Weddings are rather wonderful examples of the two coming together. Small children running around, grandparents, young adults just starting out in life, couples beginning families, pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers, 80-year-olds dancing with 20-year-olds. The people who have known you all your life alongside the people who have only just met. And, inevitably, the people who are no longer there too.

The wedding was held in Tuscany, the land of ancient history, medieval architecture and Renaissance art. It was here that these two young people chose to say their vows under the shadow of the elegant La Pescaia Resort, a handsome 19th century farmhouse on an ancient road between Rome and Sienna.

My sister walked down the aisle to Friends by Francis and the Lights. Very modern, slightly electronic music which, at first, seemed almost incongruous in this old Tuscan setting but as I watched her coming towards us, it actually felt completely right.

Here were two young people bringing their own energy, their own music and their own moment into this historical place that has seen generations come and go before them.

Because life moves forward and we have to embrace the new whilst also honouring the past. And I think our homes need to do this too.

It’s how we make new houses feel characterful and full of personality, and old houses comfortable, usable and relevant to the way we live now. In a new house, we might soften the edges with antiques, reclaimed flooring, old textiles and pieces that already carry a little patina. We add texture and layers and things that have lived another life before arriving with us.

And in old houses we do almost the opposite. We add WiFi and dishwashers. Modern kitchens and bathrooms. Great big squishy sofas (antique sofas weren’t designed for watching television. They were designed for people sitting bolt upright, most probably whilst wearing a corset.) and this mix of old and new is the essence of life… we honour the past and embrace the new…

I always think that we don’t really have much that’s new in our own home. We love vintage and antique things. I’ve always fantasised about time travelling (a perhaps an essay for another week) and I love the history that old things bring into a room.

But then I looked again and on a little tour around my home I realised that of course my home is full of new things mixed in with the old, the ancient and the now. First we have the modern conveniences- dishwashers, cookers, fridges and then there are the modern sofas that sit alongside antique armchairs recovered in antique linen but made into newly sewn loose covers, then there’s the television, the laptops, modern cutlery in the same drawers with antique bone handled knives, everyday new china,on the shelf with vintage china, modern Duralex glasses sitting alongside 19th-century hand-blown wine glasses, 1940s aluminium chairs made from old aircraft after the war, paintings by my father in the 1970s, now sitting in antique gilt frames. The clothes in our wardrobes, a mix of high-street and thrift store purchases… the shampoo bottles in the shower sitting on an antique French ceramic hanging shelf

Then there’s what I like to call the vintage modern things. 1930s industrial factory lights, our 1960s swivel chairs in the snug (upholstered in antique linen that I dyed sky blue) and the original 1950s fridge full of beer and wine (I have never come across another fridge that keeps drink so perfectly cold).

I love the stories and passed lives these old things hold and I think that add romance and mystery to all the new stuff. I like to imagine who sat at a table 150 years ago, who else has looked in that mirror and what rooms and lives has it witnessed in its reflection over 200 years? Whose feet walked across our reclaimed floorboards before ours?

And then there are the things whose stories I do know. Anyone who has followed me for a while will probably know about some of the collections I inherited from my Uncle Gavin, but I also have things from my father’s mother and heirlooms from other beloved relatives and ancestors. These are different somehow, because the history isn’t imagined. They come with people and memories attached.

My mother recently passed on to me a beautiful Chinese lacquered sewing box that belonged to my great-grandmother. It’s slightly worn on top because at some point she tried to polish it and accidentally rubbed away some of the decoration. Apparently, she was devastated, but I love it all the more for that.

Of course, the funny thing is that all of these things were new once. The factory lights, the fridge, the swivel chairs, were all modern objects in their own time. All these items have stories and hold memories even if we don’t know who their original owners are.

There is a portrait hanging in our sitting room. A black and white photograph of a young soldier in uniform from the Second World War. Actually I have absolutely no idea who he is. Many years ago, I bought the vintage mirrored frame on eBay and his portrait came with it. I fully intended to take him out and replace him with a photograph of someone from our own family, but when it came to it, I couldn’t do it. I felt a kind of pang of hesitation. This young man was somebody’s son, perhaps somebody’s brother, lover or best friend. Someone once knew exactly who he was. So, he stayed and to me he is the unknown soldier and he represents all those unknown people who have touched and used and looked at the old things in our home before us. All those lives that somehow remain attached to the objects they left behind. He now hangs amongst our own family photographs, a bit strange, perhaps but he’s part of the family now.

I think that is what I was feeling at my sister’s wedding. There I was, talking to people I had never met before and missing the people who were no longer with us. Watching the old dance with the young in a 19th-century farmhouse, in an ancient Tuscan landscape, surrounded by centuries of history, while two young people at the beginning of their married life brought their own music, friends and energy into it.

