On a shelf in the sitting room of Emily Johnson’s west London home sits a tangerine. Its skin is pocked and waxy-looking and appropriately citrussy. On closer inspection, however, it seems a fraction too glossy, and a quick squeeze confirms it is glazed earthenware. Johnson had the piece made by her ceramics company, 1882, in honour of Glasgow-born artist Bruce McLean, with whom she and her team in Stoke-on-Trent have collaborated for the last few years. “His theory,” she explains, “is that if, when you’ve finished a piece of work – a sculpture, a painting, whatever it may be – you put a tangerine on it or near it, and the piece sings, then it’s passed the tangerine test.”
Johnson has applied that test, albeit on a larger scale, throughout the ground floor of her Victorian terrace. An expansive rear extension incorporates the kitchen, whose tangerine-hued shelving unit was made by the same Stoke-based craftsmen who provided the V&A with bright orange plinths to display a collection of vessels and platters by McLean in 2017. Ditto two console cabinets in the adjoining double reception room. And then there’s the resin kitchen floor, which, if not quite tangerine, is what you could call “tangerine-adjacent”.
