Every Beautiful Room Started as a Complaint, with Debbie Mathews

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode! If your taste runs in more than one direction, this conversation is a good place to start. Canadian designer Philip Mitchell, author of Collected Interiors: Rooms That Tell a Story, loves too many things to settle on one style, and his rooms mix centuries and cultures without apology. What makes it work isn't limiting the styles. It's being picky about how many pieces are out at once, and giving each one enough breathing room that you notice...

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode! In this Think Like A Designer episode, I sit down with Nadia Watts, a Colorado-based interior designer who works all over the country, to look closely at a home filled with salvage-yard finds, family heirlooms, old-world antiques, and contemporary art. It's about why some wildly mixed rooms feel deliberate while others just feel busy. The difference isn't matching. It's that every piece is in conversation with something else in the room: a c...

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode! In this episode, I sit down with Sophie von Oertzen Williamson, author of The Art of the Clash, to talk about pattern, color, and the mix — and end up talking about how long it actually takes to earn your own eye. Sophie is 42 and has trained her eye across very different worlds: Switzerland, Germany, the UK, Singapore, Ohio, now Connecticut. At 28, she didn't have the aesthetic she has today. Not for lack of talent — she just hadn't lived t...

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode! In this guest episode, I sit down with Lauren Hidalgo, founder of the online marketplace Awarehouse, to talk about something we rarely stop to add up: what we're actually spending on the small stuff. It's about how we assign value to what we buy — especially handmade objects — and the gap between what something costs and what it's actually worth. The $25 throw pillow doesn't feel like a real purchase. But enough of those add up to real money...

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode! In this Designers at Home episode, I tour the Dallas home of Aubrey Butcher — co-founder, with her husband Kale, of the tile company Riad Tile. Every room has a volume control. Most of us only know how to turn it down — fewer things, blanker walls, quieter colors. Aubrey knows how to work both ends of the dial: which parts of a room to hush, and which to let shout. And because she and Kale spend their days sourcing stone and tile from around...