Homes that feel as good as they look

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

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 —