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.
Clara Bittencourt
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.
18 articles
Materials
Materials that age well and materials that only look new
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
Bedrooms are lit for cleaning and used for sleeping
The overhead fitting in most bedrooms is the brightest thing in the room at the moment you least want brightness.
Room by Room
Children's rooms are storage problems that change every two years
Everything bought for a five-year-old is wrong by eight. Designing for the change is the only durable approach.
Room by Room
A spare room that is only spare is empty eleven months a year
Guest bedrooms are the least used rooms in most houses. The ones that work have a job the rest of the time.
Materials
Grout is the weak point in every tiled surface
Tiles do not usually fail. The joints between them, and what is behind them, do.
Materials
Board width, species and finish are three separate decisions in a timber floor
People choose a wood floor by colour and then live with the consequences of three specifications they never considered.
Materials
The wall behind the paint decides how the paint looks
Two rooms painted the same colour look different because one is on fresh plaster and the other is on forty years of history.
Materials
Wallpaper does things paint physically cannot
It is not a more decorative paint. It is a material with thickness, pattern repeat and a completely different failure mode.
Materials
Silicone is a consumable and it is supposed to be replaced
The black line around a bath is not a failure of the house. It is a maintenance item that nobody was told about.
Materials
Microcement and polished concrete are finishes, not floors
The seamless look depends almost entirely on what is underneath and who applied it, which is why results vary so much.
Materials
Upholstery fabric is chosen by touch and worn out by friction
The fabric that feels best in a showroom is often the one that pills, fades or flattens first at home.
Materials
Cork, linoleum and vinyl are three materials sold as one category
They are grouped as resilient flooring and they come from completely different places, with different lives and different ends.
Room by Room
Extraction is the part of a kitchen nobody looks at until it smells
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
Lime and cement are not the same mortar, and an old wall knows the difference
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
Rooms that still work when your body changes
Most homes are designed for a person at the peak of their mobility. The adjustments that suit a different body are largely…
Materials
Every fixing is a question about the wall behind it
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
Stone floors are cold, heavy and close to permanent
A stone floor outlasts everything else in a house, which is exactly why it deserves more thought than any other surface. The three…