (you want there to be a strong cinnamon flavour). Wait for the tea to cool completely before adding all the spices and sweetener. Whisk to combine and serve immediately on ice. Tip 1: You can also use chai flavoured tea bags or ginger tea if you prefer. If using ginger tea, please replace the ginger in the above noted recipe with cinnamon. Tip 2: For a child-friendly version, add 1/4 cup of apple juice. Tip 3: Please don't leave out the black pepper; it helps you absorb the turmeric. Further Reading: www.thelittleplantation.co.uk Shop Dining Back to top

Influencer Edits

The Little Plantation Takeover: Pistachio Milk Green Smoothie

For the first in her series of guest blogs, food stylist extraordinaire The Little Plantation shows us how to whip up a mean green pistachio smoothie. If you're a fan of instagram food porn pics (and let's be honest, who isn't), chances are you'll have stumbled across Kimberly's beautifully shot culinary creations. We knew she had exceptional taste but it was still much to our delight when we spotted Heal's home accessories popping up on her feed - needless to say, we jumped at the chance of getting these wonderful recipes on our blog. Make sure to give this delicious all-day smoothie a whirl and why not complement with the exclusive Mervyn Gers ceramics sumptuously modelled here. Shop Now Pistachio Milk Green Smoothie Pre-preparation Time: soaking the pistachio nuts overnight Preparation Time: 10 minutes Makes: 1 large smoothie bowl or 2 regular sized smoothie bowls Ingredients for the home-made pistachio milk: 1 cup of pistachio nuts, soaked for 2 hours 3 cups of water 1 date, pit removed 1 tiny pinch of salt Ingredients for the smoothie: 2 cups of pistachio milk 1/2 avocado 1 date, pitted 1 banana 1 cup/handful of seasonal greens such as baby spinach 1 teaspoon spirulia or wheatgrass powder (optional) Instructions: Soak the pistachio nuts in filtered water for at least 2 hours or overnight. When they are ready, strain them and place them in a high speed blender, together with the date, salt and water, then blitz until smoothie. Strain the mixture through a cheese cloth or muslin cloth. Save the pulp in a container in your freezer for future baking. Then measure out 2 cups of pistachio milk and place in a high speed blender together with the avocado, pitted date, banana, spinach and spirulina/wheatgrass powder if using. Blend until nice and smooth. Enjoy! Top with seasonal fruit, cacao nibs or edible flowers. Further Reading: www.thelittleplantation.co.uk Shop Now Back to top

In People’s Homes

Marvel At Our Marble Moodboard

Our curated collection of marble design shows you how to incorporate this season's must-have material within your home. For centuries marble has been a feature of opulent interiors, it's natural veined pattern adding an elegant contrast to a room setting dominated by solid woods. Yet the durability of the material also makes it a worthwhile investment for everyday family life, as is the case in many Italian homes where locally sourced white Carrara features prominently on worktops, counters and coffee tables. Seduced by its functionality and style, designers from Tom Dixon to Lee Broom designers are once more returning to marble this time carving the ancient material into contemporary shapes and introducing modern solutions. Marvel at Marble Tom Dixon Stone range: Chopping Board £75, Serving Board £65 and Cake Stand £120. Not only does marble provide a sense of grandeur to the table when used for serving dishes but is also very practical providing many years service especially when compared to wooden chopping and serve boards. Ideal for everything from petit fours to a cheese board, Tom Dixon's Stone range adds elegance to any dinner party pairing white Morwad marble with brass elements. Lee Broom Chamber Pendant range in Small £840 or Large £960. Unlike other more brittle types of stone, marble can be carved very thinly will still maintaining a solid shape. Lighting designers such as Lee Broom have taken advantage of these natural properties, with his Globe Table Lamp, Marble Tube Light and Chamber Pendant range all utilising the semi-translucent qualities of the material to create decorative diffusions of light. Free Range Coffee Table £695 and Side Table £355 shown with Slouch Three Seater Sofa from £2,195, Kaiser Idell Table Lamp £536, Andria Rug £510 and Merino & Cashmere Throw £130. While their modern form wouldn't look out of place in a cutting-edge, minimalist scheme, these marble tables from Blu Dot work just as well in a homely sitting room. Paired with the Slouch sofa, some modern soft furnishings and a few designer accessories, the clean white stone adds a light break from a strong navy palette. Shop Marble Back to top

