Five Ways to Make Good Interior Design Decisions

Firstly thank you all so much for your lovely comments about the finished house. As I said, I will be going through every detail for you in the coming weeks but it seems only fair to let Red Magazine have its moment before I do that. In addition, I saw a feature at the weekend which I thought would make a really good starting point for anyone who is mired in renovations/design dilemmas and interior indecision. So let’s take it back to the beginning.

One of the things that people have said to me most often is how did we pull all this together in under a year. In fact we moved in at the end of September 2022, started work in the November, broke for Christmas, started again in January and finished by the end of April. I’ve been sitting on the Red magazine feature since then!

So yes we did it very fast. And that was partly due to one enormous piece of luck which was finding a good builder with availability on our timetable. Let’s not underestimate the importance of that. The other thing was planning – the sale took six months and during that time I pored over floor plans and paint charts and graph paper and even during the times when I doubted the sale would ever happen I knew I was fully prepared to get stuck in as soon as it did.

It’s also worth mentioning that if we hadn’t needed to replace the floors, heating, boiler and windows before we could even build a wardrobe we might not have done it as fast. When you move into a space that’s liveable it’s easy to put up with it for longer than you actually want because the more you unpack the harder it becomes to deal with the idea of packing it up and disrupting the way you have learnt to live in a space.

In many ways we didn’t have a choice on that front as we were living out of boxes and not just in the bedrooms. There wasn’t enough storage in the kitchen to unpack while the upstairs power shower didn’t work and the downstairs shower room was full of mould. The former dining room was home to 63 boxes of books and they all needed to be moved around so the floor could be replaced.

So let’s just say I was motivated to make a lot of decisions in record quick time. But then I read an interview with a Harvard professor of psychology Ellen Langer, who has been teaching a decision making course for 40 years.

She says, not rocket science this bit, that making decisions is highly stressful and adds that stress is at the root of much illness so it pays to learn to do it better. And that is the premise of her book. Now she applies her process to helping you in life but I saw the headline – FIVE FAILSAFE RULES TO MAKING GOOD DECISIONS – and realised that these decisions can be perfectly applied to interior design. So here they are (feel free to use them in life as well!).

1 Gathering too much information can result in Analysis Paralysis

This resonated with me so much. I talk to people every day who are deep into washing machine performance reports, gazing at 27 different shades of white, agonising over which handle would be best on the loo door. As a result they have so much detailed information they are simply unable to make a choice as they have got lost. One of my very first clients told me she had 3000 pins on her kitchen board and all she knew was that she hated blue. In fact she loved navy blue but she had lost sight of that thread as she had so many pictures to analyse.

Try giving yourself an instant shortlist of three (appliances) five (chairs) or 10 (paint shades to choose from). Resist the urge to dive in deeper. It won’t help. Make the choice and move on because

2 Listing Pros and Cons is pointless

When you have to much information and are confused you start making lists of pros and cons. But when the cons outweigh the pros you often don’t like that result so you resolve to ask “just one more person” because what your gut knows (but you aren’t hearing) is that you do actually know what you want but for some reason you feel you can’t justify that decision so you look for a reason not to. But that doesn’t make you happy so you keep digging and you know what? Five years go by and you’ve still got the same horrid unworkable bathroom you had when you moved in. And to be clear I’m not talking about budgets here. For the purposes of this feature let’s assume budget is a given. This is the next stage – choosing the stuff and planning the room.

Instead listen to your gut – the reason you keep asking for more opinions is because either you don’t trust yourself to get it right or you know what you want and you want to keep asking until you hear what you want from someone else. The demon of external validation. We have lost the art of listening to our instinct and are instead distracted by the 21^st century equivalent of keeping up with that neighbour Mrs Jones – aka Instagram –  and all that we see there. And that’s wrong because you need to…..

3 Free Yourself to make the Wrong Choice

When you are tackling a big renovation there are dozens of decisions to be made every day. This somehow makes it easier as the theory is you have the space to get some of them wrong. As Professor Langer says if there are only 10 questions you’re under more pressure to get them right than if there are 100.

So if you’re doing one room each decision becomes bigger. Allow yourself to get some things wrong. You can always repaint, swap the hinges on the door, buy a new table and sell the old one. Focus on the big decisions and, to paraphrase, the smaller ones will sort themselves out. Basically you need to…

4 Forget making the “right” decision – just make a choice and make it work

This is key. When you’re in deep it can take two hours to decide the height of the shower or where exactly the valves will go. And you won’t always get it right. But it won’t be the end of the world. My kitchen cupboards were supposed to line up with the pantry so the view through the internal window would be seamless. Turns out the previous owner hadn’t wanted to get a party wall agreement when she built that extension so she simply built in front of it. We didn’t know this until the cupboards were ordered and the plumbing work began. Instead they sit slightly forward. I am the only person that notices this (and I have road-tested this extensively). Not only does no-one else notice but when it’s pointed out most people think it was deliberate to show off between the two rooms. And, bonus, the worktop in the kitchen is slightly deeper than the standard 60cm so there’s more space. We could have held up the work, reconfigured the whole thing, spent time and money or we made a decision to carry on and we made it work. And that’s freedom because

5 Regrets are pointless: an alternative decision could have been worse.

Like I say we could have stopped the work, knocked down the extension, sought more permission, re-ordered the kitchen. The builders might have needed to go to another job. We might still be living in a building site. And we would have spent twice as much money. So an alternative would definitely have been financially worse. This is also known, says Professor Langer, as falling up: “If you and I go out for lunch and it’s wonderful we have a great time. If the food is terrible I won’t eat as much and that’s good for my waistline so yay. My whole life is yay.”

So my kitchen doesn’t run in a flat line from one room to the next but it didn’t cost me any more money, it still looks great, I’m not (quite) broke and the work is finished and in a magazine. So that’s falling up right there.

If you want to read her book and apply to life rather than just decorating it’s called The Mindful Body by Ellen Langer.