This time of year, everyone wants a haunted house. Pumpkins on the doorstep, cobwebs in the corners, candles flickering in windows that, for the rest of the year, nobody looks at twice. But I have always believed every house is a little haunted. Not by anything frightening, but by the people who lived there before.
The groove worn into a stone step. A door that sticks in the same place every winter. A wall painted four times that still shows its first colour when the light hits it just so. These are the ghosts I look for when I walk into a home for the first time.
Most renovations try to exorcise them: strip everything back, make it new, make it anonymous. I understand the impulse, a clean slate feels like control. But a home with no past rarely feels like a home. It feels like a showroom waiting for someone to arrive.
So I prefer to let a few ghosts stay. An old beam left exposed, a handmade tile saved from the original kitchen, a piece of furniture with marks no one can quite explain. They give a room something we can't design from scratch: the sense that life has already happened here, and will happen again.
Autumn is a good season to notice this. Here on the Costa del Sol, the light drops lower and turns golden earlier in the evening, shadows grow longer, and the textures we ignore all summer suddenly come forward: the grain of oak, the weight of linen, the roughness of lime plaster. It is the season of candles rather than ceiling lights, of deeper colours, of rooms that hold you instead of displaying you.
If you want to bring a little of that into your home this week, you don't need decorations from a shop. Turn off the overhead lights and see what your rooms look like by candlelight. Notice which objects catch your eye, because they are usually the ones with a story. Bring them forward, give them space, let them be seen.
Halloween is one night of borrowed ghosts. The ones that live in your home stay all year, and they are worth designing around.