THIS LIFE SUSI BELLAMY

The designer’s work is all about dazzling colour paired with innovative pattern, as her home beautifully demonstrates

- Catherine Coyle

For an adventurer, Covid times have been hard times. Susi Bellamy’s career has relied on twists and turns, risks taken and journeys to new surroundings, all of which have fed her creativity, infiltrating her work, whether as a magazine editor in London, an artist in Florence or a textilesmaker in Northumberland. The route might not have been all mapped out in advance, but her willingness to take a chance has given her a lifetime of variety and experience that fizzes with joiede vivre. You just have to take one look at her home to see the pleasure life has brought her.

“I’ve always told stories,” she says. “When I was editing fashion and beauty, I’d always think in terms of stories, and this has followed in my work as an artist and maker.”

After an early career in London styling photoshoots for glamorous magazines, she moved to the USA when her husband’s job took the newlyweds to Delaware on the eastern seaboard. There, following the birth of their first child, she embarked on the adventure of life as a full-time parent navigating a new city on the other side of the world. “A baby is a great way to strike up a conversation and meet new people,” she says. “I made a lot of friends, and Delaware and nearby Philadelphia and Baltimore really opened my eyes to art.”

Bellamy acquainted herself with Philly’s Barnes Foundation (one of the world’s greatest collections of impressionist and post-impressionist painting) and the Baltimore Museum of Art and quickly enrolled in painting classes at the latter. “I haven’t stopped since,” she smiles.