In my 20s, I once moved in with a girl who had a fairly definite idea about interior design. From the moment I walked in the door, I knew we were a match made in hell.
It wasn't so much the floral sofa, or the baby pink carpet. I could even have survived the cutesy-pie collection of Cabbage Patch Dolls propped up on the bed, along with enough frilly cushions to build a softly, softly version of the Great Wall.
No, it was the art. My girlfriend loved the work of the late New York photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, specifically his black and white studies of full frontal naked men.
Now, I appreciate the human form as much as anybody, and I can even recognise an aesthetically pleasing male body. But that doesn't mean I want them plastered all over my living room, bedroom and even bathroom walls.
Eventually, I moved out and, as reaction to my previous digs, my new flat was so macho it was like the domestic equivalent of Old Spice cologne: big black sofas, dark timber panelling, lots of hi-fi equipment, and walls adorned with photographs of women and cars.
Thankfully, there's a happy medium, a place where just enough of the girliness is removed from an interior, to make a home liveable for a man. We're talking about the gender-neutral abode.
Some interior design elements such as colour are inherently masculine and some feminine. 'It's in our genes,' says psychologist Dr John Irvine. 'We make an interpretation of a colour, based on how it makes us feel. And I think that this is innate in our visual-processing system. There's also the element of imprinting. For instance, little girls are dressed in pink from the day they are born.'
