Dubbed the French Hamptons, Île de Ré is an island attached by a bridge near La Rochelle, where lots of Parisians have holiday homes, so it feels gently chichi but not nearly as much I as Cap Ferrat, I’m told. Probably why I liked it. You'll find miles and miles of car-free cycle routes through vineyards, the prettiest shuttered towns in hues of mostly green and a little blue (I've since been told there are only eleven paint colours inhabitants are permitted to use), pine-backed sandy beaches, oyster farms, daily markets and salt farms. It's bigger than you'd expect! Probably about an hour's drive from one side to the other.

If you do drive, parking is almost always free and easy for each town and beach, and there are free electric buses if cycling isn't your thing - although you'd be seriously missing out. It's almost odd to see people walking on two feet here.

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We drove across the bridge from La Rochelle, then on to where we were staying at La Phare - a good 45-minute drive up into the north of the island. So hire bikes: they come in all shapes and sizes for different abilities and ages. Rocky isn't confident on a bike yet, so I had a little attachment on the back of mine so she could ride with me.

La Phare is a sort of beachy holiday village - quite basic, but has all you need and is very comfortable. Apart from the pillows. I'm never leaving home again without my own. Basically a French Center Parcs vibe. I wouldn't stay here if I didn't have kids, so look into a hotel or renting un gîte (a furnished holiday cottage or villa, usually in the countryside) instead. La Phare is moments from the beach and a short cycle into the closest little village called Les Portes-en-Ré which is divine.

Great little local shops and a small market square with restaurants dotted about. Our favourite find was La Poissonne - pure seafood, plucked straight from the sea. Not one for kids without mature or experimental palates. Ours sat and watched us devour curried mussels, oysters and ceviche. We made it up to them at the LPR van (Les Portes-en-Ré) - really good burgers and fries.

A word of warning: restaurants only open 12–2pm, then close again before 7, so get there early if you can book. The French are a little unaccommodating - if you don’t have a booking you ain’t coming in! The local supermarket was brill though and had all we needed for a lovely breakfast at home on our sandy deck.

Ars-en-Ré, the next closest village, was a good 40-minute bike ride across the salt flats - stunning. You pass through vineyards and fields of horses and donkeys, and can stop to buy bags of salt on the way. I hugely regret not buying more as it beats any table salt you can get back home. The countryside is beautifully wild and natural, and Ars-en-Ré itself is a really stunning town to explore, with its church, coffee shops and patisseries.

The French aren't known for their coffee, and they'll look at you blankly if you try to order a flat white - but we tracked down a brilliant coffee shop called Café Octopus, selling the most beautifully curated gifts, books and kids' bits. I got my oat milk flat white fix and picked up postcards for the grandmamas back home. We had lunch at La Bouche Rit, which was fab - ask to sit on the square. I kept nipping off my chair to duck into the little shops that surrounded it. The clothes shops here are simply too good.

Other spots we tried, all up in the north:

• La Cabane du Feneau - very cool, amazing seafood, but not one for kids

• Les Huîtres de Trousse - a seafood farm with mega oysters and shrimp

• La Cabane de la Patache - a nice cabana restaurant by the boats, good for kids to potter on the beach while you eat

• Trousse Chemise - a very popular beach with shallow waters, where kids can wade along the sandbar

• Le Bout du Monde - good for dinner

Fair warning: there isn’t a huge selection of offerings for kids meals. Either poulet or fish and not deep-fried like back home. So load up on snacks or feed them first!

We spent our days flitting between two beaches: one good for crabbing at low tide, the other more for swimming - sandier and more kid-friendly. The first, just up by La Phare, is Plage du Gros Jonc. The second, a bike ride through the forest, is Conche des Baleines (Beach of the Whale). There's also a surf school we'd book into next time, when the girls are a little older - Ré Surf, at Les Portes en Ré.

We really loved visiting the top of the island, but felt we might be missing out on the south, where La Flotte and St Martin are situated. So after a week at La Phare, we moved to the HR Hotel in La Flotte, a pretty little harbour town - it reminded me of a French Padstow. A little touristy (coming from a tourist, lol), and the shops weren’t quite what they were in the northern villages, but we did have a smashing meal at Chez Raph. You can’t book, so we queued for an hour, but God was it worth the wait! Food to die for. Also been so pleasantly surprised that no dinner here has broken the bank. Full starter, main and deserts with wine came to 80 euros.

Also a great little bar called Le Bistrot Point Bar on the waterfront, great for a little pre dinner lifter. And the food market on Thursday was off the chart good - a proper feast for the belly and the eyes.

We ventured into St Martin for a wander on our last night, which was beautiful - so many lovely side streets and local artisan shops. We let the kids choose, and they wanted pizza and pasta. We also went to Do Ré Mie in St Martin (excellent for baguettes/pastries).

Finished off with La Martinière for the best artisan ice cream - OMG the flavour offerings. Hello mango coconut.

Other recommendations (highly rated, eaten at over the trip): La Cible, @beachbariledere, @re_ostrea.

Will most definitely be back to explore some more and beef up this guide as I feel there are quite a few more treasures we haven’t yet found!

Thank you so much for reading No Place Like Home. It genuinely means the world.

The book is out on 10th September and, if you were planning to buy a copy anyway, I’d be so grateful if you pre-ordered it.

Apparently (and this was news to me), pre-orders are a Very Big Deal in publishing. For a first-time author, they’re what tell publishers and bookshops, “This one’s worth getting behind.”

So if No Place Like Home was already on your list, ordering it now rather than later makes a far bigger difference than you might think.

Pre-order here

Thank you for being here, for reading, and for cheering me on. I don’t take any of it for granted.

Jojo x

Good lighting doesn’t announce itself. Bad lighting does, usually by making every room in a house look like the inside of a supermarket at 2pm.

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We recently finished a project with nearly 200 individual light fittings. Not 200 identical downlights, but close to 100 distinct designs across the house, many of them specified as pairs where the room called for symmetry: wall lights either side of a bed, matching pendants over an island, sconces flanking a fireplace, or two lights either side of a mirror in a hallway. Pendants. Chandeliers. Wall lights. Picture lights. Surface-mounted spots. Flush mounts. Semi-flush mounts. Swan neck fittings, upright fittings. It sounds excessive written down like that. It didn’t feel excessive walking through the finished house. It felt like the house had been lit the way a face is lit for a portrait, not the way a car park is lit for safety.

