Why I love Interiors Magazines

Courtesy House to Home

Come into my study, my bedroom or my lounge, and you will be astonished at the number of interiors magazines that are stacked, filed or simply lying around, waiting to be read. There are British home decoration magazines, American interiors journals, and of course Australian residential style periodicals.

Is it a covert passion, is it wishful thinking? Have I missed my calling and secretly desire to be an interior stylist, rather than a novelist? Why is this creative writer so taken up with the fine detail that goes into the furnishing and equipping of a home?

The answer is a simple one. Interiors are very good indicators of the character and life-attitude of the occupier of that space. Displayed belongings, kinds of books, colour, design and style are things that tell us a lot about the person who lives there. So I mentally choose the rooms the characters in my books might live in, and think of them in those spaces. Levels of tidiness are not as important as what a particular protagonist chooses to place on a shelf, or what colour to have the walls of a kitchen, or what kind of crockery to place food upon.

A character whose belongings are retro, say... sixties, would dress, think and behave in such a different way from another whose rooms are decked out in carefully chosen Regency antiques, with furniture that looks like it's been dipped in honey, and expensive curtains and carpets that reflect the era. A reader would know exactly how to mentally conjure these two different persons. A reader would imagine them accurately right away: simply from a description of what their houses look like on the inside.

Courtesy Best Home Design

When creating a 'baddie' I could put him in a house that is totally meticulously and scrupulously tidy, decorated in ultra-modern, sparse urban chic, in shades of beige, grey and dull white, with black and white steel-framed pictures on the walls. Here and there are highlighted objects in bright red: a cushion, an ornament, a vase. You can see him already, can't you? His hair is sleeked back, and he carefully adjusts a single tall ornament to precisely the correct position after his housekeeper has left. Then he takes the keys to the safe, which is in plain view in the bare office, where one sheet of paper lies on the desk. It's all sterile, and exact, particular and ... deadly.

All this from seeing a minimilist interior in a magazine! It is a visual metaphor: the steel is a precursor of his gun, the red splashes are of course blood.

Interiors: they can be so important in fiction. And my magazines provide the personality of every single character I create.