Living with Art - Veranda Magazine Issue 5, Volume 36 - October 2022.

LULU LYTLE has been an Egyptomaniac all her life. Yes, massive cultural obsessions with the ancient civilization have come and gone, but the cofounder of Soane Britain has been having an Egypt moment since she was a little girl collecting travel brochures about the far-flung destination. She wrangled a trip there with her parents at age 17. “To me it was completely intoxicating,” she says. “The intensity of the heat and the light, the extraordinary relief of the shade, the ripples on the Nile, the over- whelming scale of the architecture. I was in love.”

It’s no wonder Lytle, who studied Egyptology at university, would lead the charge of what has all the markings of another revival. To wit: Soane’s 42-piece Egyptomania collection of fabric, furniture, and lighting that launches this season. Earlier this year Pierre Frey launched Merveilles d’Égypt, its monumental collection of 38 textiles, wallpapers, and rugs in collaboration with the Louvre. And British bath and tile company Balineum released its Louis Barthélemy Egyptomania collection—48 hand-painted ceramic tile designs with hieroglyphic figures and motifs reimagined by the Cairo- and Paris-based artist.

Lytle says she often grabs an hour at the British Museum to visit one piece at a time— a Coptic textile, a Pharaonic chair—and meditate on how it might speak anew today. Now she can trace those inspirational lineages with every piece of Soane’s collection, from a side table’s silhouette drawn from furniture found in Tutankhamun’s tomb to an item in her collection—an early-20th-century tent panel that was central to her pattern collaboration with British-Syrian artist Yasmin Hayat, an expert in Middle Eastern art and its intricate geometries.