The Home Style Handbook | Lucy Gough
Intro: Welcome to the one and only interior design book podcast, Decorating by the Book, hosted by Suzy Chase from her dining room table in New York City. Join Suzy for conversations about the latest and greatest interior design books with the authors who wrote them.
Lucy Gough: My name is Lucy Gough and my new book is the Homestyle Handbook.
Suzy Chase: This book is right up my alley for this podcast. My goal with this show is to pass on handy tips to my listener, who's most likely not an interior decorator or a stylist. I want all of us to live in a home that reflects our personality and our style. But what I hear so often is, Suzy, I don't know what my personal style is, and I always say it's inside of you. You just need to explore what you like and what speaks to you. So I love that you've written a handbook and would love to hear the first step to finding inspiration. What do you tell people? Thank you so much for having me. I'm so thrilled to be here with you.
Lucy Gough: Absolutely. So, being a stylist, I think I probably take my creativity for granted. Really. I use it every day in my artistic kind of ways, but I realize that there are a lot of people who don't have that natural creativity. So one of the reasons I wrote the book is to kind of guide people through the whole process. Some of the things that I tell people is to look around you when you want to find inspiration for the start of your styling project is to look around you. Walk down the street, look at the beautiful shop fronts and look at the pebbles that are in front of you when you're walking along the beach and look at the color differentiation, look at the trees and the plants and look at what people are wearing and really just kind of taking it all in around you. It could be looking at your photos at home, it could be looking at your kids Lego and the different color palettes, but really kind of just taking inspiration from around you and then kind of starting to create your own gallery of textures and colors as you go along. Kind of pick up that postcard that you see in the shop and pick up that lovely piece of Lego that's in a fantastic color orange that you love and keep them all in a little box and start to kind of pull together a bit of an inspiration box for yourself of things that you love.
Suzy Chase: You say restyling a home involves a lot more planning and coordination than people realize. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Lucy Gough: Yeah, I mean, I think for me, the homes that I love to walk into are the ones that I walk in and I feel like they're full of soul and love, and the only way to really achieve that is kind of over time. It's not about going to a store and just buying the whole suite they've got right there in front of you, even though, sure, if that's what you want to do, that's fine, but kind of collecting things over the years and bringing your personality into the space. So I suppose that's what I mean about it takes planning and coordination, but you really need to put yourself into the space. When I say it takes time to evolve, you do need to think about things as you're going along, like measuring, making sure that something's going to fit. I love to buy things secondhand all the time, but you need to make sure that you're measuring as you go along to make sure that it fits, or sketching your ideas before you go down, or sorting and tidying up as you go along. It's all these things that can take a lot of time. And so that's what I mean by quite a lot of planning and coordination should go into a space. It's not just the inspiration and the mood boards and all the creativity, it's actually the tidying and the editing and all that stuff as you go along. And ideally, I think your space should take quite a long time to really reflect your personality. It's a journey. It's something that you should enjoy and should be kind of slow in a way.
Suzy Chase: I always love when an author has a how to use this book section. What are the different ways we can approach the home style handbook?
Lucy Gough: Basically, I've written it for you to read in one of two ways. You read it from the beginning to end. If you're the kind of person who wants to put their feet up with a cup of tea on a Saturday morning, uninterrupted, and read the book. But when the publisher asked me to write it, it was actually their suggestion for each chapter to be about a different room. So if you were going to be restyling your bathroom, you could purely go to the bathroom section. It's just all there in the one chapter. So you can use it either way, just specifically for what you're looking at at the moment, or go from beginning to end. The book is in two parts. The first part is all about the foundations of styling and mood boards and inspiration and things like that. And then the second half of the book are chapters of different rooms. So yeah, it's very much a book of two halves.
Suzy Chase: You tell us not to aim for perfection in our home. It sets us up for disappointment. So what should we be aiming for?
