It is unimaginable to think of luxury and third-world poverty in the same brain space. Yet they have no problem coexisting together in the real world. Grouping things in certain buckets often tends to shed meaning otherwise invisible.

I once was asked if I do homes or luxury homes. What do you answer to that? To those that live in the homes lacking the prestigious social adjective, their homes never looked sub-par until the adjective came along. The presence of this 6-letter world in front of your home adds status and the lack of it strips your home of seemingly substantial worthiness.

For those who are grateful to be able to always have a place that they call home, it is important to acknowledge and understand that design has the power to shape how you connect to that home. Design is often such a misused word with too many options open to interpretation that rarely two people using it mean the same thing.

So I feel like, before continuing, I have to define how I plan to use it:

Design is that combination of elements, of walls, ceilings, floors, objects, textures, colours, light that form a mood that one can continuously experience.

From what you have covering your chair and the pillow on it, to what you touch with your hand on the coffee table, to what your gaze falls on as you look across the room is controllable and predictable and as such, it can create a certain kind of atmosphere.

Yet what is the hardest to get in the environment around you is an intrinsic meaning. If you have close to you the things that matter to you, that is a luxury that not only measures up to social standards but surpasses it.

If you can justify what you have and give it the weight of culture, ecological responsibility, family values and the sheer pleasure of living, who is to say that this is not luxury? In a world where so many of us complain about the lack of meaningful experiences, it is time to rethink what luxury is.