Materials
Paint finish matters more than paint colour
The same colour in three finishes produces three different rooms. Almost all paint disappointment is a sheen problem.
Editor, Rooms With Stories
Astrid edits Rooms With Stories and believes most interiors problems are lighting problems.
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Materials
The same colour in three finishes produces three different rooms. Almost all paint disappointment is a sheen problem.
Renovation
Doing the right work in the wrong order means paying for some of it twice. That is the most common renovation failure.
Renovation
Treating condensation as rising damp is expensive and ineffective. Diagnosis has to come first.
Objects & Craft
Rooms furnished in one purchase read as showrooms. The good ones accumulate, and the gaps are part of it.
Room by Room
A room reserved for eating twice a year loses its argument. A table that is used daily wins it back.
Room by Room
They occupy real floor area on two levels, take heavy traffic, and are usually the last place anyone thinks about.
Materials
The reason carpeted rooms feel calm has less to do with softness underfoot than with what happens to sound.
Light
Adding more light to a room that already hurts to be in usually makes it worse. The problem is contrast, not quantity.
Light
The lighting choices that make a house feel calm at night are broadly the ones that interfere least with the body clock.
Light
A dark window at night is a mirror. Put anything beyond it and the room stops ending at the glass.
Small Spaces
A three-metre room and a two-metre-forty room of the same floor area are not the same room, and they need opposite decisions.
Small Spaces
Footsteps, doors and chair legs travel through the structure. That is a different problem from a neighbour talking, and it needs a…
Renovation
A large part of a new build-out becomes circulation, and some of it comes out of rooms you already had.
Renovation
Nobody photographs the work that costs the most, which is why first-fix services surprise people every time.
Renovation
Permissions shape a project rather than merely approving it, and discovering them late is how good designs get thrown away.
Renovation
The work that makes a project feel finished is small, fiddly, unprofitable and the easiest thing in the world to leave undone.
Objects & Craft
A chair has to fit a body, take repeated load at its weakest joints, and still look like an object. Most fail at one of the three.
Objects & Craft
Size is the decision that determines whether a rug pulls a room together or floats in the middle of it looking apologetic.
Objects & Craft
A shelf bends according to its span, its thickness and what is on it, and the relationship is steeper than most people expect.
Room by Room
Where a second toilet can go is decided by pipes long before it is decided by taste. Understanding the constraint explains most of…
Light
People use the switch by the door and ignore everything else. A lighting scheme that needs four separate journeys to set up will be…
Room by Room
Every house has a place where outdoor things are dumped, and in most houses it is the hallway floor. Giving that job a room changes…
Room by Room
The nursery becomes a bedroom, the bedroom becomes an office, the office becomes a spare room again. Rooms that survive this are…
Light
Two windows of identical area can light a room completely differently. Height, depth in the reveal and distance from a corner…
Materials
They get grouped together as one look, but one is a palm, one is the skin of that palm and one is a grass. They fail in different…
Light
Lighting schemes are drawn as a list of fittings, but a room is read through the contrast between what is lit and what is not.…
Small Spaces
The instinct in a tight room is to shrink everything in it. What usually results is a room full of undersized pieces that neither…
Small Spaces
Plans are drawn as furniture on a floor, but a large part of that floor is route, swing and standing space that can never be…
Renovation
Removing a wall is presented as a lifestyle choice and is actually a load path problem. What the wall was carrying does not…
Renovation
A building is a record of what was normal when it was made. Some of those materials are harmless in place and hazardous the moment…
Objects & Craft
What you sit on is three separate systems under a cover. Almost every sofa that fails early fails in one of the two you cannot see.
Objects & Craft
It is a desk, a workbench, a place to eat and somewhere to put things down. Almost nothing else in a house takes that much contact.
Objects & Craft
A door handle is operated thousands of times a year by every person in the building. Very few components in a home take that much…
Objects & Craft
A piece that comes to you through a family is rarely chosen and rarely refusable. Deciding what to do with it is a practical…
Objects & Craft
Most plants that die indoors are described as having been overwatered. What usually happened is that they were given water they had…
Objects & Craft
Cookware behaviour is metallurgy. How quickly a pan heats, how evenly it holds that heat and how it reacts to food all follow from…