Nothing could dampen my love for John Lewis – I aspire, therefore I am

We should all be able to create an environment we feel happy and comfortable in – mine involves trips to a certain department store, writes Katy Brand

John Lewis made its point to Downing Street earlier this week (PA)

At various points in my life John Lewis has been my happy place. And on a couple of occasions I’d even go so far as to say my "safe space".

During lean years work-wise, I have saved money for Christmas, putting aside what I can in advance, thinking to myself: "We’ll have beans on toast for a bit and then we can have some John Lewis treats for the festive season."

A wander around John Lewis when I was feeling low or displaced often set me right for some reason. Well, I am a good middle-class girl after all. This is what we do.

We walk around the soft furnishings section, picking up cushions and wincing at the idea of paying £85 for a piece of yellow velvet with a pheasant on it. Then put it back making a mental note to look up "yellow velvet cushion pheasant" on Amazon later. And there will be options to be found online for a third of the price, but deep down you know it’s inferior because, well, because it’s not John Lewis. That’s the point. I aspire, therefore I am.

Now, I know there’s a certain John Lewis look, and things can veer towards the naff end of interior decorating if you go all out with the vintage hurricane lamp style candle holders, the vintage decorative wooden telescopes on brass tripods, the vintage sepia-tinted globe drinks cabinet, and yes even the vintage yellow velvet cushions with pheasants on them.

But still, most of us can only afford to buy a couple of items from John Lewis every now and again, so the chances of actually living in a "John Lewis nightmare", as Carrie Symonds reportedly described the Theresa May-designed hell-scape she inherited at No.10, are slim.

We get the basics at Ikea, some posh bits at John Lewis if there’s some extra cash around or you got a voucher for your birthday, and the rest is picked up from other places along the way. In the end your home becomes an organically eclectic environment, full of loved items or a coffee table with a story behind it. A home is built over time.

But perhaps if you are worried (for some reason…) that your home is not going to be built with love or have the opportunity to grow over time, well then you may need to pay tens of thousands of pounds to quickly and artificially create the sort of thrown together mess we all curate ourselves over the years for a fraction of the cost. It’s understandable that you would want to put your imprint on a place, personalise it a little and every prime minister has a budget of £30k at their disposal annually to tart up the residence. But the cost of the current resident’s refurb is at last £88k, rising to up to £200k if you believe some reports.

A "friend" rushed to Boris Johnson’s defence saying he should not be expected to live in a skip, though I was not aware that such a demand was being made, nor that this was an accurate way to describe his quarters pre-tart up. Unless Theresa May and her husband were living in a skip all this time and didn’t know it. Somehow I doubt it. Does John Lewis do skips? Vintage sepia tinted wooden skips with a pheasant on them perhaps?

But one PM’s paradise is another PM’s hell, or John Lewis nightmare and there’s no accounting for taste. It has been remarked upon by several people with an eye for this sort of thing that the designer Symonds chose, Lulu Lytle (known as the "saviour of British rattan" apparently – no, me neither) has an interesting style. To me, It has a certain "dictator’s jumble sale" sort of quality to it – maybe it’s intentional, who knows at this point, but it also looks to me like it has the potential to bring on a migraine so I’d give it a hard swerve myself.

Of course we should all be able to create an environment we feel happy and comfortable in, and currently no photographs are available of the actual flat itself so we can only go on samples of the designer’s previous work. And if they had paid for it themselves at the start of this whole affair it would be nobody’s business but their own.

But it is now all our business and, as many have pointed out, in some parts of the UK you could actually buy an entire house for less than they’ve spent on temporary accommodation. In some parts of west London you could probably at least buy a couple of skips of your own, with the potential to add a third as an extension, or dig a hole and drop one in it for a much coveted basement conversion. But the fundamental point remains, as all good middle-class girls who shop at John Lewis know, if you can’t afford it, you put it back.