A few things about me you may not know

After 24 years of designing interiors for private clients, I have become fairly clear about what I like. Although, perhaps, what I really love is a little harder to define. I like homes that don't look as though they have been finished.

There is something about a room that has a sense of history to it. A faded fabric, worn timber, old stone, a piece of furniture that has been around for a hundred years and carries a few marks from the people who have used it. I would almost always choose something with a little wear over something pristine. Perhaps that is why I like black so much, it has a way of making everything around it feel more interesting. It gives definition and depth, but it also creates contrast. Pale, faded and weathered things somehow look even more beautiful against it and if the black is old, better still.

I love the meeting of old and new too - a beautifully made contemporary kitchen in an old house, modern joinery alongside a piece of furniture that has been lived with for generations, new materials that don't try to imitate the past, sitting comfortably alongside things that have survived it. I don't think everything in a home needs to match its surroundings, in fact, I rather like it when it doesn't.

Perhaps because the homes I find most memorable are not really about how they look at all, they are about how they feel. The way the afternoon light falls across an old floor, the particular chair that everyone ends up sitting in, the table that has acquired time worn marks because people gather around it. The things that have been bought, inherited, found, kept and moved around until, eventually, they simply belong.

This is probably why I don't follow trends particularly closely, there is nothing wrong with trends I just find myself more interested in what remains when they have gone. A beautiful interior still needs to work, of course. I care rather obsessively about scale, proportion, light, layout and the relationship between things. Beautiful furniture in the wrong room is still in the wrong room. I also care about the quieter things too - timber, stone, plaster, metal, joinery and craftsmanship - the things you might not consciously notice, but somehow feel when they have been done well.

And I edit, a lot. There is always another beautiful fabric, another chair, another lamp and I am perfectly capable of falling in love with all of them, but I don't think a room becomes better simply because you put more things in it. Sometimes the most important decision is what you leave out.

Perhaps this is something I have learnt through renovating five properties of my own. It is one thing to draw a beautiful room, it is quite another to live through creating one. You learn about budgets and builders and dust. You make endless decisions, then make more decisions about the decisions you have already made. You discover that the thing you thought would take a week has taken three and occasionally, usually somewhere around the point when everything is covered in dust and nothing appears to be going right, you wonder why on earth you started.

But you also learn something rather important - a home is not a photograph. It has to accommodate real life, to age. It has to be used, it has to withstand children, dogs, dinner parties, quiet evenings, bad days and all the ordinary things that happen in between.

And perhaps that is what I am really looking for when I design an interior. Far from perfection just something with enough character to become more beautiful with time, rather than less. Something that feels collected rather than decorated, a home that looks as though it has evolved naturally, even when, somewhat paradoxically, it was my job to help create it. A place where my clients feel warm and protected, safe and proud.

After 24 years, I still care enormously about how a room looks, but I care much more about how it feels to live there.

And I still like black.