Three Kinds of Creative

I was scrolling on Instagram when Howe London posted this picture. An old Georgian chest of drawers, filled with logs. It stopped me in my tracks. Not because it was particularly beautiful, but because someone had looked at a piece of furniture and thought: what else could this be? - and then had the craftsmanship to execute that vision.

It got me thinking about what true creativity actually looks like.

There's a version of it that gets talked about a lot in the world of interiors. It's called having an eye. Knowing what you like and what you don't and being able to say why. It's what makes you linger on certain pages of House & Garden and skip straight past others. An important thing to develop, and one I'm still very much working on. But I've come to think it's only part of it. Growing up, I watched two other kinds of creativity play out at home.

The first is understanding not just what a room looks like, but how it functions - how people actually move through and live in it. Nobody taught me this more clearly than my mother, Jane. Just as a room would settle into itself, I’d come back from university to find she’d pulled it apart and started again. Not restlessness. Something sharper than that. When people came for drinks or dinner, she’d quietly clock where people naturally gathered, how conversation moved - or didn’t - around the room. Whether the furniture was creating flow or quietly killing it. Then she’d take all of that and reconfigure everything. We used to tease her endlessly. Mum’s playing Tetris again. It’s only now, having developed a real interest in interiors myself, that I realise she was onto something.

The third is harder to explain. It’s a kind of lateral thinking - the ability to look at a space or object and imagine it completely differently. A conch shell on a shelf wasn’t just a beautiful thing to look at. It became where she kept cotton buds. Practical, unexpected, quietly brilliant. Which brings me back to that chest of drawers.

That instinct - to ask what else a room or object could do or be - is what separates the interiors I find really interesting from the ones that are simply well put together. It’s the thing I find myself hunting for on Instagram, past all the perfectly styled dressers and interchangeable neutral palettes. Not the beautiful room. Those are everywhere. The clever one. The one where someone has quietly done something you’ve never seen before and made it look completely obvious.