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A break with the traditional Monday post of Beautiful Rooms as I figured you might want to be the first to see the not quite so beautiful rooms that we will be moving into in three weeks time. This is very much a post of befores. I'm hoping the afters will not take too many

I wasn't sure if I should post this given the sad news about the death of the Queen last night. In the end I have decided to leave it here as planned. There is no disrespect intended and it is up to you to read it now or later as you wish.  Something slightly different

Some of you will have read this before – I first published it in 2018 and it was then expanded to six questions for my second book 101 Interior Design Answers, which came out as the lockdown started in 2020. As we near the anniversary of that date and we appear to have lurched from

A sightly random selection for you this week although is anything ever really random? Bit early in the week for an existential discussion on the natural of randomness (although if you've ever tried to lay tiles without the brain forcing you into semblance of a pattern I'd be interested to hear) so while, on the

As ever a random selection of rooms which have caught my eye in the corridors of the internet this week. Starting off with this pretty table and chairs in what I think might be the image that first sparked my concept of the importance of a disrupter colour. Arts & Crafts Breakfast Table by christopher

Well it finally got me. Two years after the pandemic started the Covid has found me - and there was I thinking I was an outlier. Clearly not. So this post comes to you from my isolated sick bed  - see below - with a few postcards of my trip to Morocco - the covid

I have been thinking about storage. This may not be the most arresting first line you have ever read, but it follows that if I have been thinking about it then you might have less thinking to do as I will have, hopefully, come up with some ideas that can help. tylko storage Storage is,

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about the trend for bringing the outdoors in when it comes to colour and pattern. We know that the colour green is on the rise, houseplants are back with a vengeance and the trend for botanical plants is massive whether you favour the Arts and

I had my annual Spring wake-up call this week when I looked out of the landing window on the way downstairs in the morning and the huge chestnut tree, which has been nothing but a tangle of naked branches for months, is suddenly fully decked out in her green dress and bursting with life. It

Today I wanted to take an in depth look at window dressings (part of a paid collaboration with Hillarys with whom I have worked many times over the years) as the company launches its new range of fabrics by the British textile designer Margo Selby. I have written about curtains before and I have mentioned

I know that many (most?) of you are interested in sustainability and trying to live in a more eco-friendly way so today I thought I would share this report on the future of the sustainable home and office which has been put together by Springwise and Aritco (a London-based global innovation intelligence platform for positive

While this is the anniversary of us moving into this house - two dilapidated flats with no key for the meter, a boiler that needed mending (good luck with that just before Christmas) followed by a bust loo and a snowstorm (so cold we slept in our coats) no-one actually buys a house this close

There are so many things I love about this week's property that I ended up wanting to include too many pictures but I have tried to restrict myself to those that are useful and which illustrate so many of the points that we discuss on these pages time and again. Also, some of the pictures

A treat for you this week as we have two houses. It turned out that the two that ended up on this week's short list had a symmetry of price so I thought we could look at both. The first is the former home of the sculptor Dame Elisabeth Frink, in Dorset, which has recently

Usually I use the last Wednesday of the month to tell you about interior design news belonging to other people. This month I'm going to show you two projects that I'm working on. As you know I’m mostly a writer rather than a doer and, aside from the odd interior design consultation, I have mostly

This week's inspiration was begun by the top two pictures - one wallpaper, one paint and then I realised there was a theme developing as I had also promised to show you a couple of the new shots of my house taken by Mark Anthony Fox, who does a lot of the dreamy photography for

Oh the Georgians had all the best houses and this one, apparently, has one of the finest staircases outside London. I'm intrigued by that - is there a staircase judge? Is it a committee that has things to tick off - the width, height of the riser, fanciness of the finial (I mean spindle)? Does

There's something so romantic about this former stables which has been converted into a two bedroom house and which looks like it belongs deep in the French countryside. But it's actually in Canning Cross in the Camberwell conservation area. Once a working stables, the building, which is set down a cobbled street, is now a