THE EXPERT

Most people specify light fittings the way they specify a doorknob: choose the function, choose the finish, move on. The result is a house where every fitting has been picked from the same showroom in the same afternoon — and the lighting reads as a set of utilities rather than a set of considered choices.

Lighting is the most underestimated decision in residential design. People spend months agonising over a kitchen layout or a piece of stone for a worktop, and then specify the lighting in a single conversation with the electrician on site, weeks into the project — when most of the more interesting options have already closed off.

A staircase is, on average, the most used architectural feature in a house. People walk through it many times a day, every day, for years. And yet, of all the architectural elements in a typical house, the staircase is the one most likely to be treated as a passage rather than a room.

The dining table is the longest-serving piece of furniture in most houses — sofas come and go, beds are replaced, but the table tends to stay. Every conversation I have with a client about dining tables starts with the same question: how do you actually use the table?

A few years ago we worked on a townhouse in Fulham for a family with Austrian roots. The brief was unusually clear: the new kitchen should not feel like a London kitchen. The answer they sourced themselves, from Vienna and it changed how I think about fireplaces.

A home that endures is one designed with care, built with intention, and detailed with materials that age gracefully. Sustainability is not a trend, and not a separate consideration. When it is genuinely held, it becomes invisible — and the home is simply better.

There is a small room in our family house that I almost gave up on. It had no obvious purpose, awkward proportions, not enough light. Today it is the room my daughters fight over — and the experience changed how I think about overlooked rooms in clients' homes.

The sofa question does not come up for a long time. By the time it does, most of the work is already done. The harder, slower work — the work that shapes how a family will actually live in a home — happens earlier, in conversation, before a single drawing is made.

I grew up in a house full of antiques. My father took me to fairs from a young age, first to look, then to understand. That apprenticeship shaped how I think about interiors now — and why I am drawn to the dialogue between centuries that makes a room come alive.

A small room stripped back will always feel small. The counter-intuitive lesson I have learned across two decades of designing compact spaces is that minimalism, when misapplied to a room with limited proportions, emphasises its limitations rather than disguising them.