Why I started this

For years, my friends called me whenever they moved. Moving in together, first apartment, first house. I'd come over, we'd walk through the rooms, and we'd figure it out together. I loved that.

But I kept running into the same thing.

I could tell someone which color belonged on that wall, and I'd usually be right, I can read a space, that's the job. They'd be happy. And then they'd be standing in a store three months later, looking at a rug, texting me a photo. Because the choice had been mine, not theirs. They had a beautiful room and still no idea why it worked.

That's not the outcome I wanted for them. I wanted them to walk into that store and just know. To recognize what they're drawn to, name it, and trust it enough to decide on the spot. Not my taste in their home. Theirs, chosen on purpose.

Because here's the thing: what they didn't have wasn't taste. It was language. Nobody had ever shown them what makes a room feel calm, or why two things they both love look wrong side by side. Once you can see that, choosing gets easy. And it stays easy, in every house you'll ever live in.

Then there was the other half of it, the part I saw at work. Young people building their first home, real budget, real chance to make something they loved and they'd go white. Every wall, every surface, every decision the safe one. Not because they wanted white. Because they were afraid of picking wrong.

It wasn't my place to talk them out of it. But I'd drive home thinking: that's not going to feel like anything. And they couldn't hire someone like me, because that costs more than most people starting out have.

That's the gap these guides are for. Not to decide for you. To hand you the thinking, so you can.

What I actually think about interiors

I love color. My closet has no black and no white in it, none. I think life is better when you know how to put colors together, and most people who say they "can't do color" have just never been shown how it works.

My own taste is Scandinavian with a good dose of Memphis on top. Those two shouldn't work together at all. All-white goes flat on me fast, so I add something loud and it holds, as long as you know which elements to take from where.

That's most people, by the way. Almost nobody is one clean style. They're two or three, and they think that means they have no taste. It doesn't. It means you have a mix, and a mix needs a method.

I get it wrong too

I've lived in the same rental for five years, and if I'm honest, it isn't us anymore.

The colors I chose back then aren't what I'd choose today. My husband didn't know what he liked when we moved in, and now he does and it's not quite what's on our walls. Nothing went wrong. We just changed.

That's the part nobody tells you: your taste keeps moving. So does your partner's. Which is exactly why it's worth understanding why something works instead of just being handed an answer. Otherwise you're back to square one every few years, paying someone all over again.

What you'll find here

Guides on color, style, materials, measuring, layout, and the mistakes I see most often, the ones friends, family, and clients all make, usually for the same reasons.

The kind of thing my sister needed when she and her husband stood in a showroom trying to work out whether a couch would fit. Not just physically. Whether the proportions would sit right in the room they had.

That's what I'm trying to hand over. Not taste. The tools.

Not because it has to be perfect, but because it gets to be yours.