THE  JOURNAL

Sometimes it is obvious that every piece in a space was expensive. Sometimes it is obvious that everything came from the same high-street collection. Either way, the room can lose some of the friction that makes an interior interesting. Most of the rooms I save are much harder to read. There might be a beautifully made chair beside a very ordinary table lamp, an original artwork above an inexpensive sideboard, or a £20 vase sitting on a piece of furniture that will probably s

Some rooms look as though they have been assembled all at once. Everything coordinates, every object has an obvious place, and you can almost imagine the shopping list behind it. The rooms I come back to are usually the opposite. They contain things accumulated at different times and from different places. A piece of studio pottery sits beside something contemporary. An old painting shares a wall with a newer print. There are books, bowls, textiles and slightly strange object

Neo Deco is one of Pinterest’s named trends for 2026, and its appeal is easy to understand. Richer woods, decorative metalwork, coloured glass, scalloped shapes and deeper upholstery are appearing together again, bringing some of the glamour of Art Deco into rooms that are otherwise much less formal. The most useful version of the look is selective. A room can take a scalloped mirror, a dark timber table and an emerald cushion without needing to become a complete 1930s interi

Rooms often come together more easily when there is one object to respond to. Vintage is particularly good at providing that starting point because an older piece usually arrives with its own colour, surface and personality already established. Once that is in place, the rest of the decisions become more specific. A timber finish can echo one of its darker tones. A textile can pick up a colour in the glaze. A lamp can soften its shape. Today, I’m starting with one of the more

Pattern is returning to interiors in a much more layered way. Florals are being mixed with stripes, geometrics with botanicals, and rooms are becoming less concerned with keeping every surface quiet. The easiest way into it is to think less about whether patterns “match” and more about how they relate to one another. A useful rule is simple: mix the scale, repeat the colour. If two patterns share a few colours, they can usually sit together quite comfortably as long as they a

Coloured glass has become one of the easiest ways to bring personality back into a room. It catches light, introduces colour without the commitment of paint or upholstery, and works particularly well when different periods and makers are mixed together. Murano and Murano-inspired glass are among the vintage styles being singled out for 2026, alongside a broader return to irregular silhouettes, decorative surfaces and expressive objects. (homesandgardens.com) The best pieces o

How to make a room feel collected, not decorated The most convincing rooms tend to feel as though they have grown over time. A piece of coloured glass might sit beside a newer lamp, a hand-painted candlestick might share a shelf with a contemporary frame, and an old studio bowl might end up next to something glossy and recent. The interest comes from the mix. That is where vintage earns its place. Older pieces bring in patina, colour, craftsmanship and shapes that feel less p

There is something immediately different about a surface that carries evidence of how it was made. A glaze that pools more heavily around the foot of a bowl. The slight variation in a woven fibre. Grain left visible beneath a dark stain. Tiny marks in hammered metal that stop the surface becoming completely uniform. These imperfections are not really imperfections at all. They are reminders that an object has passed through somebody’s hands. This was central to the Arts & Cra

The easiest way to bring Arts & Crafts into a modern home is not to recreate a period interior, but to borrow its instincts: natural materials, visible craftsmanship, botanical pattern and objects that feel chosen rather than coordinated. Think dark timber softened with linen, hand-thrown ceramics beside warm brass, leafy prints against plain walls, and lamps that cast a low, amber light. The effect should feel layered and lived-in, with enough irregularity to stop it becomin

Maija Isola, Unikko fabric, 1964. Marimekko. In 1964, Armi Ratia declared that Marimekko would not produce floral prints. Her reasoning was that flowers were so beautiful that she believed no printed pattern could represent them adequately. Her view had logic behind it, with Marimekko’s prints up to that point working by reducing a subject to its essential graphic form. Ratia appears to have believed that flowers resisted this process. Maija Isola disagreed, and designed a se

The First Dress The first Marimekko fashion show was held in Helsinki in 1951, a result of Viljo Ratia purchasing a failing oilcloth printing factory called Printex two years earlier. The oilcloth industry was not what it had been, and his wife, Armi Ratia, had come up with the solution. She had trained at the Art Industry Central School and worked in advertising, and her solution was printed cotton. She asked a group of young artists to apply their graphic designs to fabric,

Sonia Delaunay, Portuguese Market, 1915. Oil and wax on canvas, 90.5 × 90.5 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Theodore R. Racoosin, 1955. Yesterday, we published the full piece on Sonia Delaunay, her colour theory, the 1925 Exposition, and why her paintings and textiles ended up in different kinds of museums. Portuguese Market is one of the paintings from early on in her career. In 1915, Sonia Delaunay was living in Portugal, after her family had been caught in the

The Quilt In 1911, Sonia Delaunay made a patchwork quilt for her newborn son Charles. She assembled it from scraps of fabric in the way she remembered from Ukrainian peasant houses, placing pieces of different colours next to each other without a plan for how they would come together. When it was finished, she noticed how the colours were affecting each other: each patch was changing how the ones around it looked, making them more intense than they would have been against whi

Why was this the most referenced painting at the Met Gala? John Singer Sargent, Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1883–84. Oil on canvas, 208.6 × 109.9 cm | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain. Three separate guests at this year’s Met Gala arrived in outfits referencing the same painting. That painting is John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X, and it is currently hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the same building that hosted the event. The subj

The Theme This year’s Met Gala dress code was Fashion is Art, tied to the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition Costume Art. The instruction to guests was to “express their own relationship to fashion as an embodied art form”. What this produced, across several hundred red carpet looks, was a spectrum running from genuine art historical engagement, to sequins with a vague gesture toward creativity. The question for me isn’t which outfits looked good, but the strength of their

Candlelight In 1975, Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon was released. The film is set across eighteenth-century Europe, and the candlelit rooms look almost like period oil paintings. When it comes to film, many don’t realise how much work goes into the sets, or how many people it takes to achieve the final result that you see on screen. Even if the locations team find a near-perfect location, every element still has to be designed, sourced, and lit to a specific visual requirement. The a

Red House Red House in Bexleyheath sits low behind an orchard. It was completed in 1860, designed by architect Philip Webb. With plain red brick, a steeply pitched roof, and no applied ornament anywhere on the exterior, it looks unlike anything else that was being built in England at the time. The domestic architecture of Victorian England was typically concerned with surface: stucco, mouldings, and decorative details that signalled the wealth of the owner. Red House has none

What is Smooth Decorator? I have a lot of opinions about spaces. The rooms we inhabit say a lot about us, our personalities, the way we respond to our environments, and even our relationships with ourselves. You can learn more about somebody by spending five minutes in their home than you can by having hours of conversation with them. Some spaces feel really warm and personal, and some feel cold and detached, both tell you a lot about the person who curated the space. One of