02 · The rooms inside
Interiors
Rooms are not arrangements of furniture. They are proportion, surface, light and a small number of decisions made in the right order.
Method
The Anatomy of a Calm Room
Calm is not a colour or a budget. It is eleven decisions taken in the right order, and most people take them in reverse.
7 further pieces
Plaster, Lime and the End of Flat White
The most consequential decision in a room is the finish of its largest surface, and for thirty years everybody has been making it by default.
Seating Without a Sofa
The three-seater facing a television is the least social arrangement ever devised. Here is what replaces it.
Kitchens That Stopped Shouting
The island grew, the handles vanished, the appliances multiplied. The best new kitchens are quietly going the other way.
The Bedroom as a Dark Room
A bedroom has one job it cannot delegate. Everything else, the art, the bench, the reading chair, is negotiable.
Bathing, Slowly
The bathroom has been over-engineered into a showroom. What actually improves it is warmth underfoot, daylight and one honest material.
Colour Above Eye Level
Most people paint the wall they look at and leave the ceiling white. Reverse it, and rooms you thought were finished start behaving differently.
Living With Stone Indoors
Stone inside a house is either the most permanent surface you will ever own or an expensive lesson in absorption rates. The difference is one number.
From the Index
Interiors
elements.
The pieces of a house that belong to this section, with the dimension that decides whether each one works.
Continuous floor
Makes space read larger far more reliably than pale paint. Honed inside, brushed outside, same stone.
Tinted ceiling
Softens the corner, lowers the visual pressure and warms every face in the room. Costs nothing but the mixing.
Lime wash
Scatters light instead of reflecting it. Marks, and the marks read as age rather than damage.
Clay plaster
Warm, grainy and remarkable at buffering humidity. Excellent in bedrooms, questionable in shower rooms.
Tadelakt
Waterproof and seamless enough to make tiling look fussy. Requires a genuine specialist with five year old work to show.
Ceiling-height curtain track
Hung at the ceiling, not the window head. The room gains height and the window loses its picture frame.