Designing homes that feel as good as they look

When I was a child I used to stay at the house of a fashion designer — a woman of some notoriety in the seventies, whose daughters have grown up to be equally chic and influential in their own right. The house was rambling, a bit frayed at the edges, chaotic in the way that only genuinely inhabited houses are. A double-height sitting room with a gallery library at one end, so you could look down into the whole beautiful mess of it. Well-loved squishy sofas you could actually

Some weeks are harder than others.And it's in those weeks where you find yourself doing small things with unusual deliberateness. Making the tea slowly. Cutting a few stems from the garden and putting them in a jar on the kitchen table. Making the bed properly, smoothing the linen, placing the pillows just so. Not because anyone is coming. Just because it helps. I’ve been thinking about why that is. A home, at its best, is not just somewhere you live. It is somewhere that h

There is a difference between a decorated room and a lived-in one. Most people can feel it the moment they walk through the door. The 'decorated' room that arrives all at once can look finished, complete somehow— everything matching, nothing out of place, not a trace of the person who actually lives there. It looks right but it feels flat. The lived-in room is different. It has accrued. It might have a corner that doesn't quite go with the rest and is better for it, somethi

I went to see The Devil Wears Prada sequel last night. And it took me straight back. Back to the editorial meetings, the press shows, the gifts arriving at the office, the advertisers wining and dining us. Back to the monthly gathering where you'd pitch your shoot ideas and your editor would either give you the green light or look at you as though you'd suggested something entirely beneath her. "Florals? For spring? Ground-breaking." Back to the life of a magazine stylist —

You know the feeling when you walk into a room and something shifts. Your eye lands. Your body relaxes. You take a breath you didn't know you needed. Nothing dramatic — just a quiet, physical sense of being somewhere that isn't asking anything of you. That feeling is what Dave and I have spent thirty-five years working toward. And it never gets less interesting. Because what feels effortless is actually the product of a genuinely good eye, real patience, and knowing — deepl

I've been thinking about a Seamus Heaney poem this week. Night Drive — written on a journey through France, at night. Rain on the windscreen, the smell of hay through an open window, small cafés shutting one by one. Nothing happens. Nothing is remarkable. And yet I've gone back to it since my early twenties. Because every time I read it I feel that particular deliciousness — rain on a warm August night, the smell of somewhere you're passing through, the fleeting aliveness o

There's a whole corner of Instagram devoted to the idea that throwing things away will change your life. Five things a day. A timer and a bin bag. I tried it last week. I found an empty tube of toothpaste, a sock with a hole in it and some packaging I was going to bin anyway. Hardly a transformation. My mum tried the timer version — throw as much as you can in five minutes — and got herself to tears. That's not decluttering. That's just stress with a deadline. The problem wit

This garden was planted on Beth Chatto's principle of right plant, right place. Build a good framework first, work with your conditions, and things establish themselves almost without effort. Over time a garden like this develops its own intelligence. It self-seeds. Plants arrive where the conditions suit them — in a crack in the path, at the foot of a wall — in ways you'd never have planned but that feel exactly right. The thing that makes the whole border feel alive rathe

I was listening to BBC Radio 4 earlier this week — one of those programmes that catches you when you're doing something else and makes you stop. It was asking whether architecture can make you happy. Whether the spaces we inhabit have a measurable effect on our emotional and physical wellbeing. The answer, it seems, is yes. And not in a vague, difficult-to-quantify way. Thoughtfully designed spaces reduce stress, lift mood, affect how we sleep, how we concentrate, even how we

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it actually means for a home to have depth. Not just to look considered. Not just to be well put together. But to have that quality you feel immediately when you walk into certain spaces — a sense that the room has layers to it. That there’s something underneath the surface worth staying for. I think depth in a home is built from two things. And you need both. The first is the designed layer. Light, space, texture, colour — the