The Great Indoors
One of 2021’s home decor trends is Biophilic design (things that mimic nature) and it comes into play with the hand-woven Guatemalan baskets, the canopy of greenery, and the endless views in the abodes of Annabelle Hickson, Meredith Hagner & Wyatt Russell, and Emilie Ghilaga. Also think Sissel rugs, knotty pine furniture, and an ample dose of natural light.
Annabelle Hickson & Family, Dumaresq Valley, Australia
“I started off kind of pretending that I lived in England—you know, with roses and those kinds of traditional plants,” says writer and photographer Hickson of her garden. “But I’ve come to accept that where I live is very different from England.” Where she lives—with her husband, Ed, and their three children, Daisy, 12, Tom, 10, and Harriet, 8—is a weatherboard farmhouse on a pecan farm in the Dumaresq Valley on the New South Wales–Queensland border. A dozen years into her country life after relocating from Sydney, Hickson has not only embraced the tempestuous weather (“It’s drought and then flooding rain”) but in 2020, she launched Galah, a magazine dedicated to rural Australia. “I’ve had quite a productive kind of lockdown,” she says. In the garden, she’s planted big, soft grasses like miscanthus, while elsewhere branches pruned from a Chinese elm tree end up above the kitchen table in a lush canopy installation that lends a woodsy whimsy to the room. Little Harriet feels right at home. “She thinks it’s all quite normal,” says Hickson, “eating your dinner with fallen leaves underfoot.”—L.R.
Meredith Hagner & Wyatt Russell, Los Angeles
“People assume all the time: Your husband got the van, and he’s dragging you along,” says Hagner. Russell chimes in: “It’s the opposite—though I wouldn’t call it dragging me along, either.” She grew up between Houston and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, backpacking with her father, including a traverse through the Rockies and four weeks on the Appalachian Trail. He spent a youth mostly outdoors at the Colorado ranch belonging to his parents (Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn). In 2018, the couple, both actors, purchased a Mercedes Sprinter van retrofitted with a Scandi-style blond-wood interior and equipped with all the trimmings—stovetop, dining banquette, modular seating, and sleeping areas—for #vanlife. “Vacations were always a little difficult because we have to plan last-minute because of our jobs,” explains Russell, who currently stars in the Marvel series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Now they head off for monthlong treks at the drop of a hat, spending days behind the wheel and nights beneath the stars in Shasta National Forest or Glacier National Park. “It’s funny because it can look so romantic sometimes,” Hagner says, “but more often than not you’re in a timed shower in a rest stop, laughing because you didn’t get enough quarters and the water stops while your hair’s still covered in soap.” The arrival of a baby, though—little Buddy Prine Russell was born shortly after this shoot—necessitates bigger quarters. “I mean, as soon as we can get our new van constructed, we’re going to be on the road with him,” says Hagner. “That’ll be a whole new set of adventures.”—L.R.
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