That project is the best case study I have for why layered lighting matters, so I want to use it to walk through how I actually think about lighting a home.

I will admit there is no quick lesson here in how to achieve this so that the lights will talk to each other. It’s taken years of learning and sourcing and mistakes to master the ability to mix so many light forms. But I can give some tips to guide you on your enlightened way.

Start with what light is for, not what fitting looks nice

The mistake most lighting schemes make is starting with the fitting. Someone falls in love with a pendant on Pinterest and works backwards from there. I start with function, and function in a home breaks into three layers:

• Ambient light: the general wash that lets you exist in a room without bumping into furniture.

• Task light: light aimed at what you’re actually doing: reading, cooking, doing makeup, working.

• Accent light: light that does nothing practical at all. It exists purely to make a room feel considered. A picture light, a shadow gap, a lit alcove.

A downlight grid tries to do all three jobs at once with one blunt tool, and it does all three badly. It flattens faces, kills shadow, and makes a beautifully finished room look like a display suite. The fix isn’t “no downlights ever.” It’s using them sparingly, in the right locations, as one layer among several, rather than as the entire lighting strategy for a house.

Walking through the fittings, room by room logic

Pendants and chandeliers: the personality layer. These are the fittings that tell you something about the room before you’ve even noticed the furniture. A chandelier over a stair or a dining table isn’t there to illuminate. It’s there to give the eye somewhere to land, to set scale, to signal “this space matters.” Where a pendant appeared more than once in this house, it was almost always deliberate: a matched pair over a kitchen island, say, where symmetry is the whole point. But across the ground floor, room to room, barely a design repeated. Each one was chosen to match the proportions and mood of its specific room: a slim brass pendant over a narrow reading nook, a sculptural glass piece over a stair void with the height to actually show it off. Pendants want to be sized to the space, hung at the right height, and treated as furniture, not afterthoughts.

Wall lights: the layer everyone forgets. Wall lights are, fitting for fitting, the most underused tool in a house. A well-placed pair either side of a bed, in a hallway, or flanking a fireplace does more for the feel of a room at night than almost anything else, because they put light at eye level instead of dumping it from the ceiling. This is where swan neck versus upright actually matters as a decision rather than a style preference. A swan neck fitting throws light down and out in a soft, directional pool, beautiful over a console or a piece of art, forgiving of an uneven wall. An upright fitting throws light up, washing the ceiling and wall, which reads as more architectural, more considered, and works brilliantly beside a bed where you don’t want glare in your eyeline.

Picture lights: precision over volume. These get dismissed as decorative extras, but a good picture light is one of the most technical fittings in the house. Beam angle, colour temperature, and throw distance all have to be right or you either wash out the piece or barely touch it. We used these liberally through the house, not just over art, but over joinery details and textured wall finishes, because a picture light doesn’t just light the object, it tells you the object is worth looking at.

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Pick up a doorknob made in 1910 and one made today. The old one has weight, a cool dense heft, maybe a rosette at the base shaped like a flower, maybe a faint engraved pattern worn smooth by a century of hands. The new one is a smooth oval of brushed nickel, indistinguishable from ten thousand others in a big box store, designed by nobody in particular for nobody in particular. Somewhere between those two doorknobs, something happened, and it wasn’t an accident.

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Walk through almost any building built before 1920 and you’ll find decoration everywhere you look, not just in palaces and cathedrals but in ordinary terraced houses, corner shops, train stations. Corbels holding up a bay window, carved into acanthus leaves. Mouldings running around a ceiling like a piece of piped icing. Taps shaped like swans. Hinges stamped with vines. Even a coal chute cover might have a pattern cast into it. None of this was accidental extravagance. It came from a simple assumption, that an object should be pleasant to look at in addition to doing its job. A door handle already turns the door. Making it beautiful too costs almost nothing extra once you have a skilled hand or a good mould, so why not.

Then, in 1908, the Austrian architect Adolf Loos published an essay called Ornament and Crime. His argument, boiled down, was that ornament is a primitive impulse. Modern, civilised people don’t need to decorate things any more than they need to tattoo their faces. A truly advanced culture strips things down to pure function and lets the material and form speak for themselves. Decoration, he said, was a waste of labour and a moral failing dressed up as taste. It’s a genuinely brilliant, genuinely persuasive essay, and it became one of the founding texts of modernism. Loos’s ideas fed into the Bauhaus, which fed into the glass and steel International Style, which fed into every form follows function building and product since. By the time Dieter Rams was writing his ten principles of good design in the 1970s, as little design as possible was treated as a moral virtue, not just an aesthetic preference. There’s real substance in that tradition. Rams’s work is genuinely beautiful, and Bauhaus furniture has aged better than most Victorian bric a brac. Minimalism at its best is not the same thing as laziness. But somewhere along the way, ornament is not required quietly became ornament is not allowed, and then ornament is expensive so let’s just say it’s not allowed.

Loos gave plainness its philosophy, but honestly, ideology is only half the story, and probably the smaller half. The sadder truth is that machines and mass manufacture took over, and real beauty, the carved, hand finished kind, became a luxury most people simply couldn’t afford anymore. A hand carved corbel takes a craftsman days. A machine cut version, if anyone bothers, takes minutes, but a flat bracket takes none at all, and flat is what gets specified. Mass production rewards the shape that’s cheapest to stamp, injection mould, or extrude in the millions. A tap with a swan’s neck and a leaf patterned handle needs more tooling, more material, more steps, more things that can go wrong in a factory in another country. A featureless chrome cylinder needs one mould and one finish. Multiply that decision across a million doorknobs, a million taps, a million banisters, and you get the built environment we actually live in, smooth, extruded, injection moulded, stripped down to whatever survives a spreadsheet. Not because anyone decided ugliness was better, but because nobody was paying for beauty, and beauty, real beauty, the carved, considered, slightly excessive kind, has never been free. Add to that a modern building industry obsessed with speed and margin, and cheap suburban development that treats trim and mouldings as line items to be cut, and you get entire houses with not one crown moulding, not one ceiling rose, not one carved newel post. Just drywall meeting drywall at a right angle, because a right angle is free and a moulding is not.

