The only looks I can live with

I dress like my home and my home looks like me. In rooms, as in my wardrobe, I love calming neutral colours and not too much ‘stuff’ on display. A house crammed with knick-knacks and walls covered with prints would make me want to move out.

So everything that’s hung or displayed is carefully thought about. I really enjoy the process of creating a relaxing space for our busy family life – and three pets.

And there’s always a project on the boil. At the moment I’m in the middle of painting a French Gray bedroom Wimborne White. I decided to do this on a whim one rainy day and it’s still ongoing. There’s also a floor being sanded noisily downstairs as I write.

This approach to interiors mirrors the way my fashion mind works, always experimenting with colours and textures to elevate the everyday – sometimes to the point where I exhaust myself.

Do you ever sit down to watch TV only to get up and move a piece of furniture around or restyle an item on a shelf? I’m guilty of this annoying restlessness, the constant quest for aesthetic perfection.

Of course, the big similarity between interiors and fashion is that both give you the opportunity to express yourself – to distinguish your personal philosophy and style from the crowd.

In recent years the home has become an unexpected new dimension of fashion, the fusion between the two fuelled by clothing brands such as Zara and Matches Fashion selling homeware.

Naturally, this plays out across social media, too. A great outfit needs somewhere to sit, and interiors influencers showcasing every inch of their homes have never been more popular.

I love looking at other people’s houses and, if I’m out for a walk, can never resist a peek through an open shutter. I also adore a celebrity home tour online. Recent highlights have been Gwyneth Paltrow’s LA residence with its Goopy interior and fashion aesthetic that I love, and Jennifer Aniston’s tour of her Beverly Hills mansion for Architectural Digest magazine – turns out I like Jen’s clothes more than her interiors.

Before her death in 2021, writer Joan Didion gave the world a peek inside her longtime Upper

East Side home – a sprawling 11-room apartment that finally found a buyer in January after its second price cut to $5.75 million. With its stylish herringbone wood floors and swathes of blue-painted built-in bookcases, it’s where she lived while writing The Year of

Magical Thinking.

Imagine living there and trying to put your own stamp on such a piece of literary history.