We’ve been rather quiet about something happening behind the scenes at The Goodenough.
Over the past few months, we’ve been giving our suites some long-overdue attention. The work is now complete (although we’re still waiting patiently for the professional photographs), and we can finally begin sharing what we’ve been up to.
Where better to start than with Virginia Woolf?
A Room of Her Own
Virginia Woolf spent much of her life questioning what society expected of women. For her, the freedom to think, to write and to have the space and independence in which to do both mattered enormously. It is an idea captured most famously in A Room of One’s Own, and one that felt particularly appropriate when we began reimagining the suite that bears her name.
We didn’t want to create a museum room. Instead, we wanted to capture something of the extraordinary creative world around Woolf: beautiful, unconventional, intellectual and just a little chaotic.
Deep cream walls provide the calm. Against them, Timorous Beasties’ exuberant Indie Jungle fabric brings colour and movement, while Pooky’s wonderfully whimsical Lachrymosa chandelier adds a little joy overhead. Even the carpet has a story: our wonderfully soft Aruba carpet is made using yarn created from certified ocean-bound plastic waste.
A conversation between artists, writers, friends and family
The artwork takes us deeper into Woolf’s world.
There are portraits of Virginia and Leonard Woolf by Vanessa Bell, Virginia’s sister, alongside Roger Fry’s portrait of the wonderfully unconventional poet Edith Sitwell. Landscapes by Bell and Fry bring quieter glimpses of London into the room, while botanical prints of Rosa gallica ‘Tuscany’ and Lilium speciosum nod to Vita Sackville-West and her passion for gardens.
Together, they tell a much bigger story about Bloomsbury: writers painting writers, artists painting friends, sisters, husbands and lovers inspiring one another, and a remarkable group of people challenging ideas about art, relationships and how life ought to be lived.
There are books to pick up, details to discover and one particularly small symbol hidden somewhere in the room that we’ll leave you to find for yourself.
Virginia Woolf once argued that a woman needed money and a room of her own if she was to write fiction.
We can’t promise literary greatness. But we can, at least, offer the room.
Discover the Virginia Woolf Suite →