Lucy Gough: Perfection, for me, is not the aim because I don't feel like it exists anywhere. Perhaps it exists in nature because I think plants and animals are pretty perfect, but I don't feel like perfection really exists anywhere else. So that should not be the aim. I feel like the aim of a restyle of your home should be one that makes you feel really happy and content and calm when you walk into your home. And whatever that means for you, whether it's a colorful space or whether it's a very lived in, relaxed, ruffled up space, whether it's minimal, whether it's maximalist, whatever it might be, whatever you think will make you happy should be your aim rather than fiction. I have a very good friend of mine, Kate Watson-Smyth, and she's got a fantastic interiors blog. And I noticed on her latest blog this week, she put the images of her home, which she puts on her social media, which are quote unquote perfect. And then underneath those images, she put the other side of the room, which was just all the stuff that had been taken out of the perfect side of the room. And it was really great. She's got a massive following and I was really proud to see that because actually we do need to start us stylists, content creators, people in this world where we're kind of pushing this way of life, or whatever you want to say. I think we all know that when we're taking beautiful images that you see circulating in social media, they do look perfect because all the real life has been taken out and has been put behind the camera. So it's really important for people to look at the images they see on Pinterest and social media as inspiration, but not necessarily as the end goal, because in reality, the real life has been taken out of those images.
Suzy Chase: Two things in the book that jumped out at me, you say you love to look up and you also study sculptural elements. What does that all mean?
Lucy Gough: When we go for a walk, any one of us, more often than not, we're going to be on our phones, we're going to be looking at a map to tell us where to go, we're going to be looking at the weather, we're going to be looking social media, whatever it is, we're going to be looking down at our phone and we look down a lot. And I think sometimes we forget to look up. And I always make it a thing to look up, especially when I'm walking around a city, because obviously, there's so much light in a city, right? And living in London for so long, always made sure that I would look up when I'm walking around. Because you've got neon lights above you. You've got amazing architectural elements above you. You've got, I don't know, it might be a windowsill that's got moss growing along it. It might be that cloud formations are really beautiful above you in the sky. And all these things I'm talking specifically about when you're restarting your home, these can give you ideas to implement into your home. And I was told by an old boss once, when I was much younger, that I too often stopped to smell the roses and wished that I'd hurry up and just run along. And perhaps it's growing up with the mother who's a bit of a crazy artist as well, but always making sure that I'm observing things and looking. But also when it comes to kind of sculptural elements, I mean, things like archways and organic shapes, like public art statues, or it could be doorknobs that feel really nice when you're holding them in your hand, when you're opening up the drawer, because they've been designed in such a way that they fit your hand. Things with curves and things that artists might have created and how they've connected with the people that are looking at them. But that's kind of what I mean by sculptural elements is when we walk through, we often see houses and buildings, and they're all straight up and down. But I also like to look at the organic shapes.
Suzy Chase: In the book you have the PREP formula. What is that?
Lucy Gough: I take my job as a stylist and an educator quite seriously because I love what I do. I'm incredibly lucky, and I have an online school where I teach people how to style their homes as well. So one of the things that I've learned to do over the last few years is to really put down what's in my head in little bite sized chunks to help people digest them and learn quicker and easier, really. And so I naturally do this prep formula in the way I style homes and photo shoots. So I called it PREP palette, repetition, edit, and place. And these four stages are separate, but they are intertwined as well. The first one I reference is that it's important to figure out what your color palette is for your home or your room. And stick to it. The second is repetition. And when you've figured out what that palette is, and a palette should be colors and textures all in one kind of repeat that theme or trend color palette throughout your home, because the repetition is the thing that makes your home feel cohesive, makes it feel like it's been done by a professional, because it feels kind of considered. It feels like you've really thought about what you're doing before you put that paintbrush on the wall. The third is edit. And this is a big one because, like I said before, those beautiful images that we all covered and that we all want our homes to look like have been majorly edited down. So editing down, literally decluttering your home, giving things away to charity, doing a garage sale or selling on marketplace, giving away to homeless shelters, whatever it might be, editing the things down in your house that you don't need anymore, and literally getting them out of your house. Because editing and decluttering and minimizing is one of the major, major ways that you'll make your home look beautiful without even trying. And then the fourth is place, where I feel like everything that you own, everything that you're left with after you've edited, should have a place in your home. Everything should feel like it's got a bit of space to breathe. And if you open up a cupboard, you don't want everything to fall out onto you because there's just too much in there. Everything should have a place. Palette, repetition, edit, and place are kind of the four main steps that I use when I'm approaching one of my projects.