In People’s Homes

Curate Your Space With Copper

The modern metallic of choice, let our shiny new Copper mood-board bring some interior inspiration to your home. Warm and lustrous, coppery tones are the perfect accent to minimal spaces or an opulent addition to classically styled rooms. Providing a modern alternative to traditional chandeliers, groups of lustred pendants have continued to prove popular as lighting centrepieces while the metallic finish also gives a fresh perspective when applied to home accessories such as mirrors, clocks and lamps. Discover Copper Discover Copper Back to top

Latest Trends

Add A Boutique Vibe To Your Bedroom

If you can’t get away for much of a holiday this summer or you just think that your room could do with a much needed face lift. We have decided to put together a few ways that you could turn your bedroom into a more luxurious and glamorous room. Maximising comfort for that much needed rest you need. Bedding I imagine the first thing most people do when they enter a hotel room is fall straight on the bed, diving into a sea of puffy duvets and pillows. White linen in particular is great for establishing a calm and relaxing environment. Create a seating area A great place to get ready for the day ahead or even a night cap or a read of a book before bed. Stylish furniture creates a sense of allure within the bedroom. The room doesn’t become so focused around sleep but rather a place for a chill out. A luxurious throw? We reckon that your bedroom could probably do with a little extra attention and care. So one thing simple thing to do to give your bedroom a different feel is to put a throw over the bed or a chair. An extra little bit of luxury won’t go amiss. It adds an aura of calm and comfort to the bedroom. Your bedroom could probably do with a little extra attention and care. Lavish lighting Bring your bedroom lighting up to date. Ditch the oversized bed lamps and get some more nifty, flexible lighting so that bedtime reading can be a joy rather than a chore. Hotel Boutique rooms are always very well lit, there’s flexible lighting to satisfy all your needs whether it’s next to an arm chair or on a desk. Ashfield Mattress Above all the reason why you often feel so refreshed from a holiday is that you have slept well! The best way to go about that is getting a new mattress for your home and make sleeping enjoyable again.

