Sarah Corbett-Winder is regaling me with the origin story of her banana phone. “Everyone else on social media was using a microphone and I wanted my own unique thing,” says the 39-year-old stylist, content creator and fashion entrepreneur of her cartoonish prop. She is sitting beside her mother, Caroline Smiley, at the family home in Wiltshire, a small, dappled dachshund circling their feet. “It’s also a useful tool because I can pretend people are calling in with a style question, like a hotline.”
“Whenever I see Sarah’s Instagram I think, well! Every penny that we’ve spent on speech and drama has paid off,” Smiley claps back.
Caroline Smiley’s Wiltshire home, with tub chairs from Emma Leschallas Antiques in Tetbury and a rug by Oka © Mark Shearwood
The mother and daughter are chatting in the duck-egg-blue striped kitchen of Smiley’s home, where Corbett-Winder grew up with her older sister. It’s a quintessentially English farmhouse set on 99 acres of land, and surrounded by roaming fallow deer and neatly clipped topiary. The decor is an exemplar of the Cotswolds brand of vintage maximalism that has become so highly sought after in recent years. There are tassel-fringed curtains and skirted armchairs in chintzy patterns, a downstairs loo plastered in wallpaper depicting the Battle of Valmy and adorned with whimsical Victorian shadowboxes, and tables and surfaces strewn with a menagerie of antique Staffordshire dog figurines, family photos and half-finished puzzles.
