How My Design Eye Developed—and What I Believe Now

People often ask how I developed my interior style, as though there was one room, book or beautifully lit hotel that decided it for me. The less glamorous answer is that a design eye develops slowly: through exposure, education, work, mistakes and years of noticing why certain spaces feel right.

My earliest lessons came from hospitality

I grew up around family restaurants, vineyards, accommodation and retail in Australian wine country. Setting tables, making beds, arranging furniture and flowers, and preparing spaces for other people were ordinary parts of life.

That environment taught me something I still believe: a beautiful room is not simply a collection of beautiful objects. It has to support what is happening inside it. A table should make people want to sit down. A bed should make the end of the day feel better. A room should help you move through it without fighting the furniture.

I did not have language for that then. I just understood that atmosphere, function and care were connected.

Studying design gave instinct a structure

I later studied design, styling and art direction in Melbourne, then worked across home, fashion and lifestyle for more than a decade. I taught design at university, styled images, developed concepts and worked in marketing, branding and creative direction.

That training did not hand me a fixed aesthetic. It taught me how to read a room: proportion, hierarchy, repetition, negative space, material, light and the relationship between an object and its context.

Taste matters, certainly. But taste without reasoning is simply preference. The useful skill is understanding why something works—and being able to apply that understanding in a completely different home, budget or style.

The phase where I followed the room instead of myself

When I first moved to Melbourne, urban minimalism and mid-century furniture felt sophisticated because they were different from the environment I had grown up around. Like many people furnishing an early home, I reached for the clearest available version of what looked current: pale rooms, recognisable shapes and affordable big-box interpretations of expensive design.

There is nothing shameful about that stage. You learn by trying things. But I eventually realised I was styling toward an image rather than building a home around how I wanted to live.

The rooms looked coordinated, yet they lacked weight and warmth. Adding more cushions and decorative objects did not solve it because the problem was not a shortage of things. The foundation lacked contrast, material depth and hierarchy.

That was an important lesson: when a room feels unfinished, buying more is rarely the first answer.

What changed

Over time, I stopped treating one named style as a complete solution. I became more interested in the tension between an older architectural shell and contemporary furniture; light and dark; refinement and ease; something inherited beside something clean-lined and new.

I also became less interested in decorating as accumulation. I do not need a surface covered in books, bowls, candles and objects to prove that it has been considered. I would rather see one strong lamp, the right table and enough space for both to register.

The goal is not minimalism for its own sake. It is clarity.

What I believe now

Clean gives calm. Style gives warmth. Restraint gives taste. Function gives meaning.

Those four ideas shape almost every decision I make at home.

Clean does not mean sterile. It means removing the visual and practical friction that makes a room feel harder to use.

Style is what gives the functional shell identity and warmth. It can come from colour, material, scale, art or a single excellent piece of furniture—not necessarily from more décor.

Restraint is the edit. It allows the architecture, furniture and people to have separate hero moments rather than competing for attention.

Function is what makes the room matter. If a beautiful chair is uncomfortable, a dining table is too large to move around or a bedside table cannot hold what you use, the design has failed part of its job.

A home should feel put together, not performed

I am not interested in creating rooms that only work in a photograph. The bed must still be slept in. The table must survive dinner. The sofa has to accommodate a real evening rather than merely filling an empty rectangle in a floor plan.

This is also why I believe renters deserve design, and why an expensive home is not automatically a considered one. Paint, architecture and custom joinery help, but proportion, layout, lighting and editing are available at every level.

You do not need to constantly reinvent your home to prove that your taste is evolving. A strong foundation can absorb new art, a different chair, a move to another property or a change in how you live.

Style is allowed to evolve

My eye will continue to change. That is not inconsistency; it is what happens when you keep looking, learning and living.

The thread is no longer a particular timber, sofa shape or trend label. It is the desire for a home to feel calm, warm, useful and intentional. The objects may change. The reasoning should become clearer.

That, to me, is the difference between consuming a look and developing a point of view.