Sourcing the right artisan for a project is, honestly, only half the job. The other half; briefing them properly, giving them the information and the trust they need to do their best work, and then protecting that relationship over months of back and forth, is where most of the real effort in working with interior design artisans actually goes.

Bespoke furniture in an interior is treated, too often, as a badge. A way of signalling that a project had a budget. In my work it is nothing of the sort.

A vintage piece in a contemporary room is a tension, and the tension is the point. Put a 1940s walnut cabinet against a plastered wall in a flat renovated last year and both objects improve: the cabinet reads as sculpture rather than as furniture, and the wall reads as deliberate rather than as default.

There is a moment in almost every project when a client asks me, usually early, what we are going to put on the walls. My answer is always the same: nothing, yet.

Let me start with the misconception I correct most often: a luxury apartment is not a luxury house with less square footage. Luxury apartment design is its own discipline, with its own codes, its own constraints, and when it is done properly its own very particular rewards.

Penthouse interior design is the only discipline I know where the most important material in the project was never specified, never priced, and never delivered to site. It was already there, on the other side of the glass.

Townhouse interior design is usually presented as a decorating exercise; a gallery of beautiful townhouse interiors, a colour scheme, some clever storage. I think that misses the point entirely.

A family home that hides the family is a failure. I say this to clients on the first visit, usually while standing in a living room that has been styled for a photograph and is quietly falling apart under the pressure of actual living — a pale bouclé sofa with a juice stain on the arm, a marble console with a scooter propped against it, a "no toys downstairs" rule that everyone has stopped enforcing.

A pied-à-terre is not a small home. It is a stage for a specific way of being in a city; three nights a week in Paris, a fortnight a month in London, a season in Dubai and the mistake most people make is to design it as a scaled-down version of the house they already have.

A second home is not a primary residence with rattan. That is the mistake I see most often, and it is an expensive one: a family takes the house they already live in, softens the palette, adds a few pieces of coastal furniture, and wonders two summers later why the place feels like a set rather than a home.

Hardware is the only material in a room your hand actually touches. You look at the stone, you walk on the floor, you sit on the upholstery but the door handle, the drawer pull, the cabinet knob: those you hold.

Curtains hung too short, in the wrong fabric, with the wrong heading. That is the most common interior mistake I see, and also the easiest to get right once you know the rules.

A rug is the architecture of a room you can see. It draws the plan on the floor: it says this is where we sit, this is where we gather, this is where one space ends and another begins. And yet the rug is the thing most people buy last, in a hurry, too small, and to fill a gap.

Textiles are the layer that softens architecture and finishes the room. Everything before them is hard: the plan, the plaster, the stone, the joinery. Then the fabric arrives the upholstery, the curtains, the cushions, the throw over the arm of a chair and suddenly the room can be lived in.

Brass warms. Steel cools. Bronze sits between. Those three sentences hold more design consequence than most clients realise when they choose a tap or a door handle almost as an afterthought.

Lime wash and traditional plaster don't just sit on a wall. They become part of it. That single fact is the reason I keep specifying them long after modern emulsion made them, on paper, unnecessary.

Beige isn't a decision. It's the avoidance of one. So is greige, its more fashionable cousin the colour you choose when you are frightened of choosing a colour at all.

There is a moment on every project when a client asks me to approve a colour, and I ask them, in return, about the finish. Almost always there is a pause. Colour they have thought about for weeks. The finish they have not thought about at all.

Herringbone, chevron, point de Hongrie, Versailles. To most people these are just names for a wooden floor. To anyone who works with interiors, they are a code a language of pattern, proportion, and craft that tells you immediately whether a parquet floor was thought about or simply ordered.

Oak and walnut dominate the conversation about wood in interiors, and for good reason both are superb. But when they become the only two species anyone considers, something is lost.