Suzy Chase: Okay, so we have our minimal palette now. Should we transfer this on to our mood boards? Mood boards are so daunting to me. Can you just talk a little bit about how to concentrate all our creative thoughts in one place and how we do that?
Lucy Gough: Okay, so, mood boards. Well, everybody seems to love a mood board. I know you say that it's a bit tricky, but it's funny. When it comes to my courses and when I teach live mood board master classes or virtual ones, people seem to go wild for a mood board. I don't know really what it is, but I think it's the fact that you're using physical board, where you're cutting and pasting and you're using your hands and you're finding wallpaper samples and paint chips and lots of things. And I think the fact that we're using our hands when we do it is a really, really nice thing. We're so obsessed with doing everything digitally that when people switch their brain over to a lovely physical mood board, and they're looking at. They're literally ripping out pictures from newspapers and magazines and cutting things up. There's just something really lovely about that. And I think also there's a lot of excitement wrapped up in a mood board, because it's the first step to the project that you're so excited to be working on people who have been saving up money to restyle their bedroom. Doing the mood board is like, yes, okay, it's really here. And I can start to have a little bit of fun. There are a couple of different ways to do a mood board. One is a good old pinterest search, because we all love that, don't we? We sit on Pinterest on our phones or our laptops and get together as many images in a similar vein that we can, and put together a board, and that feels quite cohesive. But what I would say is once you've kind of done your inspirational walks and you've walked around your home and you've found things that you love. Maybe I own eight blue things in this room, so maybe blue is the color that I'm drawn to. That could be your starting point. Let's just say you go to Pinterest and social media, find a whole heap of images that you love that have that same color palette in it. So let's say you get 2030 images that all have a blue thread through it. It's much better to start with more images than less. And then you can just kind of cull back. You can pair them back, and then once you start to pair them back, you start to realize that there is a bit of a thread, and you might end up with three or four really beautiful images that you go actually love these. This is how I want my home to look. Another way that I teach people to kind of get to their starting point is to kind of walk around their home and have a look at their trinkets and their collections and the things that they've collected from holidays and the things that they've bought for their children, because a lot of people put more money into their children than themselves or their bookshelves. What book spines are you drawn to? And you might find that there's a thread through your collections that actually you really love. Then that's a really good starting point. And then you can kind of just put them on a board in front of you and using your hands, kind of curating them in a really beautiful way. And that can be a starting point for your project. It could be that that shell that you found on your holidays. You could go and find a wallpaper that has that shell or that text shell, that color. And so mood boarding should be a mixture of beautiful images that inspire you, gorgeous kind of objects that you found along the way. And then once you've kind of got them together, that's when you can go online or go into a store and find your wallpapers and your paints and things like that. That kind of feed into the collection of things that you put together on your mood board.
Suzy Chase: Another thing I love about this book, and I love so many things about this book, is you show us your mood boards, you pull back the curtain, and your mood boards come to life on page 24. Can you talk a little bit about your own mood boards?
Lucy Gough: I create mood boards for every project that I'm asked to create, whether it be a photo shoot for a magazine or a photo shoot for a high street department store, or it might be for a private residential client or something. But a mood board is something that I need to create to kind of convey my ideas, that person that's getting me to do the job. And I always like to make sure that I've got a wallpaper and a paint and a surface, something organic, like a leaf or a flower, because those colors in nature are so amazing and so easy to find a beautiful flower, and then go and translate that into paint when you go to your DIY store. So I always put something organic on the board, things that I've collected from my travels, and I kind of put them together in a beautiful way to kind of sell an idea, really. And then on page 25 of the book, I kind of show how you can take a mood board in two different directions, because there are empty ways that you can style your home from the same mood board. So I show the mood board I've created, which is lots of pale tones and neutral William Morris fabric in there, and some birch ply, an old black and white artwork. I think I've even got some star anise and a little bowl. Just some things, old pegs, things I've collected, and put them into a board. And then I show you that you could take that in a really modern direction, or you could take it in a traditional direction, depending on what you like, the aesthetic that you like. If you're going in a modern direction, you're probably going to end up with smooth surfaces and harder edges and kind of more of a graphic look to it. But if you wanted to take it in a traditional interior way you'd probably want more organic, rustic timbers and french flax linens, things that have a texture to them. So you can take your mood board in a couple of different ways. There's an infinite amount of ways that you can style your home, but if you keep that kind of balance of colors and textures from your initial mood board, it'll totally work.
