An Introduction

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 my favourite places to for interiors: Lunuganga Estate in Bentota, Sri Lanka. Designed by Geoffrey Bawa 1948-1998

I work in the film industry as a set decorator, essentially the interior designer of the spaces you see on screen. I am constantly thinking about how characters relate to their spaces, which objects they do or don’t own. The name Smooth Decorator comes from a pun on my job title, and it’s been my instagram handle for years, so it felt appropriate to move it over for this.

Smooth Decorator will publish four times a week as standard. On Sundays and Mondays I’ll be writing about design: movements, makers, materials, and design principles. On Wednesdays and Thursdays I’ll be writing about art: painters, works, context, and the influence and legacies of certain people or pieces. Every six weeks or so those two threads will meet in a post about production design, the discipline I work in, where I’ll write about what film sets are actually doing and how to read them.

One of my favourite artists: Ed Clark. From the 2024 exhibition at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. I particularly like his Moroccan series and his pieces where colour and light is influenced by place.

The idea running through all of this is that art and design are never neutral. Whether it’s a historic interior, a painting, or a set build, someone made a decision about every element. This publication is about learning how to read and understand those decisions.

I also love to save beautiful objects from the tip. I rescue homewares which have had a previous life somewhere, restore them, and resell them on my eBay and Etsy shops. That world and this one overlap more than you think, and the eye you develop by looking at design history is the same eye that spots something at a house clearance or a prop sale. Occasionally, I’ll write about this too.

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