Designing a home that ages well

An interior architect on patina, on the materials that improve with wear, and on why the rooms that photograph best are often the ones hardest to live in.

There is a category of interior that looks finished on the day it is completed and worse every day after. Our guest calls these rooms brittle. Everything in them depends on staying exactly as installed, so every scuff reads as damage rather than history. The alternative is to choose materials that have somewhere to go. Unlacquered brass, oiled timber, lime plaster, wool, leather. All of them change, and all of them change in a direction most people find agreeable. The design decision is made once, at specification, and then the room does the rest of the work on its own. We talk about the practical cost of this. Materials that age well are usually more expensive up front and require a tolerance for the awkward middle period, when a surface no longer looks new but has not yet settled into anything you would call patina.

The conversation turns to lighting, which our guest considers the most commonly botched element in a domestic interior. The failure is almost always the same: a single bright source in the ceiling, doing all the work, flattening the room and everyone in it. The fix is unglamorous and cheap, which is several lamps at different heights. On colour he is more relaxed than expected. Paint is the least permanent decision in a house and the one people agonise over most, while flooring and joinery, which are genuinely difficult to reverse, get decided in an afternoon. His closing advice is to live in a space through one full year before committing to anything structural. Light changes across seasons in ways that are difficult to predict from a viewing in March, and rooms reveal their actual use patterns slowly.