'Nicholas' gives me the creeps big time, but this Reddit guy's analysis is as bad as Nicholas's plummy, post-lobotomy accent. Fancy as Nicholas would like to be, he doesn't purport to be from any background but a humble one. And he doesn't purport to live in 'some mansion on the moors it seems.' He lives (when I last paid attention) in a small basement flat in a New Town, Edinburgh, or an adjacent neighborhood on that northwest sector of the historic city.
[quote]He wants to look like he's got money and a mansion and is an international home designer but it appears he is actually just the son of a pretty well off family (like parents are maybe a doctor or lawyer) and it affords him the ability to travel internationally to Dubai...He says he designs home but posts not even a vague portfolio online though he claims he's been doing this for nearly a decade. But no proof, nothing to show he actually designs. Just photos of him abroad...I think he's got money but no direction and someone recommended he get into design
Obviously the guy is a complete fabrication. He's only an expert because he calls himself one. Nobody else could do so without breaking up in laughter. Of course he has no portfolio, he just wildly extrapolates an exchange of Instagram likes follower from Wales and another from an American who has a house in France as 'international clients..'
The Reddit investigator/exposer of truths doesn't have a clue about how it is that young-ish men fund their travels to exotic Dubai. Even pudgy dumplings like this one who does dress like a 55-year-old Sebastian Flyte might have done for tennis can find their way there now and again ('a lid for every pot'), but it usually involves a rimchair, and very fucking rarely family money.
If there were family money, would he have such a dodgy little flat, and would he move around the same lamp to appear and bits of furniture in three or four different locations within the same 'photo shoot' with his own mobile? He's thrifty to a fault because he's poor as piss. His travels, fancy and otherwise, are at the invitation of others. He can barely spring for a scone and a tea in the carriage house of some National Trust house. Once he merely described the Trust property's tearoom in passing, saying that the patrons on the other side of the French doors seemed to be having a lovely time with their lovely sandwiches and lovey tea. And he can be pulling in much dosh from those sad and tedious testimonials to the wonders of some beauty product, not when his face always looks like he'ß licked the inside of a Vaseline jar or a bag of greasy crisps.
Nicholas, if that's indeed his name, wouldn't be the first to fake it to make it as an 'expert' on manners. Unfortunately for him, he's not intelligent enough, nor clever enough to be even the least bit inclined to anything about design and design history, about art and art history, about antiques, about the complicated factors that shaped tea rituals. He's just learned a very few, very rudimentary things and seems happy enough at that. Why bother to actually be an expert, or be able to fake it with some aplomb, but it's as if he read a New York Times article 'Here Are 5 Takeaways on Faking a Posh Act.'
It doesn't take an ace internet sleuth to see that Nicholas is out of his depth, that he doesn't have a design background nor a good self-taught designer, nor does he have a portfolio of international or even county clients, nor is he a design historian, nor a tastemaker, nor an 'influencer,' nor the son of well-off doctors and lawyers. He's told us some of these things himself, and the rest is obvious.
The Reddit sleuth is no more a good sleuth than Nicholas is a good designer.