Suzy Chase: I really love that you have put the two photos of the rooms that you styled from these mood boards in the book. To me, it's fascinating to see the different ways you styled the two rooms with sort of the same elements on the mood board.
Lucy Gough: I didn't want people to feel alienated. I didn't want them to pick up this book and be like, oh, well, I'm never going to be able to achieve that room or that home because it's too big, it's too grand, I can't afford it. Or something like that. I shot in beautiful homes, but I made sure that I shot small spaces and moments and corners that people could look at that image and go, yes, okay, I think I can translate that. And breaking it down into mood boards and then showing you how I go from mood board to room, I thought would be really helpful for when people are reading the book. Yes, home is about corners and moments. You are exactly right. It is difficult for people who aren't professional stylists to look at a room and be able to go, right. This is how it's going to look. Visualizing it can be really difficult. But if you get your phone out of your pocket and you hold your phone onto the corner of that space and the corner of that room, give yourself those boundaries, those photographic boundaries, like you do when you're taking a photo, you can be like, okay, I'm going to conquer this corner today, or I'm going to conquer that corner today. Don't feel overwhelmed, necessarily, by doing a whole room or a whole home at one time. Think about it as a series of moments, and it just makes it a little bit easier, I think, to digest.
Suzy Chase: So when you restyle a home, you like to create a wow factor when entering the room. What does that look like?
Lucy Gough: I suppose for me, as a professional stylist, I want people to remember the spaces that I've created. And one of those ways is, oh, yeah, that's right. That home with that big, beautiful artwork, or that home with that statement rug, which so graphic and gorgeous when I walked in. Wow moments are about making people turn their heads, really, and look again. The easiest way to achieve that is through size. A big, beautiful statement rug. The biggest artwork that you can afford on the wall, a wall mural, essentially wallpaper, but a big image blown up. So you stick it onto your wall like a big sticker or a wall hanging, essentially hanging a rug on a wall or hanging a tapestry or an artwork on the wall. Something big and bold that makes people turn their heads. And again, I know people think, well, that's possibly too expensive for me to do, but it can be inexpensive if you go and buy your own canvas and you paint it in a beautiful, bold color yourself. I am a massive secondhand purchaser. Almost everything in my home is secondhand. I buy a lot of things on marketplace, Facebook marketplace. I buy a lot of things at markets. And it's much easier to afford a large piece if it is preloved. But I sold something on Facebook marketplace the other day and the girl literally came to the door, grabbed the piece, she went and got in her car and she turned her head and she went, oh, I love your artwork. And it was literally a painting that was just inside the door. It was kind of big and bold enough that in the 2 seconds that she looked inside my hallway, she clocked it and went, love that. And I think that's the wow factor is somebody going to, oh, I love that piece. And that usually comes from size.
Suzy Chase: When you were 14, you were given free rein to style your bedroom in whatever way you wanted. I want to ask you how you styled it and what would you tell a parent of a child who wants to decorate their own room?
