What I Know at 71 That I Couldn’t Have Known at 40: Design, Style, and the Art of Living Beautifully

There is a question I get asked more than almost any other, in various forms and from women at various stages of life, and it goes something like this: how do you make it all look so effortless? The honest answer is that it is not effortless at all. It is the result of decades of looking carefully at the world around me, at rooms, at gardens, at the way light falls on a wall in the afternoon, at the way a well-cut blazer changes how a woman carries herself. It is the result of years spent as a residential interior designer, learning to listen to what a space needed before I touched a thing. And it is the result of a gradual understanding that the same principles that make a room feel beautiful apply, with surprising consistency to how we dress, how we live, and how we show up every single day. Let’s chat about What I Know at 71 That I Couldn’t Have Known at 40: Design, Style, and the Art of Living Beautifully.

What I Know at 71 That I Couldn’t Have Known at 40: Design, Style, and the Art of Living Beautifully

At 71, I see this more clearly than I ever have. And I want to share what I have learned, not as a set of rules, but as an invitation to think about your own home, your own wardrobe, and your own life with the same discerning, endlessly curious eye that good design requires.

The same principles that make a room feel beautiful apply, with surprising consistency ,to how we dress, how we live, and how we show up every single day.

What a design career teaches you that no style guide ever will

I spent several years as anl interior designer before I started this blog, and the most important thing that work taught me had nothing to do with furniture placement or paint colors. It taught me how to edit.

Every great room starts not with addition but with subtraction, with the discipline to remove everything that is “okay” so that what remains is only what is genuinely good. The piece with soul. The fabric with depth. The color that makes the whole room sing. The furniture that looks as if it is collected over time rather than being selected from a catalog.

The same principle applies to a wardrobe. The women I find most stylish, at any age, but especially at 60 and beyond are not the ones with the most clothes. They are the ones who have done the hard work of editing until what is left is a collection that is entirely, confidently theirs. Every piece fits. Every piece reflects something true about who they are. There is no rif-raf, only those pieces that tell their own personal story.

Jill Sharp Weeks is the perfect case in point. She leans fully into her own story and isn’t the least bit afraid to dress like her house. That kind of wardrobe does not happen by accident. It happens through the same process a designer uses on a room: look intentionally, remove ruthlessly, keep only what is fabulous!

If you love Jill’s aesthetic you migh enjoy reading How to Get Jill Sharp Weeks Collected Organic Look

Every great room starts not with addition but with subtraction. The same is true of a great wardrobe.

The collected look — in your home and in what you wear

One of the phrases I return to again and again, in my former design work and in how I think about getting dressed is the idea of the collected look.

A collected home does not look as if someone ordered everything from the same page of a catalog. It looks like it has been gathered over time, with love and intention. The juxtaposition of an antique breadboard gracing a modern coffee table. A textile from a trip alongside a painting by a local artist. Layers of pattern and texture that feel personal rather than prescribed. It is a home that tells a story.

My personal style works exactly the same way. A vintage find alongside a beautifully made contemporary piece. A vintge jacket I have owned for years alongside something I discovered last season. Investment pieces mixed with things that simply made me happy when I found them on eBay or Etsy. The result, at its best, looks like it has been assembled over a lifetime, because it has.

This is one of the great advantages of dressing and decorating at 71. I actually have a lifetime of beautiful things to draw from. I have a vintage jacket I bought in my 50s that still looks extraordinary. I have the antique chest Steve and I found antiquing in the Maine that anchors our guest room to this day. I have my newish garden garden, a work in progress. It will never replace the 30 year old collected garden from my former home but that’s okay. None of this can be replicated by someone who is 35 and starting from scratch. This is the accumulated beauty of a life lived with intention.

A collected life — in your home, your garden, your wardrobe — looks as if it has been gathered over time, with love and intention. Because it has.

The design eye crosses every boundary

Something I did not fully appreciate until I had been blogging for several years is how completely the design sensibility crosses the boundaries between categories.

When I write about fashion, I am drawing on exactly the concept I use when I write about interiors. The principles of proportion, balance, color, texture, and scale apply whether I am talking about how to layer a room or how to put together an outfit. The question is always the same: does this feel considered? Does this feel personal? Does this feel like it belongs together, or does it feel like pieces that happened to end up in the same place?

And then there is the garden, which I think of as the ultimate design project, because it changes with every season. It rewards patience in a way that few things do, and requires a particular kind of eye for how things will look not just today but months and years from now. My former rose garden, which I developed for years, is as much a design project as any room I have ever worked on. The color combinations, the heights, the succession of bloom takes the same kind of intentional thinking that decorating a beautiful room requires.

