Designing homes that feel as good as they look

One of the most useful decorating tools I’ve ever used isn’t a paint chart or a tape measure. It’s a camera. That might sound strange coming from someone who’s spent the last thirty-five years styling and designing homes, but as they say a camera never lies and it highlights things we’ve stopped noticing.The camera has no emotional attachment to the extra chair that was placed as a temporary measure and that you’ve been re-routing around for years but that has somehow become

Instagram has been full this week of gardeners sharing advice on how to help plants survive another hot summer. Hosepipe bans, drought-tolerant planting and gardens under stress seem to be everywhere I look. When we talk about creating a calmer life, we rarely talk about the garden, but I think we should. Our gardens can either become another long list of jobs demanding our attention, or they can become places of respite and rejuvenation. A few years ago, Dave and I took a hu

It's July, and everyone is home. The dishwasher seems to be on a permanent cycle. Dirty cups appear in the sitting room faster than I can carry them back to the kitchen, only to mysteriously reappear a few hours later. There are coats slung over the backs of chairs, shoes abandoned in the hall, and creative projects spreading themselves across the kitchen table. (That bit, I rather love.) and my own bedroom is probably the untidiest room in the house because by the time I've

I’ve just come back from a week in Greece, and one of the things holidays always remind me is how differently we experience the world when we’re truly present. For a few precious days I focussed on spending my time with loved ones, slowing down and my senses seemed to wake up. I noticed the rhythmic, ever present chorus of cicadas rising and falling with the afternoon heat, the gentle lap of the sea against the rocks below our villa and that delicious sensation of a warm bree

There's a question I used to ask people as a child. If you had your last few pennies in the world, what would you buy — a loaf of bread, or a bunch of flowers? Most people said bread. Sounds like a sensible answer, but I would laugh in their faces. Why would you buy bread when you could buy flowers? My mother still tells this story, fifty years on. I think now that it wasn't really a question about flowers at all. It was an instinct, fully formed long before I had any langu

Last week I wrote about the healing powers of gardening, and how I had neglected my garden even though I knew it was exactly what I needed during one of the hardest years of my life. Grief does strange things to a person. Since losing my brother Ben, I had not been able to do very much for myself — whether that was survivors’ guilt, or simply that I couldn’t locate myself clearly enough to think about my own needs, I’m not entirely sure. I had also kept myself from yoga for

Yesterday the solstice and Father's Day fell on the same day. I don't think that's nothing. The longest day of the year — the day of most light — sitting exactly on top of the day we think about fathers, about what we carry from them and what we've lost. There's something in that worth pausing over. My brother Ben died in April. He should be spending today with his children, and his father — my father — is spending it without his son. I woke early, and instead of reaching f

I've been standing in my living room looking at things. It's a large L-shaped space, open plan, the kind of room that has accumulated rather than been decorated. The IKEA sofa is covered in antique linen. The aluminium dining chairs are reproduction US Navy issue, a classic design made to last decades aboard ships. The dining table is an antique Swedish postal sorting table, the kind of thing that once organised other people's letters and parcels and lives. The armchairs are

Nearly all magazine photography was shot in studios back then - blacked out empty shells, deep in the East End of London— often old warehouses, long before it was fashionable to live in one — where the rents were cheap and the loading bays were big enough to take a whole room set off a van. We'd meet the driver at 6 or 7 in the morning, more often than not having already been to Covent Garden flower market first. That was its own particular world — the market at five-thirty,

Somewhere between London and the Welsh border, on the way to my grandmother's house. Wild and windswept, misshapen by years of motorway weather — it had stopped arguing with the wind at some point and simply grown around it instead. We passed it at 70mph. It came up on you all of a sudden around a bend and was gone before you could properly look at it. And yet I watched for it every single time, and every time it came and went it gave me a moment of both joy and peace. I'v