Perhaps you spend most of your spare time in the kitchen, cleaning, cooking and washing. Are you always on duty to cries of “Mum, where’s my.../I want.../My tummy hurts”? Or maybe you’re simply waging war over the remote control. If so, you need a “mum cave”, and you don’t need kids to qualify. The term was coined by the New York-based interior designer Elaine Griffin — after, of course, the man cave — and it is “a place where a woman who nurtures others can finally nurture herself”.
A distinct child- and man-free zone, a mum cave is a place for retreating and recharging, for private phone conversations, for cooling off, even if only for 15 minutes. “It’s a room for getting back to you,” says Griffin, author of Design Rules: The Insider’s Guide to Becoming Your Own Decorator. Having designed plenty of mum caves, Griffin now predicts that this will be the defining trend of the decade. Those open-plan homes of the Noughties are closing in for some much-needed privacy. One wonders what took us so long, especially when some women even report resorting to using the loo for sanctuary. As the interior designer Ilse Crawford puts it: “A room of one’s own is a prerequisite for a mind of one’s own.”
So, what constitutes a mum cave? Though the symbolic act of shutting the door on everyone is hugely calming, an entire room is not a requisite. As well as the potting shed, the garage and the loft, you could also appropriate the landing, the dining room or even an unused corner in the bedroom. Griffin identifies five key concerns. First, a mum cave needs a place to sit and work (unlike men, women relax by doing things). It also needs storage, such as a bookcase or shelves, because, she observes: “You can’t feel restful, creative and recharged in chaos.” It needs seating for girlfriends who visit: Griffin recommends ottomans and benches, which can be “pulled up or pushed in a corner”. It has to be personalised, for example with a colour that makes you happy, mementos that speak to you or treasures that cheer. And to be a sensuous place where emotions can flow freely, it needs to appeal to all the senses — it is a place for warm, tactile, fragrant things. In need of a persuasive argument for your case? Try this: “You can’t take care of the family if you don’t put yourself first,” Griffin says.
The Mum Cave, by Elaine Griffin, the New York City-based interior designer, using products from HomeSense
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Danielle Proud
Interior designer and author
Trust the craft queen Danielle Proud to be on her second mum cave, having upgraded from a humble shed in her East Sussex garden. As well as having her distinct stamp, with 18th-century embroideries of parrots, Diptyque Figuier candles and pink lamps by Kartell, the oak-lined lean-to has been designed to complement her colouring. “Thanks to the nude and gold tones, which always suit blondes, anyone who comes to see me probably thinks I’m 10 times better-looking,” she says, laughing. The space also enables her to achieve a level of concentration that is not possible in the “mad, messy” house she shares with her gallery- and nightclub-owner husband, Alex, and their two children, Ulysses and Farrah. Being in her mum cave, she says, allows her identity to blossom. “My role is different in here, as I don’t feel like a wife and a mummy. Without the kids pulling on my skirt, I can connect with my previous self.” It’s also a space for a change of pace, and she indulges in pastimes that require time to relish, such as reading magazines or having a coffee. “I have a coffee-maker in here and not in the kitchen,” she says. “You don’t appreciate good coffee in a rush.” It’s in moments of relaxation that her best ideas come: “I think all mums need a space like this — it’s essential if you want to feel creative after having kids.” danielleproud.com
Sam Roddick
Activist and founder of Coco de Mer
Proof that a mum cave doesn’t require four walls and a door. Sam Roddick has commandeered a private corner in her handsome house in north London, which she shares with her 12-year-old daughter, Osha. Although her home is a constant meeting place, with friends and associates always dropping in, this space, just off her kitchen, is never occupied. “It’s quite intimate and closeted,” she says, and thus conducive to “wonderfully deep conversations”. Mostly, she uses it for writing speeches and thinking. “I also have an office at home, but it can get too distracting. Here I can relax and creatively explore,” she says.
Everything about it seems to nurture creative thought. As well as being flooded with natural light, it has the best view in town, she claims: “A long horizon is great for the imagination.” Old family photos and portraits cast “a shadow of ancestry”, making for an emotional space, while walls painted the colour of “dirty ocean” evoke the symbolism of “femininity and ferocity”. “When I’m creating, my starting point is not what something looks like, but what it feels like — I need a place based on feeling.” Where better, then, than this “womb of thought”
Nicole Farhi
Fashion designer
In another life, Nicole Farhi would have been an artist, so it’s not surprising that her sanctuary is her sculpture studio, a conservatory latched onto her Hampstead house. Stepping inside allows her to “empty” herself, she says. “Sometimes I sculpt, sometimes I don’t do anything but think. I just get into myself.” She might spend three or four hours at a time here, usually on the weekend, and she begins proceedings with a clean-up. “It’s a good way of clearing away the outside life,” she says. Then she’ll play some classical music — Brahms, Bach, Beethoven. “It shuts out other things,” she says. “I get to the core of what I really feel more quickly.” It’s perhaps symbolic that nature (“gorgeous wisteria and ivy”) is allowed to creep in — a free garden frees her mind, she says. Although her husband, the playwright David Hare, is not forbidden from entering, he is “respectful — he will call out from afar; he wouldn’t barge in”. It’s not a social space, nor even a space for phones. While Farhi is keen to point out that there are no rules (too confining), she would never answer a call: “It’s ridiculous to interrupt the flow."