A Beautiful Room Needs Somewhere for the Eye to Rest

All images by Michael Sinclair | Photographer

VIA House and Garden UK

You have found the sofa. The rug is down. There is art on the wall and a lamp beside the chair and something old on the coffee table that took you three months to find. The room is finally beginning to feel like yours.

And then you see the empty corner.

Perhaps it needs a chair.

The chair needs a little table.

The table looks strangely bare, so you put a lamp on it. There is now a lamp quite close to another lamp, but this one is smaller, so you decide that is different.

Then there is the stretch of wall above it.

You know how this goes.

We talk a lot about layering when we talk about interesting interiors. We talk about mixing periods and patterns and woods. We talk about books and textiles and collections and art. We talk about the little things that make a room feel as though it has developed slowly, rather than arriving in twelve matching boxes on a Saturday afternoon.

All of this is true.

But somewhere in our enthusiasm for making our homes interesting, I think we have forgotten about the empty bits.

And the empty bits matter.

Look closely at a room you really love and there is usually somewhere your eye can stop working.

It might be a bare section of wall between two pieces of art. A side table holding only a lamp. A quiet stretch of floor beside an elaborate chair. A mantel that hasn't been filled from one end to the other. A beautiful old cabinet with absolutely nothing hanging above it.

Nothing is happening there.

That is precisely why everything around it looks so good.

There is a temptation, particularly when you love old things, to believe that character is something you can accumulate indefinitely.

One more painting.

One more strange little wooden stool.

One more brass candlestick because, obviously, this brass candlestick is completely different from the other six brass candlesticks.

I understand this temptation extremely well.

But there is a point where adding character begins to obscure it.

The beautiful lamp you spent months looking for becomes less remarkable when it is surrounded by seventeen other things asking for attention. The painting with the wonderful muddy colours disappears into a wall where every available inch has been asked to perform. The chair with the peculiar shape becomes simply another piece of furniture in a room full of furniture.

Interesting things need space around them to remain interesting.

This doesn't mean your house needs to become minimal.

I don't particularly want a minimal house.

I like rooms with evidence in them. Books that are actually read. Bowls brought home from somewhere. Art collected slowly. Furniture from different decades. Things inherited, things found, things bought because they were too strange to leave behind.

I want a house to tell me something about the people who live there.

But a good story has punctuation.

It has pauses.

It doesn't deliver every sentence in capital letters.

The best layered interiors seem to understand this instinctively. They can hold an extraordinary amount of information without feeling exhausting because everything has been given a little territory of its own.

There might be pattern everywhere, but not everywhere at once.

There might be ten beautiful objects in the room, but they haven't all been arranged on the same table.

There might be art covering one wall while another remains almost entirely quiet.

This is the difference, I think, between a room that feels collected and one that simply feels full.

And it is why one of the most useful things you can do when a room doesn't feel quite right costs absolutely nothing.

Take something away.

Not everything. Not half your belongings. There is no need to stand in the middle of the living room with a donation bag and suddenly develop a new personality.

Just remove the thing that doesn't need to be there.

The little table whose only purpose is filling a gap.

The generic picture you bought because the wall looked empty.

The collection that somehow grew from three objects into eleven.

The decorative object you don't particularly like but have been moving from shelf to shelf for six years.

Then leave the space alone for a while.

This is the difficult part.

An empty space can initially feel like an unfinished sentence. We have become so accustomed to seeing homes styled within an inch of their lives that restraint can register as absence.

Give it a few days.

You may discover that the room didn't need another thing.

It needed somewhere for the eye to rest.

And perhaps this is also why the objects we truly love become more important as we become better at editing our homes.

When there are fewer things competing for attention, the good things become louder.

The crooked little painting suddenly looks intentional.

The old wooden table becomes sculptural.

The lamp with the ridiculous shade becomes the thing everyone notices when they walk into the room.

You begin to understand that decorating isn't simply the process of finding enough beautiful things.

It is deciding which beautiful things deserve the space.

That distinction becomes particularly important with vintage.

The pleasure of vintage has always been partly in the hunt. There is always another object. Another lamp. Another chair with a shape you have never seen before. Another slightly unnecessary ceramic animal that somehow seems very necessary when you're standing in a flea market holding it.

But collecting and displaying are two different skills.

You can love many things without asking all of them to speak at the same time.

Some can move to another room. Some can go into a cupboard and reappear in six months. Some can be sold or passed along because they were right for you once and aren't anymore.

And some deserve an entire table to themselves.

That might be the part of decorating we talk about least.

Knowing when something is enough.

Knowing when the strange lamp doesn't need a stack of books, a candle, a bowl and a small framed picture beside it.

Knowing when the old cabinet doesn't need anything above it.

Knowing when the empty corner is allowed to remain an empty corner.

A beautiful room isn't one in which every inch has been considered and filled.

It is one in which every inch has been considered.

And sometimes, very deliberately, left alone.

-Juliette