In a moment I want to share with you the most incredible book. A fin de siècle novel that is the very definition of decadence, and is packed with more decorating ideas than Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen’s waste bin. But first let me share this – a bamboo rocking chair from our local charity shop (Jill, as per, is seething).

And here is a selfie of me sitting in it…

H’only kidding. It’s Franz Kupka’s painting The Yellow Scale (1907), currently gracing the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of A Rebours, the book I’m reading. A Rebours – or Against Nature – was a sensation when it was published in 1884. It is thought to be the ‘poisonous French novel’ which leads to Dorian Gray’s downfall in Oscar Wilde’s famous novel.

The central – in fact, really, sole – character is Des Esseintes, a rich Parisienne who buys a house out of town to seclude himself from bourgeois society. Then nothing much happens, that is if you count decking out your dinning room like the inside of a boat and bejewelling your pet tortoise so it goes better with the rug, ‘nothing.’

Amid chapters mainly devoted to Latin literature, the creation of perfumes, and fantasising about going to London but then not bothering, the decorating ideas come thick and fast:

“As to furniture, […] the only luxuries he intended to have in this room were rare books and flowers. [He] confined himself for the present to fitting up ebony bookshelves and bookcases round the greater part of the room, strewing tiger’s skins and blue fox furs about the floor, and installing beside a massive money-changer’s table of the fifteenth century, several deep-seated wing-armchairs and an old church lectern of wrought iron…”

Strewn tiger skins and a massive table? I’m doing something similar myself in the back parlour.

The book really is astounding – strange, intricate, alienating, naturalistic and yet unlike a conventional novel. It still reads as so very modern – Des Esseintes grows bored of his hothouse flowers and instead falls in love with the purer artifice of fake blooms, for example. If you’re interested in Warhol, Tim Walker or Elton John’s £293,000 flower bill, this is the book for you. I’ve even put an outrageous Pinterest board together to give you a taste of the interiors this book describes.