Journal

The start of a renovation is wonderful. The plans are signed off, the builders arrive, and within a couple of weeks walls are coming down. Every day there's something new to see, and you can't stop sending photos to friends. Then, somewhere around month two or three, it goes quiet. Not on site, where there's plenty going on. In you. The excitement fades, the dust doesn't, and nothing seems to be moving. That's the long middle. Every big renovation has one, and it's the part a

10th October is World Mental Health Day, and the advice about calm homes is everywhere. Declutter. Go neutral. Hide everything away. Some of that helps. But in my experience, calm isn’t about how little you can see. It’s about how a home works, and whether it’s working with you or against you. The trouble with hiding everything For a lot of people, out of sight really is out of mind. Put the school letter in a drawer and it doesn’t get dealt with. Shut the bills behind a cupb

Another heatwave, another week of closed curtains and warm bedrooms. If you're currently living with a house that turns into a greenhouse every time the sun comes out, you're not alone, and you're not stuck with it either. Some of this is about what you do today. Some of it is about what you plan for next year. Here's both. Design it out, if you're at that stage If you're renovating, extending, or specifying new windows and doors, this is where to put your attention first. Ex

There's a moment early in every project that most clients don't realise is happening. It's not the mood board. It's not the site visit. It's the conversation before any of that, where we are asking about your kids' after-school routine, whether you cook with the radio on, how long you spend at the kitchen table after dinner, and what drives you quietly mad about the way your home works right now. It looks like a chat. It isn't. What we are actually doing Every question has a

One of the questions I'm asked most often is: do I need an architect and an interior designer, or just one or the other? The honest answer is that it depends on the project. But what I've seen, again and again, is that the renovations that turn out best are the ones where the whole team is in the room from the beginning. Where the architect, the designer, and the client are all pulling in the same direction before a single wall comes down. Andrew Mulroy is the founder of Mulr

If you've ever watched a home renovation show and thought "I could do that" — you're not alone. And honestly, the best ones are brilliant at capturing the excitement of transformation - I love them too! But there's a version of interior design that television has created which bears very little resemblance to what a professional designer actually does day to day. That gap matters — particularly if you're about to spend a significant amount of money renovating your home. What

Renovation is emotionally demanding — I've written about that before, and it's something I see in every project I work on. But alongside the emotional experience, there are some very practical things that catch people off guard. Not because they haven't done their research, but because they're rarely talked about until you're already in the middle of them. These are the three I come back to most often. 1. It takes longer than you think. Even well-planned projects with experie