Meet Camilla — founder, and the eye behind every room.

I have never been able to walk into a room and leave it as it is. I’ll move the lamp, turn the chair, talk myself out of rehanging the art and then do it anyway. A room tells you how to feel the moment you’re in it, and a dull, careless one has always felt to me like a small tragedy.

It started early. Long before it was a job, I was hauling other people’s unloved furniture home, sanding it down, giving it another life and selling it on. I was the teenager rearranging her bedroom at midnight. Some people grow out of that. I never did.

For over a decade my actual job was the money — real estate: the returns, the asset management, answering to the investors behind each building. Residential blocks, offices, shopping centres, right across Europe. But how each one looked, felt and worked was the part I could never leave alone. Most people treat those as two different jobs. They aren’t — a building people love is a building that performs. Beautiful was never the enemy of the numbers; it was how you made them. Thousands of buildings, every budget going. You learn how people actually live. You also learn, fast, that beautiful and expensive have far less to do with each other than anyone thinks.

That’s the part I’ll happily argue at dinner. The most beautiful room is rarely the priciest one — it’s the considered one. Texture on texture, something old beside something new, a colour that shouldn’t work and completely does. The small things given a place to belong: a stack of books, a tray, one low lamp instead of the overhead glare. The details you feel in a very good hotel and can never quite name at home. I think of it the way I think of getting dressed — it’s never the most expensive thing that makes the outfit, it’s how it’s put together.

And no — you don’t have to give any of it up just because life got busy. A calm, beautiful room that takes it all in its stride. A rented flat that finally feels like yours. A linen sofa that takes the dog and the toddler in its stride, and still looks the part. I’ve done all of it. Most of the rules people think they’re stuck with were never really rules.

The only true catch is time — the hundreds of hours it takes to find the right pieces across Europe, to know what to spend on and what to leave alone, to see the whole room before a single thing is bought. Happily, that’s my favourite part. So at ORELA, I do the looking, the weighing, the hundred small decisions — and hand you back a room that feels like it was always yours.

Camilla