The award-winning journalist and author of How To Build A City shares her thoughts on the joys of home and why it’s always worth getting out of your comfort zone

How has your style evolved?

My first editorial job – at this magazine – coincided with the start of my adult life. It opened my eyes to Scotland’s place in the context of global design and shaped how my tastes developed over the next fifteen years.

It taught me to look outside the country I live in, something I think about a lot in my books, which explore the connections between architecture, housing, community and travel.

In terms of my writing style, I’ve always chased colour and detail, but the older I get the more I realise how important it is to feel your way through your work.

Who or what are your biggest influences?

I admire Kirsty Wark’s interviewing skills and her career spanning novels, broadcast and written journalism. I also love the writing of Muriel Spark, Ali Smith, Lucia Berlin and Lorrie Moore.

Who is your design hero?

The artist David Harding, who in 1968 was appointed the first dedicated town artist in Glenrothes. He spent a decade responding to this post-war new town, still in its infancy, making sculptures and etchings that would become part of the urban landscape.

Glenrothes is where I grew up, and I spent some time with David before his death at the start of this year. He showed me that Glenrothes was the town that art built.

What is your favourite building?

Glasgow’s Mitchell Library. It has a strange setting, perched above a motorway, but the marble hallways are like nowhere else on earth.

Describe your dream home

I’m living there now. It’s a small Victorian terrace in a Perthshire village with a study I use as my writing room. There’s a plum tree in the garden and a log-burner that stays on much later into summer than it should. Every time I step back through the front door my nervous system is calmed.

What’s it like inside?

It’s inspired by nature and nostalgia. There are sheepskins, brass lamps, jewel tones (the fireplace is painted in Little Greene’s Citrine and the kitchen cupboards are Farrow & Ball’s Arsenic) with wonky tiles and imperfections everywhere. I’m allergic to bare walls; my favourite artworks in my collection are by Carol Rhodes, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Rhona Taylor.

What makes a home?

Paintings in old wooden frames, ceramics made by friends, as many books as possible, a fire, herbs in terracotta pots, garden flowers on the table, linen sheets, a homemade cake in a glass dome, something cooking on low in the oven, living with someone you love, a dog sunbathing on the lawn, always wishing things were a bit cleaner.

How do you invest in yourself?

By pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Over the last two years I’ve travelled extensively researching my new book, How to Build a City: Journeys into the Urban Future. I wanted to understand what was shaping the world’s most extreme places – the wars, climate catastrophes and social predicaments such as loneliness and discrimination we live alongside – and how the built environment was responding.

Which iconic interior product do you wish you’d designed?

I missed out on an Alessi La Cupola espresso pot on Facebook Marketplace recently and it still stings. Aldo Rossi designed it to look animate, with the cranium-like dome of the lid, the little beak and the silly bobbin on top.

The one luxury item you really want to have is

A Snoopy lamp by Flos. It does actually resemble the cartoon dog.

What should we be investing in right now?

Libraries, growing our own food, the Scottish fashion industry, our lumbar spines, the art of conversation, ways to be free.

An object you’d never part with

I’m unsentimental about belongings. I could replace anything – just not people or dogs.

If money’s no object

I’d travel more, to see different living arrangements, meet interesting people, open myself to change and feel things deeply.

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In the frame: Bard, a studio and gallery for Scottish craft in Leith