Guiding Lights

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Following Sworders’ collaboration with Guinevere Antiques, our Fine Interiors Department are extremely excited to usher in their first sale of 2025 with the collection of two more King’s Road icons.

Leading the March auction are the selected contents of Tile Barn, Northamptonshire, former home of Charles Edwards and Julia Boston.

^{The Charles Edwards & Julia Boston Collection}

Charles, the globally renowned lighting designer, purchased Tile Barn in 1986 after two decades in London, where he built his reputation for sourcing fine English antiques, specialising in unusual decorative objects, furniture and light fixtures. With his wife Julia, he spent 18 months amalgamating the barn with a Victorian cottage and other stone outbuildings on the site, transforming it into a country home for them to share.

Named after the unusual tile roof that once covered it, the barn is dominated by a huge drawing room where oversized lanterns hung between the original wooden joists of the A-frame roof, creating clear focal points within the space. The lighting was characteristically Charles, but this was perfectly balanced with pieces that epitomised Julia’s taste, with delicately aged tapestries, paintings and prints softening the stone walls and creating a welcoming interior for them to enjoy and entertain. Such was the success of their joint decorative enterprise that, for decades, the home was used to stage the marketing imagery of Charles Edwards’ lighting, which appeared in publications such as The World of Interiors, House & Garden, Architectural Digest, and Elle Decor.

^{The Charles Edwards & Julia Boston Collection} 

Since 2002, Julia Boston Antiques have developed a reputation for being specialists in 17^th, 18^th and 19^th century French furniture, tapestries and decorative paintings and prints. Charles opened his first shop in London in the late 1960s in Kensington’s Abingdon Road, from there, he moved to Notting Hill, opening a shop in Rabbit Row. After renovating Tile Barn, he opened a shop at 582 King’s Road in 1987, and in 1992, Charles Edwards was founded in the same location, where it continues to thrive today.

^{The Charles Edwards & Julia Boston Collection} 

On 25 and 26 March, Sworders Fine Interiors will be selling a selection of inherited and expertly sourced items from the couple’s former home, including Georgian and Victorian furniture, lighting, works of art, curiosities, carpets and more. Beautifully presented in historic images of Tile Barn, these items reflect the couple’s deep knowledge and passion for timeless design and the quintessential country house aesthetic, which have shaped two of London’s most celebrated interior brands over the past three decades.

Tuesday 25 & Wednesday 26 March | 10am

fineinteriors@sworder.co.uk | 01279 817778

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