Yay! And also the cluttered English country house look—good news for me!

I have what a designer friend calls a “layered aesthetic”. What does she mean by that? Well, I’m not a minimalist, for one thing. I don’t know if I would call myself a maximalist, either. My style falls in a happy medium, which is maybe the natural place for a middle child?

I think all it means to be a maximalist is to like what you like, and to put it all out there on the table, “put everything down,” as the writing advice from Annie Dillard goes, and to be unafraid of using your favorite colors next to each other, and not worry about whether something fits the theme. Spoiler alert! At home, the theme is you.

Sure, I know there are people who like beige and gray and greige and whatnot and I’m not saying everyone who does gray and beige is scared. I do think, though, that people have done a bit too much worrying about what other people will think or say about their house. It has been drilled into us for decades that good taste and elegance look like restraint.

Honestly, who cares? Who spends the most time in your home? You do.

I love color, and I love art, and I love little objects that mean something to me or my clients. I know I use my own house, and now my new office, for a lot of the photos in these blog posts, and that is mostly because I often take the photos as I’m writing. But everyone has little things lying about that mean something to them because their child made it at camp, or their grandmother gave it to them at her last Christmas.

I was recently quoted in this article in The Spruce about bathroom colors about how into periwinkle I am. It really does go so great with black and white tile. I’ve done a periwinkle bathroom but I didn’t have a photo. Although I’m doing a powder room in this wallpaper right now for a client:

So I sent the author these photos of my living room. I have two different paintings of peaches in my living room, one 19^th century oil and one 20^th century watercolor, and I am so thrilled every time I walk through I start singing, “Millions of peaches, peaches for me…”

What a lucky thing to have inspiration all around you! At church a few Sundays ago, the sermon was based on an excerpt from the Mary Oliver poem, “Sometimes”:

4. Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention/Be astonished/Tell about it

(apologies for the formatting; wordpress doesn’t like single spacing)

And I think that just about sums up my mission as a designer. I would amend the last, I think, for my purposes, to read, “Tell your client what you see in them, and that it’s okay.” People are far too worried that they are going to get it wrong. There is no wrong in decorating. Well. Maybe I shouldn’t go that far. But you see where I’m going.

We’ve talked about this before (I think?) but there are two reasons I do this work. 1) I like nice things, I like pretty things, I like making things pretty, I like sharing my knowledge about pretty things with my clients. But just as importantly, 2) I like people, and I think you are all astonishing. The direction we will take in a project is entirely up to the eccentricity of the homeowner. And I really do mean that in the nicest way.

Yes, we can make it all work together. No, you don’t have to get rid of everything. Yes, I might want you to get rid of something you got when you were 24 and had no money and got this thing at a yard sale or online and it’s just been sitting there ever since because it has become part of the scenery and you don’t even see it anymore. Inertia is a powerful force. (Or anti-force, for you physicists, but you know what I mean.)

But I’m the kind of person who puts the kids’ preschool ornaments on the tree and displays their pottery projects. Home is where the heart is.

So while there are a great number of examples out in the world of carefully orchestrated maximalism, I don’t think you know how close you could get to fashionable maximalism just letting yourself like what you like.

And here comes Mary Oliver again, from Wild Geese: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

Give your soul a little joy and let it have a red lamp and a wild abstract floral painting. Let there be light in the darkness of winter and cozy up on an ocean-blue velvet sofa with big down pillows. (Oof, now I want one!) Find the backsplash tile or wallpaper that makes you smile when you turn off the overhead light in the kitchen at night and it glows under the cabinet lights, and the bed that makes you happy to get in it. It’s all out there, waiting for you to hoard it like a dragon.