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.
Astrid Holm
Editor, Rooms With Stories
Astrid edits Rooms With Stories and believes most interiors problems are lighting problems.
Contact Astrid through our contact page — mark your message for their attention and it will be passed on.
36 articles
Renovation
Renovation sequencing is where budgets are actually lost
Doing the right work in the wrong order means paying for some of it twice. That is the most common renovation failure.
Renovation
Damp has three common causes and they need different fixes
Treating condensation as rising damp is expensive and ineffective. Diagnosis has to come first.
Objects & Craft
Buy furniture slowly, and leave the gaps
Rooms furnished in one purchase read as showrooms. The good ones accumulate, and the gaps are part of it.
Room by Room
The dining room did not die, it moved
A room reserved for eating twice a year loses its argument. A table that is used daily wins it back.
Room by Room
Stairs and landings are rooms that nobody counts
They occupy real floor area on two levels, take heavy traffic, and are usually the last place anyone thinks about.
Materials
Carpet is an acoustic material that happens to be a floor
The reason carpeted rooms feel calm has less to do with softness underfoot than with what happens to sound.
Light
Glare is why a bright room can be uncomfortable
Adding more light to a room that already hurts to be in usually makes it worse. The problem is contrast, not quantity.
Light
Evening light in a home is doing something to your sleep
The lighting choices that make a house feel calm at night are broadly the ones that interfere least with the body clock.
Light
Light outside the house changes how the inside feels
A dark window at night is a mirror. Put anything beyond it and the room stops ending at the glass.
Small Spaces
Ceiling height changes what a small room can take
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
Most noise complaints in flats are about impact, not voices
Footsteps, doors and chair legs travel through the structure. That is a different problem from a neighbour talking, and it needs a…
Renovation
An extension rarely adds as much usable space as it looks like
A large part of a new build-out becomes circulation, and some of it comes out of rooms you already had.
Renovation
Rewiring and replumbing are the invisible half of a budget
Nobody photographs the work that costs the most, which is why first-fix services surprise people every time.
Renovation
Find out what you are allowed to do before you design anything
Permissions shape a project rather than merely approving it, and discovering them late is how good designs get thrown away.
Renovation
The last ten per cent of a renovation is where projects stall
The work that makes a project feel finished is small, fiddly, unprofitable and the easiest thing in the world to leave undone.
Objects & Craft
Chairs are the hardest thing in a house to get right
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
A rug that is too small makes a room look smaller
Size is the decision that determines whether a rug pulls a room together or floats in the middle of it looking apologetic.
Objects & Craft
Shelves sag for reasons you can calculate before you build them
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
The downstairs cloakroom is a drainage decision wearing a small door
Where a second toilet can go is decided by pipes long before it is decided by taste. Understanding the constraint explains most of…
Light
How a room is switched decides whether its lighting ever gets used
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
A boot room is the difference between a clean hall and a losing battle
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
Most rooms change use twice in a decade and few are built for it
The nursery becomes a bedroom, the bedroom becomes an office, the office becomes a spare room again. Rooms that survive this are…
Light
Where a window sits in the wall matters as much as how big it is
Two windows of identical area can light a room completely differently. Height, depth in the reveal and distance from a corner…
Materials
Cane, rattan and bamboo are three plants with different tolerances
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
Shadow is the half of lighting that never gets planned
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
Small rooms are not rescued by small furniture
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
In a small room, circulation eats the floor before furniture does
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
Taking out a wall is a structural question with a decorating disguise
Removing a wall is presented as a lifestyle choice and is actually a load path problem. What the wall was carrying does not…
Renovation
Old houses hold materials that must not be disturbed
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
A sofa is a frame, a suspension and a filling, in that order
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
The table is the hardest-working surface you own
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
Handles and knobs are the parts of a house you actually touch
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
Inherited furniture arrives with obligations
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
Houseplants are a light problem wearing a watering can
Most plants that die indoors are described as having been overwatered. What usually happened is that they were given water they had…
Objects & Craft
Pans are three metals answering the same question differently
Cookware behaviour is metallurgy. How quickly a pan heats, how evenly it holds that heat and how it reacts to food all follow from…