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...
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...
Your home should make you happy (seriously)
"Bright." "Calming." "Sophisticated." There are plenty of words people use to describe their design goals. But joy rarely makes the list, like we're not supposed to aim for it. Which is strange when you think about it. Your home is the one space that's entirely yours. And most people, if they're being honest, just want to walk in and feel good. So let's talk about how to bring joy into your home. Fix what's broken first I see a lot of people try to add joy to a room whose design already isn’t...
One corner changed how I feel at home
In urban design, there's a concept called the "third space." Your home is the first space. Work is the second. And the third is somewhere you go purely to decompress. Cafes, libraries, parks. Places with no agenda. Most people have never thought about creating one inside their own home. But you should. Think about where you go to switch off at the end of the day. For most of us, it's the living room. But the living room already has too many jobs. It's the social hub, the TV room, the spot...
5 minutes every fortnight to take your home from boring to beautiful.