Undressing a home – and leaving it in the buff

I’m currently sitting on my sofa as drills are shrilling. This sofa is a beautiful piece that I designed and made around five years ago – and it’s now in its third house. It will rest here until we move. Then I hope it will follow me, because I love it and I hope it loves me back. It may need a spruce up (dogs/22 year old/me/it’s white) but it will last for a very long time. And this makes me very happy. You could fling the word sustainable in here, or you could just say sensible and beloved. I bought well and once, and I’m happy to give in to the fact that I and it will have to adjust to future rooms.

On another sofa on the opposite side of the room are quite a few boxes of lights waiting for our Steve (electrician) to hang them. Again, they have moved from home to home, but I still love them. Charlotte Perriand and I will be friends until I’m holed up as an octogenarian in the Barbican, as will Noguchi and some very rustic European wall sconces.

My current kitchen, which has brought the shrilling into my life, was last decorated in 1986. A Laura Ashley facsimile, it has been strangely comforting with its acid yellow and terracotta palette. But now the 30-year-old wall oven has blown and so Steve is here. We aren’t ready to ‘do’ the kitchen, but I need a new cooker. We are very focused on cooking and eating in our family and so now we have a loose arrangement of cooker, garden table and acid yellow. Dreamy it isn’t – but helpful, useful and very liberating.

We now live in a four-story town house and I’m satisfyingly tearing strips of floral wallpaper off every time I go up and down the currently-pink-carpeted stairwell. Not quite as free as being a student again, but I am loving this chosen pause. Normally I choose to live as an aesthetic minimal. I’m fully aware that this is because my brain is very busy, so my visual surroundings must be quiet. I feel our new home and the noisy state it is in is challenging me, perhaps even taunting me. But it is showing me I’m not quite sure what I want or how I want to live. This means I simply can’t know what colour to paint my walls. Imagine!

I do know I want freedom. And I believe that freedom at home can come from undressing and then resting on decorative decisions. Good underpinnings are all you really need to futureproof. The remainder is story telling. Our house is watertight, newly rewired, replumbed and heated. Expensive – but for want of a friendlier term – responsible.

We decorate our homes wholesale when our lives change. A change of city, house or family unit underscores why we may suddenly feel the need for a pink sitting room. Our customers often don’t recognise why there is this visceral and emotional need – but once acknowledged, they take permission to slow down. My team don’t have sales targets, or AOVs set. Making a home isn’t a race and our job is to help our customers tell their story of home as it unfolds. It doesn’t come from spreadsheets, it comes from respect, which is love in plain clothing.

I’m hoping we all feel it is time to take a more nuanced and slower approach. A cooker here, a rug there, two kittens perhaps ….

Home to me has become very simple – a house full of beautiful things yes, but a home full of loved and content people is much, much, much more to me.