Does the room have a clear point of view?

One of the easiest ways for a room to feel disjointed is when every decision has been made individually.

You see a sofa you like, so you buy it.

Then a lamp.

Then a rug.

Then some cushions you spotted online.

Individually, they might all be lovely.

But there was never really a plan connecting them.

A well-designed room normally has some kind of visual thread running through it.

That doesn't mean everything has to belong to one rigid interior style. In fact, I don't particularly like homes that feel as though they have been lifted straight from a catalogue.

Your home should feel like you.

But knowing the styles, colours, materials and shapes you're naturally drawn towards makes decorating significantly easier.

It gives you something to come back to whenever you're considering a new purchase.

That one question can save you from an awful lot of expensive mistakes.

Whether the proportions feel right

This is one of those things that's difficult to spot until you know to look for it.

Sometimes a room feels wrong because the furniture itself isn't wrong at all.

It's simply the wrong scale.

A tiny rug floating underneath a large sofa.

A small pendant lost above a big dining table.

A huge sofa squeezed into a room without enough space around it.

Or lots of little pieces of furniture where one larger, more confident piece would have worked better.

Rugs are a particularly common example.

I see them as one of the key pieces in a room rather than an afterthought. A rug that's too small can make the furniture around it feel disconnected, no matter how beautiful everything else is.

Before you buy, look at the room as a whole.

Think about the visual weight of everything you're adding rather than simply whether an individual item fits.

Sometimes fewer, better-proportioned pieces are all a room needs.

The lighting — especially when the main light is switched off

This is one of my biggest design non-negotiables.

Have lamps.

Preferably more than one lighting option.

A beautifully decorated living room can completely lose its atmosphere when the only source of light is a bright central pendant.

The moment evening comes, you want the room to soften.

Table lamps, floor lamps and wall lights allow you to create pools of warm light rather than flooding the whole room from above.

I nearly always prefer warm white bulbs for living spaces.

Wall lights can be particularly lovely too — either side of a mirror in a hallway, beside a bed or layered into a living room scheme.

Good lighting isn't simply about being able to see.

It's one of the quickest ways to change how a room feels.

And when you're trying to create a home that feels warm, calm and inviting, that matters just as much as how it looks during the day.

What you've done with the windows

Window treatments have a much bigger effect on a room than people often realise.

They're one of those elements that can quietly make an interior feel far more finished.

Personally, I almost always prefer curtains to reach the floor.

Where the room allows it, taking them close to ceiling height can draw the eye upwards too, making the window feel more generous.

And rather than eyelet curtains, I prefer a more tailored heading such as a pinch pleat.

Roman blinds, shutters and layered window treatments can work beautifully too.

The important thing is that the window dressing feels like it was considered as part of the design, rather than added once everything else was finished.

There is a reason beautifully designed hotels pay so much attention to curtains, blinds and lighting.

Those details completely change the atmosphere of the room.

Whether the colour actually connects

A cohesive colour scheme does not mean painting your entire house beige.

And it definitely doesn't mean choosing one colour and repeating exactly the same shade on the cushions, rug, feature wall and accessories.

Colour can be much more interesting than that.

One simple way to make a home feel considered is to repeat certain colours in different ways throughout the space.

Another is to allow palettes to change from room to room while making sure neighbouring rooms still complement one another.

I naturally gravitate towards softer heritage colours — blues, greens and warm neutrals — often mixed with wood for extra depth.

But the exact colours matter far less than the relationship between them.

Even a colourful room can feel incredibly calm when the palette has been thought through.

Likewise, a completely neutral room can still feel disjointed if every beige, white and grey is fighting with the next.

Whether everything looks brand new

Some of my favourite rooms combine new pieces with things that have already had a life.

A good sofa.

Then perhaps a vintage side table.

A wooden chest of drawers.

An old sideboard.

Artwork found somewhere unexpected.

Something brought home from a holiday.

These pieces stop a home feeling as though you walked into one shop and bought the entire display.

I tend to think of it roughly as a 70/30 mix of new and old rather than trying to furnish a room entirely with one or the other.

I particularly like investing in important pieces such as sofas and beds, then looking second-hand for tables, consoles, sideboards and storage furniture.

Older solid-wood furniture can add texture, history and character — and often feels far more individual than another piece of inexpensive flat-pack furniture.

Your home doesn't need to be finished overnight.

In fact, I think the best homes rarely are.

Let it evolve.

Does it feel intentional — or simply decorated?

This is probably the biggest one.

The homes that feel expensive to me aren't necessarily the ones where everything actually was expensive.

They're the ones where you can see that somebody thought about their decisions.

They invested in the foundations.

They considered the sofa.

The rug.

The window treatments.

The lighting.

The colour palette.

And then they allowed the personality to build around those things.

That might mean books on a shelf.

A slightly unusual piece of art.

Vintage furniture.

Family photographs.

Objects picked up while travelling.

Pattern.

Colour.

None of those things need to match perfectly.

They simply need to feel as though they belong there.

The opposite is a home that has been decorated entirely according to whatever happened to be trending at the time.

Trends can be brilliant inspiration.

But use too many of them and eventually your home starts looking like everybody else's.

A beautifully designed home should tell you something about the people living there.