It would be easy to wave this off as fogeyism, a longing for a past that was, let’s be honest, also full of ugly things, built by craftsmen who were often paid badly and worked long hours in bad light. That’s fair. Nobody should romanticise the working conditions of a Victorian carving shop. But the argument for ornament was never really about the past. It’s about a fact of human psychology that seems to hold up regardless of era, that people are drawn to complexity that rewards attention. A plain white wall gives your eye nothing to do. A moulding with three or four planes catches light differently depending on where you stand and what time of day it is. A carved corbel gives a child something to trace with a finger. These aren’t decorative luxuries, they’re small, cheap sources of daily pleasure that we’ve mostly engineered out of the built world in the name of efficiency. There is also a strange irony in how technology has made ornament cheaper to produce than at any point in history, right as we’ve collectively decided we don’t want it. A computer controlled router can carve a repeating moulding pattern in a fraction of the time a Victorian joiner needed. A 3D printer can produce a corbel, a rosette, a decorative bracket, for a few pounds in material. We have, for the first time, the tools to bring back real detail at something close to mass market prices, and we’re mostly using those tools to make things smoother, not richer.

And it isn’t as if the skill has vanished. There are still small workshops carving corbels and brackets to order, foundries casting door furniture from Victorian patterns, joiners who can run a proper ovolo or ogee moulding on request, coppersmiths and platers making taps and handles by hand rather than pulling them off a container ship. They tend to be tucked away, working for architects and designers doing period restorations or for the rare client willing to pay for it, and their order books are usually full for months. What they prove is that none of this knowledge is lost. The carving shops didn’t disappear because nobody could still do the work. They shrank because almost nobody was asking for it. Which means surely the shortage isn’t skill, it’s demand, and demand is the one thing that’s actually in our hands to change.

So here’s the case, plainly. Bring back the corbels. Bring back the mouldings, the carved newel posts, the leaf patterned door hinges, the taps that look like something rather than nothing. Not as pastiche, nobody needs a fake Victorian terrace built out of styrofoam trim glued onto a modern box, but as a genuine design value again. Put ornament back on the list of things a good design brief asks for, alongside function, cost, and sustainability. It doesn’t require abandoning modern materials or modern efficiency. It requires deciding, again, that a door handle can be interesting, that a tap can have a little personality, that a ceiling doesn’t have to be a blank plane meeting four blank walls. The tools to do this cheaply already exist. What’s missing is the will, and maybe just enough people saying out loud that they miss beautiful things, and that plain was never actually a requirement. It was a choice. It can be unchosen.

Jojo loves - links to beautiful things!

The skill hasn't vanished. Here's where to find it…

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The trouble with starting from friendship is that friendship runs on rules business quietly breaks. Friends owe each other loyalty and patience indefinitely, no performance review attached, no probation period ever, even if they show up forty minutes late to your birthday with a bad excuse and no cake. Business runs on the opposite logic. Someone has to be able to say your idea is wrong, we need to kill this project, or worse, we need to let you go, and none of those sentences have ever appeared in a birthday card. The moment you owe someone unconditional loyalty as a friend, you lose the ability to hold them accountable as a colleague, and the moment you try anyway, you're suddenly the friend who brought a performance improvement plan to book club.

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And when it goes wrong, and it often does, you don't just lose a business relationship, you lose the friendship too, because the two were never really separable once you tangled them together like two different coloured socks in the wash. Money changes the friendship, even when you're not talking about money. An ordinary disagreement suddenly carries the weight of who owns what, and it's hard to go back to casually texting memes once you've sat through a conversation about a "vesting schedule."

There's a subtler cost too, the one that shows up long before anything blows up. Working with close friends quietly discourages honesty. You don't want to bruise things, so you don't say the pitch deck is weak or the strategy's drifted toward a cliff edge, and everyone else at the table can feel exactly what isn't being said, the way you can feel a fart being held in at a dinner party. Founding teams full of old friends often end up with a blind spot right at the centre, among the people supposedly closest and least willing to say the obvious thing out loud.

None of this means work should be sterile and friendless, marching in each morning like it's a Soviet ball bearing factory. The point isn't to avoid closeness, it's to let it grow the right way round. You work alongside someone, watch how they handle pressure and the seventh boring Tuesday in a row, and build trust through actual shared effort rather than history you already had before either of you showed up. A friendship grown that way has already survived disagreement and honest feedback, a far better stress test than shared memories of primary school, and it tends to be sturdier than one imported from outside and asked to carry a business on its back too.

So don't go looking for your co founder in your closest friend from university, and definitely not because you already know their coffee order. Go looking for the right person for the job, someone whose judgment you respect under actual pressure, not just at the pub, and let the friendship arrive later, earned rather than assumed. Work with people you can be honest with. Become friends with the people you work with. Get the order right, and you give yourself a real shot at a business that works and a friendship that lasts, instead of one slowly poisoning the other while you both pretend not to notice.

I’ve been lucky enough to see this play out the right way round myself. Some of my realest friendships grew out of years of working alongside people first, arguments and deadlines and all, and now I get to sit over a glass of wine with them and talk, unreasonably happily, about work, which is either a wonderful friendship or a mild personality disorder, and I’ve decided not to look into it too closely. These friends just get it. They know exactly why I haven’t answered a WhatsApp in four days, because they haven’t answered theirs either. They’ll let me vent about a nightmare supplier or a client who’s changed their mind for the ninth time this week, and instead of glazing over, they lean in with a story that’s somehow worse.

There’s also a nice lightness to it that I didn’t expect. If a work friend goes out with a different group of mates and I’m not there, it doesn’t sting the way it might with an old friend. There’s no weird feeling, no mental tally of who invited who to what. We each have a whole life outside work that the other doesn’t need to be part of, and somehow that makes the friendship easier rather than smaller. It also just makes work more fun. Genuinely, properly fun, in a way that’s hard to fake and hard to get any other way.

The business takes over my life more than I’d like to admit, and it comes with a particular flavour of guilt, the kind reserved for missed birthdays and the friend you keep meaning to call back. Out of work friends deserve better than the distracted, half present version of me checking a phone under the table, and that guilt never fully goes away. But my in work friends don’t need the apology in the first place, because they’re living the same juggle. They’ve seen a bad week swallow a weekend up close, and instead of being hurt by the distraction, they just nod, carrying the same weight themselves. Some people simply already understand, and don’t make you say it out loud.

It was never a chore we shared. It was the thing that brought us together, and it’s still the thing we both love. That’s a rarer gift than people think, and it only comes from getting the order right. My work pals, you know who you are!

Jojo loves…

Molten Gemstone Baguette Hoop Earrings
Hoops so lightweight you forget you're wearing them, until someone asks where they're from.

