On Living Well Through Design

Your work moves across interiors, architecture, and lifestyle. How would you describe your design perspective today?

My perspective is really rooted in how people actually live and work in a space, making the everyday beautiful but never at the expense of function. I think the most successful interiors are those where you can't separate those two things, where something looks extraordinary and works perfectly at the same time.

I am also deeply interested in emotion and colour. For a long time people were nervous to experiment with colour in their homes, there was this sense that neutral was safe. I love that that is changing. Colour done well does not just make a space look interesting, it changes how you feel in it, how you move through it, how you start your morning. That emotional dimension is something I think about constantly.

Ultimately what excites me most is creating spaces that have genuine personality. Interiors that feel completely unique to the person living in them rather than a version of something they saw in a magazine. That is where the real work is. Anyone can make a room look beautiful. Making it feel like someone is the much harder and more interesting challenge.

There’s a strong sense of intention in your projects. When you enter a space, what do you instinctively respond to first?

Light, always. Before anything else I notice how light moves through a space. Where it falls, where it gets blocked, how it changes the feeling of the room at different times of day. Light is the thing that no amount of beautiful furniture or considered colour can compensate for if it is wrong.

But almost immediately after that I notice whether a space feels like it belongs to someone. There is a quality that the best interiors have, a sense that every decision was made for a reason, that nothing is there by accident or because it was safe or expected. You feel it within seconds of walking in and it is almost impossible to fake. That is what I am always looking for and always working toward, that feeling that a space is genuinely inhabited rather than just decorated.

I think that instinct is what drives my interest in personality and emotion in interiors. A room can be technically perfect, the proportions right, the materials considered, the light beautiful, and still feel like nobody lives there. That gap between beautiful and alive is the most interesting territory for me as a designer.

Your spaces feel both structured and expressive. How do you approach that balance?

For me the balance between structure and expression comes from mixing rather than matching. I never want a space to feel like everything was bought from the same place or chosen from the same palette that is when interiors start to feel like a showroom rather than a home, and not in a good way. There is a kind of sterile perfection that actually drains a space of all its personality.

So I work with contrast deliberately. Old pieces alongside new ones, different wood tones rather than one consistent finish throughout, textures that push against each other rather than quietly agree. When you mix hues of the same element different shades of wood, varying depths of a colour, you create something that feels layered and collected over time rather than installed in an afternoon.

The structure comes from having a clear emotional intention for the space and knowing how it should feel before you decide what goes in it. The expression comes from the freedom to break the rules once that foundation is set. I think that is the only way to make something that feels both considered and alive. You need the architecture of an idea and then the courage to fill it with things that surprise or evoke emotion for you.

When selecting furniture or objects, what tends to guide your decision most?

Quality is always the starting point for me but I think about quality in quite a specific way. It is not just about price point or provenance, it is about whether something will improve with age or just deteriorate. The pieces I am most drawn to are the ones that get better the longer they are lived with, furniture that develops a patina, objects that accumulate meaning over time. That longevity is what separates a considered interior from one that will need redoing in five years.

But function is equally non-negotiable and it has to be completely honest to how the client actually lives. If a family has young children and pets, the most beautiful linen sofa in the world is the wrong sofa. I would rather find something that performs brilliantly for the next eight years and still looks purposeful and considered, knowing that when the children are older we can revisit and elevate. There is real skill in making something practical feel genuinely beautiful.

So I suppose what guides me most is this question, will this piece still be right in ten years? Not just aesthetically but functionally, emotionally, practically. If the answer is yes that is usually a sign it deserves to be in the space.

How do you think about longevity in design, especially in a time where trends move quickly?

I think longevity and trend are opposites. Trends move quickly because they are driven by what looks good on a screen in a particular moment and that is a completely different thing from what feels right to live with over years.

As I mentioned earlier, quality is always my starting point and that principle is really what longevity comes down to. The pieces that last are the ones made with genuine integrity, from honest materials, by people who cared about what they were making. A piece of furniture chosen for those reasons will still be right in ten years. Something chosen because it was on trend this season almost certainly will not be.

And it comes back to how people actually live in a space too. When you really understand a client's life, how they move through their home, what they need it to do, what they want to feel when they walk in, you naturally make choices that last. Because you are designing for their reality rather than for an aesthetic moment. Like I said before the family who needs something hardy while their children are young but beautiful enough to feel intentional that brief requires you to think long term from the very first decision. That discipline actually makes you a better designer because it forces you beyond the surface.

The interiors I admire most have a quality that feels current now but would have felt current twenty years ago and will still feel right twenty years from now. I do think sometimes trend has a place in the decorative layer for example a cushion, a print, something you can change easily as your taste evolves. But the bones of a space should be chosen as if trends do not exist.

Your work blends influences seamlessly. How do you approach layering without it feeling overdone?

It comes back to something I mentioned earlier about avoiding that showroom feeling, the sense that everything was chosen from the same catalogue on the same afternoon. Layering works when there is genuine contrast and personality in the room, and that comes from being willing to embrace things that are not perfect.

A piece of furniture with a slight irregularity, an object that was clearly made by hand, something vintage that carries the marks of having been lived with. Those things give a room soul in a way that pristine matching pieces simply cannot. When everything is too considered in the same direction it stops feeling like a home and starts feeling like a set.

The same principle applies to how I think about wood tones and materials. As I said earlier I never want everything to match, I want things to complement each other. Various different wood tones in the same room create depth and interest. The same wood repeated on every surface flattens everything and removes all the visual tension that makes a space interesting to be in. Colour is where I think layering is most misunderstood. A very restricted palette, one or two colours played completely safe, can actually make a room feel like it has no depth or character at all. It looks considered on paper but feels empty in reality. I prefer to work with a palette that has range of different hues, different depths, colours that relate to each other but surprise you a little. That range is what gives a room the feeling that it has been built up over time rather than decided in one sitting.

Ultimately layering without overdoing it is about having a clear emotional intention and then trusting yourself to bring in things that feel right even if they do not obviously match. The room should feel like it has a story and as we all know stories are never perfectly coordinated.

Are there any conventions in design that you find yourself rethinking or challenging?

Open plan as the default aspirational layout is something I think is genuinely ridiculous! There has been this assumption for years that knocking everything through is the sophisticated choice, that more visual space automatically means better living. And I think it is actually one of the most impractical ideas in mainstream design.

I experienced this firsthand with my own home. People kept telling me I should open the entire ground floor from front to back for one continuous space. And I could not think of anything worse. Why would you want your washing in the same eyeline as your kitchen, or your shoes in the same space where you sit down to eat dinner? It completely ignores how people actually live in favour of how a space photographs.

We kept our utility room, our downstairs WC and an unusual T-shaped hallway that gives the house real character. People questioned those decisions and I stood by every single one of them. Because a utility room is where life actually happens, it is allowed to be a little messy, it is contained, it does its job without bleeding into the spaces around it. That containment is not a compromise, it is a design decision.

This goes back to something I feel strongly about across all my work, you have to think about how someone lives in a space before you think about how it looks. Open plan everything prioritises the aesthetic moment over the lived reality. A beautiful room that does not function for the person in it is not a successful interior. It is just a photograph.