The Curations
5 minutes every fortnight to take your home from boring to beautiful.
The right $25 lamp beats the wrong $1,000 sofa
My favourite piece in my office is a table lamp I bought for $25 on Facebook Marketplace. The shade was hideous, so I spent another $25 replacing it. Fifty dollars all up, and it's the first thing people comment on when they walk in. I've also watched people spend $1,000 on a table and feel almost nothing change in the room. The changes that make a home feel luxurious are not always expensive ones. Scale does the heavy lifting If you have $100 to spend on decor, I'd rather see it go on one...
There's nowhere left in the house to switch off
I could have bought a machine that makes espresso at the push of one button. Instead, I bought a grinder, a scale, and a little tool that looks like a miniature rake. Every morning I weigh the beans, grind them, rake the grounds flat, tamp, and watch the shot pull. Four minutes of fiddling for a coffee I could have had in fifteen seconds. The fiddling is the point. Apparently this has a name now, and the name is friction-maxxing. I know. It started as a parenting idea, from writer Kathryn...
"Is your home ever actually finished?"
I've spent the last fortnight looking at chairs. Not because the ones at my writing table are broken. They're fine. I just liked browsing and looking at great stuff out there. Which dragged me into a question I've never properly answered: is a home ever actually finished? I don't think it is. And that takes a lot of the pressure off. We treat our homes like a project with a deadline Somewhere along the way, decorating became a race to completion. An empty wall feels like unfinished business,...
Nothing in your living room is older than you
There's a reason an Airbnb never quite feels like a home. Everything in it was bought new, at the same time, from the same two or three shops, and that alone is enough to tell you nobody has really lived there. A lot of real homes are in the same position, and for understandable reasons. You move in, you need a sofa and a bed, and somewhere to eat fairly quickly, so you buy them together because that's the sensible thing to do. A few years on, it still looks like it. The easiest way out of...
Why doesn't anything in your room stand out?
I look at a lot of photos of other people's rooms. Enough that I've stopped being surprised by what's usually wrong with them. Eight times out of ten, there’s just too much going on. That's a hard thing to tell someone, because every piece of design advice they've ever been given points the other way. Room feels flat? Add a plant. Feels cold? Add a rug, some cushions, a lamp in the corner. The whole industry runs on the assumption that a room you're unhappy with needs another purchase....
Should every room in your house share a palette?
A subscriber left this under one of my community posts last week, and it's been rattling around my head since: "Is it necessary to carry a colour palette throughout an entire home? I love my main space palette, warm neutrals and blues, but I don't want the second level to be more of the same. How do I transition?" No, you don't have to repeat the same palette everywhere. But the opposite isn't true either. You can't hand every room its own unrelated scheme and hope it sorts itself out. What...
Every home is good at something
People often send me photos of their rooms, and the message attached is nearly always a list of complaints. The ceiling's too low. There's an alcove nobody knows what to do with. One window, facing the wrong way. Fair enough. That's what they're asking me to fix. But I've noticed something in a few years of reading those messages: almost nobody opens by telling me what their home is already good at. Which is a shame, because that's usually where the answer is. Every home is good at something...
The 20% that decides whether a home has a soul
I spent most of May and June travelling across the States and Canada. Good hotels, places I'd wanted to see for years. And by about week three, the thing I wanted most was my own living room. Not because the hotels were bad. Most of them were great (though they are bloody expensive! You get far more for your money in Asia). But that was also the problem. Every one of those rooms had been designed nicely and belonged to nobody. Which, if I'm honest, describes a lot of the homes I get sent...
Your home, your rules (with a few exceptions)
"White walls are so depressing." Someone left that under one of my videos last week. A few days before, a different person told me a dark, wallpapered room I'd shared was "just depressing" too. Two rooms that couldn't be more opposite, and both of them got handed the exact same verdict. It got me circling a question I've been chewing on for years: what actually counts as wrong in design? Two different kinds of ‘wrong’ When someone calls a room wrong, they're usually pointing at one of two...
Why 'matching' is making your room boring
If I had to boil all design advice down to a single idea, it would be contrast. Colour contrast, texture contrast, contrast in style, contrast in shape. Almost everything that makes a room look and feel alive traces back to it. When every piece in a room coordinates too neatly, there's no friction. Nothing for your eye to land on. The space just… flatlines. Contrast is what gives a room its pulse. Here's how to build it into your space without tipping over into chaos. Colour This is the...
5 minutes every fortnight to take your home from boring to beautiful.