Why I'm bored with perfectly finished interiors

Like many interior obsessives, I love nothing more than to pore over the latest glossy edition of my favourite interiors magazines.

Rich in ideas and conversations about design, each edition (and I have copies of ELLE Decoration dating back to the '90s!) feels significant to me as a designer. They're a way of validating my own ideas, as well as fuelling new ones. The same could be said of Instagram and, more recently for me, YouTube.

But there's a 'but' to this story.

Perhaps it's because I've spent so many years looking at interiors, or maybe because I've spent so many years designing and styling them myself, but I've started to realise that the rooms I remember most aren't necessarily the most beautiful. They're the ones with something slightly wrong with them.

A chair that doesn't quite match its setting. A mid-century coffee table with chipped edging sitting alongside a beautifully plush new sofa. A painting hung slightly too low. Books piled where they probably shouldn't be. A faded rug in a sun-drenched room. Something inherited. Something found. Something that clearly didn't come from the same showroom as everything else, or roll off the same production line.

I'm increasingly bored by rooms where everything is perfect, perhaps even over-styled.

It's not that I've stopped appreciating beautiful design. Far from it. But perfection can be strangely anonymous. I find myself looking at these seemingly flawless spaces and wondering how their owners actually live in them.

Where do they throw down a book? Where does the coffee cup get left? And, importantly, where does the dog sleep?

Because the rooms that truly attract my interest these days are the ones that feel as though somebody actually lives in them.