Félicien Top
The kind of top I reach for when I want to look like I've made an effort without actually making one.

Raffia Cruiser Straw Boater Hat
This is going to become a permanent fixture on my head for our road trip around France this summer - car windows down, hair doing whatever it wants underneath.

Slingback Espadrille
Cinnamon suede, an espadrille sole - summer, basically, in shoe form.

Thank you so much for reading No Place Like Home. It genuinely means the world.

The book is out on 10th September and, if you were planning to buy a copy anyway, I’d be so grateful if you pre-ordered it.

Apparently (and this was news to me), pre-orders are a Very Big Deal in publishing. For a first-time author, they’re what tell publishers and bookshops, “This one’s worth getting behind.”

So if No Place Like Home was already on your list, ordering it now rather than later makes a far bigger difference than you might think.

Pre-order here

Thank you for being here, for reading, and for cheering me on. I don’t take any of it for granted.

Jojo x

Please note that this post contains affiliate links.

Nobody puts it on a mood board. Nobody adds it to Pinterest under “dream home.” And yet it’s one of the few details that will make a visitor stop mid-sentence and crouch down to look at the floor like they’ve found a fossil. That’s the power we’re talking about.

It’s easy to overlook because it’s, quite literally, underfoot. But the threshold is doing more work than almost any other junction in a building. It marks the boundary between public and private, wet and dry, loud and quiet, formal and casual. Get it right and a home reads as considered from the ground up. Get it wrong, or worse, ignore it, and even a beautifully finished project can feel like it ran out of budget three centimetres before the finish line.

Here’s how I think about it, whether you’re renovating your own place, building new, or just deciding where the fun bits of the floor plan should go.

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Why this tiny detail matters more than people expect

Most people experience a threshold before they consciously register it. Your foot feels the change in level, texture, or temperature a fraction of a second before your eyes catch up. It’s basically a plot twist for your feet. That sensory handoff is what makes the detail so powerful. It primes the transition into a new space before you’ve even looked up.

It’s also one of the few places in a build where structure, trade coordination, and design intent all collide in a single line, usually about 20mm wide, usually the last thing anyone thinks about until it’s too late. Waterproofing membranes, subfloor build ups, expansion gaps, and two entirely different trades who may or may not be speaking to each other that week, all have to agree on the same narrow strip. Nail that coordination and the detail disappears into the background, exactly as it should. Botch it and you get lippage, a visible ridge, a grubby line that collects dirt, or just a boring meeting of two materials that never quite shook hands, and eventually, someone’s disappointment.

Timber to timber: let the direction do the talking

Changing timber direction between rooms is one of the best low cost, high impact moves you can make. It’s basically a magic trick. Same timber, same budget, completely different feeling, just because the boards decided to turn a corner. Running boards perpendicular from a hallway into a living room, or laying a herringbone insert at an entry before the boards resume their run, immediately signals “this is a different zone” without a single wall.

A few tips:

Commit to the change, don’t hint at it. A subtle 15 degree shift reads as a mistake, or worse, as though the installer sneezed. Full 90 degree changes, or a deliberate pattern insert (herringbone, chevron, or a picture frame border), read as intentional.

Use a change in direction to mark arrival, not just difference. Entries, thresholds into primary suites, or the transition from hall to living zone are the moments worth spending on. Save the drama for somewhere it earns its keep.

Match board width and species across the change unless you’re deliberately contrasting tone (say, a darker timber in a study off a lighter hallway). Consistency in material with a shift in laying pattern feels curated; changing everything at once feels like the budget ran out and someone panicked.

Tile to timber: solve the level change honestly

This is the trickiest of the lot, because tile and timber build up differently and almost never sit at the same finished height without a very stern conversation between trades.

A level change between rooms is really only something you should allow yourself if just one room is being refurbished on its own, say, retiling a bathroom within an otherwise untouched home. If you’re renovating the whole project, working from scratch, the levels throughout need to be worked out early, well before anyone picks a tile, so there’s no change in height between rooms at all. Even a few millimetres can catch out anyone who shuffles or drags their feet, and a stubbed toe is not the kind of detail you want people remembering the renovation for.

Plan the build up early, not on site, the day the tiler and the flooring installer meet for the first time and neither of them is thrilled about it. Get them talking to each other before either material shows up. This is a coordination issue as much as a design one.

Flush is the goal, but sometimes tile and timber simply won’t sit at the same height, even with careful planning, because one build up is thicker than the other. When that happens, don’t try to force a fudge and hope nobody notices. Instead, leave a small, deliberate gap between the two materials, something like 5 to 10mm wide, and let it read as an intentional groove rather than an accident. This is called a shadow line or reveal. Edge that gap with a slim timber strip or a fine metal trim, never a thick or dark grout line, so it looks crisp rather than like an unfinished join. Done well, it reads as “we chose to do this” instead of “we couldn’t make the heights match.”

Avoid the standard aluminium capping strip if you can. It’s the single fastest way to cheapen a transition that everything else in the room has been considered for. Think of it as the design equivalent of a beautiful outfit paired with the wrong socks. If you must bridge a level difference, a stepped timber detail or a stone threshold slip (more on that below) will always look better.

Tile to tile: treat it as a joint, not just a junction

When two tile types meet, say, a large format porcelain in a kitchen meeting a smaller mosaic in a butler’s pantry, the grout line itself becomes the detail. It’s a tiny line with a big opinion.

But grout is only half the story. This is where you can actually have some fun rather than just negotiating a truce between two tiles.

Change the laying direction of one of the tiles at the threshold. Even a straight lay tile can be rotated 45 degrees right at the junction, or run in a different bond pattern for a metre either side of the door. It signals the change without adding a single new material, and it costs you nothing but a conversation with the tiler about setting out.

Bring in a third, complementary tile to sit between the two. A narrow band of a different tile, stone, or even a contrasting colour of the same tile, acts as a proper pause between spaces rather than an abrupt handover. How playful you make that middle tile depends entirely on the mood you’re going for. A subtle honed stone reads quiet and considered. A bold contrasting tile reads like you meant it and you’re not sorry.

Keep grout joint widths consistent across both tiles where possible, even if the tiles themselves are different sizes. A mismatched grout width either side of the same line is one of those things people can’t name but will absolutely feel in their bones.

Align the joint with something architectural, a door reveal, a change in ceiling line, a benchtop edge, rather than letting it land wherever the tile setting out happens to fall. An intentional threshold aligns with the building; an accidental one just happens to be wherever the tiler ran out of tile.

