The Eye Is the Thing
On what forty years of looking actually teaches you — and why it cannot be learned any other way
In March 1987, I was seventeen years old and standing in a saleroom at Christie’s in King Street, St James’s, trying not to drop a Van Gogh.
The painting was Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers. My job that morning was to help transport it. Nothing more. But I was in the room when the gavel came down at just under $40 million — the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction — and I can tell you that the feeling in that room was unlike anything I’ve experienced before or since. Not excitement exactly. Something older than that. A recognition, shared by everyone present, that they were watching something that would be written down.
I was a porter. I was supposed to be invisible. I stood there with my hair on the back of my neck standing up and hoped nobody noticed.
That morning is where the eye began. Not in a classroom. Not in a textbook. In a room, with a real object, in real time, watching real people respond to something genuinely extraordinary.
The eye cannot be taught in the conventional sense. It can be trained — by looking at thousands of things, by handling objects, by being wrong and understanding why you were wrong, by standing in enough rooms with enough people who know more than you do until their knowledge starts to become yours. But the fundamental capacity for it — the ability to see what a thing actually is rather than what you expect it to be — that either develops or it doesn’t. And it develops through exposure, not through study.
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I have been exposing myself to beautiful and significant things for forty years. I started in Christie’s post room at fifteen. I dealt on Portobello Road and Bermondsey market, buying things at six in the morning before anyone else arrived. I furnished homes for people whose names you’d recognise. I sourced for royal families across three countries. I spent six years working closely with Madonna — decorating her homes, understanding her vision, learning what it means to serve a creative intelligence of that order while bringing your own.
I was credited alongside Alexander McQueen and Kanye West on her Sticky & Sweet world tour. She credited me alongside them in the tour programme. Not as a decorator. As a collaborator.
That’s the distinction that matters. Interior design, at its most reductive, is about making rooms look a certain way. What I’ve always been interested in is something different — the conversation between a person and the objects around them. What a room says about who someone is, who they want to be, what they’ve seen and loved and carried with them. The objects are never just objects. They’re evidence.
This is why Source Me It exists. Not to find things that are available. To find things that aren’t — pieces that have never been on a website, never been catalogued, never been seen by anyone except the families who’ve kept them for generations. Objects that carry real history rather than a manufactured provenance. The kind of things that end up in rooms and stay there for a hundred years because they were right from the moment they arrived.
The eye finds those things. Algorithms don’t.
I am not a decorator. I am not a stylist. I am not, in the conventional sense, an interior designer. I am someone who has spent forty years learning to see — and who has built a business, at last, that is simply about that.
Everything else is furniture.
