When YOU ask me to write about interior design – something I’ve never consciously thought about – I walk through my house. I’m really looking at it, as if for the first time. Then I sit on my century-old orange couch, a gift from my mother, which smells like my dog, and I think.
I quickly realize, and like all things obvious, the revelation feels amazing, that my home is a physical manifestation of my loves and my conflicts. Of my own.
That’s what a house is: a mirror. Mine is beautiful and filled with love. It’s also gross and overwhelming and it doesn’t work.
This is where I am spiritually. Physically, I am in a very dirty house.
Six years ago my husband and I moved to a farm in West Cornwall. We love old buildings: this one is 300 years old. In retrospect, the purchase was typical for us: the house didn’t pass mortgage inspection (the walls were unstable), so we paid for the work before we bought it. We married late, so came with quite a bit of wear and tear, as did the house.
Six years ago, Tanya and her husband moved to a farm in West Cornwall. She says the couple loves old buildings
If we could fix it, we could fix it ourselves. That was the idea. None of this was conscious.
I knew nothing about design when we got married, he knew even less. I had lived in a series of white studio flats in north London – my favorite was a kitchen with a double bed in it, just like Cinderella’s house – and he lived with his mother. Neither of us had ever decorated anything. I now think we were in the grip of a kind of self-hating snobbery, a belief that design is trivial. Imagine thinking about placing a lamp while you could be watching Spooks.
We painted the farmhouse the color of the Teletubbies – pink, blue, green, yellow – and filled it with bric-a-brac until it was the residential equivalent of a woman getting dressed in the dark. We had been given furniture by relatives: a kitchen table, which had to be sawn in half to get through the door. We also had furniture from my mother’s second house. We even had furniture we bought ourselves (my beautiful desk and bed from Lombok), but it was swamped by our parents’ castoffs and my own crazy purchases: a fake baron’s chair for my husband and a fake ancient Egyptian sarcophagus for our son. . We’ve published every book we’ve ever owned – we’re smart! – as a gift for the dust mites.
We have hundreds of pictures, expensively framed, but we have no idea how to hang them. We have about six sets of kitchen utensils, many broken lamps with pink shades that we bought from lots, and several jelly molds. Nothing fits anywhere, and nothing has a home.
I know my house is chaotic and I feel overwhelmed by it every day. It seems impossible to clean it, and I have a personal relationship with each spider anyway, so I probably don’t need to clean it. I mentioned one who lived in the guest bathroom, Charlotte. (I know.) One time when I turned on the tap, she came out angrily to see what was going on. Charlotte looks like me.
My coping mechanism is to yell at my husband and buy blue tables. I have six in different sizes. Nothing fits everywhere, and some are broken. “That crack,” said the man in a store, “is part of the table’s journey.” I bought it anyway. My living room looks like a blue table convention. What I used to think was a good design is clearly a merger of the restaurant Maxim’s in Paris and a company called Castle Magic, which will build a replica of a medieval fort in Idaho, plus a junk shop. Or to put it another way: it’s like The Wizard of Oz and Mean Girls.
So when YOU reached out, I asked a friend who knows about design to come over. She has renovated three holiday homes called Middle Colenso Farm in West Cornwall and, more recently, a flat in Penzance called the Bell Tower, overlooking the harbour. They’re all rustic and dramatic, decorated with the mid-century design pieces she loves. There are no pink rocking chairs or blue tables. They are peaceful and beautiful, and it never occurred to me that I could have something like that. They work.
Occasionally I have consulted her, and she is always right. She told me to paint our brick fireplace gray if we were going to put a wood stove in it. (I was thinking green, like a witch’s face – who wouldn’t want that with a shockingly pink rocking chair?) It’s the most beautiful part of the house now: that is, it makes the rest of the house look awful looks as if it is waiting for similar love elsewhere.
Tanya says she and her husband have “about six sets of kitchen utensils, many broken lamps with pink lampshades that they bought from DIY lots, and several jelly molds.”
According to Tanya, the pair have hundreds of prints, expensively framed, but have no idea how to hang them
She told me to buy a light gray vinyl floor for the bathroom floor to match the William Morris wallpaper, and rejected my suggestion of conker brown. She went through the house with me and, like a good psychotherapist, helped me to listen to myself. Finally it clicked.
I have to throw half the stuff in a container and clean the rest, then I can dye it in colors I can stand to look at. I spend the next week throwing things away: the awful metal pot rack that the pots get stuck in; the broken spare potato peeler; three of the blue tables, one of which has lost a leg. My friend explained that there is no point in choosing colors if your furniture doesn’t fit the space in the first place, or if there is too much of it. I start with this principle: what is the space for? Do I want this? Is there a working lamp? Why do I have a shelf full of candlesticks that I can’t reach? Ditto teapots.
I KNOW MY HOUSE IS CHAOTIC, AND I FEEL OVERWHELMED BY IT EVERY DAY. CLEANING FEELS IMPOSSIBLE
Don’t buy a huge sofa from Loaf: your rooms are small. You need fewer good throws, not more bad ones. Are you really ever going to watch Jaws 3 again? And if the answer is yes, then what’s wrong with you?
Do I really want half a Lego Hogwarts on my desk and the rest on the floor? Why is the unused aquarium in my husband’s study? Why do I have a box of shoes in the hallway if I have a closet upstairs? As I clean up, beautiful things emerge. A spindly Edwardian lamp in the hallway. Roller shutters in my study. My stained glass. My wood paneling.
I visit the Newt in Somerset, recently voted the best boutique hotel in the world. It’s from the same period as my house, and it has the aesthetic I’ve been craving since I switched from Teletubbies living in a fake castle with blue tables. I wander through pristine Georgian rooms painted green – reflecting the farmland through the window – and think: this place works. Why does it work? How?
I leave the Newt feeling calm – good design brings convenience – knowing that I will paint my house green to match the hotel and never again buy a piece of furniture that is the wrong size just because I am too lazy and snobbish to do an hour of research. I have come to realize that the home is not just a metaphor for relationships and our inability to govern them. We in turn have a relationship with it, and we can listen to it or not.
I sit in my study now and look at the Georgian moldings and the window: I can see the garden and the candlestick, and all the things I love. For some reason, just thinking about design now gives me a choice, and so can you. It’s just a language I’ve never bothered to learn. What do you like?
What do you want? What can you lose? Enjoy this interior design issue – and your home.