Room by Room
The hallway is doing more work than any other room
It is the space every visitor sees first, that everybody passes through daily, and that almost nobody designs.
Contributing writer, Rooms With Stories
Clara writes about small flats and rooms asked to do too many jobs.
Contact Clara through our contact page — mark your message for their attention and it will be passed on.
Room by Room
It is the space every visitor sees first, that everybody passes through daily, and that almost nobody designs.
Materials
Everything in a house is on a trajectory. Choosing well means choosing what you want it to look like in ten years.
Room by Room
The overhead fitting in most bedrooms is the brightest thing in the room at the moment you least want brightness.
Room by Room
Everything bought for a five-year-old is wrong by eight. Designing for the change is the only durable approach.
Room by Room
Guest bedrooms are the least used rooms in most houses. The ones that work have a job the rest of the time.
Materials
Tiles do not usually fail. The joints between them, and what is behind them, do.
Materials
People choose a wood floor by colour and then live with the consequences of three specifications they never considered.
Materials
Two rooms painted the same colour look different because one is on fresh plaster and the other is on forty years of history.
Materials
It is not a more decorative paint. It is a material with thickness, pattern repeat and a completely different failure mode.
Materials
The black line around a bath is not a failure of the house. It is a maintenance item that nobody was told about.
Materials
The seamless look depends almost entirely on what is underneath and who applied it, which is why results vary so much.
Materials
The fabric that feels best in a showroom is often the one that pills, fades or flattens first at home.
Materials
They are grouped as resilient flooring and they come from completely different places, with different lives and different ends.
Room by Room
A cooker hood is a fan, a duct and a route out of the building, and the fan is the least important of the three. Most disappointing…
Materials
Mortar is meant to be the sacrificial part of a wall. Replacing a soft one with a hard one moves the damage into the bricks, where…
Room by Room
Most homes are designed for a person at the peak of their mobility. The adjustments that suit a different body are largely…
Materials
A shelf comes down because of what it was screwed into, not what it was screwed with. Knowing which of four wall types you have…
Materials
A stone floor outlasts everything else in a house, which is exactly why it deserves more thought than any other surface. The three…