Interiors
The half-metre decisions
A room reads as wrong for reasons guests can feel and cannot name. Almost all of them are measurements.
Inside the plan
Interiors
Interiors is about the half-metre decisions: how high the pendant hangs, how far the sofa sits off the wall, why a room with four beautiful objects reads richer than one with forty.
Interiors
Interiors
The colour question
Why the white you chose looks grey, and how to build a palette that survives the seasons.
Interiors
The materials that age well
Some surfaces improve for thirty years. Others look tired in eighteen months. The difference is predictable.
The short version
The rules that are actually rules
Almost everything in decoration is taste. A handful of things are not, and they are the ones that make a room look either resolved or slightly wrong in a way guests cannot name.
Rugs go under the front legs of the seating, at minimum. A rug that stops short of the furniture shrinks the room and makes the seating look like it is standing on a mat. Pendants over a table hang so the underside is 75 to 85 cm above the surface. Art hangs at 145 to 152 cm to the centre, unless there is a sofa under it, in which case the bottom edge sits 20 to 25 cm above the back.
Then there is the one nobody applies: a room needs an odd number of light sources at three heights, and at least one of them at eye level or below. That single move accounts for most of the difference between a hotel lobby and a home.
Worth knowing
Pendant above a dining table
underside 75 to 85 cm above the top
Coffee table to sofa
35 to 45 cm, and level with the seat cushion
Art centre height
145 to 152 cm from the floor
Walkway through a seating group
75 cm minimum, 90 cm where it is the main route
The house vote
One wall, one decision. What goes on it?
Use it now
Palette Studio
Build a four-part palette against the light your room actually gets.
Questions people ask
Three that carry weight and one that appears twice. More than that and the eye stops resting anywhere. The three are usually the walls, the large upholstery and the floor, and the fourth is the one people remember.
2700 K in living rooms and bedrooms, 3000 K in kitchens and bathrooms where you need to see edges. Never mix the two in one sightline, which is the mistake in nine out of ten renovated houses.
Bigger, yes, up to the point where it stops 20 to 30 cm short of the walls. A rug that runs wall to wall is a carpet, and it removes the floor from the design.
Dimming. Putting every circuit in the main rooms on a dimmer costs less than a chair and changes the house at seven in the evening more than anything you could buy instead.
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.