Interior Design Features That Seem Like a Good Idea Until You Live With Them

Some interior design ideas make complete sense right up until you have to clean them, walk around them, find somewhere to put your shampoo or use them while half asleep. They look beautiful in photographs and seem perfectly reasonable when you’re choosing finishes, particularly when the practical annoyances haven’t happened yet.

Then you live with them for six months and realise the person who designed that gorgeous bathroom apparently never washes their hair. I’m not suggesting everything in a home has to be chosen purely for practicality, because that would make for some fairly depressing interiors.

But there are certain features where the inconvenience starts to outweigh whatever made them attractive in the first place.

There are certain features where the inconvenience starts to outweigh whatever made them attractive in the first place.

Open Shelving in the Kitchen

I like open shelves. I have open shelves. What I don’t particularly like is the idea that they can replace a substantial amount of closed kitchen storage without changing how you actually use your kitchen.

The beautifully styled version contains six handmade bowls, three matching glasses and one slightly wonky ceramic jug with an olive branch in it. Real kitchens contain cereal boxes, half-used bags of pasta, vitamins, plastic lunch boxes and that one mug everyone keeps despite nobody actually liking it.

There’s also the dust, which becomes considerably less charming once it has mixed with the fine layer of grease that kitchens inevitably produce. Open shelving works brilliantly when it’s used selectively for things you genuinely use often or want to display.

It becomes less brilliant when you’ve sacrificed cupboards for it and now have to make your everyday groceries look aesthetically pleasing. I don’t need my stock cubes contributing to the overall visual direction of the kitchen.

Freestanding Baths Squeezed Against Walls

A freestanding bath can be absolutely beautiful when there is enough room around it. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way we decided that every bathroom could have one, including bathrooms where it fits with approximately seven centimetres to spare.

That little gap between the bath and wall then becomes its own ecosystem of dust, hair and things you can see but cannot possibly reach. Cleaning behind it requires either unusually long arms or a level of commitment I don’t personally have.

Why is this bath wedged against the window?

If the room genuinely allows a freestanding bath to sit freely, I understand the appeal completely. If it has to be wedged into exactly the same position where a fitted bath would have gone, I’m less convinced.

A good built-in bath can look fantastic, gives you somewhere to put things and doesn’t require you to develop specialist cleaning equipment. Sometimes the less glamorous option wins once actual life gets involved.

Vessel Sinks

I have vessel sinks myself and I still love the concept, so this isn’t me warning everyone away from them. I would happily choose them again. What I wouldn’t choose again is the way mine sit quite close to both the countertop and the wall, because those narrow spaces around them are annoying to clean. Water and dust inevitably find their way into the exact spots your hand and cleaning cloth struggle to reach.

If I were doing it again, I’d choose a bowl with steeper sides so it rises away from the countertop more quickly, rather than having that shallow curve that stays close to the surface for too long. I’d also make sure there was more space between the basin and the wall.

This vessel sink is much easier to clean.

It’s a tiny detail you barely think about when you’re choosing a beautiful basin, but you definitely notice it once you’ve cleaned around it a few hundred times. The vessel sink would stay, I’d just be much pickier about its shape and placement.

Black Taps and Shower Fittings

I had black tapware myself until fairly recently, and while I still think it can look great, I eventually changed mine. Companies can make all sorts of claims about the durability of their finishes, but black tapware simply shows wear faster than many other metal finishes. Scratches, fading and wear around the places you touch regularly become much more obvious against black. Water marks certainly don’t help either.

That doesn’t mean I’d tell someone never to use it, because sometimes black really is the finish that works best with a scheme. I’d just go into it knowing that it probably won’t age in quite the same forgiving way as chrome, stainless steel or some other metal finishes.

Bathrooms get used hard, however beautiful they looked on installation day. I’d rather know upfront that the pristine matt-black stage may have a shorter lifespan than the brochure

suggests.

Enormous Kitchen Islands

I have a large kitchen island and I genuinely love having a large island, so size itself isn’t my issue. Mine works really well and gives us loads of surface space, but I probably wouldn’t choose such a large square island again.

My kitchen island.

The problem with going too deep is that you lose the ability to simply reach across it. Something can be sitting directly opposite you and still require a walk around the island to retrieve it, which feels faintly ridiculous when it is only a metre or so away.

If I were designing it again, I’d still go generous, but I’d favour a long rectangular island over a very deep square one. You keep the workspace and seating without creating a middle section that nobody can comfortably reach. It’s one of those things that looks incredibly luxurious on a floor plan because bigger seems better. After living with one, I think the real luxury is being able to lean across and grab something without taking a small tour of the kitchen.

Open Wardrobes

Open wardrobes always look wonderful when they contain twelve neutral shirts, four pairs of beautifully spaced shoes and one linen blazer. Mine would not look like that. Even if you are extremely organised, clothes create visual clutter simply because there are lots of colours, shapes, fabrics and hangers competing for attention. Add the inevitable pile of something you wore for two hours and might wear again, and the carefully curated boutique effect disappears fairly quickly.

No one's wardrobe looks like this.

My walk-in wardrobe is actually a mixture of open and closed storage. The sections you can see from the bedroom have doors, which was a deliberate choice because I didn’t want to look at rows of clothes from bed. The rest is open, and although it’s practical and easy to access, I wish I’d put doors on those sections too. Even when everything is tidy, I find seeing that much clothing visually overstimulating.

Clothes simply create a lot of visual information. There are different colours, lengths, fabrics, hangers, shoes and bags, and keeping everything organised doesn’t make all of that disappear.

If I were doing the wardrobe again, I’d put doors on the lot and enjoy opening them when I actually need something.

There’s also dust, fading from sunlight and the simple fact that sometimes you want to close a door and not look at your belongings. I understand open hanging in a dedicated dressing room or as a small feature, but an entirely open wardrobe in a bedroom asks quite a lot of your organisational habits. Doors are wonderfully forgiving things. I’m happy to let them do some of the work.

Showers Without Enough Storage

Few things make a newly renovated bathroom look cleaner than a shower with almost nothing in it. Unfortunately, people who shower tend to own shampoo. And conditioner. And body wash. Possibly a razor, face cleanser and several products somebody bought with very good intentions and has used twice.

If you don’t plan somewhere for those things during the design stage, they end up lined along the floor or balanced precariously on whatever tiny ledge happens to exist.

As if people would have a wooden stool in their shower.

A niche is only useful if it is actually large enough and positioned where you can reach it comfortably. The same goes for shelves, ledges and built-in storage. I would happily accept a little more visual interruption in exchange for somewhere sensible to put the things I use every day. A minimalist shower is no longer particularly minimalist once six bottles are sitting on the floor.

Tiny Bedside Tables

There is a particular kind of bedroom photograph where the bedside table is barely wider than the lamp sitting on it. It looks lovely, especially when the bed is beautifully made and nobody appears to own a phone, book, glass of water, glasses, hand cream or anything else required between getting into bed and getting out again.

How is this practical?

In a real bedroom, bedside tables have a job to do, and making them tiny purely to create more empty space beside the bed usually means that job gets transferred somewhere else.

This doesn’t mean every bedroom needs chunky bedside cabinets with three drawers. A simple table can work perfectly well, but it needs enough surface area for the things you actually keep beside you.

Proportion matters too, particularly next to a large bed where a tiny table can look oddly apologetic. I’d rather give it another twenty centimetres and have somewhere to put my book.

The Best Features Still Work Once You Live With Them

None of these choices are automatically wrong, and quite a few of them are choices I’ve made in my own home. Some I’d happily make again, just not in exactly the same way. Living with something teaches you the details that are very easy to miss when you’re looking at plans, samples or beautifully photographed interiors. The shape of a basin suddenly matters because you’re trying to clean behind it, and the dimensions of an island matter because you’ve walked around it three times while making dinner.

Good design should still make everyday life easier.

I’m all for choosing things simply because they’re beautiful. Homes would be very boring if every decision had to pass some sort of practicality test before being allowed through the front door. But good design should still make everyday life easier, or at the very least not make it unnecessarily annoying. Sometimes the lesson isn’t that you chose the wrong feature at all. You just know exactly how you’d do it better next time.