This is what our homes should feel like too. Not preserved in the past and not slaves to the pursuit of the new, but places where different times can coexist. Where the things we inherit and the things we choose now, sit naturally alongside one another. Where we honour what came before while making room for what comes next and actually what we think of as old and new is constantly shifting as life moves forward.

This week has been one of those weeks that seems to have been almost entirely about getting ready for things.

At the weekend we finally managed to have a rather belated birthday lunch for my mother, who turned 84. I made the fig and goat’s cheese tart I’ve been sharing this week, potato dauphinoise and a salad of rocket, finely sliced fennel, orange and avocado with toasted pine nuts and a really good garlicky dressing.

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A photograph is the ultimate edit. You choose what goes into the frame and, just as importantly, what stays outside it. Very often a few inches to one side there’s a pile of discarded ‘real life’ items that didn’t make the cut: the extra books, the third pair of shoes (not just the artistically placed pair of plimsolls by the door), the party invitations on the mantelpiece, the pile of clean washing waiting to be folded. Not only that, if you moved the camera a few inches to the left or right, up or down, you would catch a completely different glimpse of the room. When we are composing photographs we pay attention to the minute details... a chair gets pulled slightly forward, a door opened slightly ajar, something distracting is taken away. You wait for the sun to disappear behind a cloud or for it to come through the window. And that is the point, of course, you’re making a picture.

But there is another side to these rooms, the parts that don’t get photographed. Not necessarily the ugly or untidy bits, although there are plenty of those in any real home, but also the parts of a house that we tend to pass over because they don’t make an obvious photograph. Then of course there are the parts that can’t be photographed: the sounds, the smells, the sense of time that passes as a shaft of light travels across the floor.

A lesser photographed are of my home.. but it catches the evening light so beautifully

Last week I wrote about the sound of opening our shutters in the morning. It’s something I’ve done thousands of times and barely thought about, and yet it’s one of those sounds that is completely connected to home for me. Every house has its own sound DNA... the creak of a particular floorboard, the familiar sound of footsteps as somebody moves around upstairs (each family member with their own distinctive rhythm and gait), rain against a window, the trees outside, perhaps a church bell that sounds every hour or a pair of pigeons that return to roost on your chimney every year.

Then there are the other senses that you can’t capture in a photograph: the smell of coffee in the morning, a fire that’s just been lit, washing drying, something cooking, flowers brought in from the garden. The feeling of a cool tiled floor under bare feet, the warmth of a patch of floorboard where a hot pipe passes underneath or the breeze that comes through a certain window.

None of these things are really photographable, but they are all part of how we experience our homes.

And then there are the actual spaces we don’t tend to photograph.

Hallways, landings, passages, doorways, the little bits between one room and another. They are rarely the hero shots, but they are the connective tissue of a home. The bits just to one side of the bedside table with a vase of flowers, the chair beside the window or the kitchen table laid for supper.

Every Saturday I send paid subscribers a more personal note from my week — things I’ve noticed, places I’ve been, things I’ve found and loved, and whatever has been occupying my thoughts. Less of an essay, more of a letter.

I’d love you to join me.

Don’t misunderstand me, I love all of those things, I’ve spent a whole career creating them. Small moments of beauty are the stuff of life as far as I’m concerned.

ButI also know that the gaps between them matter just as much.

In fact, those gaps are part of what allows the beautiful moments to work. It’s the chiaroscuro idea of light and dark: you can’t have one without the other, and the same goes for decorating your home. You have to have space around the beauty for it to shine. Those spaces help to lead your eye towards the focal point and objects often look more beautiful when they have some breathing space around them.

Negative space is a big deal in design, we talk about it a lot, but I think it is just as important when thinking about a whole house. There needs to be a rhythm between the moments of interest and the ordinary bits in between, because we don’t actually experience our homes as a collection of still images. We move through them, catch glimpses through open doors hear what’s happening in the kitchen when we’re sitting in another room.

This is why it’s important to think about the design of your home as a whole: to think about how one room moves into another, the view across two or three spaces, how a material might appear in one room and then again somewhere else, a colour that repeats itself from room to room, or having the same floor running through several spaces.

This is what we call flow, and it’s flow that helps a home hold together, so that each room feels part of a whole home. Not because everything has to match — quite the opposite — but because there needs to be some sort of conversation happening between the different parts.

Some people call this the red thread — it’s quite a well-thumbed idea now — but understanding why the red thread is important changes everything and when you allow a home to develop its own language, it comes naturally.

Have you noticed that the houses you love the most don’t feel like a collection of individually decorated rooms (although that’s a whole other fun design technique that we’ll save for another day), they feel cohesive, like one place.

That’s difficult to capture in a photograph because it isn’t really about a single view. It’s about the experience of moving through the whole. And one of the biggest things I’ve learnt from spending so much of my life photographing homes is that a photograph will never capture the whole.

