I had a fabulous discussion with Claire Franklin today on the Gentle Discipline Podcast. Claire is an interior designer who has spent fifteen years inside other people’s houses, from small flats to eight-bedroom homes, and she writes The Harmonious Home Approach on Substack.
Her work starts with the people who live in the house and gets to their rooms last.
I found Claire through an essay she published in July. She overheard two women in a gym changing room picking apart a colleague’s divorce, a marriage of 22 years that ended on a Tuesday evening when the husband came home and said he was leaving. Claire is nearly 52. Her own marriage has run about that same length. She brought the story home and went on a rant about it, and her husband stopped her with one line: “It’s probably because he felt irrelevant.” So she asked him whether he felt irrelevant in their marriage. He said yes. That question came out of years of work she did on herself first, work that started with a collapse, led her to therapy, and eventually, when a boundary needed to finally be set, cost her a relationship with the parents she grew up with.
What amazes me so much about Claire is the empathy and curiosity she maintains through both her inner and outer work.
She took the empathy she built in therapy and carried it into her consultations, where a couple arguing over a sofa is usually arguing about something entirely different. Most designers in that room hear a disagreement about fabric. Claire hears one person being made to feel small in a house they pay for. She is one of the few people I have talked to who can hold childhood, marriage, and floor plans in the same hand and somehow make that connection obvious.
Fifteen years of walking into homes, from one-bedroom flats to eight-bedroom houses, and the thing clients almost always cared about more than the people they lived with
The gym changing room, two women dissecting a colleague’s divorce after 22 years of marriage, and why that story followed her home
Her husband’s response when she finished telling it: “It’s probably because he felt irrelevant.”
What happened when she asked her husband whether he felt irrelevant in their own marriage
The dishwasher, the app he installed to monitor it, and her question about whether an appliance had become the thing that made him feel seen
Running a household in what she calls single-player mode, and how often she still catches herself doing it
Growing up with narcissistic parents and what a child learns about her own needs in that house
The moment that sent her to therapy and took her whole world down with it
Family estrangement, what it costs, and the part nobody prepares you for
Why she puts the relationship with yourself ahead of every other relationship in the house
Coming off autopilot and learning to feel things while they are happening
Rewiring a brain in midlife, and her case that you are never too old for a do-over
Boundaries, control, and ego, and how she tells the three of them apart
Carrying what she learned in therapy into the first twenty minutes of a design consultation
The client who arrives with a Pinterest board, and the question Claire asks before she looks at it
Watching a couple argue about a sofa and hearing the older argument underneath
Wives who undermine their husbands in design meetings, and the day she realized she was doing it at home
Emotional safety in a house: what builds it, what breaks it, and why nobody relaxes without it
What belonging looks like in a home, and the gap between having your own room and being considered
A child’s emotional needs, and how often the layout of a house answers a different question
Her case against the decluttering movement
Building the confidence to make a home on your own terms without waiting for permission
The 50/50 rule she uses now for decisions and for parenting
Letting the house fall into the background so you can get on with living in it
The part of her own marriage she is still working out
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