I am Priya Raghunathan, and Decorating Our Space is where I write down what a room actually measured, what I changed in it, and whether the change held.
I rent a flat in Portland. Two rooms get real light. One never will, no matter what I put on the walls. There is a radiator under the best window and a bedroom door that swings into the only wall long enough for a wardrobe. None of that is going to be fixed, so everything I write starts from the room as it is rather than the room I would draw if I were starting from nothing.
Why I measure first
For years I decorated the way most people do, which is to say I bought something that looked right in a shop and then discovered at home that the walkway past it was fourteen inches wide. A tape measure and twenty minutes would have caught it. So now I measure first and decide second, and the numbers go in the article, because a rule that works in a fourteen foot room and fails in a nine foot one is only useful if you know which room it was written in.
What is covered here
Eight areas, and they stay the same. Room layouts. Color and paint. Furniture choices. Wall art. Mixing materials. Windows and curtains. Small spaces. Decorating basics. That is the whole scope, and I would rather go deeper on eight things than shallow on forty.
How the pieces get made
A change lives in one of my rooms for a few weeks before it becomes an article. The first week flatters almost anything. By the third week the lamp is in the wrong place or the rug has curled at one corner, and that is the part worth writing down. Where something only works under a particular condition, low ceiling, north light, a lease that bans drilling, the article names the condition.
When it did not work
Plenty of what I tried was wrong. I hung a mirror to bounce light into a room whose only window faced a wall, and it bounced nothing. I bought a sofa by the fabric and sat on a sagging frame within two years. Those attempts stay in the pieces. Knowing which mistake you are currently making is usually more useful than being handed the finished answer.
What this is not
It is not a styling service, not a showroom, and not a place where a room stays as tidy as it looks in a photograph. The photographs illustrate an idea. They are not pictures of my flat. I write everything myself, and nobody buys a kind word here.
Write to me at contact@decoratingourspace.org.