Storytelling through interiors

If you’ve been here for a while, you’ll know that I love interiors and design. It gets me just as excited as writing and reading books does.

But it’s taken me a long time to figure out how to bring my love for interiors together with my writing, and my love for books. I used to think the two had to be kept separate but I now l no longer do. I used to feel like I had to hide my interest in interiors because it might come across as superficial or materialistic. This is a hangover from my journalist days when I used to volunteer to write interiors pieces but then keep the fact that I was doing so secret from my news desk colleagues, who clearly thought that anything like that was not serious or clever, was just fluff.

But the truth is, I’m so genuinely inspired by the way we live and the way other people live and the stuff we surround ourselves with and how we piece it together. I love reading things like the Journal by The Modern House and I love watching the House & Garden videos. It’s shopping for pretty things, yes, but it’s also more than that. Putting a room together is another way for me to be creative, and I think about the stories I want corners and walls to tell, and the way I want a space to feel, and I look for those stories and feelings everywhere.

What I’ve learnt about storytelling from interior design

I also especially love looking at writers’ homes, because their homes will inevitably say something about their storytelling, and it feels like it might reveal something of their process. In my writing, I think often about the spaces my characters call home. I love pinpointing the details of where they live, because I believe all those tiny details can silently give so much away, like little secret clues. In a way, all my characters in all my short stories and books are searching for a place to call home and I think to a certain we can all understand that feeling, of wanting somewhere to belong.

I’m wary of oversharing too much about my home here and on social media and it surprises people that I’ve been reluctant rather than excited when journalists have approached me about featuring our home in their magazines (I had my arm twisted for The Observer, Elle Decoration and House & Garden). But I think that’s also the writer in me; it feels like my story to tell, and it feels different if I’m the one telling the story not someone else.

Recently I was talking with another author about what home means to me and it occurred to me that home-making (is that the word?) is just another kind of story telling. In the simple act of choosing colours for our walls and putting pictures up, really we’re making a feeling, creating an atmosphere. Lining up little plot points. Adding intrigue. And so, we make a world for ourselves to live in; a sort of lived-fiction. I guess we don’t all get to tell our stories and I’m lucky I do. So I guess this is a little bit of my story; somewhere between the faded pink of the walls and the sunkissed yellow of the floors there’s a summer romance of sorts, and I think you can even feel it. A story I’m always telling.