The curtains are blue and white, but the room around them is anything but cool. A soft pink wall runs between the windows, the sofa is a warm plain colour, and a red patterned footstool sits on a blue rug. The fabric at the windows is the most commanding pattern here, yet it has plenty of company.

Inherited curtains frame the sofa in Emma Sherlock’s Hampshire sitting room. Photograph: Boz Gagovski.

For interior designer Emma Sherlock, those curtains were the starting point. As she told House & Garden, they came from her grandparents’ previous house and had spent thirty years in a trunk. She was initially uncertain about accepting them. Their softened background eventually suggested the sitting room’s pink walls, painted in Farrow & Ball’s Pink Ground.

It is an appealingly specific way to begin a room. An inherited fabric arrives with its own colours, scale and history, none of which has been chosen to suit the next owner’s furniture. The task is to give it a convincing place. Here, the curtains hang in generous lengths behind the seating, so their pattern belongs to the architecture of the room rather than appearing as a small decorative relic.

The plain sofa beneath the windows is a particularly useful choice. Its broad, uninterrupted seat gives the eye a pause below the busy folds. Cushions bring back blue, yellow and deep red in smaller areas, while the footstool introduces another red pattern lower down. There is continuity without every surface wearing the same print.

The pink backdrop holds the different fabrics together without matching any one of them exactly. Its warmth sits comfortably with the curtains’ softened background. In another house, the light and the fabric already in the room would matter more than choosing the same name on the paint tin.

Floral armchairs, a green fireplace and pictures extend the room’s mixture of colour and pattern. Photograph: Boz Gagovski.

On the fireplace side, the mixture becomes bolder. A cream-ground floral chair has a dark red cushion, a green painted mantel sits behind it, and pictures occupy the wall above and alongside. There is enough pale ground in the upholstery for the shapes of the chair to remain clear. The room feels furnished around places to sit, rather than organised as a display of matching textiles.

Sherlock’s own account of the house describes a slow decorating process over twelve years. Panelling and joinery helped give newer parts of the brick-and-flint cottage more structure. The objects then accumulated within it. That timescale matters: a room assembled gradually can absorb an odd painting or a different chair without everything having to be solved on one shopping trip.

In The English Home’s June 2026 interview, Sherlock describes adding pictures as she found them, some valuable and others simply things she liked. The wall grew through those additions. That makes the art more interesting than a ready-made set: there are different subjects, frames and sizes to look between, with the pink paint visible around them.

A patterned sofa and blue cushions sit against pink walls, with books visible through the open doors. Photograph: Boz Gagovski.

The sofa on the opposite side holds a stronger red-and-cream pattern. Blue cushions connect it visually to the window fabric, while dark green cushions echo the room’s painted and planted greens. Through the open doors, shelves of books extend the sense of a room that can contain plenty of things. The arrangement is rich, but its larger blocks of colour remain easy to distinguish.

A second inherited textile appears in the daughter’s bedroom. The blue linen above the bed came from the family of Sherlock’s husband, whose grandmother’s family had owned a linen business in northern France. Here it has a new job as a small canopy. The large area of blue gives a definite shape to the bed, alongside pink checks and a patchwork quilt.

Inherited French linen forms the blue canopy in the daughter’s bedroom. Photograph: Boz Gagovski.

The bedroom shows the same willingness to give an existing possession a substantial role. A photograph cannot establish whether a canopy is safe for a particular child. Any fabric around a child’s bed needs an age-appropriate, securely fitted arrangement without accessible cords or loose material that could entangle a child, and clear of lamps and other heat sources.

For an ordinary sitting room, beginning with something already owned can make the next decisions more precise. Lay the textile beside possible wall colours and the furniture that will stay. Consider its background as well as its brightest colour, and its scale from the other side of the room. That is a manageable first step; it makes no claim that a designer’s accumulated interior can be reproduced cheaply.

The detail worth keeping in view is the plain sofa under those elaborate curtains. It gives the old fabric room to be noticed, and still looks like somewhere to put your feet up. An heirloom need not turn the whole room into a period setting.