Interiors
The materials that age well
Some surfaces improve for thirty years. Others look tired in eighteen months. The difference is predictable.
Your result
The Old House
Thick walls, small windows, and four hundred years of other people's decisions.
You want rooms that already have a character you did not have to invent. Old houses give you proportion, materials that have already proved they age well, and the enormous advantage that nothing you add has to carry the whole room on its own.
What works about it
Everything you buy looks better in a room with lime plaster and a stone floor than it does in a new one. Old houses are also warm in summer and structurally forgiving of layered, accumulated decoration in a way that new-build interiors are not.
What to watch
The services are the project, not the decoration. Wiring, plumbing, heating, damp and insulation will take most of the budget and produce nothing anybody can see. Resist the urge to open everything up: the small rooms and low doorways are the reason the house feels the way it does, and a knocked-through old house is neither one thing nor the other.
The rooms it needs
- A kitchen that is genuinely the main room
- At least two rooms small enough to heat quickly
- A modern bathroom, unapologetically modern rather than pastiche
- One deliberately contemporary intervention so the house is not a museum
Read next
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The most photographed kitchens in the world are frequently the worst ones to cook in. The reasons are measurable.
The Saturday letter
One letter a week, on a Saturday.
One letter a week: the new long read, one room worth studying, one number worth knowing. No advertising, no tracking, one click to leave.