She is the vindictive snow
Beautiful, cold causing her chilling touch to leave me numb
She creates an overload of dopamine for me
But like I said she left me numb
She compressed limerence upon me
The concentric feelings I have for her  linger
This contours her opaque heart
Leaving her pliable words lay rendering in my mind
She applies this solvent to it leaving me broken
Forlorn she left me
Yet, the tactile, numbing sensation keeps me going
For she is the one I love
Causing our hearts to be diptych artwork off our hinges.

Arriving, I find her briefing three press assistants on her upcoming catwalk show while simultaneously rifling through her closet — a dressing-up box filled with animal print and lacy confections — to choose her outfit for our shoot, while Desert Island Discs plays in the background.

Tucked at the end of a row of terraced houses close to London’s Portobello Road, Temperley discovered the six-bedroom property was on the market two years ago through her close friend, the designer Jasmine Guinness. The unique two-storey villa has a studio-style extension on the back of the property designed by the Victorian architect, Richard Norman Shaw.

She moved in 18 months ago with her son, Fox, 7, and her boyfriend, Greg Williams, 43, a portrait photographer, along with his two children from a previous relationship. ‘I’ve always been a Notting Hill girl at heart. I love that it’s so green, I love the market and my offices are around the corner.’

Temperley cites the interior designer Rose Uniacke (the creative genius behind the Beckham’s Holland Park home) as inspiration for fashioning her own interiors: ‘Rose has beautiful taste, sleek, clean but still really soft.’

The house’s all-white interior provides the perfect backdrop for Temperley to hang her beloved antique cut-crystal chandeliers and floor-to-ceiling mirrors sourced from Golborne Road’s Les Couilles du Chien — famous for its historic bric-a-brac — and the Clignancourt flea market in Paris. The most striking of these is an intricately etched diptych of French brasserie mirrors that sits proudly over her living room sofa.

For colourful accents, she looked to her archive of textiles, which ranges from heirlooms from her great-grandmother’s travels around the Orient to remnants of past fashion collections: ‘I have big haberdashery drawers, which are used for storing my collection in a warehouse in Greenford,’ she says. Having such a vast collection gives her the chance to indulge in some serious upcycling; a Mexican rainbow throw livens up a plain cream sofa while a wedding cloak from Turkmenistan makes a quirky wall-hanging.

Despite the global influences, the Union Jack is a recurrent motif: ‘When I worked in New York [in the mid-Noughties] I was called ‘Little Miss English’. I loved using materials such as lace and lots of references to Victoriana — all very British.’ Look closely, and you’ll find red, white and blue accents everywhere — on teacups, Roberts radios and on silk cushions.

‘To me, being British represents being able to be individual, eccentric and not taking yourself too seriously.’

Temperley was born and grew up in Somerset on her family’s cider farm in Martock, before moving to London aged 18 to study fine art at the Royal College of Art. The countryside has an ineluctable pull for Temperley and she carves her time between her office — ‘probably 80 per cent of the time, 10 per cent of the time here, 5 per cent in Somerset at the moment, and 5 per cent everywhere else’.

But if her west London home is all breathy shades of Farrow and Ball, Temperley’s country pile — a sublime 5.6-acre regency property called Cricket Court that was once the media magnate Lord Beaverbrook’s home — is the opposite: ‘In Somerset my sitting room is dark burgundy, we’ve got black bedrooms and an ochre-coloured library.’

To bring a little of the country back to the capital, Temperley peppers her house with beautiful bunches of wild flowers, sourced from florist Juliet Glaves, who grows her own blooms in Shropshire: ‘I always loved The Secret Garden and as a child I spent hours collecting flowers and drying rose petals on every surface. I am a hopeless romantic at heart and I love British country gardens and their flowers.’

Another great passion of Temperley’s is reading and no corner, staircase or table in the house is complete without stacks of books and fashion magazines: ‘Sally Tuffin [the British fashion designer-turned-ceramicist] has got an incredible fashion library at her home in Somerset and my dream one day is to have a room lined in books.’