Lucy Gough: We lived in the outer suburbs of Sydney, Australia, and we lived in a kind of new build home and it was a beautiful family home. So when I was 14, I don't actually remember the conversation, but my mum must have said, you can do whatever you want. Because I remember looking for what felt like quite a long time for a fuchsia duvet. And it had to be a block color and I couldn't find it anywhere. And so it must have been months, really. I was only 14, I didn't have a huge amount of money. It must have just been every time I went to the shops with my mum, I had to look in the department stores for a future duvet. And so I really wanted that. And then I painted the wall the same color. There's a bit of a fuchsia overload, but I seem to really love it. And then I went to my cousin's wedding and I was given a Japanese paper parasol as the wedding favor. All the guests were given one to hold because it was sunny, and so I ended up kind of opening up that paper parasol and hanging it from the ceiling. And I volunteered at a really big market in Sydney. It's in a place called Kirribilli. It's a really well known monthly market. Lots of secondhand vintage things. And I used to volunteer there every month. And when my last month came about, I'd been there for a year. One of the stallholders said, you can have anything from my stall. Whatever you'd like, you can have, because you've been lovely. Whatever. So I was like, I really want that retro television. It didn't work, but the outer casing was a really bright. In my mind, it was a really bright orangey red color and it didn't work. It was ridiculous. But I took it home and I put it on my shelf and so I had all these colors and elements going on which I thought were just fabulous. And so my mum just very much let me do what I wanted, really, with the small funds that I had. And I absolutely loved it. I loved coming home at the end of every school day and seeing my room. It made me really, really happy. And I suppose when it comes to parents allowing their children to have some creativity in their space, I suppose it can be approached in a couple of different ways. And I often get people saying to me, I really want to style my home in a certain way, but how do I get my husband on board? And it's kind of a similar thing. And perhaps you could come up with three or four different looks yourself that you like and then give that to the child and say, pick one of these four looks and then you can go for it, because then that makes you and the child happy with the choice, and it makes the child feel like they've made the decision, but actually you've already whittled down the choices for them to have.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called HOME, where I ask you to describe one memory of your childhood home. And please start by telling us where it was.
Lucy Gough: One that I've got a really lovely story about is the one that I spent the ages of one to six in the house. It was a house that my parents had built, so they'd chosen the design, they'd built it and it was in a place called. I grew up in Hornsby in Sydney, which is kind of 45 minutes north of Sydney city. Very leafy, very safe, very quiet. A beautiful place to grow up. And my parents built this beautiful home. And I do remember having some fantastic birthday parties. I did have a clown, which was really cool. When I was five, clowns are really freaky now. I do remember the clown being at the party and thinking it was amazing. And we really loved that at home. And not to go too much on a tangent, but when I was five or six, my dad had a brain aneurysm just one night, and our life was essentially changed forever. He lost his memory, his short-term memory. So we had a new life to kind of deal with. So my parents had to sell that home. We ended up moving into a much smaller place. Anyway, 30 something years ago, we sold that home, but we always really loved it. And only a year ago, a man got in touch with my mum. He found her online and said, hi, I'm the guy that bought your house 30 years ago, and I'm just about to sell it. And I just wondered if you wanted to see it another time before I sold it onto somebody else, which was amazing, really, because my mum is an artist and she's got a website, so he found her that way. So luckily she was searchable, and so we took him up on the offer. And so only a year ago, less than a year ago, we went and saw the house that we all had such fond memories of, and he hadn't changed it at all, which I found completely fascinating coming from a world where everybody in my life updates or styles their home every week, every month, every six months, every year, there's something that changes. In 30 years. He had done nothing to the point where I had written my name behind the curtains on the wall, I had written my five year old handwriting. Lucy. And it was still there. And it was like a time capsule. It was quite remarkable. And it was just really lovely to be able to go there with my parents and my family and have a look around the home and really kind of relive those beautiful childhood moments in that home, which was only our home for five years, but we really, really loved it.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you? On the web and social media?
Lucy Gough: So I have a website, which is lucygoughstylist.com, and I also have Instagram, of course, which is Style by Lucy. And I'd absolutely love to connect with anyone. And I always say to people, if you've got any interiors dilemmas, if you've got any questions about your own interior, I love connecting with people on social media. Send me a DM and ask me a question and I'll do my best to kind of answer it for you. But I love trying to help people figure out their come.
Suzy Chase: Watch out. You're going to regret it. No, I'm kidding. Well, this was so informative and inspiring. Thank you, Lucy, for coming on Decorating by the Book podcast.
Lucy Gough: Thank you, Suzy. It really means so much. Thank you.
Outro: Follow Decorating by the Book on Instagram. And thanks for listening to the one and only interior design book podcast, Decorating by the Book.
