The simple secret behind my design philosophy
How to know when to buy something - and when to leave it behind
A bonus post for paid subscribers to celebrate the weather cooling down (for now) and the end of June.
One of my lovely clients, who is working on a house in Spain while living in New York, asked me about my design philosophy the other day. She had spotted a pair of leather chairs on an auction site with a starting bid of €60 ,and she wanted to know what I thought.
She was asking me because (she admitted) she has a history of falling for a bargain without stopping to consider if it’s something she actually wants to have in her home.
In this case she had already decided that she would probably reupholster the chairs, which is a not inconsiderable expense. So she emailed to ask me how I applied my design philosophy when shopping - and I was immediately thrilled to upgrade what I tend to think of as gut instinct to a thought process and from there to an actual guiding philosophy.
Interestingly, she did not just email to ask me if I thought if she should buy them.
There’s often an outsourcing of taste when it comes to interior design (it’s not just about getting someone else to do the thinking and planning), and while that’s in essence a large part of what you pay for when you commission a designer, it also goes against everything I try to do when someone hires me for a project. That is to say, I will always try and lead anyone I work with to an understanding of their own taste and style, while taking care to explain why something might work and why it doesn’t, and what we can do instead so that it does.
So when this lovely client emailed to ask me to explain my design philosophy so that she could learn from it and apply it to future purchases, I was only too happy to spend some time thinking about my thought process.
More than anything, I want you all, when you read this newsletter, to understand how to create homes that will tell your personal stories. I want you to develop your own tastes and opinions and not just receive mine - because if you do that, you will never really understand why your rooms work. You will make mistakes when it comes to updating and refurbishing, because you won’t really have understood what you were doing. That’s fine if you’re the sort of person who always hires an interior designer, but if you’re not, you need to know what you like and why you like it, so you can redecorate whenever you want to.
