Things you should buy for your house
Because I have them in mine - and they work
It turns out it was exactly one year ago (7 July 2025) I wrote a piece titled Things I’m not buying again which was an interiors take on a couple of fashion pieces I had seen. And it has since been read 45,000 times. So this year I’m going to turn it around and tell you about the things I do buy and have bought, and would absolutely buy again.
This is the original article, if you want to recap before moving forward…
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Things I'm not buying again
I have often drawn parallels between our clothes and our cushions: observing that dressing your house is like dressing yourself except that your house doesn’t have fat days or hungover days or lie-on-the-sofa-in-trackie-bottoms-with-a-packet-of-biscuit days. Our homes are, for the most part, consistent in appearance from one day to the next, so once you find your style it should be easy, right?
At the end of that post I included five things I love in a general sense (I collect hands, I love a fish motif, and I’m a sucker for a candlestick) but today we’re getting into specifics. Pieces that I buy on repeat when I move house, or have recently discovered and would buy again should the need/house arise.
Paid subscribers already have access to my Interiors Black Book, which gives you a list of my favourite places to shop. Today we’re focusing on the actual items.
OK, let’s get into it. I made a list of what I wanted to include in this post before I started writing it and now that the brain has started to chug round (these days there’s always a bit of a booting-up session before the cogs start to actually whirr) I can already think of a few more, so I won’t number them, but will just write them as they occur.
RECLAIMED LABORATORY WORKTOP
Mine came from Retrouvius, which basically just means it’s more expensive than anywhere else you might source it - but they’re about 25 minutes from my house and we can fit a 120cm length in the car, so there’s that.
I used this material extensively in my last house and currently have a length waiting to be fixed in the loft of this one, as my younger son is about to move back in following his university graduation.
It’s a convenient and affordable way to source vintage wood, although it’s apparently running out as there aren’t so many old schools to get it from now. It’s incredibly versatile - it makes a great kitchen workshop as well (see last week’s Design Dilemmas) and it’s a good way to bring character and patina to a newly created or decorated room.
In the image above you can see we used it to create a bathroom vanity unit. We began with two wall mounted basins with a table between them but it turned out there wasn’t enough storage (there never is) so we decided to build something more substantial. By happy coincidence, the gap between the basin and its wall mounted pedestal (which hid all the plumbing) was exactly the same thickness as a piece of this worktop so we could slide it right in.
We added a second shelf and two sides to create a table. In the top image, which was styled for a professional photographer, there are some pretty flowers and artfully folded towels. In reality we had two laundry baskets on the floor underneath (one whites and one darks, but it could just as easily have been his ‘n’ hers) and a third basket in the middle, into which we chucked all the spare shampoos, soaps, razor blades and general bathroom stuff.
If I still lived there I would show you a non-curated image, but I don’t so I can’t - and the tragedy is that I strongly suspect the new owners will have ripped it out for something more modern, but let’s hope they salvaged the wood at least. Above is a semi-real image where I removed the dirty laundry.
The top part of the mirror was from Ikea, the lower half was made from the fancy mirror tiles we could barely afford when we moved in. We used off-cuts from the shelves themselves to frame it all and make it all look like one piece.
We also used the same reclaimed wood to create a long desk in the loft conversion, which was intended as a space where The Mad Husband and I would co-work together in joyful harmony, but the reality is he likes to listen to music and I like laboratory silence so that lasted about an hour before it was less marital harmony and more a threat to actual matrimony and I stomped off downstairs.
We have also used it whenever we have wanted to create a desk in an alcove, as you can see below in the current house.
It’s a genius product that I will always, always find a use for and I think you will too.
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