Always use the width of the door opening to determine the width of your threshold, not the other way around. It’s the single easiest way to make sure the transition looks planned rather than squeezed in wherever it happened to land.

Consider a stone slip threshold (honed marble or a matching stone bullnose) between two tiled zones, particularly wet to dry transitions like an ensuite into a bedroom. It reads as a proper “sill” rather than a repair job.

There’s one more threshold move, though, the one I genuinely save for the special projects. It’s not for every home, and that’s exactly why it works.

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Nobody tells you about this part. Not the tired part, everyone tells you about the tired part. I mean the part where you become the kind of person who doesn’t notice she’s wearing underwear as a hair accessory, because her brain is already four tasks ahead, drafting an email while looking for a shoe while calculating whether there’s time to fit in a workout before the school gates close, because the workout is the only ten minutes of the day that belong to no one but her.

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I didn’t take maternity leave. Not really. I don’t say that to be impressive, because it isn’t. I say it because I think it’s the reason I’ve never known anything else. There was no before and after, no clean line where I got to put the old life down and pick up the new one once I’d learned how to hold it properly. I just kept buckling in. Every day, a new set of straps, and you tighten them as you go.

We’ve had help here and there. A wonderful French nanny when the kids were really small and we were living in our flat in London, back when both Brad and I were trying to keep our own businesses alive at the same time as keeping two small humans alive, which is, it turns out, two full time jobs pretending to be one. Both our parents live that bit too far away to lean on for regular childcare, and honestly, I didn’t want to gate crash their well earned retirement with two tiny, exhausting children. We tried an au pair a couple of years ago too. It didn’t stick, not because she wasn’t lovely, but because something in me kept refusing the help even as I was drowning for want of it. I also just don’t really like someone living permanently under my roof.

Here’s the truth I don’t say out loud very often: I don’t want help. I want to be with my kids. Even when I don’t. Even when I am so depleted that being with them feels like one more demand on a body that has nothing left to give. I want it anyway. So I’ve had to accept that I am doing both, always, at the same time, forever, the business and the mothering, and that most days I am not doing either one particularly well. I am doing them both at about 70 percent, which from the outside might look like 140 percent of a person, but from the inside just feels like never quite arriving anywhere.

And when I do manage to do one of them properly, really show up, really nail the client call, or really be present on the floor building the Lego tower, or pretending I really want to be in this moment colouring in a mermaid, it costs something. I can feel the bill coming due. First in my body. The shoulders go, or the back, or I catch a cold that a well rested person would have shrugged off. Then, if I don’t stop, it moves up into the mind. That’s the part that frightens me. The physical falling apart is almost a relief, a permission slip (see, I really was carrying too much) but the mental unraveling is quieter and harder to point to, and by the time I notice it, I’m already in it.

I wish there was another word for juggle. Juggle sounds skillful. It sounds like something you’d applaud at a party, a person keeping bright objects spinning in the air, look how clever, look how coordinated. But that’s not what this is. This is not juggling. This is load bearing. This is a woman who is also a wall, and the wall does not get to decide, halfway through the day, that it would like to stop holding up the roof. A wall mid renovation too, as it happens, propped up while the rest of the house gets rebuilt around it.

A load is not something you toss and catch. A load is something you carry until you put it down, and I haven’t found the place yet where I’m allowed to put it down. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe that’s the actual invisible part, not the tiredness, which is visible enough if anyone bothered to look, but the fact that there is no scheduled moment, no designated hour, when the carrying stops and someone else takes a turn. You just keep walking with it, recalibrating your grip, and calling it juggling because the truth is heavier than that word and people don’t always know what to do with the heavier word.

So this is that word. This is the load. The pants in the hair, the vest under the jumper, the two businesses and the two kids and the man beside me carrying his own version of the same weight, and yes, the builders in the kitchen too. I’m not writing this because I’ve solved it. I’m writing it because I think a lot of us are out here carrying the same thing and calling it something lighter than it is, and maybe it helps, a little, to just say this is heavy, actually. And I’m still here. Buckled in. Carrying it all anyway.

To anyone carrying a similar load, I see you.

Thank you so much for reading No Place Like Home. It genuinely means the world.

The book is out on 10th September and, if you were planning to buy a copy anyway, I’d be so grateful if you pre-ordered it.

Apparently (and this was news to me), pre-orders are a Very Big Deal in publishing. For a first-time author, they’re what tell publishers and bookshops, “This one’s worth getting behind.”

So if No Place Like Home was already on your list, ordering it now rather than later makes a far bigger difference than you might think.

Pre-order here

Thank you for being here, for reading, and for cheering me on. I don’t take any of it for granted.

Jojo x

And yet. I am still, in some fundamental way, adjusting.

I grew up shaped by London. The noise of it, the pace of it, the extraordinary ordinary fact of walking down a single street and encountering approximately forty different cultures, cuisines and conversations before you’ve reached the coffee shop. I didn’t know I was formed by all of that until I left it.

We moved out in early 2021 - Both girls arrived into a London life and were then promptly relocated to fields and fresh air before they were old enough to have an opinion about it. They have adapted magnificently. Better than me, if I’m honest. They are proper little country girls now - messy, feral in the best possible way, usually far more interested in foraging in the garden and rescuing whatever wildlife has crossed their path than in anything happening indoors. Rain or shine, they are outside. I’m not entirely sure they remember London. I’m not entirely sure they’d care.

What I miss

The diversity. I miss it more than I expected to and more than feels straightforward to articulate. Not just the people, but the food. The ability to want something specific and obscure for dinner and simply... go and get it. Japanese. Turkish. A very particular kind of ramen bowl. The city provides. The countryside does not.

I also miss the pop. As in, popping out. “I’ll just pop to the shops” was a sentence I said without thinking for the better part of thirty years. It is no longer available to me. The nearest convenience store is a twenty minute round trip. There is no nipping. There is no dashing. There is only committing. I still can’t wrap myself about the convenience of an Ocado shop, because I just really like “popping”.

The first time I ran out of something mid-recipe and registered that I could not simply go and get it, something shifted in me. I now have to plan meals like I’m preparing for a siege.

And then there’s the change. Or rather, the lack of it. I am not a creature of comfort. I like new things, new places, new experiences - the next thing, always. London feeds that instinct effortlessly. Something is always opening, changing, happening. Out here, the rhythm is steadier. The landscape doesn’t reinvent itself. The same places exist week after week, largely unchanged.

