THE SEASONAL HOME

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 sink into. A patchwork of frayed Persian rugs across the floor. Vertiginous stacks of books, vintage china and quirky objet d'art.

Twice a year she did a complete changeover.

As summer approached, out went the tapestry cushions, the fur throws, the heavy curtains. In came white linen loose covers, blousy vintage florals in dusty pastels, pale lightweight curtains that moved in the breeze. Even the lampshades were switched to white. The whole room transformed. Not redecorated — transformed. The bones were the same. The feeling was entirely different.

I was entranced. I thought it was the most magical, clever thing I had ever seen. Not decorating as I understood it. Something more instinctive than that. The house was simply moving into its summer self.

I've been thinking about that room a lot this week, because I've been doing my own version of it. Maybe not as completely as that house from my childhood but small acts that take the house from winter into summer. The cushions and throws on the sofas are swapped out for lighter linen and cotton ones, the sheepskins come off the chairs and are replaced with simple striped seat pads. The winter duvets come off and the summer ones go on. This sounds simple but it changes everything about how a bedroom feels, how you sleep, how the room looks at seven in the morning with the light coming in.

The vessels I reach for shift. In winter I want the weight of a bronze lustreware jug, something that holds the low light. In summer I want vintage pressed glass, or a single Spode teacup holding one extravagant bloom from the garden — a peony, an allium, something that wouldn't survive an arrangement but is perfect alone.

Even the incidental things change. The bags hanging in the hallway swap from leather to rattan. The coats on the hooks go from the dark heavy things we wear from October to the pale linen jackets and denim that belong to this season. You might not consciously notice these things as a visitor. But you feel them. The house has shifted register.

And then there's the fireplace. In winter it works hard. In summer it gets put to bed with a particular arrangement of stacked cut logs — clean, architectural, almost decorative.

But the transformation I love most is what happens outside.

I once photographed a house on Shelter Island, off Long Island, for a book. It belonged to a man who worked for Ralph Lauren and what he had done with his outdoor space has stayed with me ever since. He had taken the entire sitting room outside. Not garden furniture. Not a bistro table and two chairs. A proper rug on the floor. Table lamps. Knick-knacks on the side tables. A coffee table. Generous sofas with proper cushions — blousy florals, the works. It literally felt as though someone had picked up the sitting room and set it down in the garden and the garden had accepted it entirely.

I think about that space every year when we start preparing ours. The outdoor dining table comes out, and above it we hang a chandelier — the same one that's been inside all winter doing its duty in the dining room. Fairy lights migrate from inside to outside. The outdoor chairs get dusted off and extra cushions added — probably a vintage floral or a hardworking stripe. Surfaces get cleared and dressed. The pizza oven gets scrubbed. It stops looking like a garden and starts looking like a room.

Because that's what it becomes. From now until September, that's where we live. Where we eat, where we sit in the evening with a glass of something, where guests gravitate without being asked. The inside rooms don't stop mattering — but they become secondary. The outside room is the heart of the house in summer.

For all of this to work seamlessly you need to have created a structure that works — that's something I come back to again and again. When the bones of a room are right, the rest is responsive. You layer in, you layer out. Texture and accessories, the vessels you choose, the textiles you reach for — these are the tools that let a space meet the season, meet your mood, meet whoever you are in this particular month of this particular year. A room that knows how to change is a room that's actually alive. And the feeling of a place — whether it's January or June, whether the fire is lit or the doors are thrown open — that is always, always what everything else is in service of.

If you'd like a fresh pair of eyes on your own room — whether you're preparing it for summer or starting from scratch — a Calm Room Review might be exactly what you need. It's not a redesign, it's a rethink. You can find out more here.

find out more here

And if you're in the middle of your own seasonal reset, Decorating with White and One Calm Moment are both in the shop. One Calm Moment is my guide to building these small intentional rituals into your home and your day.

Get One Calm Moment here