What We Believe About Home: Love How You Live

When I first started using the words Love How You Live, I don't think I ever imagined they'd become such a big part of the business. They weren't dreamt up as a marketing line. They were simply three words that felt right to me. And all these years later, they probably say more about what I believe a home should be than anything else I could write.

I've never believed that good interior design is simply about creating a beautiful room. Of course how a room looks matters enormously to me. I still get incredibly excited when a scheme starts to come together and something we've had in our heads for months becomes real.

But I've always been much more interested in how a home feels.

I've thought about that a lot this summer. We were lucky enough to spend a few weeks travelling through Namibia as a family and, since coming home, I've been asked so many times what it was like. Strangely, I've found it really difficult to answer.

I can tell you about the landscapes, the wildlife and the huge amount of space. I can show you hundreds of photographs. But none of it quite explains how it felt to be there. There was something about the quiet, the vastness, slowing down and being together that I haven't really been able to put into words. You had to feel it.

And perhaps that's why I've come back to these three words again.

Because I think home is a bit like that too. You know when you walk into a home that feels right, but it's difficult to describe exactly why because it isn't one thing. It's not the furniture, the colour on the walls or how much somebody has spent. It's something about the way it all comes together and, more importantly, the way the people who live there seem to belong in it.

That's why, when we start working with a client, I want to know far more than what colours they like or which rooms they've saved on Pinterest. I want to know how they actually live. Where everyone gathers, which rooms get used and which don't, where they eat, where they work, where they go when they want some peace and what, if we're being truthful, drives them mad about their home.

Often it's the smallest things that tell us the most.

We've talked a lot recently about designing for Tuesday morning as much as Saturday night, and I keep coming back to it. Of course Saturday night matters. I want a house to feel wonderful when friends come over and everyone is around the table, but there are far more Tuesday mornings.

Making coffee, getting everyone out of the door, coming home at the end of the day, eating together, sitting somewhere comfortable, closing the door and feeling that you're home. Those moments won't necessarily make the photographs at the end of a project, but they're behind so many of the decisions we make.

A beautiful home is wonderful, and I will always want to create beautiful homes. But I want more than that for our clients. I want to create somewhere that feels like them. Somewhere that works for the way they genuinely live, takes the ordinary days as well as the special ones and, over time, simply becomes home.

Maybe that's why those three words have stayed with me for so long.

Love How You Live isn't really about loving your interiors.

It's about loving the life you live within them.

Namibian Dessert for his playground