A FOREVER HOME, BUT NOT FOREVER
The Difference between decorating your life, and renovating your future self.
"Moving is one of life's most stressful events, along with death, divorce, and marriage."
Have you ever found a recipe, but spent months waiting to make it?
When the day finally comes, you go to the farmers market for your veg, you buy the grass fed meat. You channel a three-Michelin starred chef and cook it to absolute perfection. Then you plate it, you take your seat, but… you’ve lost your appetite?
Just me?
I’ve bought, renovated and or moved thirteen times in the last twenty years. How I still have my hair and sanity is beyond me. The idea of home, will always be more than just the roof I live under. It’s a place to escape, create, be my truest self. A place to share with the people I hold dearest. Turns out I'm not just creating homes; I'm collecting expensive lessons in what doesn't work.
As a teenager, rearranging my bedroom was a regular occurrence. A compulsion.
I’d push the bed to the other wall, rotate my desk. For my mother, it was an annoyance, my sister made no apologies in thinking I was weird. Even then, I needed a space that reflected exactly who I was in that moment. It was my way of making the only space I controlled something new.
Something I created.
According to the numbers, 30% of THE RESET reading eyeballs, aren’t UK based, meaning my history and or past may not have crossed your proverbial desk. A huge part of my reset, is allowing the people who’ve grown up with me on their screens over the last three decades to finally meet me where I am. Not through the filter of my on-screen exploits, through my words here on this platform. The one I control.
My dirty secret if you will, is a much-loved pursuit. A part of who I am, seldom shared or explored with the masses.
Architectural Digest raised me better than most babysitters. Elle Decoration elevated my palate from Ikea to Eames. A life barely mentioned… until recently.
Sharing my home with the lovely people at TMH came as a surprise to everyone I know. I'm not the 'come look at what I have' guy. Never have been. I was raised in an environment where getting anything of value meant getting low, keeping your mouth shut, and definitely not inviting cameras into your living room.
Opening the door to their cameras was basically sending out engraved invitations to the universe saying "Please, come judge my stuff” or the more South London appropriate “As soon as I take a holiday, help yourself to robbing the place. You’re welcome”.
As much as I loved the home I created and gushed about it on camera, the work behind the door of number 72 was built for a past I no longer represented. I was decorating my past, but had outgrown the drapes, literally and existentially.
What's the point of perfectly coordinated throw pillows when your soul has jumped ship? The whole place had become a museum to who I used to be, with bespoke marble to match. The ideas, the furniture, the layout… a laundry list of everything I wanted, only years before.
Thirty layers of paint, three years of my life. I'd built the dream house for someone I used to be.
I was once a teenager with a De Sede couch and zero life skills. I’d just left art college, but was buying art. My culinary life was built on first hand mistakes while my home was full of second-hand Danish furniture. MacDuff in Shoreditch sold me classic leather and suede while laughing at my expensive taste, teaching me to trust my eyes not the noise.
What I was re-learning during this process however, was that my 'forever home' no longer matched my version of forever. This wasn't some petulant homeowner who needed a new project now that the hard work was done, I was a single man rattling around a family home like a marble in a shoebox. My forever no longer matched my right now, and apparently neither did I.
I needed guidance, and found a clarity in returning to Donald Judd. He became an unlikely design therapist. His boxes and their case for simplicity pushed me toward the difference between wanting something and needing it.
There I was, obsessing over perfectly proportioned metal rectangles and minimalist sculptures, when it hit me, Judd's boxes weren't trying to be anything other than what they were. No pretence, no performance, just honest geometry doing its thing.
From the education came the change. Specifically, the day Vincent Van Duysen broke my brain and Joseph Dirand taught me the art of elevated simplicity.
Here I thought I'd mastered the whole design thing, and then these bastards showed up with their impossibly perfect rooms that looked like they'd been carved from single blocks of expensive air.
Van Duysen's spaces were so calm they made monks look like teenagers doing the Harlem Shake. While Dirand had this infuriating ability to make emptiness feel luxurious. Suddenly I was realising that good can always get better, and my "perfect" home looked like a teenager's mood board compared to their surgical precision.
With my design aspirations reframed and an emotional audit delivering a distance between what I wanted Vs where I was, change was unavoidable. I had to sell, I needed to move on… and so… I have. Destroy and rebuild they said…