A Textile Designer’s At-Home Treasures

Photo: Clare Louise Frost

“Normally, I spend all of my waking hours not at home,” says textile designer and actor Clare Louise Frost from her home, a rental in Windsor Terrace, where she has lived since 2015. She says she is usually near constantly at TAMAM, the shop she co-founded in 2019 along with her partners, the textile designer Elizabeth Hewitt and Huseyin Kaplan, a prominent antiques dealer and rug producer. The spaces, however, are not so different: Her apartment is decorated with finds picked from her travels around the world (India, Morocco, Afghanistan, Turkey) in search of artisan-made treasures. As much as her life has been about travel, Frost says, she’s actually — as she puts it — “an inveterate homebody at heart.”

The walls in Frost’s bedroom, seen above, are covered in pieces from men’s striped shirts. “The big dark piece is mine, ink and string on canvas — it depicts the view from my home on Burgaz Island in Istanbul.” The decorative pillows include Frost’s Emerald Leopard print, and the green lumbar is made from a vintage quilted coat. The bedding is from Tulu Textiles, designed by Elizabeth Hewitt. The quilt is Frost’s and was hand-embroidered in Kabul.

Her living room is decorated with a divan covered in Anokhi block-printed cloth with a block-printed quilt designed by Frost on top. The trunk was handmade in Afghanistan, bought in Kabul, and is filled with textiles. The big oil painting is by Leonard Maurer. Photo: Clare Louise Frost

The dining area has a table set with vintage Russian roller-printed cotton fabric, which was hand-embroidered by the ladies of Kabul. The Farima hand-embroidered drapes were designed by Frost for her textile line. Photo: Clare Louise Frost

The triptych is composed of pages from a page-a-day calendar given out for free in Turkey. Photo: Clare Louise Frost

The dining area has a cupboard filled with Kütahya-ware and stacks of Iznik and Moroccan serving bowls. The plates on the wall are antique Kuznetsov. The antique silver candelabra belonged to Frost’s grandmother. Photo: Clare Louise Frost

“My two desks are both family pieces,” Frost says. “One is from the 1950s — it was the childhood desk of my dad’s cousin, then moved to my older sister’s room in the ’70s, which is when it was painted yellow. The other desk was my great-great aunt’s. My grandmother used it — some of her things are still in it; we’ve never removed them. I love stumbling upon her little keepsakes.” The oil painting is by Frost. It depicts, per Frost: “A view from another home, a dead dog, a long since ex-boyfriend.” Photo: Clare Louise Frost

A portrait of Frost, who is happy to be home, safe, and managing to keep her business going remotely. Photo: Courtesy of David Lawrence Byrd