Interior style: do you have to have one?

Hello lovely,

This is something I get asked all the time by my clients.

Do I need to know what my interior style is?

Am I contemporary? Traditional? Country? Mid-century? Eclectic?

Can I put that sofa with that table? Does this artwork actually "go" with the rest of the room?

And my answer is: no. You absolutely do not have to conform to one particular interior style.

In fact, I think the best homes are usually the ones that don't.

Start with how you want it to feel

We talk a lot about understanding colour and finding the colours that make you feel good, but I think we need to have exactly the same conversation about style.

Before you think about what you want your home to look like, think about how you want it to feel.

Because your home isn't a showroom. And it isn't a Pinterest board.

It's the backdrop to your life.

Old things and new things

And the homes I fall in love with are always the ones that tell me something about the people who live there.

They're a combination of old things and new things. Expensive things and things picked up for £10. The chair you inherited from your parents sitting next to the very modern lamp you absolutely fell in love with. Artwork you saved up for alongside something your child drew at nursery.

They might not technically "go".

But they go together because they belong to you.

And I actually think when everything in a home becomes too uniform, too coordinated and too perfectly designed, it can start to feel a little 2D.

You walk in and think, this is lovely.

But you don't necessarily know who lives there.

A blessing and a curse

There are certain interior aesthetics that I see replicated again and again online. One home starts to look like the next, which looks like the next, which looks like the next.

It reminds me a little of the grey-on-grey era. We've just swapped one prescribed aesthetic for another.

And that's where I think Instagram and Pinterest can sometimes become a blessing and a curse.

They are incredible tools for inspiration (I use them all the time), but they can also make us question things we would never have questioned before.

So I want you to ask yourself something.

If Instagram didn't exist, would you care?

Would you care that your sofa looked a little bit misplaced?

Would you care that your kitchen wasn't perfectly finished?

Would you worry that the vintage table you found at a market didn't technically match the chairs?

Would you look at the wall filled with your children's drawings, photographs, postcards and pieces of art you've collected over the years and think, God, none of this goes together?

Probably not.

You'd probably just look at it and think, I love this.

And that is the bit I want us to hold onto.

Because those are the things that give a home soul.

What feels like me

I'm going through this exact journey with my own house at the moment.

The more I work on it, the less interested I am in deciding what my "interior style" is, and the more interested I am in understanding what feels like me.

I've been going right back to some of my earliest memories of colour, thinking about places I love, objects I'm drawn to, materials that make me feel something and the memories I want our home to hold.

It's also a great opportunity to get to know the style of your partner, or anyone you live with. Sam and I have had so much fun playing a game. He shows me something he likes, I show him something I like, and then we find an aesthetic that blends the two.

And honestly?

My mood boards are an absolute jumble.

There's colour everywhere. Old furniture next to contemporary pieces. Patterns that probably shouldn't work together. Things inspired by Cornwall, things that remind me of riding when I was younger, pieces I've found and fallen in love with and things I've had for years.

But the funny thing is, when I put it all together, it does have a thread.

Me.

And perhaps that's the only interior style we actually need.

Your home doesn't need to fit neatly into a category.

It doesn't need to be "modern country" or "mid-century" or "eclectic" or whatever the algorithm has decided we're all supposed to love this month.

It just needs to feel like you. So this week, rather than asking yourself: What's my interior style?

Try asking: How do I want my home to feel?

What do I already own that tells my story?

Which colours, objects, places and memories make me feel something?

And, perhaps most importantly:

If nobody else ever saw my home, would I still choose this?

Because I think when you start there, something much more interesting happens.

You stop trying to create a home that looks like somebody else's.

And you start creating one that could only ever be yours.

A little bit of homework for you...

So, after reading this, I'd love to set you a little challenge.

Because these are the pieces that I think we should be designing our homes around.

They're the pieces with personality. They're completely unique to you. Nobody can replicate the memory or feeling attached to them, no matter how hard they try.

And when you start filling your home with more of those things, rather than things you think you're supposed to have, that's when your home starts to tell your story.

Below is my favourite coffee mug, which Sam picked up for me at a ceramics fair. It's the perfect blend of colour, fun and childlike whimsy, and it makes me smile every morning.

Perhaps your interior style isn't a style at all.

Perhaps it's simply a collection of all the things you love.

Episode three: the kitchen

Episode three of the Bruton renovation is all about the kitchen, and it's really everything I've been talking about above. A lot of the episode is me working out how I want this kitchen to feel, and how we're actually going to use it.

My dream would have been to upcycle it. Just paint the units, change the worktop, and we're good to go. But this house hasn't been touched for about 25 years, so it's all a little bit flimsy and it needs a bit of TLC. So the aim is: rip it all out.

The colour palette was the main thing when I was thinking about this kitchen. What are the colours, and the feeling, that I want this space to have?

I really want the green and blue you see outside to be reflected inside. A really heavy yellow-undertoned green, the kind you find in the grass against the blue sky, for the units. Then I'm thinking brass, but with mixed metals on the handles and the appliances, so stainless steel with brass with the yellow-undertoned green.

When you're thinking about your kitchen, I think most people get quite hung up on the worktop and the counters. But actually, anything that you touch, I'd really think about the feeling you want to have. Do you want a handle you can quickly, easily pull? Or those smaller knob-style handles?

After we'd designed it, I came straight back to the house the next morning and just ran through how I use the space day to day. When I wake up in the morning and walk down the stairs, where do I want to make my cup of coffee? What do I want to be looking out at? When I've got friends round, where are they going to sit? Where are they going to watch me cook?

I love things in uneven numbers, so if I can, I'd love to get three bar stools, so Zac can come home with his friends from school and do his homework there. And I'm never going to call it a dining room table, because that sounds too formal. It's a kitchen table.

Tash x

PS. If you have a piece or an object you love, please hit reply and tell me about it, along with any stories or memories you're happy to share. I love seeing what you're all designing your homes around.

All images sourced from Pinterest unless stated.