If your past interiors don't make you cringe, you're not doing it right

If you’ve ever read one of my interiors books you’ll know that the homes I like to feature don’t conform to one particular style. Usually what links them - aside from their creativity or a unique quality relating to the topic of the book - is their sense of realness. You know people live there. There are signs of life: bits of paper stuck on the fridge; wires under desks; detritus from lives lived. In fact one of the chapter headings in my third book Life Unstyled is “People Live Here”.

Being welcomed into other people’s homes to document how they live is an absolute joy and privilege. Being trusted to portray the owners’/renters’ homes in a positive light is a responsibility I take very seriously. In fact, I can’t quite believe so many have trusted me over the years, usually based solely on an email from me and my publisher and a link to my work.

Recently, my own home was featured in a new interiors book Home Matters, by author/photographer Penny Wincer. At the time of the shoot, there was a lot that was still noticeably unfinished in the house and while I was happy to work around those areas, I had to warn Penny. Fortunately her attitude was the same as mine regarding interiors - it’s about the story not just the end result. Look closely at one of the images in Penny’s book and you can see the shimmer of silver insulation not yet covered with plasterboard in my newly built mezzanine.

The first time my house was ever featured in a magazine was in 2011 and it was my sweet little bungalow in Highland Park, Los Angeles. (Sorry Margate Bungalow, you weren’t my first). Prior to that, in perhaps 2009, the house had been featured online in both Design*Sponge and Apartment Therapy, the pioneers of American interiors blogs back then, both of which went on to be mega media hubs for interiors.

Later, after moving back to London, a few shots of my rented Stoke Newington home were featured in a book Urban Vintage by Swedish author/photographer Ida Magntorn. The same house was later photographed for one of my own books Bohemian Modern. I’ve always been willing to show my home in varying states of completion, but like most things in life, looking back can evoke a fair amount of cringe.

I don’t love my style looking back at most of the images I mentioned. The signs of life I so vehemently fought to be represented in my books later on, feel too chaotic, too much, too overwhelming in the images of my own home and when viewed more than a decade later. I question my decisions about colour and furniture and art and pretty much everything.

The first image below is my current home for Penny’s book and it calms me.

My current home photographed by Penny Wincer last year. Scroll to see its evolution in the intervening months

The two spreads below (from a story in Anthology magazine) are of my house in LA circa 2011 and it makes me feel panicky and a little bit embarrassed.

So many little bits! So much colour! So much kitsch!

But I LOVED that house. I was so proud. It was that house that launched my career in many ways. And at that time, especially in LA, I was going against the grain in a sea of chic mid-century modern homes with Ercol sideboards and classic Eames recliners and honey coloured wood floors.

My new home as pictured above still has signs of life and a sense of being lived in and imperfect, but admittedly it is minimal, at least on the day it was photographed. I hadn’t yet properly unpacked after the builders had (almost) finished and so the decoration was minimal.

The photos of my home in Penny’s book are honest in that they represent my home at that time in my life and I love having her beautiful book as a record. But time marches on and homes slowly (or rapidly if you’re me) fill up. Over the last year my home has continued to evolve and adapt to my changing needs, and (sadly) it no longer looks as soothingly minimal as the day Penny shot it.

Both my life and my personal style have changed since my LA days as pictured below. I no longer have small kids at home with their plastic toys and piles of shoes littering the floor. Busy family life and four people’s stuff crammed into a tiny house has been replaced by a quieter home life and mainly only my own stuff to worry about.

But I can’t blame my family. It was me! I loved a bit of tat. I loved all the bits and in some ways I still do, but now it’s more contained, corralled.

Most notably, my love for bold colour and kitsch has waned significantly since those days, being replaced by an earthier palette in recent years (although we know I still love a twee floral).

My LA house in 2011 - an explosion of colour and little bits of tat

(A brief side note here: if the image above wasn’t so old and low res you’d be able to clearly see on the bookshelf above my yellow desk an interiors book photographed by Penny Wincer! Life can be so strange sometimes. Little did I know, later that year after moving back to London I’d meet Penny through her then agent. And then years later - fast forward to present day - she’d feature my home in her new book).

The first house I bought in LA, 2005. This image was in 2011 from Anthology magazine. I still have the red velvet chair but now it’s covered with a piece of cream linen. And I still have the painting of the roses. The rest were deemed ‘too vintage’ as my taste changed.

My rented London house after moving back from LA. Shot in around 2015 by Katya de Grunwald for my second book Bohemian Modern. This house was decorated with zero budget because we’d sold or given away almost all our things to make the move back home. And we weren’t sure if/when we’d go back to LA and didn’t want to invest too much.

Bringing it back to the present day and my current style of decorating, even that is still evolving day by day and has changed since Penny’s book shoot last year.

The large table - although I absolutely adored it - had been a mistake. Much too big for the space so it had to go. And so this little corner has reverted to being made up of odds and ends that aren’t quite right and don’t quite fit, but for now will do.

Now the table is too small, having been bought for my last tiny London kitchen, the pine cupboards don’t make use of the room’s height but had nowhere to go when I turned my office into my mum’s room, the little shelf (found in the loft and coated with leftover paint) perched on one of the cabinets is a bit pointless as a display for bric-a-brac that I don’t really want on display anyway (See earlier point about less clutter making me feel calm these days).

And so my home continues to shift and its contents expand and contract, as I play my never-ending game of gather/purge possessions until I get it ‘right’.

Sometimes with interiors, there are things that look great but just don’t work practically. And conversely, there are times when things function really well but look a bit crap. This corner of my home now falls into the latter category.

There is a sweet spot where the two converge - function and form - but I’ve learned over the years to live my life and be happy with my lot in the intervening days/months/years until things click into place.

I still look back at images of my home from as recent as - ahem, earlier this year - and I cringe. It’s inevitable.

But Taylor Swift said it best at her commencement speech for NYU students a couple of years back:

"Learn to live alongside cringe. No matter how hard you try to avoid being cringe, you will look back on your life and cringe retrospectively. Cringe is unavoidable over a lifetime. Even the term ‘cringe’ might someday be deemed ‘cringe’."

I’m already cringing for quoting Taylor Swift talking about cringe.