Julia Murray has moved house more times than she can count, and every time she set out to turn the new place into a home. It never quite worked. The finished rooms came close to what she had pictured, and never exactly, and something she could not name was always missing. Most people make their peace with that. Julia, standing in yet another almost-right room, asked a different question: how do I fix this? The hunt for the answer took her out of the record industry and into a business of her own. It also turned out the missing thing had a name. It was emotion.
The clues had been there since she was a teenager. At fourteen or fifteen, a visit to an exhibition of show homes flipped a switch, and she started sketching floor plans for her dream house and rearranging her bedroom furniture, again and again, chasing a feeling she had no word for yet. “I’ve always been interested in houses and how people live in them,” she says. “I just didn’t recognize it, or even know interior design was a possible career at the time.”
Chasing the thing she couldn’t name
Years later, married and moving wherever her husband’s job took them, she renovated one property after another, and the same two problems kept surfacing. The trades she hired did not always work well together, which meant costly mistakes and delays. And the finished rooms, again and again, were not quite what she had imagined. There was something missing, and she still could not put her finger on it. So she went back to school to find out. She wedged a face-to-face design course between the school run and her own homework, chasing down childcare so she could learn in a room full of other students. “Challenging,” she says, “but rewarding.”
What she learned reframed the whole job. Interior design gets written off as a bit frivolous, all cushion-plumping and soft furnishings. Julia found the opposite. “By interpreting the feelings people want when they walk into a space, you create a layout and a room that delivers that for them.” Think of the hotel lobby or the restaurant that made you say “wow” before you were three steps inside. That was not an accident. Neither is the gloomy, badly lit room that quietly flattens your mood. She started calling her field the emotions business, and she means it plainly.
She calls interior design the emotions business. A room sets your mood before you speak.
Color, and other convictions
Ask her how she gets there and the opinions come quickly. Blues and greens, she says, are the most harmonious colors for balance and calm, the ones we already love outdoors, in the countryside and the sea and the sky. There are endless shades of both, though any scheme needs accents and finishes to come alive. Neutrals can feel just as balanced, and turn bland the moment you stop paying attention. As for the gray that took over everyone’s houses for a decade: lovely in small doses, “oppressive” in large ones. This year she is taking a course in color psychology, the science underneath the instinct she already trusts.
The record industry did not leave her empty-handed either. It handed her two rules she still runs on. Never assume anything. And creativity needs a process, because a good idea only survives contact with a dozen suppliers if structure carries it all the way to the finished result. Her favorite proof is a curtain. “If you don’t put in writing that you want a braid on the leading edge exactly two centimeters from the edge, the maker will just decide the distance, and it probably won’t be what you wanted.” Music and interiors, she points out, are the same kind of work underneath: a creative idea turned into a physical thing through many hands, which is exactly where it can all go wrong.
Let the music play on
She never really left the first career behind. She is still close with friends from her EMI days, some of them still in the business, and she goes to see live music whenever she can. Only one thing has changed. “I used to work in an office with two or three artists playing at once, no problem. Now I don’t think I could concentrate.” Ask her advice for anyone eyeing the same leap and she is warm about it, and honest about where the difficulty actually lives. “It’s the start of a long journey, with plenty of challenges along the way. Most of them are about running a business, not design.”
The House Ministry is at thehouseministry.co.uk and @thehouseministryinteriors.
