Behind the Design

I constantly get asked to give my advice on design by random people I meet in restaurants, or while waiting in line for my dark mocha frappucino. What colour should I paint my bedroom? Or so-and-so, the famous designer, is my favourite, but she's so expensive. Can you recommend another brand to get the same look and feel without spending so much money?

I used to have my standard answers ready to spill at a moment's notice. I always talked about keeping it simple; how the objects in your room should never completely tell the story of your life, but rather reveal it over time. Or you should never let the sofa shine brighter than yourself; always remain the star of your own party.

So how did I become obsessed with colour and pattern all of a sudden? And does this mean perhaps my life has become a little less colourful - more beige - and that I am now ready to accept colour in my living spaces?

The trend for a good decade, in some interior design circles, has been non-colour; an absence of colour ... well, beige. Designers served up taupe, off-white, cream and warm grey with a touch of beige. Some people require beige in their lives, and I completely understand where they are coming from. Some people have so much stuff going on in their minds that they need the calm of an off-white room to relax and unwind.

John Pawson, the famed British minimalist architect and designer who spent his early years in Japan and has constructed a few fashion monasteries and even a real monastery in the Czech Republic that now produces face creams and mustards, lives and breathes Wabi-Shaker minimalism. Yet his wife Catherine, also an interior designer, loves colour and pattern. While having dinner at their home in the Notting Hill area of London, a designer friend of mine opened a pious looking dining bench and out popped Catherine's wings of patterned fabrics in the richest colours imaginable. My friend, the designer who created "beige chic" in the US, started laughing. Aha! There is a bit of colour lurking below the surface in each of us. Perhaps it's not always visible, but it's there.

So as you attempt to discover the colour that lies beneath, live with abandon. Don't listen to people like me telling you to keep it simple, do as your heart desires. If you want to live with a red sofa with leopard print pillows and accents of gold, by all means do so. As a famous designer once said: "Artists can colour the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must colour things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid."

Prepare to lose some old ideas. I'm still the old, beige me. But perhaps with a touch of colour.