Latest Trends

Swede Ease

Design writer Ellen Himelfarb reveals the quiet charm of Swedish design. "The first time I saw an all-white room was in Stockholm. In a perfectly quaint gabled house, past a lane of shops whose windows were meticulously curated, the owners hand painted the walls and wood floors an almost bluish white that faded out into the overcast sky out the windows. Their furniture – simple leather dining chairs by David Design, a wooden kökssoffa (kitchen sofa) pulled up to the Super-Ellipse table by Bruno Mathsson, the designer bookshelves from ROOM Stockholm – seemed to float enticingly in the space. In the corner of the compact living space was a 19th-century kakel ugn, a cylindrical wood-burning stove nearly three metres tall, with a glazed white surface garlanded with fanciful ceramic and brass detailing. People were actually ripping them out of their homes back then in the 1990s, said my friend, and leaving them on the street for the taking. Scandinavian design, and Swedish in general, had been influencing UK furniture manufacturers for decades by then. Ercol and later G-Plan had embraced Northern European values of functionality, sustainability and a low-slung look throughout the latter half of the 20th century. Yet it wasn’t until the late ’90s that Nordic functionalism truly took hold and the British began to steer away from heavy farmhouse pine and Italian flash. Our two nations weren’t all that different, after all. We share a great deal of dreary weather, and the idea that white could reflect what little light we got meant that paint companies were suddenly producing more whites than the Eskimos had words for snow to cover our deep heritage reds and greens. Dwindling resources meant we had to make do with available, sustainable materials – and eco movements put paid to the notion that we could and should look beyond our borders for the finest of everything. British shelter magazines brought us white and teak interiors from the length of Sweden. The Wallpaper* generation caught up on names like Børge Mogensen – available only through the rare enlightened importer like Twentytwentyone. And they began scheduling holidays to coincide with the Stockholm Furniture Fair, despite the fact that it landed smack in the middle of February. In 1999 Wallpaper* founder Tyler Brûlé bought a weekend home on an island in the Swedish archipelago, near Stockholm, and sang its praises in print. Often. The world began coming around to postwar design – not only furniture but architecture and fashion – partly from being exposed to that Swedish ideal. Simple, accessible funkis, or functionalism, was born of the tradition of craftsmanship and the necessity of making efficient use of limited materials after the wars. Like the Italian olive oil industry or strawberry farming in Belgium, small family businesses have allowed the Swedes to maintain a consistent quality across its furniture manufacturing, and it shows in the products’ quiet accessibility. I once asked Anna-Lena Knutsson, executive director of Hyssna-based furniture designer Albin i Hyssna, what it was like to compete in her industry as head of a small, private operation run from her grandfather’s hometown. She replied: “We’re all family-owned businesses here.” Certainly there’s an echo of that in the UK’s current lust for handicraft and the efforts to restore furniture manufacturing with skilled regional makers. Not long after Acne Studios opened on Dover Street to showcase its outré jeans and graphic casuals, our perception of Swedish design began to broaden. A new generation of designers out of colleges like Beckmans, Konstfack and Umea were breaking out of the established canon and moving beyond what we’d expect from a Swede. Arctic-born Monica Förster, designer for Swedese, Offect and a dozen international manufacturers, comes to mind. As do Stockholm-based architects Claesson, Koivisto and Rune, who design not only striking minimalist homes but also the furnishings that belong there – like the customisable Concord chair and the deceptively simple Kelly chair. More recently Marcus Huber has brought young designers like Stefan Borselius and the seven-year-old design studio Note to design furniture for Fogia, a Stockholm-based manufacturer with its own factory and a penchant for unexpected curves and colours. Daniela Upmark, who studied in Lund, took advantage of our current obsession with lighting and atmosphere when she hooked up her BXXLight, a made-to-order lightbox that resembles a vintage cinema marquee. Even Acne itself has designed prototype sofas and chairs that defy classic Swedish lines. The rebels occasionally come from surprising places. Markus Johansson, scion of the Albin i Hyssna family, has developed a much more surreal, organic look, referencing underwater life and often appearing in a historically un-Swedish matt black. Former furniture consultants Chris Martin (an Englishman) and Magnus Elebäck launched the furniture company Massproductions to explore industrial production in a more efficient way than perhaps their previous clients had. The New Guard of Swedish designers might flout the traditional Swedish ideal yet their pieces sit rather comfortably within a Swedish context. Or any context, really. When was the last time you saw someone reach for a step stool that wasn’t the Step by Karl Malmvall? It retails with everyone from Design House Stockholm to MoMA Store and has come to define a new standard in functional design. Today more than 50,000 Swedes live in London and the landscape of Swedish businesses in the capital proves the two cultures are not just fair-weather friends. A few years back a Scandinavian friend passed me a box of Läkerol liquorice sea salt pastilles, and despite the fact I spent the rest of the afternoon wrenching them out of my teeth, it was a habit-forming moment. I discovered Läkerol about the same time the most talked-about bakery in East London was the new, fabulous Fabrique, and twisted kanelbullar rolls were the reason nobody could keep to their anti-carb diets. (Denizens of Soho had long since been hooked since Nordic Bakery pitched up in Golden Square.) By the time &Other Stories opened near its sister COS on Regent Street in 2013, our relationship with contemporary Swedish culture was bonded like so many asymmetric jumpers. Visit any of those establishments (and their imitators) and you’ll also get an eyeful of Swedish design in all its incarnations, from tall wood Windsor chairs to punchy, patterned ceramics to slick, slimline display rails. It seeps under your skin. That’s quite a legacy for a handful of families plugging a time-honoured craft. But there it is, plain as day, a sign we’ve seen the light. " Ellen Himelfarb lives in London and is a writer specialising in architecture, design and travel. Ellen writes for Wallpaper* and The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, and is the co-author of the London Design Guide. Swedish Summer at Heal's is an event at our flagship store from 27th July - 23rd August 2015.