It’s a bit like when we look at ourselves in the mirror and can only focus on the bits we don’t like about ourselves... my legs aren’t long enough, my tummy sticks out, there’s a mole on my face... the things we think need fixing. But no one else is looking at those details. When people look at you they see the whole of you, and I think it’s the same with our homes.

A home is a bombardment of senses and experiences that our brains take in all at once. The sounds and smells, the spaces between rooms, the empty bits, the messy bits, the glimpse through a doorway, the light changing as you walk through the house. The completely ordinary parts that would never make it into a photograph but which are the real heroes of how it feels to live in a home.

Atlanta x

One Calm Moment

If this has made you think differently about spaces and the moments in between, One Calm Moment takes the idea a step further. It’s my guide to noticing what you already have and creating small moments of beauty around your home. Not by redecorating or buying more, but simply by looking at things differently.

It’s 24 pages exploring my method for creating small moments of beauty from what you already have.

One Calm Moment — £20

All this made me think about how much time we spend trying to make a life, or a home, or even a style. Trying to decide what something should be, when sometimes perhaps we just need to wait and see what happens. Homes need time to evolve and the funny thing is that we are also constantly evolving so the idea that a home is ‘finished’ is, I think, a total misnomer.

At last, the rain has arrived here on the marsh.
I have loved this long, hot summer, but after all the hose pipe bans and droughts and watching our gardens crips to a cinder it is definitely a cause for celebration. . The garden seemed to breathe an audible sigh of relief and you can almost watch in real time the lawn turning from brown to green. Everything smells different: That delicious scent of wet earth, moisture on the air and roses as they have begun their second flush.

Weekend Postcard continues below for paid subscribers.
These are my more personal weekend notes on home, seasons, life and the things I’ve noticed along the way. I’d love you to join me.

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There is something very grounding about spending time with someone who has known you for almost your entire life. Someone who has seen you through the highs and lows of life, remembers your parents when they were still young, your childhood home, your teenage self, was there for your wedding day, the birth of your children, in fact every meaningful event of your life. I think these very old friendships have felt particularly precious to me this year. Since losing my brother in April, the people who hold pieces of my history feel even more precious. There is something incredibly comforting old friends that know you so well, good and bad.

Anyway, old friends need feeding.

The rest of this weekend postcard is for paid subscribers. This week: old friends, a recipe for Chicken Fatteh, a slightly Fawlty Towers weekend stay, parallel lives and six of us lying under the stars. If you’d like to read on and receive my weekend postcard each week I’d love for you to join me.

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Much like sleep hygiene, he explained, it’s about the rituals and good practices that support our socia…

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I’ve spent most of it behind a screen, writing, rebuilding my website and trying to untangle what the next chapter of my business should look like. By Friday I realised I’d been so busy creating that I’d almost forgotten to notice.

Almost.

The Annabelle Incrediball hydrangeas have quietly turned that extraordinary acid green they always reach just before they begin to fade. I think I love them even more now than when they’re bright white.

There was also a small victory….

🤍 Continue reading

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It’s a camera.

That might sound strange coming from someone who’s spent the last thirty-five years styling and designing homes, but as they say a camera never lies and it highlights …

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What I knew I didn’t want was yet another high maintenance garden to tend and I didn’t want was another area that needed loads of watering if we were going to continue to have hose pipe bans every year. So our brief to ourselves wasn’t just “build a dry garden.” It was: how do we create a garden that gives us more than it takes, and that ties this whole plot together.

This week I’m taking paid subscribers behind the scenes of the creation of our gravel garden.

I’ll share the thinking behind its design, the plants that have earned their place, the ones that haven’t and everything I’ve learnt along the way.

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When we talk about creating a calmer life, we rarely talk about the garden, but I think we should. Our gardens can either become another long list o…

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Monday was spent photographing more of the new book with Polly. It was a day governed by light as we were shooting in one of the cabins and wanted to catch the beautiful dappled light that filters through the poplar trees in high summer. We had plenty of time to catch up on each other’s lives whilst we waited for just the right “dapple”… and although it slowed us down enormously, neither of us minded. Some things simply can’t be rushed and they certainly can’t be recreated artificially. It reminded me that nature often knows best if we’re prepared to work with it rather than against it. I’m so looking forward to sharing the new book with you all in September 2027.

By Tuesday evening the house had changed completely. Honey (our 15-year-old) had invited six friends to stay and before long the pizza oven was lit, dough was being rolled out and the snug had been transformed into a giant sleep den with mattresses, duvets and blankets spread across the floor. I always love watching this happen—it’s what the house is for: gathering people together. Every stage of family life seems to leave its own mark on a house. Years ago it was children’s birthday parties and dens made from dining chairs and blankets. Now it’s teenagers and young adults gathering with friends, talking late into the night and somehow managing to fill every corner of the house with laughter. It struck me again that the best houses aren’t the ones that stay pristine. They’re the ones people want to return to because they feel like they can relax and be themselves.

