13/03/2026
Last night at , Patrick Williams launched The House Rules - and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
The house rules. Not the designer. Not the brief. The house.
Its proportions, its light, its materials - the particular knowledge a building accumulates over years of being lived in. The role of the designer, he said, is not to impose something new, but to understand what the building is already asking for.
He spoke about patina. The quiet marks left by people who came before us - not as imperfection to be corrected, but as depth. As character. As the thing that makes an old house feel like itself rather than like a project.
Because the bones of a building, he suggested, carry its spirit. What lives inside comes and goes. The furniture, the finishes, the interventions of each successive generation - all of it temporary. The architecture endures, and everything else should answer to it.
The second volume -Another Spoonful - is named for the soup his mother made in France, where a spoonful of yesterday’s soup always went into today’s. A fitting metaphor for the craftspeople the studio works with - people who understand that true making leaves something permanent behind.
Interviewed by - whose instinct for the people doing the most considered work in design brought exactly the right questions to the room. It’s rare to hear these ideas expressed so clearly by someone working so closely with historic buildings.
The House Rules by Patrick Williams. If you live in - or simply love - historic houses, it belongs on your shelf.
