Stuck on how to approach your home redesign?
Ome way is to approach room and house schemes through layered, thoughtful processes that balance aesthetics with livability. 
Here’s how some of the leading practitioners work:
Starting with a focal piece or inspiration
Many designers begin with an anchor object that dictates the room’s direction. Beata Heuman frequently starts with a vintage rug, an unusual ceramic, or a piece of art, then builds the entire color palette around it. She might find a 1970s Italian lamp with apricot and olive tones and let those hues ripple through fabrics and paint choices.
Similarly, Ben Pentreath often begins with architectural precedent or a historical reference — perhaps a Georgian room scheme or a particular Swedish palette — and adapts it to contemporary life. Meanwhile, Bunny Williams is known for starting with clients’ existing collections or heirlooms and weaving new purchases around these meaningful pieces.
Layering pattern and texture
Rather than matching everything, designers create visual richness through controlled mixing. Rita Konig masterfully combines stripes, florals, and geometrics in one room, unified by a common color thread. She emphasizes the importance of varied textures: velvet against linen, smooth lacquer beside grainy wood, glossy ceramics on matte surfaces.
Nina Campbell takes a similar approach, often using five or six different fabrics in a single room but ensuring they share an underlying palette. She’s spoken about the “80/20 rule” — 80% calm, 20% pattern or color punch. Veere Grenney also excels at this layering, mixing English chintz with modern stripes and solid velvets in sophisticated, livable combinations.
Considering the bones first
Before selecting anything decorative, accomplished designers assess the architecture and function. Nicola Harding prioritizes the practical infrastructure: built-in storage, lighting design, window treatments, and how traffic flows through spaces. She’ll reconfigure layouts entirely if the existing arrangement doesn’t support how clients actually live.
Robert Kime was famous for this architectural thinking, often stripping rooms back to their Georgian or Victorian bones before rebuilding them with historically appropriate but comfortable elements. Steven Gambrel similarly starts with spatial planning and architectural details, ensuring millwork, paneling, and built-ins are resolved before considering furnishings.
Creating a cohesive color narrative
Rather than treating each room independently, many designers think about color flowing through an entire house. Farrow & Ball’s founders, though more known for paint than full interiors, championed this idea of rooms “talking to each other” through related hues.
Beata Heuman often uses unexpected colors on woodwork — painting skirting boards in contrasting tones rather than defaulting to white — which creates a more intentional, enveloping atmosphere. Nicky Haslam was known for bold lacquered rooms that nonetheless connected through sophisticated colour progressions.
Charlotte Moss approaches this by creating what she calls a “colour story” for each project, often starting with neutrals as the foundation and introducing accent colors that appear in varying intensities throughout the house.
Mixing high and low, old and new
The best designers resist the showroom aesthetic where everything is new and coordinated. They create rooms that feel collected over time. Rita Konig might place an affordable jute rug under a precious antique table, or hang contemporary art above a Georgian chest.
Nate Berkus built his reputation on this accessible mixing, combining flea market finds with custom pieces and contemporary art. Kelly Wearstler takes it further, juxtaposing brutalist vintage furniture with delicate antiques and cutting-edge contemporary art in the same space.
Bunny Williams pioneered this approach in American design, teaching generations that a room needs “something old, something new, something architectural, and something from nature” to feel balanced and alive.
Building around natural light
Sophisticated designers observe how light moves through spaces throughout the day before making color decisions. Rose Uniacke is particularly known for this sensitivity, often choosing chalky, complex colors that shift beautifully as light changes, and positioning furniture to take advantage of specific lighting conditions.
Michael S. Smith talks about designing differently for north-facing versus south-facing rooms, using warmer tones where light is cool and vice versa. Axel Vervoordt takes this even further, treating natural light almost as a material itself, designing entire rooms around how dawn and dusk will transform the space.
Establishing anchor pieces and working outward
Many designers identify the largest or most expensive elements first — the sofa, dining table, or primary rug — then build around these. This prevents the costly mistake of falling in love with a £15,000 sofa only to discover it doesn’t fit the scheme.
Suzanne Kasler works this way, often starting with the upholstered pieces that will define the room’s comfort level and color foundation. Veere Grenney similarly identifies key furniture first, ensuring scale and proportion are right before moving to smaller decorative elements.
Thinking in layers and timescales
Accomplished designers recognize that rooms develop over time. They’ll often deliver a project with “gaps” — empty wall space for art to be collected, or shelves left partially bare to accommodate future acquisitions.
Nicola Harding talks about designing in phases, installing the essentials first and allowing decorative layers to accumulate naturally. This prevents the overly finished, stiff quality that can come from doing everything at once.
Considering scale and proportion
Before worrying about colour or pattern, designers assess whether furniture suits the room’s proportions. Miles Redd is known for his bold approach to scale, often using oversized lamps or unusually large artwork to anchor rooms and give them drama.
Timothy Corrigan emphasizes the importance of substantial furniture in large rooms, avoiding the common mistake of pieces that are too small and tentative. Conversely, in smaller London houses, designers like Nicola Harding or Rita Konig excel at selecting appropriately scaled pieces that don’t overwhelm.
The common thread among all these designers is their resistance to formulaic approaches. They treat each project as unique, responding to the architecture, the client’s life, and the specific quality of light and space they’re working with rather than applying a signature style regardless of context.