Faux plants used to be an admission of defeat. Dusty silk ficus in a hotel lobby, plastic ivy trailing along the top of a kitchen cupboard, that specific shade of green that exists nowhere in nature. The category earned its reputation honestly. The good ones now are genuinely hard to identify from a few steps…
Blank walls are the last thing most people deal with, and it shows. Furniture gets chosen carefully, paint gets three sample patches, and then a single small print goes up somewhere around shoulder height because it was the thing that was available, and there it stays for six years. The strange part is that walls…
Most home offices are decorated as if the work happens somewhere else. The desk faces a wall because that is where the plug was. The chair came from the dining table. The only light is the ceiling fitting that was already there, and a lamp got added later because the screen was hard to see…
There’s a particular kind of room that makes people slow down the moment they walk in. Sunlight falls across a worn rug, a rattan chair sits at an angle with a throw tossed over its arm, plants spill from a shelf, and nothing looks like it came out of the same delivery box. It feels…
Most people don’t come to minimalism because they love empty rooms. They come to it because they’re tired. Tired of hunting for keys under a pile of post, tired of cleaning around things they never use, tired of a living room that looks messy again an hour after tidying it. The promise of a minimalist…
The first time you walk into a genuinely good maximalist room, the reaction is rarely “that’s a lot of stuff.” It’s usually closer to a held breath. Everywhere you look there is something to look at, and none of it feels random. A 1970s brass lamp sits beside a chipped Staffordshire dog. The walls are…
There is a version of mid-century modern that has been sold back to us so many times it has stopped meaning anything. Tapered legs stuck onto a chipboard cabinet. A velvet sofa in a colour nobody used in 1958. A sunburst clock hung above a grey sectional and called a nod to the era. The…
Walk into two houses on the same street and you might struggle to name what separates them. Both have wooden furniture. Both have soft neutral walls, curtains rather than blinds, a rug under the coffee table, a lamp on either side of the sofa. Nothing in either room is shouting. Yet one feels like a…
The most expensive room I have ever stood in did not look expensive. Plaster walls, a plain linen sofa, a rug you could have walked past without noticing, and almost nothing on any surface. What registered instead was a kind of stillness. The light fell differently because the plaster absorbed it. The door closed with…
The seventies have a reputation problem, and most of it comes from a handful of photographs that keep circulating. Avocado bathroom suites. Orange and brown geometric wallpaper covering every wall of a small room. Carpet in places carpet should never have gone. If that is your reference point, the idea of decorating a home this…
