Inside my wonky childhood memory, we had twenty seven fruit trees in our back yard. I’m sure it wasn’t that precise number – likely more, but still there was an incredibly splendid feeling of towering trees and surging vines.

The abundance of the present

It is easy to be ensnared by the desire for more. More rooms, more money to buy more things to fill those rooms and more recognition for having said ‘things’. Sometimes this ‘more’ is thought of as abundant and to have less than this feels meagre.

It feels right to think of abundance at this time of year. A veritable glut of produce as well as high holiday consumption of a sort, mingling with holiday thinking time. There is nothing like hot weather to make you do nothing but think deeply.

Pleasure.

Colour can be a joyful and visceral delight. It doesn’t have to be anymore complicated, than that it makes you happy. It should bring you pleasure as well as comfort and safety. This is the heart of our Ice Cream. Equal parts contentment, joy and delight.

Choosing colour is intimate. A river running, the slick of a horse’s rump, a painting of flowers, Keats, friendships, the flight of a lark and a brown paper parcel tied up with string -  are all primeval and real sources of joy for someone. And they say “this is me, this is home”. Being your own advisor with colour, nuance and detail feels to me, to be the right way forward.

Simplicity in living has been on my mind – both in how I run my business and in our own lives at home. Why do we long for simple now? - because I don’t feel I’m alone in the puzzle of more/less/better/please-take-my-phone-away. And why has simple living changed its current position in our shared imagination of the life (and homes) we want to live with? Perhaps because simple is currently quite hard to have. Life and society are currently noisy, complex, troubling, and yet abundant.

We all dream of the perfect moment of home happiness. It takes place in an impeccable room, which is beautifully nestled inside a flawless house. A static moment hoped for at a distinct point in our fluid life. And so we mood board, Pinterest, plan, budget and spend our hard earned savings and hopes on a well-designed house that will deliver this perfection to us.

Breathability.
It’s a word we use to describe the goodness of our paint. It’s a word many people use to describe many things. And it is, perhaps, a word that is moving into the world of vaguely uncomfortable ‘speak’.

Next week my very good friend Steve is coming over for the day. We will laugh, tell stories, and ask about each other’s families – and actually listen for the response. Then Steve will leave and email me an invoice later in the week. Steve is not my therapist – he is my electrician. We have been together since he had one baby and a fledgling business. Now he has two school aged children and a growing and successful company.

Rhythms of childhood memories, as well as marks and fragments in later life - all form our unique views on how we feel about colour. Every life choice or expectation affects what we would like to live with.
And this is how you find your personal palette.

I believe personal story telling is at the heart of any home – and that a home should be a long and rambling poem of your life – and only your life.

What is Christmas about? – I think it’s mostly about love and beauty – at home. Both words have many meanings. Some are simply aesthetic visuals and others, a complex expression of what we would like the world to see.

From October, we want to treasure home in its truest sense – as a container for everything.
An almanac of our homes as the holder of our possessions, experiences, palettes, people and place. This stance on our home as an ongoing story, rather than a quickly curated chapter, is something that I think about a great deal. A real looseness and beauty of decorating as a marker of your life, rather than of trends or of others.

What is it that makes us itch to get a paint brush in hand? Ordering paint samples before we have moved in our books, pets and armchairs. Creating folders and scrap books of what it will feel and look like, as we wait for the interminable legal process to make it ours – all ours.

When I was a child, my mother worked in a chocolate biscuit factory. Every week she would bring home a paper grocery bag full of broken biscuits. Delicious, discarded seconds. To a child , a chipped Tim Tam is still a Tim Tam (Kiwi bikkies – but you are missing out).