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

Even the boring ones. Something about your place works better than the house next door, and it's normally the thing you've stopped seeing because you walk past it eleven times a day.

Call it your home's superpower. Once you know yours, every decision gets easier, because you're building around something instead of starting from a blank page and a Pinterest board.

Ignore it, and you can spend serious money making your home worse.

I see it most in period homes: someone buys a Victorian terrace with its multiple rooms and hallways and slightly dim light, then sets about making it bright and airy and open plan, because that's what a good home looks like on Instagram.

Walls come down, everything gets painted white, and it still feels off. That house was built for privacy and intimacy, and they've just spent eighty grand removing it.

Finding yours

Look at where you and your guests naturally end up, what visitors comment on first, and what you'd put in the listing photo if you sold tomorrow.

The answers tend to cluster around one of five things.

Symmetry. A central fireplace, or windows sitting at equal distances. Arrange along that centre line and reinforce it with matching pairs, or with matching visual weight: a sofa on one side of the chimney breast, two armchairs balancing it on the other. Symmetry is the one superpower people break by accident, and a room fights back hard when you do.

Period features. Original cornicing, sash windows, fireplace, parquet flooring. You can't fake these, so don't try to modernise them either. Point the furniture at the fireplace, hang floor-length curtains at the sash windows, and sand the floorboards back rather than covering them.

Natural light. Watch where the good light lands at different hours, then put the chair you actually sit in there. Sheer rather than heavy curtains, and a mirror on the wall opposite a window will push that light further into the room.

Flow. Some homes just move well. There's somewhere to drop your keys and take your shoes off that isn't the living room. A hallway feeds the rooms rather than making you walk through one to reach another. The kitchen sits next to the doors out to the balcony, so entertaining doesn't involve a relay.

A view. The most wasted of the five, every time. The sofa goes where the TV wall is, and the best thing about the house sits behind everyone's heads. Turn the seating to face it, keep tall furniture out of the sightline. Renovating? Put the rooms you barely think about on the side facing the fence.

If you genuinely don't have one

Some homes are a blank box, and that's fine. A superpower can be built. Wood panelling on a ceiling, a wall of joinery, or beautiful curtains framing a tall window.

That's really the whole job. Work out which one is yours, then hold your next three decisions against it.

Cheers,

Reynard