I have a weakness for things that are slightly strange.
Not strange for the sake of it. But the object that makes you look twice. The lamp with proportions that feel a little unexpected. The ceramic piece you can’t immediately decide is beautiful. The chair that perhaps shouldn’t work, but somehow does.
They’re almost always the pieces I remember (and have built my eye around).
There is something very safe about a room where everything is beautiful in exactly the same way. The colours work. The furniture is balanced. Nothing jars. Nothing is technically wrong.
And yet, sometimes those rooms are the easiest to forget.
For me, the most interesting interiors usually have something in them that creates a little tension. An object that interrupts the prettiness. Something sculptural, oversized, odd, brutalist, playful or just slightly difficult to place.
That piece often becomes the thing that gives the room its personality.
I notice the same thing when I’m sourcing for the atelier.
There are plenty of objects that are objectively lovely. Beautifully made, elegant, easy to understand. But they don’t always make me stop.
The pieces I’m most drawn to tend to have something less straightforward about them.
Perhaps the colour is unusual. The scale is slightly exaggerated. The silhouette feels almost architectural. The material is unexpectedly rough beside something refined. Sometimes I’m not even entirely sure why I like it at first.
That uncertainty is often a very good sign.
I think we’ve become so accustomed to seeing perfectly resolved interiors that there can be a temptation to make every object agree with the next. But contrast is what gives a space rhythm.
A brutalist metal sconce beside a soft linen wall.
A strange piece of 1970s Murano glass sitting on an otherwise restrained console.
A heavily textured ceramic vessel in a room filled with smooth stone and polished timber.
A peculiar little vintage object that has no practical purpose whatsoever, other than making you happy every time you see it.
These pieces don’t necessarily match.
They do something better.
They make everything around them more interesting.
That idea sits at the heart of how I source for the atelier. I’m not trying to create a collection where every object belongs to the same period, style or country. Pieces can be separated by decades - sometimes more than a century - and still sit comfortably together if there is something connecting them.
It might be form. It might be material. It might simply be attitude.
I’m much more interested in that conversation than I am in perfect coordination.
Of course, the slightly strange can sometimes be a harder sell.
The safest object in the room is often the easiest one to imagine living with. The unusual piece asks a little more of you. You might have to think about where it goes. You might wonder whether you’ll tire of it. Someone else might not understand it at all.
I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing.
Some of the best objects are a little divisive.
They’re the ones people ask about when they walk into your home. The ones you remember seeing years later. The ones that could never have come from a room assembled entirely from one showroom floor.
A home doesn’t need to be filled with eccentric things to feel personal.
Usually, one is enough.
One object that feels slightly unexpected.
One thing that doesn’t behave quite like everything around it.
One piece that makes you look twice.
The piece that seems a little odd, oversized, ugly-beautiful or difficult is often the thing that makes an interior.
That’s often where the room begins to feel like yours.