Emma Thomas is the Style Editor at Homes & Gardens and Livingetc magazines, looking after the decorating features. Before joining Homes & Gardens in 2014, Emma worked for over 25 years mainly as a freelance interior stylist and art director producing photo shoots for many editorial titles and commercial clients, including Elle Decoration, Livingetc (she worked on the launch issue back in 1998!), Habitat and The White Company, to name but a few. As well as overseeing and art directing the original photography we produce, Emma also leads on many of the decorating and design ideas and features you see in print and online.

When Emma started out as an interiors stylist, the industry used polaroids and film in the production of shoots. There was no digital world, no websites, no mobile phones, no social media… Sourcing products for features and photography involved a great deal of walking the streets, searching for inspiration ‘in real life’ (there was no online world for research). Looking through art books and taking photographs with a camera for reference images. Her film processing bill at Snappy Snaps was enormous. And sending faxes to arrange press loans for photography (rather than the now much more convenient emails, which were not even a thing yet back then). How things have changed in the last 20 years.