Hugo Marchetti

Hugo Marchetti trained as an architectural historian and spent ten years working in museums before he started writing for general audiences. He remains convinced that the history of domestic interiors is one of the most illuminating histories there is - it tells you exactly what people valued, feared, aspired to, and tried to hide.

He grew up in a Federation-style house in Melbourne's inner north that his parents were slowly, unintentionally ruining with modernisation. The hallway coving was replaced with a flat ceiling. The fireplaces were bricked up. The kitchen was extended into what had been a sunroom. Hugo watched all of this with a child's mixture of helplessness and fascination, and it made him someone who always wants to know what a house used to be.

His writing for The Home Almanac tends to pick up a single domestic element - a dado rail, a picture rail, a sash window - and trace its history from origin through decline and revival. He is interested in the gap between what something was designed to do and what it has come to mean culturally, and in the way that home fashion operates on very long cycles that we tend to notice only in retrospect.

Hugo has written for The Monthly, Architecture Australia, and Dezeen. He lives in a late Victorian terrace in Fitzroy that he has been very careful not to renovate.