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Getting our fix

My friend Lucy - fellow Londoner, fellow escapee, moved out at almost exactly the same time as us - and I have a phrase for it. Going into London is “getting our fix.” We say it without irony because it is completely accurate. You top up. Whatever that feeling is - the energy, the anonymity, the sense that everything is happening and you are adjacent to it - you absorb enough of it to last a few weeks, and then you come home.

I am fortunate enough to have a reason to go regularly. I kept my studio in Notting Hill. Partly for practical reasons because its still “out West”. Partly, if I’m being completely honest, because I wasn’t ready to fully let go, and I’m not sure I ever will be. It means I get my fix on a schedule. I step off the train at Marylebone and something in me recalibrates. I spend the day in the big smoke, I see my team, I see my clients, I walk streets that still feel like mine in some way. And then I come back to the fields and the fresh air and the twenty minute round trip for a pint of milk, and it all feels entirely right again.

Five years in and I’ve stopped trying to choose. The city fills something up. The countryside lets it settle. I’m not sure I could function properly on either one alone.

What I wouldn't trade

What I didn’t expect was that without the constant churn of new things, my overworked, perpetually busy mind has had to slow down. And in that slowing, something else has happened. The places we return to week in, week out, be it the pub, the farm shop, the same walk on a Sunday, have quietly become an extension of home. You get to know the people who work there. They get to know you. That familiarity, which I once would have mistaken for stagnation, or truth be told - even annoyance, turns out to feel remarkably like belonging.

The air helps too. It still surprises me, the quality of it, stepping outside in the morning into something that simply doesn’t taste of anything at all. Just an hour outside of London, and yet it feels like another world entirely. Nothing beats the drive home; the moment I hit the green spaces, down goes the window and in goes a great big lungful of it!

And the children. Watching our girls move through childhood with space - actual, physical, run-until-you-can’t-breathe space - is one of those things I couldn’t have properly valued until I saw it. They roam. They get muddy. They know the names of things we have never taught them. Life at their pace, in their scale, feels right in a way I didn’t know to want for them.

Life slows down outside of town. Coming from someone who hasn’t sat still in forty years, I cannot believe I’m about to say this - but I think that might be the point.

My Local Black Book

Marlow, High Wycombe, Fingest, Henley-on-Thames & the villages in between…

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Let me be upfront about something. I have a problem.

Not a problem in the sense that anyone is concerned. Not even I. A problem in the sense that there are, at any given moment, a significant number of cushions in my house. On the sofas. On the beds. On the chairs that definitely didn’t need cushions but have them anyway. It has become something of a signature at House Nine - in my own home and across every project we work on - and I am not remotely sorry about it.

Because here’s the thing about cushions that their detractors - and yes, they exist, and yes, I’ve met them - consistently miss. They are not just soft things to sit next to. They are one of the most effective, most affordable, most low-commitment tools in an interior designer’s kit. And I will die on this hill. Surrounded by cushions.

What they actually do

A room without cushions is a room that hasn’t quite finished getting dressed. They add layer. Texture. Depth. That quality that makes a space feel considered rather than simply furnished.

In our projects, cushions are often one of the last things to go in and consistently one of the things clients react to most. It’s the moment a sofa stops being a sofa and starts being a sofa that belongs in that room. They pull colours from a rug, echo a tone in the curtains, introduce a pattern that the rest of the scheme has been quietly building towards. They do a lot of heavy lifting for something you mostly just sit next to.

They also, obviously, add comfort. But it goes beyond the physical. A well-dressed sofa or bed signals that someone actually lives here, that the space is loved and inhabited. Cushions do that quietly and efficiently.

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Where they earn their keep most

Colour and pattern. That’s where cushions really come into their own.

Not every client is ready to commit to a bold fabric on a sofa they’ll own for a decade. Not everyone has the budget, or the nerve, for statement curtains or a wallpapered wall they might regret by Tuesday. Cushions are how you have that conversation with colour without signing anything. They’re temporary. Changeable. Relatively speaking, cheap. A couple of beautifully chosen cushions can do more for a room than almost any other single purchase at the same price point.

We use them constantly as a way of introducing pattern into a scheme that might otherwise feel safe. A neutral sofa becomes interesting. A bedroom that needed something becomes a bedroom that has something. It’s one of the most affordable ways to elevate a space, and as a designer, I’d rather spend money wisely and use cushions to do the talking than blow the budget on upholstery a client might tire of.

The case for more

There is a school of thought that says less is more when it comes to cushions. One or two per sofa, tastefully placed, nothing too chaotic.

I respectfully disagree.

More is more that often not, well, more. Different shapes - a good mix of squares, rectangles, the occasional bolster if you’re feeling adventurous. Different textures - linen next to velvet next to something with a little embroidery or fringing. Different scales of pattern. The key is to find your common thread - a colour that runs through them, a mood they all share - and then layer confidently within that. This is something we do on every project: the cushions are never an afterthought, they’re part of the brief from the start.

A word on the ones who hate them

They know who you are. And I am not afraid to say, it is mostly our husbands. They’ve told me cushions are pointless, impractical, just something to throw on the floor at night. That they serve no purpose.

To which I say: neither does a beautiful painting. Neither does a candle you light for an hour on a Thursday evening. Some things exist to make a space feel good. That is purpose enough.

So I want to know where you stand.

Are you a cushion person - or do you think I have gone too far?

Tell me in the comments. I can take it.

The House Nine Cushion Edit

These are the brands and pieces I actually use. In client projects, in my own home, and on the wishlist for the new build that is currently giving my cat an existential crisis.

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Every morning at 7.30 the vans pull up, and the build begins. Inside, we’re doing the school run in various states of chaos, the kids straining at the door wanting to go and say hello to the guys before I’ve even found their shoes. We spill out eventually, all of us, into what is now officially a building site. A proper heatwave overhead, a portaloo where the garden used to be, and ten strides between the cottage and the works. We are currently minus a washing machine. I have taken to washing my pants in the sink and hanging them on the clothes horse outside. They dry in minutes. Heatwave has its uses. Fair to say home looks like an encampment.

And I am, genuinely, loving it.

