Design Dilemmas
Episode 1: Where I aim to answer your burning interior and life quandaries. This week, we're talking colour choices, first date meals, demolishing walls, maximalism and sunshine breaks.
A couple of years back, I started asking my Instagram audience to submit their interior and lifestyle orientated quandaries via a Story box for my attention. This could include anything (within reason, obvs) - room styling, recipe ideas, travel questions or how to live with three teenagers without wanting to chop off your own head. You get the gist. The resulting series, Design Dilemmas, turned out to be a very a popular idea. I’d receive hundreds of requests for help, ideas and recommendations that I would post monthly via my blog, twenty questions answered to the very best of my (admittedly, sometimes limited) ability. It was one of my most read posts and it was also, excellently, great fun to write which is always a bonus.
This week, I decided to start building my Substack into different areas of content and the return of Design Dilemmas seemed the perfect place to begin. I am not immune to design dilemmas myself, believe me. Pretty much my entire aim in life is that my life and specifically my home should make me happy and this ethos, together with my shockingly transient personality, means that I am regularly changing my mind about things and more specifically, moving furniture around to bring me joy. My children love this, of course. Often they would return home from school to find that I had swapped around the dining and living room and they had no idea where to find the television.
I’m not, as I have said before, an interior designer; merely someone who is obsessed with decorating and styling her own home. But my endless verve for rearranging and updating means that I have plenty of ideas and notions as to how you can make your home your own. I am also a very keen cook (albeit quite lazy; if I can’t prepare it in advance then it’s a no go for me) and I love to travel. In fact, I LIVE to travel; I would happily move to the sunshine forever to leave the Yorkshire rain behind. If you are reading this post, I would hazard a guess that you are also very similarly inclined and therefore as enthusiastic about layering up a rug or swapping around a cushion as I; that you like a quick and easy recipe and possibly also enjoy a selection of tapas with a glass of rose in the sun. But most of all, I LOVE making changes to my spaces, specifically doing this without spending loads of money, thus the reason why I am equally addicted to thrift shops and second hand trawling. I even wrote a book about it, ha.
Anyway, this week I am relaunching the glory of Design Dilemmas on to the Substack stratosphere for paid subscribers and I’ll be posting five more every Sunday for your viewing pleasure. If you would like to become a paid subscriber, receive these extra posts (plus more) and add your own dilemma, whether it be interior or lifestyle, to my list, then please press the paid subscribe button and whack it down there in the comments. Think of these posts as a design for a happy life as equally as for your home. Let’s kick this off.