The new Irisa range from Barker and Stonehouse is a contemporary collection inspired by retro style.
The range includes a dining table and chairs, as well as an accompanying sideboard and even a TV table. Made from a mixture of oak and oak veneer, the furniture echoes the looks of mid-century designs with their simple lines and tapered legs.
Prices start at £85 for the dining chair.
See the range online
This Herbbs tea towel from Zara Home offers another bright and colourful retro tea towel design to add your collection and at a bargain price too.
The tea towel depicts a design not dissmilar to New House Textile's Herb Garden design which dates back to the fifties. Like that design, this cotton tea towel is decorated with an illustration showing pots full of herbs. This design is given a contemporary twist by the use of bright pop colours.
The tea towel costs a bargin £5.99.
Buy it online
The Waldorf Sofa is part of Heal’s classic designs range.
The shape of the sofa takes its inspiration from designs of the 1930s, with its semi-circular ends and cutaway arm details. The sofa is available in a range of fabrics, so if the floral pattern pictured here isn’t to your taste then they may have something more to your liking in-store.
It is available exclusively to Heal’s and is currently in the sale with a starting price of £1,596 reduced from £1,995.
The 1970s was undoubtedly a decade of indulgent luxury, with the birth of the disco era and the popularity of decadent holidays in the Riviera sunshine. With that comes a striking fashion aesthetic that's captured well in this Stripe Bustier Bikini from Urban Outfitters.
The two piece manages to capture a contrasting hyper-femininity at the same time as creating a structural silhouette, capturing that later seventies love of daring shapes. The mix of stripe directions highlights the seaming structure, while the lines are kept clean and simple enough to carry the design.
It's available now from Urban Outfitters UK for £35.
To easily achieve a genuine vintage look from any outfit, accessories are often the quickest and most effective way, regardless of the trend you are tapping into. This Peaked Cloche Hat from Diane von Furstenberg lends an instantly sixties feel to any outfit, without lacking subtlety or classic looks.
The hat takes a classically pre-War cloche style and gives it a sixties update, with a more structural shape and the addition of a pageboy style short peak. Finished in a luxurious burgundy felt fabric, with gold hardware, the result is a piece that captures all that felt modern and chic in the sixties.
It's available online from Matches Fashion for £125.
In his last book The Sixties Unplugged, Gerard De Groot proposed that the 1960s weren’t the happy-go-lucky radical decade of popular belief and now in his new book, he casts a similarly unbiased eye over the 1970s.
The Seventies Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic Look at a Violent Decade takes an episodic approach to the decade, looking at some of the major political events around the world. In his introduction, De Groot writes that he wanted to move away from the stereotypical view of the 1970s as not being as good as the 1960s, but found that the theme that dominated his research was how violent the decade was. With chapters on dictators, terrorists and Vietnam, it is a pretty serious read and certainly not your typical beach book (although I read it on my recent holiday).
It is available in paperback from Amazon, priced £5.84
