It's all about beautiful spaces...

I've been decorating rooms since I got my own room for the first time aged about 11, I think. Initially this meant sticking pictures of popstars on the walls, but then my parents extended our house and I got a huge new room PLUS my own bathroom... I don't think the furniture ever stayed in the same spot longer than a few weeks.

Then someone made the mistake of giving my mother the (very first) Terence Conran House Book - this was the 70's I hate to say - and I thought it would be great to paint a stylised landscape on my bathroom walls in bright London-in-the-70's colours. Without the homeowners' permission of course. I thought I'd do it in secret. Unfortunately, I picked oil-based paints (we didn't think about VOCs in those days) and you could smell it all the way to the front door. I'd heard someone say to place a cut onion in the room to absorb those nasty paint smells. All that happened was you could smell onions AND paint all the way to the front door.

I was in trouble. Big trouble. For weeks. AND: I had to live with the smell (thank goodness for Benjamin Moore these days).

And even years later when the bathroom had had several new coats over that one lurid landscape, one could still see the outlines of those lollipop trees. But you get what I'm saying... I've been a designer of sorts my whole life.

I took it to a whole new level when I started building houses for myself. I was 26 when I did it for the first time. I was young and stupid enough not to be scared one bit. I know better now. But that's still what I like best, building from the ground up. However, in the end, it's all in the interiors, because a house is just another house until you make it home, isn't it?

So here goes, world... say welcome to Penwork Design! We're going to create beautiful, livable spaces everywhere we go...