A decorator I admire once told me to never forget the three ‘Fs’ of interior design: ‘Finish, photograph, and f—ck off’. The point, I think, was that it’s easy for interior designers to get bogged down in never-ending projects. A bit here, a bit there, perpetually involved but never quite finishing a house.
Those words do rattle around in my head from time to time, but I don’t strictly treat my projects that way. I love building long-term relationships with clients, checking in on them, staying involved in the evolution of a house and of their lives, even after the project is ‘finished’.
But part of the thinking behind the three Fs does resonate. For one, never finishing a job can be exhausting. It prevents the designer from ticking a project off their list and moving on to the next one. For another, most clients actually want a finished home. They want to wave goodbye to me, shut the door, and turn around to bask in the satisfaction of living in an excellent, finished interior. I know that, because I’m that way about my own house. And, I suspect, most of you are too.
The difficulty is that finishing a project is the hardest part. Ask anyone in the business. By the time you’re at the finishing stages, you’ve already picked all the low-hanging fruit. The easy choices, the big sweeping brushstrokes, are done. All that’s left is the tough stuff: the tricky corner that rejects every piece of furniture you try; the gaps just waiting to be filled with a table lamp, a scatter cushion, a little rug.
When I’m working for clients, I don’t find all those awkward bits daunting. I make a list and start ticking things off. When it’s someone else’s house, it’s so much easier to see those trouble spots as problems to be solved rather than avoided. It’s easier to be decisive. And, crucially, it’s my job to finish those bits, so failing to do so feels like failing to do good work.
Unfortunately though, none of that applies when I’m working for myself. The three F’s have been on my mind recently as I’ve been finishing my own flat. Observant readers may have noticed that Will and I had our flat photographed and published here recently. We’ve done it because we are ready to sell the flat and move onto the next project. You can read all about it in the article I wrote for to accompany those photos. But it was the run-up to the shoot that really had me thinking: how on earth do I finish and photograph my own house before I have to F-off?
I mean, other than Will, there’s no prospect of an unhappy client. And, honestly, I hold myself to an unrealistic standard when working in my own home. With clients, there’s an attitude of ‘The idea is good, the result will be good, let’s get it done,’ whereas with myself the self-doubt creeps in: ‘Oh, I don’t know… maybe it could be better. I should keep looking…’
I also think that a designer’s own home is where you see the essence of their design soul, the DNA that encodes the rest of their work. I certainly look at other designers’ homes that way, even though I know it’s a generalisation. After all, if this is what I do when there is no client to please, then this must be ‘me’, right?
I suspect a lot of designers struggle with that. I know I do. I found myself thinking, over and over: how do I distil ‘me’ into this choice of side table, lamp, rug, or sofa? What even would a ‘Brandon’ sofa be? I don’t know! At the very least, it’s a sofa that I like. But does it need to be more than that? You can imagine the spiral of uncertainty that kind of thinking leads to. Maybe you’ve even felt it yourself. As I said, I doubt I’m the first designer (or casual home decorator) to feel that way about their own house.
So how do you get through it? How do you reach the finish line of the three F’s? For me, the answer was to go back to instinct. To override my feelings of self-doubt and simply act without thinking. It is exactly what I ask of my clients: Trust me to make choices for you; don’t overthink it; remember that anything you don’t like can be changed. If I expect that of them, then I must be capable of treating myself the same way.
In practice, that just meant getting on with it. Is this a ‘Brandon’ sofa? Who knows? And more importantly, who cares? It’s a sofa that I like, and that fits the space. So I chose a fabric. I ordered it. I paid for it. Done, and on to the next thing.
I think that’s true for everyone working on their own homes. Choosing a paint scheme for your whole house sounds hard. Who can translate themselves into a colour palette? But choosing one colour you like on a paint chart is not. Trusting your likes and dislikes on a smaller scale is the key. If we break our decisions down into component parts, they become easier. Too often people look at the big, wide problem of decorating their home, rather than the series of small, manageable decisions that create it.
So if you are stuck like I was, make a list of smaller decisions, allocate the budget, and get out of your own way. Stop thinking, keep moving, keep acting. And one day, you’ll look at your list and realise you’ve finished it…that the house is ready for photographs, so to speak. And if you’re lucky, and don’t have to F-off, you’ll get some time to enjoy it.
