People assume they know the kinds of places I like.
As an interior designer, they imagine I always want to go to the newest cocktail bar. The beautifully designed boutique hotel and the restaurant everyone is talking about and to be fair, sometimes I do. I enjoy getting dressed up, love exceptional design and I love luxury but I’m just as likely to spot a random Irish pub and say, “Let’s go in there.”
It took me years to realise I wasn’t really looking for beautiful places but I was searching for places with a point of view. Its never really been about whether somewhere is expensive or cheap It’s all down to whether it feels like it could exist anywhere else.
Ask me about my favourite bars and you’d probably get them completely wrong. One was down a side street in Thailand, It had random objects covering the walls, the toilets barely flushed and It looked as though every traveller had left something behind over the years. It was the opposite of polished and hadn’t been curated to within an inch of its life It simply had a point of view.
When I lived in Berlin, my favourite bar was my local, It was open twenty-four hours a day, tradespeople came in after work, sex workers stopped by between clients, there were students, artists, old men nursing the same beer for hours, everyone occupied the same room and it felt unapologetically Bavarian. It wasn’t trying to appeal to everyone It was simply itself and I spent more hours in that bar than i would car to admit to!
Another favourite was an old abattoir that had been converted into a bar. again, what I loved wasn’t that it was unusual, It was that it had conviction.
Now don’t get me wrong, I also love some of the most beautiful hotels in the world and I’ll happily spend a fortune staying somewhere with extraordinary interiors.
Beauty matters. Always has and always will but beauty alone has never been enough to make me fall in love. I’ve walked into countless beautiful bars, restaurants and hotels and thought,
“Oh yeah.”
“This is nice.”
Then forgotten them a week later.
Because after you’ve seen the fifth marble bar, the fifth burnt orange velvet banquette and the fifth carefully curated palette, they begin to blur into one another. Everything is beautiful, correct and ticks all the boxes but its forgettable.
What I’ve realised is that I’m not searching for perfection I’m searching for identity. I don’t fall in love with places because they’re beautiful. I fall in love with places because they know exactly what they are.
Take the Elvis obsessive whose house is styled like a mini Graceland, It isn’t my aesthetic, not even close, but after thirty seconds I know more about the person who lives there than I do after walking around an entire Pinterest house. It’s impossible to mistake that home for anyone else’s. Now compare that to the house assembled from Pinterest boards and Instagram saves. The travertine. tick, the fluted glass, tick, the boucle chair, tick.
Everything is technically right. Everything says, “I have good taste.”
But after five minutes I still have no idea who lives there.yes, the house has taste but the person has disappeared and that’s when I realised something. I can forgive bad taste far more easily than I can forgive borrowed taste but I don’t think we borrow taste consciously. I think we absorb it. nWe see the same oak slats, the same boucle chair and eventually they stop feeling like trends and start feeling like truth.
Familiarity quietly disguises itself as preference.
So I wonder how often this happens.
Do you actually like it?
Or have you simply seen it enough times that you’ve mistaken familiarity for taste?
I think that’s why feature walls have always puzzled me. They often feel less like a design decision than a compromise.
“I like colour... just not enough to commit.”
This isn’t an argument for eccentricity, or maximalism, or filling your home with Elvis memorabilia. The point isn’t to make your house louder but to make it more truthful.
My job as a designer isn’t to amplify every impulse. It’s to uncover what is genuinely you, strip away everything borrowed, then express it with beauty, restraint and permanence.
As a designer, I know this isn’t always straightforward, every project is a conversation. Budgets matter, planning has to be taken into consideration and clients matter. Not every idea survives the process, nor should it. But this is the standard I’m holding myself to.
I don’t want to create homes that simply demonstrate that their owners have good taste. I want to create homes that reveal the people who live in them. Homes that couldn’t belong to anybody else. That absolutely doesn’t mean giving clients everything they ask for, they don’t hire me because I know where to buy expensive furniture, they hire me because I can see how hundreds of small decisions combine into a feeling and yes, sometimes that means challenging a decision, not because it’s my personal preference but because it’s moving us further away from the home they told me they wanted in the first place. They’re looking for someone to uncover what makes their home unmistakably theirs, then express it with beauty, restraint and permanence.
That’s my philosophy.
Beautiful homes are everywhere but beautiful isn’t rare anymore.
Identity is.
The funny thing is, I think this is true of people too. A beautiful person with no curiosity, humour or opinions might catch my attention, they probably wouldn’t keep it. Beauty catches my attention. Character keeps it.
Perhaps that’s why the places I remember most all have the same quality.
The Thai bar.
My Berlin local.
The converted abattoir.
The great old hotels.
Even the luxury places I love most. None of them were trying to be approved of, they were just being exactly, unmistakably themselves.
Which is, I suppose, the only thing worth being.