All of this is to say: if you have ever thought of design and style and garden as separate interests that happen to coexist in your life, I think they are actually one interest expressed in different forms. The same eye, the same sensibility, the same love of beautiful things can be applied to every corner of a well-lived life.

The brands that understand this — and the ones that don’t

Over the years I have become increasingly drawn to brands, in both fashion and interiors,  that seem to understand this integrated approach to design and living.

In fashion, I seek out brands that offer something that will last but offers something different: they design clothes that assume the wearer has taste, context, and a life that extends beyond the moment of purchase. Their prints reference art and nature. Their silhouettes are considered rather than trend-driven. They are clothes that work as beautifully in a well-designed room as they do on the street, which sounds odd I know, but I think every design-minded woman will immediately understand.

In interiors, the brands I return to are the ones that prioritize craft, material, and the kind of beauty that improves with age rather than looking dated in two seasons. I am drawn to things that have a story, provenance, artisanship, and an honest relationship between form and function.

What these brands share, across categories, is a refusal to be disposable. They are making things meant to last, to be lived with, worn repeatedly, loved over time. That is a design philosophy I find deeply aligned with how I think about dressing and decorating. We have moved past the phase of acquiring. We are in the phase of curating.

We have moved past the phase of acquiring. We are in the phase of curating. And that is a fabulous place to be.

What this chapter looks like from the inside

I want to be honest about what daily life at 71 actually looks like through this lens, because I think there is a tendency to make these conversations sound more aspirational and less real than they actually are.

I “try “to start my  mornings in the garden when the weather allows, instead of immediately checking my emails. There is something about that daily ritual of walking through growing things, seeing what has changed overnight, cutting flowers for the house, that sets the entire tone for the day. It is grounding in a way that I think of as design for the soul. You are in the presence of something beautiful that you have had a hand in creating (alongside Steve), and it puts everything else into perspective.

Even if I am walking Scout I try to look presentable. Not because I spend a lot of time on it.  I do not. I try to keep my activewear current. My wardrobe at this point is curated enough that every choice I make feels pretty good. I reach for things I love. I have let go of the things I merely tolerated. The result is that getting dressed feels like an act of self-expression rather than a problem to be solved.

And then there is the house, which Steve and I have spent years making into a home we love. It is not finished. I do not think it will ever be finished, and I think that is one of the great pleasures of living with a design sensibility: there is always something to consider, to refine, to curate.  A home is a living document. So is a wardrobe. So is a garden.

What I know now that I wish I had known earlier

If I could distill what thirty years of design thinking and a decade of building this community have taught me into a handful of things worth knowing, here is what I would say:

• Edit before you add. In your home and in your wardrobe, the most powerful move is almost always subtraction. Live with less, but make sure every single thing you keep is something you genuinely love.
• Quality and soul matter more than trend. A beautifully made piece, whether it is a cashmere blazer, a beautiful oil painting, or a well-chosen antique will outlast twenty trend-driven purchases and give you more pleasure every single time.
• Your home should tell your story, not someone else’s. The most beautiful homes I have ever been in are not the most expensively decorated. They are the most personally decorated full of things that mean something to the people who live there.
• The same eye works everywhere. The principles of proportion, balance, color, and texture that apply to a beautiful room apply to a beautiful outfit and a beautiful garden. Trust your eye. It knows more than you think.
• This chapter is not a diminishment. Everything you have accumulated, the taste, the confidence, the knowledge of what you love and loathe makes this the most creatively rich chapter of your life. Treat it that way with respect.

The most beautiful homes I have ever been in are not the most expensively decorated. They are the ones that tell a story.

A final thought on living beautifully

I started this blog in 2012 with a simple idea: share the things I loved. Interior design, Fashion, the garden Steve and I were creating in the Salinas Valley. Good food and wine from California’s Central Coast. What I did not anticipate was how completely those things were connected.  How  the same sensibility that made me love a well-layered room made me love a well-layered outfit, and how the patience that a garden requires translated into a different, slower, more considered approach to everything.

You might enjoy my post What my Garden has Taught me About How to Live.

At 71 I can say with absolute certainty that the design eye once curated only gets sharper. The taste only gets more refined. The ability to walk into a room, or open a wardrobe, or look at a garden and know immediately what it needs and what it does not need. The ability is the gift of experience, and it is one that keeps giving.

Remember you are not past your most beautiful chapter. You are in it.

I would love to hear from you. What has living with a design eye meant in your own life, whether that is in how you dress, how you decorate, or how you tend your garden? And is there an area where you feel like your eye has sharpened most as you have gotten older? Let’s get the conversation going.