Some of you will remember the apartment I helped work on in The Hoover Building a couple of months ago… well today I wanted to show you the last room that I didn’t share before. That’s the bathroom. I didn’t show you because a) I had nothing to do with it and b) bathrooms –…
The core promise of the Hippocratic Oath, taken by all doctors, is “First, do no harm” – Primum, non nocere (a Latin translation from the Greek). I have been thinking about this a lot recently amid society’s increasing awareness that the planet is burning; that we have squandered our resources and failed to protect the…
For today’s Monday Inspiration we are going on a house tour. To say this incredible house near Belfast, northern Ireland, was a wreck when Ciara Devir and her husband Peter Boyle first laid eyes on it, is probably one of the biggest understatements I have heard in recent times. The 20 bedroom baronial house, which…
For this week’s podcast we were thrilled to visit the home of broadcaster and author Fearne Cotton, whose book Happy, has been on the bestseller lists since it was published two years ago. We wanted to find out her what makes her happy when it comes to her home and, as she is about to…
I don’t know why I haven’t thought of this as a title for a series before but there we go. I’ve thought it now and this week for the Wednesday Ad Break it’s all about French Connection. Founded in 1972 the company set out to provide well-designed fashionable clothing that would appeal to a large…
After all the razzamatazz of the great rooms of the century which has occupied the last few weeks, it’s time to return to some real rooms by real people that we can draw just as much inspiration from as those done on million dollar budgets for million dollar owners. I was on a judging panel…
Blue is the world’s favourite colour. Time after time in surveys this restful shade comes out on top. In 2017 Dulux, which sells in 80 countries around the globe, chose a soft greyish blue as its colour of the year and last year Farrow & Ball included a version in its new collection. Dulux’s decision…
I’m going to finish this mini series of the greatest rooms of the century by looking at some more recent designers. When I spoke to William Norwich, the editor of this Phaidon book, he told me that while they started in the 1900s (see last Monday’s post for a room for each decade) sometimes when…
Last week Sophie and I took the podcast on the road to record at Clerkenwell Design Week. You can, as ever, listen to the full episode here, but the two key aspects that we discovered were the changing design of the workspace and the increasing attention being paid to sustainability. Clerkenwell Design Week is now…
I am returning once more to this book: Interiors, The Greatest Rooms of the Century, on this bank holiday Monday…. hellooooo *waves* is anyone out there….? as I wanted to look more closely at design through the decades. Now, the caveat is that I can only show you the rooms that were cleared for publication…