Light Chasing

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, still half dark, the cold coming off the concrete, buckets of stems in every direction, loud with shouting voices, the rumble of huge industrial trollies of blooms hurtling along the long aisles of stalls that were arranged in lines inside the vast, almost brutalist concrete building that held the market at Nine Elms . You'd pick up what you needed and be back on the road before the city had properly woken up.

By the time we arrived at the studio, Brick Lane was already alive. Fruit and vegetable stalls, brightly coloured plastic buckets stacked in towers, men selling watches of debatable provenance from folding tables. I walked along that street hundreds of times in those years, arms full, trying not to drop anything, trying to hold in my head the complete picture of what the set needed to become.

Because I had designed it. That's the part that gets lost when people imagine what a stylist does. I would design the set — draw it up, brief the set builder, commission whatever needed to be made. One shoot I remember in particular: an eight-page feature on radiator covers. Ten different designs, each one shot in its own complete room setting. Ten covers designed and made. Ten sets built, furnished, dressed, lit and shot. My assistant and I would arrive before the photographer, before the lighting was touched, and we would hang the curtains, construct the furniture, unpack crate after crate of props, arrange and rearrange until the room looked like somewhere real — like somewhere a person actually lived, even though every inch of it had been invented from nothing.

And then the photographer would arrive and disappear under a black cape draped over the large format camera. The assistants would spend hours building the light. Layering it. Silk diffusers through a fake window. A reflector angled just so to suggest afternoon falling across a chair. The result was beautiful. You'd recognise it from the Silk Cut campaigns of that era — that particular quality of perfected, velvet light. Gorgeous. Controlled.

Entirely false.

Then something shifted. A new wave of photographers emerged who wanted to work with daylight. Real daylight. So we started shooting on location, in actual houses, begging and borrowing access from homeowners who got the dubious privilege of watching us turn their homes inside out for a day — hanging curtains, positioning mirrors, moving furniture — all without payment. I genuinely can't believe they allowed it. But they did. And through that we started learning something entirely different. Not how to build light. How to read it. How to work with it. You'd learn a house in a morning. Which corner caught the light at nine and lost it by eleven. Where the flat midday fell and what it did to a white wall. Where the afternoon came in golden and low and made everything it touched look like it belonged in a painting.

That world eventually changed — location owners got wise, started charging fees, rightly so — and out of that shift Dave and I built an entire business. Beach Studios, in 1997. An agency placing privately owned houses with photographers and magazines. And then we went further: designing spaces specifically for photography. Houses architected around daylight. Front to back. Light moving through a space all day, from room to room, following the sun.

We lived in some of those houses.

And that is where I truly understood what light does to a person. Not what it does to a photograph — I already knew that. What it does to a body. To a mood. To how you move through a day. A house full of daylight does something to you that is almost impossible to explain to someone who has spent years in rooms without it. You wake up differently. You think differently. The house feels alive in a way that has nothing to do with what's in it.

Light is not the backdrop to decorating. It is the most powerful decorating tool there is. And it should be the first decision, not the last.

Our first house together — a typical Brixton terrace — taught me the practical version of that lesson. These houses are built narrow and deep, which means they have a chronic problem: dark centres. The light floods the front rooms in the morning, floods the back in the afternoon, and the middle sits in semi-shadow all day. Everything we did in that house was in service of solving that problem. We opened up the spaces front to back to let the light flow through. We covered entire walls in glazed tiles to bounce it. We placed mirrors to catch it and send it into the parts of the house where it wouldn't otherwise reach. We kept window treatments minimal — nothing intercepting what little there was. We painted the floors white, because light falls onto floors and white floors send it back up again. We replaced a window with French doors: more glass, bigger opening, and light falling flat onto the floor rather than cutting in at an angle through a smaller frame.

None of these were decorating decisions in the conventional sense. They were light decisions. The decoration came after. The light came first.

This is what I come back to in every consultation, every room I work on. Most people treat light as what's left over once the decorating is done. They choose paint colours, fabrics, furniture — and then notice, at the end, that the room feels dark. Or flat. Or somehow wrong, without being able to name why.

But light is a material. It behaves like a material. You can direct it, reflect it, filter it, amplify it, interrupt it. A mirror placed to catch the afternoon and send it across a dark hall is not a decorating choice — it's an architectural intervention. A white floor is not an aesthetic preference — it's a way of redistributing the light that enters a room.

Once you start seeing it this way, you can't stop. You walk into a space and read it the way a photographer reads a set. Where is the light coming from. What time of day does this room come alive. What is blocking it that doesn't need to be there.

I've been chasing light my whole career. I learned to chase it in a studio, building it from scratch under a black cape. I learned to love it in real houses, following it from corner to corner with a camera. I learned to design with it in the spaces Dave and I built together.

I've been living by what I learned ever since.

Atlanta x

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