I'd go with his choice, because even if it wasn't 'my' style, I'd rather feel like he's taking an interest and equally invested in our home together. Plus, if I'm being completely honest, I think his taste is probably better than mine. ;) He rarely has an opinion on anything house-related, so when he puts his foot down, I go along with it: and on each occasion, it's been exactly the right decision. Example: I wanted the whole house painted out in ecru and antique white because it looks awesome with oak floors and I'm kind of a minimalist. Hubby insisted on painting the lounge room in yellow. YELLOW. I thought he'd lost his mind... but I went with it, because I get my way 99.9% of the time, so why quibble about the 0.1%? He insisted that 'in Winter, you'll be glad we have this warm, cozy colour'. And you know what? Every Winter, I love that room. It's an odd duck compared to the rest of the house, but damned if it doesn't actually work surprisingly well. It'd definitely be too much to take as a house-wide theme - but contained as it is, it's pretty great.

If you are at all fussy about what you eat, you must cook. It's as simple as that. But if your kitchen isn't well designed, and far too many aren't, cooking becomes more difficult or dangerous. I see a lot of stories on sites like Houzz about kitchen design that are all over how a kitchen looks, but not so hot on how they work. A kitchen isn't a room, it's a tool. Yes, the individual components should work, but they should work together, too. Cupboards should be structured so that you never have to kneel to get something, you never have to push jars aside to get the one you want, and you never have to lift heavy things from above your head. You should never bang your head on a cupboard door handle reaching to the back of the bench, either. And of course they should make it easy, almost inevitable, to put your floury or greasy hand on exactly what you need within two seconds - the time it takes a sauce to curdle - of you deciding that you need it. Designers pay lip service to ergonomics, but as a rule haven't a clue what it means. A kitchen sink, for instance, should be sited so that the person who does most of the washing up, even if that is only rinsing stuff on its way to the dishwasher, doesn't have to stoop (bad for the back) or reach (carrying your arms ahead of your body is tiring) to use it. Surfaces. Every kitchen where anybody at all is ever likely to make pastry NEEDS a stone slab. It stops the butter layers from melting into the paste layers because it's cool. This, people, is why granite benches are a thing. You just can't do the same job on wood. Or stainless steel, for that matter. The stone slab needn't be any bigger than 600mm square, but it really should be there. Speaking of wood, any kitchen surface you can't put a cake fresh out of the oven or a pan straight off the hotplate on is a bit useless. It looks nice? Sweet. You've got frilly curtains in your machine shop, right? My core expertise is in garden design rather than kitchen design, but I've been cooking in good and bad kitchens for fifty years, and in any case, bad design is bad design, wherever it rears its ugly head!

Gioenne, what's your sudden interest in the Houzzers hygiene habits?? Sheets, toothbrushes, kitchen sponges. What's next? Knickers. Frequently - for my toothbrush.

Congrats on the new home. Very exciting. As an experienced unpacker (we move every 2-3 years), the trick for organising is to stand in the space, consider how you will do things (ie imagine you’re cooking dinner, cleaning up, getting a drink etc) and, using sticky notes, decide where the easiest placement of kitchen utensils will be. You might, at this first stage, have six items that would be best in one cupboard. That’s normal. Choose the one(s) that you use most often, then with this in mind, redo the process. And be prepared to throw the whole system out after you’ve been in the house for a month or so Houses have a strange way of encouraging us to adapt to them no matter how intellectual/consistent/prepared we think we are