In Conversation With: Emma Burns

Joint Managing Director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler

At Emma Burns's house in Oxfordshire, the front door is the last thing you find, not the first. Hers sits at the far end of the garden, so that arriving means walking the length of the garden first - a sequence of outdoor rooms, each setting the scene before you so much as reach the door.

We visit on a joyfully balmy evening at the end of June, and soft dappled light is scattered across the first of these garden rooms. The planting is deliberately loose and bucolic: wildflowers, grasses, roses and a run of espaliered apple stepovers grow with a kind of serendipity. Among them stand several large standing stones, giving the whole scene an unexpectedly pagan air. "I wanted it to feel really wild," Emma says, "and different from the rest of the garden." In the corner is her newest addition: a folly, built for her by Rollo Dunford Wood, tin-clad outside and timber within. She has barely left it since it arrived. "It's beyond beautiful," she says. "Something very snug and nice about it being lined with wood. It's just very calm and lovely."

Then the path narrows, and a tall topiary hedge of clipped doves closes off the view ahead entirely. It is a deliberate piece of theatre and builds anticipation. Only once you pass through, does the garden open out into lawn and generous borders, heavy with purple, set against sharp chartreuse Alchemilla mollis. There is, notably, no yellow.
"I'm not a fan of yellow in a garden," Emma says, with a delightful assuredness about her own taste that I find both endearing and admirable. She is, after all, the Joint Managing Director of esteemed interior designers Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, where she has spent most of her working life.

The dovecote and stables - her house - sits at the far end of this open room. To its left is the old hay barn, now a library; to its right runs a magnificent wall, a survivor from the days when the property was part of a larger estate and this the kitchen garden. Emma has dressed it with a deep border of English garden favourites: roses, scabious, thalictrum, euphorbia, alliums. Tucked at the end, a Claverton hosepipe sits neatly out of the way - though, Emma admits, it is the sort of detail that catches the eye anyway.

Given her career, the instinct to think of a garden as a sequence of rooms is perhaps inevitable; she trained first at Charles Hammond before Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler became home. "I definitely do think of the garden that way," she says. "You have to walk through it; so it's really important that it looks nice, has a feeling." Even within a modest footprint, she has carved out five or six distinct places to sit, each doing something different, together making the whole feel larger than it is.

The old hay barn is a thing to behold in itself. Emma converted it into a library, with a gallery bedroom on one side and office space on the other, careful not to compromise the volume of the roof. The books line the walls almost like wallpaper, sorted by subject - literature, art, history, travel, garden, interiors - and many have come down through her family. "Quite a lot of them came from my parents and my grandparents and people over the years," she says, "so they're all kind of old friends."

Colour throughout the garden is handled with the same precision as structure. The woodwork - barn, gates, everything - is painted in a deep shade Emma calls Bronze Green, chosen partly for the joke buried in its previous name. "It used to be called Pigeon," she says, "which I thought was frankly funny, because it's a dovecote." It is a philosophy she credits to her years at Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler: "John Fowler said, 'All greens go together; you only have to look at nature.' It's so true."

Objects with history run through the garden as they do through her interiors work. A lead planter, rescued when the design firm left their long-time premises on Brook Street, now anchors a rambling New Dawn rose against old stone -"almost Albertine," Emma says, "just a little bit clearer," sacrificed for a rose that keeps on flowering. Further along the same wall grows an older rose, planted some forty-five years ago, which she is quick to point out has kept what New Dawn lacks: "That smells exactly like a rose should smell. It's a proper Sleeping Beauty type number." Nearby, a carved stone character known affectionately as Mr Tradescant has been relocated more than once in pursuit of the right neighbours. "He was a bit more rustic," Emma explains,"so I moved him around the corner. I feel he's very happy now. He knows his place."

By the time we sit down for a post-garden-tour-tipple, the light has shifted to a deep golden hue and lights up the honey Cotswold stone of the buildings. The garden feels less designed than accumulated: a folly here, an old rose there (dug out of Emma’s former London garden and rehomed, of course), added year on year rather than planned all at once. Even so, each addition carries the same instinct that shapes a room when she designs: know exactly what you want someone to feel, and let the space do the telling. It is a garden built the way she builds a room: with instinct, with history, and the deft eye of someone who works with colour, texture and pattern for a living, and nothing about it is rushed.

Emma Burns is Joint Managing Director at interior decorating firm Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler.