‘The Soft Minimalist Home’ book feature
Last year, our home was featured in Abi Dare’s ‘The Soft Minimalist Home’, a beautiful book exploring minimalist interiors through real, lived-in homes across Europe and the UK.
As an expat, my relationship with the idea of “home” is layered and complex. Once you leave your first home behind, nowhere ever feels quite the same — your sense of belonging becomes fragmented, distributed across people, places and memories. For me, home is no longer tied to a single place but shaped by moments gathered along the way.
This fluid and evolving understanding of home has been central to how I approach creating our living space. Rather than aiming for a fixed ideal, I embrace the process — treating our home as an ongoing conversation between our lifestyle, our experiences, and our values. Influenced by both Scandinavian and Japanese principles, our space blends calm functionality with deeply personal meaning. It is a creative sanctuary — gently evolving over time, alongside us.
Unlike client projects, which often have defined budgets and timelines, our home is growing and evolving slowly, shaped by resourcefulness and restraint. As a designer working in interiors, I was initially hesitant to share our home publicly — conscious of how an unfinished home might be interpreted against the polished benchmarks of professional work. Yet, I’ve come to see value in showing this process: the layers, imperfections, and honesty of real, evolving lived in homes.
That’s exactly what The Soft Minimalist Home captures — a collection of 15 beautiful and unique spaces as a gentle counter to wider assumptions minimalism must be sterile or unattainable. These homes — large and small, rented and owned, finished and in progress — reflect the real, lived stories of their occupants. Alongside visual inspiration, the book offers practical insights into colour, lighting, texture, and objects — tools for creating spaces that are both personal and full of stories.
It has been a joy to see our home in print, alongside so many other beautiful homes. More than anything, it’s a reminder that home is not a fixed destination, but an ongoing expression of how we live and who we are.
‘The Soft Minimalist Home; Calm, cosy decor for real lives and spaces’ by Abi Dare, photography by Benjamin Edwards and published by Ryland Peters and Small.
