The houses people grow tired of rarely have a problem of taste. They have a problem of where to put things.
Two years into a house, nobody complains about the colour of the walls. They complain that there is nowhere to put the vacuum cleaner. About the coat that lives on a chair because the entrance has no hook. About the suitcases on top of the wardrobe, in plain sight, because there was never enough height to hide them.
None of this shows up in photographs. A house is photographed empty, and empty, every house works.
What you see and what you put away
When I design an interior I make two lists. One is what stays on show, and it is the short one. The other is what has to disappear, and it is always longer than the client expects: the ironing board, the cleaning things, the cables, the shoe boxes, the paperwork, the toys that move somewhere new every year, the weekend bag and the big suitcase for August.
The second list is what decides the project. If it does not fit, it stays in sight, and no choice of material saves a room where something is always out of place.
The sum nobody does
Before choosing a sofa, I do a simple sum: how many linear metres of closed storage exist today, and how many are needed. There are almost always fewer. In older flats there are far fewer, because they were designed for people who owned less.
That sum changes the plan before it changes the decoration. Sometimes it takes thirty centimetres from a bedroom to give the entrance a cupboard, and a year later that is the decision the client likes most, even though it was the hardest one to accept.
Storage is the only part of a house you notice only when it is missing.
