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...
Why do your curtains look cheap?
A lot of you have asked me how to get that structured, wavy look in curtains. So this week I’m answering it, along with a few curtain mistakes I see all the time. The Fold Comes From the Track That look is called an S-fold, sometimes ripple fold or wave fold, after the gentle S-shaped curves the fabric makes along the top. Most of the work is done by the hardware. S-fold curtains hang from a dedicated track, and the carriers that run along it are spaced at an exact distance from each other;...
Where do you feel most at ease?
When I head to a café to get work done, especially when I’m travelling, I look for a particular kind of seat. A banquette along the wall is my first choice. A table by the window comes a close second. Blue Bottle Coffee Nagoya The one I’ll avoid if I can is the table in the middle of the room, the one people squeeze past on their way to the counter. I can work there, but I never quite settle. The worst version of this was back in my office days. We hot-desked, and the desk I dreaded sat...
Is your entryway actually working?
On my last trip to the US, I spent a month moving between Airbnbs and family homes in the suburbs. Most days had the same rhythm. You pull into the garage, the door rolls down behind you, and you walk straight into the kitchen. Keys, bags, and mail go straight onto the kitchen bench. Shoes come off awkwardly by the garage door (or didn’t come off at all 🙄). Almost every one of those homes had a proper front entrance. Hardly anyone used it. It seems like a small thing, but how you come home...
Why your home feels like it’s for someone else
I was listening to a podcast with Chris Do, an Emmy Award-winning designer, and the way he separated artists from designers has stuck with me. An artist has something to say. They feel something about the world and turn it into a painting or a piece of music, and the work invites you to see things from their perspective. If your view happens to line up with theirs, it becomes great art. Petit Palais, Paris. The paintings were why I went. The building is what stayed with me. A designer starts...
The $30 object that makes a house a home
I've fallen into a new rabbit hole lately: hunting down old design books that are no longer in print. Bought a few from eBay recently. Mark Hampton on Decorating and Ilse Crawford's Home Is Where the Heart Is? Both secondhand, and both out of production as far as I can tell. Part of the reason I go looking goes back to when I was a kid. When I was 11 or 12, I started pulling books off the shelves at home and reading them. Two of them were The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Dale...
Want more colour but worried it'll clash?
We recently shared a few posts on Instagram about colour, all built around one simple idea. If a colour combination works in nature, a painting, or a pattern, it will work in your home. The comments and DMs that followed sounded a lot like the emails I get. You want more colour in your home. You just don't know how to mix colours without the room looking chaotic. So how do you build a palette that's varied and still holds together, especially with three or more colours in play? These are the...
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...
5 minutes every fortnight to take your home from boring to beautiful.