It’s easy to think of the world of interior design as the preserve of those with both too much money and too much time on their hands.  Surely it’s just ‘stuff’ that looks pretty, it doesn’t say anything particularly interesting about us other than what interior design magazine we might be reading.  Or does it?

Well my take on it is that it could well be far more revealing of the individual. There is a concept, introduced by Richard Dawkins, that our genes are not limited to expressing themselves just to our biology such are eye colour but their expression extends far beyond this to include the effect a gene has on its environment. And what is interior design if it isn’t a way in which we choose to manipulate and alter our direct environment.

After all, from a  behavioural genetics point of view, interior design is just a form of nest building.  Admittedly most nests in the wild don’t include paisley patterns or danish furniture but they’re not as far removed as us ‘sophisticated’ human would like to think.

So perhaps the interior design we choose for our most personal of spaces, our home, can reveal a significant amount about us.  It’s a window perhaps not into our soul but maybe into our genetics.  So next time you’re round at a friend’s house pay a bit more attention to the way in which they have decided to decorate, design and furnish their home, you may just get an insight into a side of them you never really knew……and they never consciously intended to show you!