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Now I am not saying we should all live in chaos… I am just saying that perhaps we don’t have to be perfect and in being imperfect our homes might actually feel more loved.

When stylists are photographing room sets… we are often adding those things to make a room set feel more real… a newspaper slung on the sofa, a jacket on the back of a chair, a basket leaning against the door frame…. A good stylist knows that these items bring the human element into a space…. That’s what makes a room feel alive. We’re often doing exactly the opposite of what you might imagine, and these details are what stop it feeling like a showroom and make it feel as though someone actually lives there- they allow the viewer to relate to the image.

I’m just wondering whether, in our pursuit of tidy, we sometimes remove the very things that make a home feel loved. Perhaps not everything that looks untidy needs putting away immediately. Not everything is clutter, some things are simply evidence of life.

If you’ve ever wondered how to turn these ideas into everyday habits, that’s exactly what Studio Practice is for.

This week I’m sharing a simple two-question exercise that has changed the way I edit my home... and the way I respond to it.

I’d love you to join us.

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By Monday evening our house had taken on a life of its own.

Our son Indi, who arrived home this spring after three years travelling the world, had organised a reunion with friends he’d met along the way. By sunset there were around twenty young people from all over the world gathered in the garden making pizzas, opening bottles, sitting around the fire pit and talking until the early hours.

At one point I looked around and realised this was exactly what we’d always hoped this house would become.

Not a show home.

A place where people wanted to gather.

Dave and I quietly disappeared to bed at about eleven, leaving them outside listening to stories and laughter drifting across the garden long after darkness had fallen. The following morning I came downstairs expecting the aftermath of twenty-six-year-olds enjoying themselves and instead found everything tidied away so beautifully you would barely have known they’d been there.

More than anything, I found myself thinking how lovely it was to watch this generation who, only yesterday it seems, were children racing around the garden together. Now they’re thoughtful, interesting, funny adults making their own way in the world, yet somehow they all still found their way back here.

Enjoying Things I Noticed This Week?

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This year, a huge fennel has self-seeded beside it. Completely the wrong place.

I love it. The bees love it too.

Every morning they’re bus…

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The One Question Edit

One of the unexpected things that came out of writing this week’s Studio Notes was realising I’d overlooked somewhere rather obvious.

I spend much of my working life asking whether an object earns its place in a room. Every project is really a process of editing. Not adding more, but removing what no longer belongs so the things that matter can breathe.

Yet somehow I’d never asked the same question of my own bathroom cabinet.

Over the years it had quietly filled with products bought with the very best intentions. A serum that promised brighter skin. An exfoliant I’d use “when I had time”. An LED mask that still sits in the cupboard waiting for the right moment.

None of them were bad purchases.

But they had become reminders of good intentions that had never become good habits.

So, instead of buying anything new, I emptied the shelf and asked one simple question.

Does this still earn its place?

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We may leave our houses behind, but our eyes never seem to stop working. I came home with far more ideas than souvenirs, beginning with a flight home full of notes about Corten steel steps. Ours at home suddenly feel rather ordinary. The ones leading down to the sea at our villa had been cut into the rock and then faced with weathered steel. Mixed with timber decking, I think they would look wonderful in our dry garden. A holiday for most people; another design project beginning in my head for me.

In the evenings we wandered into Fiskardo, a place I first visited twenty-five years ago. The faded Venetian buildings remain every bit as beautiful, but the harbour itself has changed beyond recognition.

The superyachts have arrived.

I found myself wondering, not for the first time, when enough almost imperceptibly becomes too much.

I have nothing against wealth. Quite the opposite. But sitting there, I realised the greatest luxury wasn’t moored in the harbour.

It was swimming before breakfast.

Fresh tomatoes and grilled fish eaten beside the sea.

The scent of fig trees on the walk home.

Time with all six of us together.

It made me think how often we mistake more for better.

The rest of this week’s observations are for paid subscribers.

This week I’m also writing about:

• why faded colours always stop me in my tracks

• what Roman ruins taught me about originality

• and why I think I’m forever searching for exactly the same balance in gardens, houses and life.

If you’d like to keep reading—and receive Things I’ve Noticed This Week in full every Monday, along with The Notebook and my weekly essays—I’d love to have you inside.

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The rest of this piece — including all five practical lessons on awakening your senses at home, plus an exclusive 40% discount code for our candle range — is for paid subscribers.

If you’d like to keep reading, and receive Studio Notes and Design Notes in full each week, plus the Diary of a Stylist, I’d love to have you inside.

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