As for the rest of the London house? It’s very much a work in progress, ‘especially being a working mum. It’s more collecting things and putting them together in a very relaxed way. Like in fashion design, when it comes to interiors things either work together or they don’t. I have a good eye and don’t like to be constricted to just doing clothes — I’d like to go into interiors. That’s the next chapter’.Read more at:www.marieaustralia.com/red-formal-dresses | www.marieaustralia.com/black-formal-dresses

I see waves of gold - water that traps a fading sun. I see a shimmer - a spread of fractured light that drifts like a net that no longer steals from the ocean. I see your feet - toes spread and curled into the sand - holding you in place even if it is just for a moment. Your eyes - blue as the angels on the diptych - gaze across to places that embodies our separation. You have so much in fragments of beauty. The vast empty spaces are filled by nature’s broken parts and you - embrace it all. I can only imagine where you stand; the air you breathe; the scenes that lift your spirits - and I sink further into the recesses of my mind. If only my salt water was that of the sea. Mine - is closer to home as it cascades and travels through the heart and blurs.

1
Defined by an intense need to
apostrophize and to tether, dictated by nothing

but your definitive space’s lissome address,

when visited, opens up to a closing, or sizing a gap
if syndetic, and reaching out for a retreat a frail gesture
    meaningfully pursuing a link, a strain  that is

2
When you were alive because you felt it, subscribing
to a phenomenon, granted by a sovereign of our difference

     unconsciously at first it was statutory to a fault but then conceding
to it and accepting, fit in this meeting as if too relaxed

    that it may sleep   or  bear noise even – your incidence of me sees clearer
than any lens, and when fond of, you will
                           make out of my clenched fists, when put together, a diptych with

    your   hands  taken into, receiving constantly the burden  of days

3
As destination of a truth
   that is  if you listen that  there is  something  inaudible in  this
       reality – your dream will make an apparition out of   its   center,

said when it is too comfortable to even slouch at a constant day,
        setting this faculty tranquil the face of  a punctual  eve
  somnambulating through   towns triggered   by   dim  white light,

   forcing windows    to  contract,  the   body somewhere  afloat, contacting
         the precision  of something  as  rescue,

your   life  seen   with  value  when   peril  touches  your  deepest  parts,
            almost daily   in this location   as if  you  were shorn out   of
                           difficulty, looking   for   me  to   halve all of this.

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]

(This poem may be considered as a dyptich / diptych / dipstick with "The Dreariness of Dawn")

                                   The Dreariness of Dusk

Anticipated no victories today
Expected no letters to be answered
Or packages of life to be delivered
Not given even the hope of a hope

But…

But, no, the weary hours were unrelieved
The weary, dreary hours of near-despair
Plodding like a mule harnessed to the past
And given only the ghost of a ghost

As was expected, the teapot was warm -
“Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea” 1

1 Katherine Mansfield

“Shine their shoes, boy.” Of ancient Ulm,
Or was it Hanover, or Vietnam news?

Whatever lives in a coptering leaves breeze flail
Burns, maybe, wrinkles over evening-orange contrails.

From ‘75, with backpack, an American teen.
You lay in a blanket that’s jungle green.

Born of tension, your luggage weared
Containing the last, probably-more, hundred years.

Pressured under coupled oceans that wash
Pepper, in the coasts, of gunpowder shells.

Every bit, godless, and landless there tread
Which is historically typical of a golden head.

You wait, with a significant loss in sheen
While much younger shoes uncover you from the rain.

“My, what a piece of ancient Ulm! It sits
Only in mud! Yet, what of the rest?

Whatever hasn’t yet lost its old meaning
That shining truth which, before, kept it going!”

Glossy, in all youth, in all sorts of sweat,
Heeded a call to consult with a death.

This set-on, and scattered, and ducked into flight
Mind unconsidered so decades might march out of sight.

Lo, quiet perforce a deep trench, or its field
Moving, not across that diptych unperturbed

Every hole through the air punctuates, shreds
The almost-last scream of a now golden head.

You run, run, run, run. Count how many feet touch the mound.
You envision how best you could look underground-

“Now, see: pressed up against its own shoes,
This thing of gold, it’s deformed and bruised!

Wherever we bore— past some trees, down a road;
Far from Ulm— we made a hole which, in it, erodes.”

Grisly, but plaqued, and so, covered up
The very remnants that resulted its death

From long ago, “This- It’s ancient!” some people say
Shipped back with laurel shawl now as its display

“Perhaps you are ageless wrapped in the old war.
Yes, tatters coming back are worth all the more.

Maybe, yes it was sent through so much wreck.
Before, far back it was born of some thread.”

“Shine its throne, man.” Of ancient blood.
That, on his deathbed is a golden head.