The Poetics of Space: On Relaxed Luxury

In a world obsessed with spectacle, relaxed luxury whispers instead of shouts.

It’s not about grandeur, or opulence or glittering surfaces—it’s about an atmosphere that exudes ease, confidence, and quiet refinement. True luxury lives in the details we don’t immediately notice but feel deeply: the hand-troweled plaster, laced in richly pigmented paint that dances with light, the cool to the touch and weightiness of a solid bronze door handle, the gentle harmony between what is built, curated and what is felt.

Relaxed luxury begins with restraint. It resists the impulse to overfill or overstate. Instead, it celebrates spatial pauses—the negative spaces that let form breathe and texture speak. It’s a way of designing that feels lived-in yet elevated, grounded yet transcendent. It’s what happens when craftsmanship meets comfort, when the tactile and intangible becomes as meaningful as the visual and a narrative (a story), speaks of and to the inhabitants and just as easily to everyone who experiences it, if done well.

For me, relaxed luxury is not a style—it’s a state of being. It’s how we experience intimacy, safety, a sense of grounding and refuge with our home environment. It’s the soft linen that wrinkles and tumbles just so, the charm of patina, art, objets, colours that evoke, the scent of wood and wax in morning sunlight, a thoughtful shelf, drawer, table or nook wherever needed, a place for everything. These are not accidents but orchestrations of feeling—spaces composed like poetry, where every element: light, shadow, scent, texture, sound, shape, colour becomes language. When a house is not just walls and roof, but memory and reverie. It is this understanding that transforms the home from a mere functional, practical structure into a sanctuary—from a container of objects into a vessel of positive emotion.

In this way, the way in which I design, design moves beyond surface level visual aesthetics into emotion and narrative—what I term emotional aesthetics™ and emotional aesthetic narrative™. After all, we don’t just build a home, we dream a home—from childhood to adulthood, and dream how we want to feel in it. Understanding relaxed luxury and the poetics of space and especially their symbiosis, is vital in the art of making the invisible visible—the emotional register of a room, the rhythm and vibration of its silence, the dignity of its simplicity. It’s vital in crafting homes where beauty rests not in opulence but in honesty, not in perfection but in soulfulness.

My instinct is: to focus on the emotional and experiential dimension of interior design, paying attention to all five senses, to create homes and spaces that calm the eye, engage the hand, head and heart, and steady the soul, to invite people to linger and feel rather than simply look. Of course, relaxed luxury will mean different things to different people but my own special brand of relaxed luxury is: considered but not pretentious, curated but not stiff, precious but not untouchable. It is human-centered, but not in a machine interface, Le Corbusier way, often favoured by architects. My approach honours our individual and primal essence, the five traditional senses: sight, hearing (the distal), touch, taste, and smell (the proximal), as well as; time, place, nature, the seasons, our belonging in the natural world, and innate need to be connected to it, and has reverence for the quiet rituals of daily life, the slow pour of morning coffee, the opening of curtains to greet the day. It invites us to slow down, to notice how space and everything in it—the tangible and intangible, the visible and invisible, makes us feel.

Ultimately, relaxed luxury is an emotional architecture. It’s about designing for physical and emotional comfort as much as for beauty—for personal resonance and authentic alignment and harmony, not merely for looks, recognition and likes. In this language of layers; light and shadow—a symphony of chiaroscuro, casting an enchanting spell that ignites our imaginations, natural materials that seduce us, thoughtful restraint that gives space to pause and breathe, orchestration of emotional aesthetics and narrative that tell an evocative story, we discover a deeper kind of richness: one that lives not in the expense of things, but in the spaces between them, in the vaults of our imagination, memory, heart, soul, psyche.

“Our house is our corner of the world. It is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.” Gaston Bachelard - French philosopher.

Bachelard’s writings in his book “The Poetics of Space” from which I borrowed the name for this journal, examines how we experience home, consciously and subconsciously, takes us on a journey, from cellar to attic, to show us how our perceptions of houses and other shelters shape our thoughts, memories and dreams, resonates with my own experience, observations and way of thinking about home, spaces and interior design.

My role as interior designer in helping you create your home characterised by relaxed luxury is to understand your personal positive emotional aesthetics™, thus helping you tailor and curate your own personal positive emotional aesthetic narrative™ for your home.

Why this approach: So you can experience meaningful connection, live in authenticity, timelessness, enjoy improved wellbeing and thrive. In short, craft a home that feels good, looks good, is deeply personal, uplifting and enduring.

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Image: De Gournay