I always said that when we started this house, I would give it my full attention. My patience. My presence. I meant it sincerely, and I have failed almost immediately. Work has been manic. I’m finishing a book. We have a number of large scale projects on the go. One of my senior team has just left on sabbatical. Good for her, honestly, go her. Which means I am picking up the slack on top of everything else. The moment I step outside the cottage door each morning to leave for work, the questions begin. Not unreasonably. The builders need information, decisions, answers, and they need them now because they move at a speed that is both thrilling and slightly terrifying. Every day I am frenzied, catching up, issuing decisions on the fly about things I thought I’d have longer to think about.

I had imagined myself serene. A little linen. Perhaps a mood board in one hand, a good coffee in the other. Reader, I have not been serene.

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And yet.

There is something happening here that I didn’t anticipate. Something about the scale of the disruption: the rubble piles, the machinery, the dust that finds its way into every corner of the cottage no matter what we do. It has stripped things back to something surprisingly essential.

The kids are feral with joy. They climb on the digger the moment the builders leave. They scramble up the rubble piles like it’s an adventure playground, which I suppose it is. I know, with the particular certainty that comes with parenthood, that they will carry this summer with them for a long time. Not the house we’re building. Not yet. But this. The chaos of the making. The extraordinary ordinariness of watching something being taken apart before it becomes something new.

Each evening, when the builders leave and the noise stops, we walk through the shell of the house together. There's rubble underfoot and sky where there will one day be a ceiling. We point at spaces that don't exist yet and talk about what they'll become. The kids run through rooms that are currently just air and intention. I let them graffiti the walls with spray paint and they talk to each other through the open pipes like giant walkie talkies! We are living in the in-between, and it is, I keep reaching for the right word, it is sacred, in its way. Temporary and unrepeatable and ours.

There is a moment in every project that I quietly love above all others. Not the reveal. Not the finished room with the perfectly placed ceramics and the throw artfully draped just so. Even though thats pretty great. It’s earlier than that. Much earlier.

It’s the moment when the house has been fully stripped bare. Every layer peeled back, every ceiling opened up, every wall taken down to its bones. Just bare brick. Raw and honest and completely unclothed.

There is something breathtaking about seeing a home like that. All that history, all those previous lives, suddenly visible. And then the blankness of it. The possibility. A house holding its breath before the next chapter begins.

I have stood in many clients’ homes at this stage and felt it. I did not expect to feel it quite so viscerally in my own. But there I was this week, standing in what will be our kitchen, thinking: this is it. This is the really good bit.

I spend my professional life helping people arrive at the finished thing: the considered room, the resolved space, the moment when everything comes together and the work is done. I am very comfortable in that moment.

But this is the opposite of that moment. Piles of brick where there will be walls. Trenches where there will be floors. Noise and heat and dust and disorder, and somewhere underneath it all, the shape of the house that I have spent the last 5 years imagining.

I always thought I’d tolerate this stage in order to reach the next one. It turns out I didn’t need to tolerate it at all.

There is beauty here too. Just not the kind that photographs well. It’s the beauty of something beginning. Of a family living lightly, stripped of most of their stuff, washing their pants in the sink and not minding one little bit. Of children who will remember a summer when home was a cottage the size of a boat and the garden was full of machinery and their mother was slightly unhinged but basically fine.

The messy and the beautiful, it turns out, are not opposites.

They might just be the same thing.

Jojo loves…

Bermuda Shorts by ME+EM
The shorts I didn't know I needed until the heatwave hit. Lightweight cotton denim, high waist, proper coverage. On rotation daily.

Jetsetter Sunglasses by FREYRS
Genuinely good quality for the price PLUS made from biodegradable acetate - love me some sustainable sunnies.

Advanced Pro-Collagen + Peptide Cream by Medik8
I had a real deep cleanse of my bathroom drawers when clearing out the house, so only my favourite products remain. I just ordered my third pot of this because there is no moisturiser quite like it - proven to boost collagen. It’s AMAZING.

Thanks so much for reading! If you find yourself wanting more, paid subscribers get access to my bi-weekly Designer’s Playbook newsletter, curated edits and a live monthly renovation walkthrough as we finally stop polishing the turd and begin the real renovation.

Upgrade to paid

And if not, stay anyway. You’re very welcome here.

One last thing - as I am still very much the new girl here on Substack, if you enjoyed it I’d be so grateful if you’d tap the little heart, leave a comment, or share it with someone who might feel at home here too. I’d love to grow this into a thoughtful little corner of the internet, and every bit of support helps.

Jojo x

Please note that this post contains affiliate links.

What I didn’t expect was the comment section to turn into something closer to a clinic. Hundreds of people, all with a window in mind, all asking some version of but what about mine? Bay windows. PVC frames. Six-pane sashes. French doors. A 2.5 metre kitchen window with nothing to anchor a rod to. It was clear pretty quickly that the appeal of the café curtain isn’t really in question - what people want is permission, and a plan, for their specific situation.

So this is me answering properly, in the order the doubts tend to surface…

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And finished means finished. Styled and zhooshed to within an inch of its damn life. Every cushion considered, every lamp angled just so. We will always cram in a photo shoot before handing over the keys - a few more stolen hours to actually see the thing we made, to soak in the result before we close the door, say goodbye, and move straight on to the next one.

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Then I drive home.

Home is a place we scraped together every last morsel to own. When we bought it five years ago, although THE most beautiful setting, the house had zero character to speak of internally - rotten windows, orange pine at every turn, moth-ridden pink carpet, a kitchen untouched for forty plus years, and two bathrooms that screamed mould the moment you walked through the door. On paper, a complete disaster. In practice, ours.

So we did what any self-respecting interior designer would do when faced with such a challenge: we began to polish a turd. Actually, that’s not entirely fair to ourselves. We’ve sprinkled that turd in glitter. We’ve coaxed and cajoled it, painted and plastered, snuck in some proper renovation work along the way, and slowly - slowly - turned it into something we’re genuinely proud of.

But here’s the question I get asked more than any other: What does it feel like to spend your days designing sprawling homes for clients, only to come home to your own modest one?

Honestly? I really quite like it.

You see, I am living proof of the cobbler and his shoes. The cobbler who spends his days crafting exquisite leather footwear for the good people of the town, only to shuffle home each evening in a pair of battered old slippers held together with optimism and a bit of gaffer tape. Does it keep him up at night? Absolutely not. Because he spent all day doing what he loves, and frankly, his feet are exhausted.

The secret, if you can call it that, is compartmentalisation. When I close the door on a client project, I genuinely close the door. Work brain off, home brain on. And home brain is significantly less demanding - she’s just grateful for a roof, a comfy sofa, and a sofa that nobody has asked her to reupholster in a statement fabric.

Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about having an imperfect home: it’s freeing. There’s no pressure to perform. No one is paying me to live here. My house is not a portfolio piece, it’s not a mood board, and it is absolutely not a showroom - yet. It’s personal. It’s ours. It’s the place where my children are busy leaving handprints on walls I haven’t got around to painting yet, and I have decided, quite firmly, to call that texture.

The kids, bless them, do not care one iota. They are not lying awake lamenting the absence of a considered tile choice in the family bathroom. They care about snacks, their friends, and dragging out every bed sheet in the linen cupboard to construct a den of truly ambitious proportions. My favourite floor lamp draped in a duvet and held up with a broom handle is, to them, a palace.

And so I have made a conscious choice to enjoy the journey. The slightly wonky journey, with its rotten windows and its ongoing kitchen situation and its bathrooms that are - let’s say - a work in progress.

As it happens, that journey is about to change. We are finally, finally, embarking on a proper renovation. The real thing. And I find myself feeling something I didn’t entirely expect: oddly, quietly sad. Sad to say goodbye to this house in its current form - this imperfect, draughty, orange-pine-clad house that has held our family together, just as it held so many families before us. It has been more than enough. It has been, in all its unpolished glory, exactly what we needed.

Yes, on the other side of the dust and the chaos and the approximately one thousand decisions about grout colour, I will finally have that beautiful home I have spent years helping other people create. And I cannot wait. But I also know I will carry this chapter with me - the handprints, the gaffer tape holding the fridge door together, the glitter on the turd - and I will be grateful for every imperfect, joyful moment of it.

The cobbler may be getting a new pair of shoes at last. But he’ll keep the slippers. For sentimental reasons.

Jojo loves…

Now, as promised, every essay will round off with a round-up of things I’m loving - the books, objects and rituals making life feel that little bit more beautiful.

Votary Cleansing Oil - Rose Geranium & Apricot
This product is divine. English made, cruelty free, vegan, female founded - so gentle and smells ridiculously good.

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy
Beautiful, atmospheric and completely transportive - the kind of book that makes you want to cancel plans and disappear somewhere windswept for a few days.

Solesino - More Pasta Dish
Hand-painted in Italy, gorgeous warm Tuscan design, with the message "More Pasta". You don't have to tell me twice.

Thanks so much for reading! If you find yourself wanting more, paid subscribers get access to my bi-weekly Designer’s Playbook newsletter, curated edits and a live monthly renovation walkthrough as we finally stop polishing the turd and begin the real renovation.

Upgrade to paid

And if not, stay anyway. You’re very welcome here.

One last thing - as this is my very first official Substack newsletter (eeeek!!), if you enjoyed it I’d be so grateful if you’d tap the little heart, leave a comment, or share it with someone who might feel at home here too. I’d love to grow this into a thoughtful little corner of the internet, and every bit of support helps.

Jojo x

There is a version of your home that exists in photographs.

Everything in its place. The light falling just so. A candle lit, a cushion perfectly plumped and straightened, a surface cleared of absolutely everything that makes it real. It is beautiful. And it is true - at least for that moment, on that afternoon, before life walked right back through the door and put its bag down on the chair.

And that there, for most of us, is the version you actually live in.

The one with the mountain of shoes in the hallway, the pile of plates in the sink waiting to be washed, and the half-finished cup of tea on the windowsill. The overflowing laundry basket, the crayon scribbles all over the dining table you gave up bothering about two toddlers ago. The kitchen at 8am on a Wednesday, when everyone needs something at once and the dregs of your coffee go cold long before you have time to drink it.

For a long time, we have been quietly taught to apologise for the second version. To close the door before someone arrives. To tidy before we take a photograph. To feel, somewhere beneath it all, that the gap between the beautiful home we aspire to and the real home we live in is a kind of failure.

I’m here to remind you, it is not.

I am an interior designer. I spend my working life creating spaces of real, considered beauty. I care deeply about light and proportion and the way a room makes you feel when you walk into it. I believe that a well-designed home genuinely changes how you move through your days - that beauty is not superficial, it is deeply nourishing.

I am also a mother. Which means I live, really live, in my spaces. Which means my home has mucky fingerprints on it. Almost all of it. Which means some mornings it looks nothing like my portfolio and everything like a life being lived at full volume.

And I have had to learn - am still learning daily - to hold both of those things at once without one cancelling out the other. Because this acceptance is where real contentment lives.

Welcome to No Place Like Home - a Substack that exists because my life is both beautiful and messy, and I suspect yours is too.

Every other week I’ll share a long-form essay on design, motherhood, business and the often messy business of being human. Sometimes we’ll talk about lighting, layouts and the psychology of home. Other times we’ll talk about comparison, burnout and what it means to take up space in your own life. Always finishing with a roundup of what I’m currently loving. For paid subscribers: my Designer’s Playbook - educational content, curated edits, and the insider interiors thinking I share with clients - plus a monthly live walkthrough of my own home renovation. Plaster dust, decision fatigue and all.

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No Place Like Home is about the space between the aspirational and the real, and why that space is not something to be ashamed of - it is something to be inhabited, warmly and without apology.

It is about giving yourself permission. Permission to want a beautiful home and not maintain it perfectly. Permission to invest in things that matter to you and let your children leave their mark on them anyway. Permission to close the laptop on the styled images and look around at your actual life - the gloriously imperfect, overflowing, lived-in, loved-in reality of it - and see that it is enough. That it is, in fact, more than enough.

It is about learning to live with the two in harmony. Not choosing between them. Not waiting until the mess is sorted to enjoy the beauty, or abandoning the beauty because the mess always returns. But letting them coexist, the way they do in every home where real people actually live.

Because here is what I know, after years of walking into people’s homes and helping them make their spaces more beautiful:

The homes that stay with me are never the ones that look like showrooms.

They are the ones that feel like someone. The ones where you can tell, the moment you step inside, that a particular life is being lived here fully - that someone laughs in this kitchen, that children sleep upstairs, that this sofa has held a thousand evenings. The ones where beauty and mess have made a kind of peace with each other, where nothing is perfect and everything feels exactly right.

That is what I want for you. That is what I want for myself.

A home that holds your real life and looks beautiful doing it.

No Place Like Home - my debut book - is out 10th September. This Substack is its companion, and everything that didn’t fit between the covers.

Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.

Jojo Barr x