Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castaway this week is the designer Patol Beck. If you've ever used a tea towel, wrapped a gift,

worn a dress, hung wallpaper, owned a tablecloth or picked out curtains, then there is a very good chance indeed, you know her work.

From dress fabrics to table linen, wrapping paper to pottery, for more than half a century. Her creative output has made its way

from high street stores and National Trust gift shops into millions of homes. The fact that she was

born in Hull between the wars to Polish emigray parents might make her beginnings sound rather drab and doer.

Far from it. Her father was a furrier who also designed and built the family home, each room inspired and seemed by his travels through Europe.

Her mother had a taste for luxury and gave her youngest daughter an appreciation of the finer things in life.

She went on to study at the Royal College of of the seems to characterize the vibrancy of her output ever since. She says, I like in my work to show people what it is that I find really wonderful about

something. I like details, the little things, the small decorations of life. So welcome Pat Albeck.

Inspiration, where do you find your inspiration?

Well, I find my inspiration mostly from flowers and gardens but I find it all over but it's easy to

take a flower and put it in a vase and look at it in detail and really find out what it's all about.

I read once that each morning you go out and pick a little flower and paint it.

Do you still do that?

Well, if the weather's not too bad, yes, I like to do that.

Except I'm finding it rather difficult to bend over double to pick tiny flowers on the ground.

And I have to have my husband pick them, and I have a terrible habit of telling him where to put the scissors.

In the nicest possible way.

We are witnessing a great decorative design resurgence right now.

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