I love designing, which is actually a pretty silly way to start because if I didn’t love it, there is no chance I would still be here.

It is HARD.

But I have discovered that I really love the stuff that isn’t easy. Hence my dogs, pottery and children.

I love hard finishes. Going to select stone at a gallery is positively, cosmically incredible. You are looking at what pressure has done to sand, foliage and minerals over millions of years, and there is something so euphoric about walking through a stone yard that I suddenly understand hippies and psychics.

And then there is tile, which I am also completely in love with. It has come such a long way, and I am so grateful for the reemergence of historical designs, while at the same time we are getting all these fresh new designs that were not even possible before the printing technology became available. The mix of materials is insane. Marble, terrazzo, clay, ceramic, porcelain. It just keeps going.

And the freaking woods are keeping me going. The veneers alone are OMG. They can be dyed, bleached, smoked, layered, reconstituted and sliced all over again. They can be book matched, slip matched, laid into marquetry or pressed over fluted, ribbed, scalloped and curved cabinetry. We can change the color, grain, texture, pattern and shape of wood while still allowing it to be wood, which is completely insane.

And all of that leads into custom furniture, because furniture needs to be two things. Functional and beautiful.

The pieces we create for our clients’ homes are completely original. I continually want us to up our game, integrating functional items into furniture so you would never even know they were there, adding texture to a simple design, playing with scale and height and working out how to make something more useful without making it less beautiful.

We work with high end clients who have amazing homes, but they still want functionality. Of course they do. They want to be comfortable. They want storage. They want things to work. And we can dish that out in spades.

We can make comfort beautiful, and we can make beautiful functional.

Wools, papers, woods, fabrics, leathers, metals, ceramics, glass and stones are all part of our toolkit. How lucky am I that I still get to play every day?