DESIGN DECODED: Bringing the fizz
Step inside the home of one of London's coolest design couples and see how you can push your own interiors to be the very best. (Clue: take care of the details and the design will look after itself.)
Every now and then I see a house, or a photograph, or even a tiny detail that makes me go a little fizzy inside. I’ve been writing about interiors since (coughs) 2001 when I was first asked to write a piece by The Independent features desk, while on maternity leave from my job there as a news reporter. Twenty-five years later I still get the fizz. The home we are going to look at today gives me the fizz (as opposed to the ick, which I sort of wrote about here under a different headline:
It belongs to Buchanan Studio, a couple I have admired for a long time. They recently sold this house (via Inigo) and I’m excited to see what they do next. You may be familiar with many of the rooms already. You may have admired and liked them, but today let’s go a little deeper and understand why they work so well.
Once you see that you understand how you can take inspiration from them without copying (that never works) but by adapting to your own taste and circumstances.
Come with me and I will show you. Because the thing that brings the fizz is often not the whole room. Take, for example, the bathroom - which will be familiar to many of you already, as it took the internet by storm when it was first revealed. I like this bathroom, I really do, and while I wouldn’t be so bold myself, we can definitely learn from it.
I have used pink and yellow, albeit in a very different way, in one of my own bedroom and bathroom suites in Italy.
So while we’re going to look at entire rooms, I’m also going to show you the details. The things that bring the fizz which are also (often) tiny elements that don’t cost much but which make the whole difference.
In that bathroom, it’s the fact that the bath and basin are also pink. In white it would just be a clever use of tiles. The pink and white striped shower curtain is a cool touch draped like that for effect, but if the bath was white the effect would be much less.
This Substack is, in essence, about learning what makes you fizz and how to bring it into your own home. It’s about understanding that copying a room that you’ve seen on Pinterest wholesale will never work - but knowing that you can use it as a jumping off point and adapt it to fit your own home in a way that works for you.
So if you would like to, as the song goes: Walk this Way… to discover some secrets of interior design and look at great rooms en route, starting with the kitchen.
Now I love the industrial feel of this - the use of super modern stainless steel in a Victorian terrace house is already a great contrast. But there are a number of tiny details that stop it feeling cold and characterless, which is an easy trap to fall into with a material like this.
But first I want to point out the lamps on the island. We’ve all seen those trios of pendant lights hanging low over kitchen islands, and indeed, there are pendants here - but this pair of metallic mushroom lights really turn this from a working kitchen into a home island where you might sit around and drink wine while chatting to the cook. You don’t have to use metal ones and, what’s more, you could easily EASILY use rechargeable lamps here, which means they would last for the evening and you could move them out of the way the next day.
These ones are plugged in with hidden sockets but if you aren’t at the installing stage then rechargeable is the way to go. Here’s my edit of portable lamps. It’s making me nostalgic for my old house, where we had a large island and everyone always sat around it.
Now the next clever thing they have done is contrasting all that shiny metal with these upholstered chairs in their own design floral fabric. I’ve had a sample of this in my desk for about three years and every now and then I just take it out and look at it. I reminds of some trousers I made out of a pair of my granny’s curtains when I was about 17. I wore them for about a week then washed them and the fabric was so old it literally disintegrated in the machine.
See the chairs? That’s what brings the fizz in here. You don’t have to worry that your plant skills aren’t up to maintaining a giant (and temperamentally demanding) fiddle leaf fig. You don’t have to fret that you haven’t got the budget for a polished concrete floor. But you do need a worktop and you do need chairs. And the contrast between those two necessary items in this space is what’s bringing it.
The rest of this post is for my lovely paid subscribers. If you want to understand how to bring the fizz to your home then you can sign up for weekly interior design updates. I’ll show you how to find your style and create a home that tells your story.