The other five key questions

Last week I wrote about whether our decor can control our behaviour, and that understanding how you want to feel in a room is crucial. Today I'm unpacking the other five questions you must ask.

Way back towards the end of the previous century I went to journalism school to learn how to be a news reporter. During the course of a year we learnt shorthand (a minimum of 100 words a minute was required because electronic recording devices weren’t allowed into court rooms, so you had to write it all down), public affairs (aka the intricacies of local government) which made up a lot of local newspaper reporting, and how to structure a news story.

This was based on the old typesetting principles, by which everything was laid out by hand and stories that were too long for the allotted slot were cut from the bottom. It meant you had to get all the important information up at the top. Preferably in the first line.

And to do that, and cover all the basic elements of a story, you had to answer six questions: who, what, when, where, how and why. As I wrote last week, this amounts to Mrs White killed Roger Ackroyd in the kitchen with the lead piping because he was rude about her plum pudding.

Or, to put it another way, if you were visiting your deaf granny and wanted to tell her the news in the most efficient way possible, what would you say to make sure she got the full gist of the story?

Over the years it dawned on me that these six questions are also crucial to getting an interior design scheme right. And so this is where I always start.

In a piece I wrote last week on whether our decor changes our behaviour, I wrote about the how – understanding how you want to feel in a space will help you get it right. Today, we’re going to look at the other five questions and explain why they are equally important.