Design Tips

Tips and tricks to help you with your own home decor

Using texture to add interest and warmth to your home

I don’t know whether it’s the promise of lighter, brighter, summer days or just too much time spent browsing Pinterest during lockdown (probably the latter!), but I’m seriously lusting after some bright and airy North American modern vintage style homes at the moment. I love their clean, considered design, rustic warmth and cosy textures – it just seems to work.

But why exactly does it work? Well, one word is important here – TEXTURE. An interior that is carefully layered up with different textures and finishes is immediately more inviting, more pulled together and basically more aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

However, layering your interior with texture and pattern is not always easy to get right, so I’ve pinpointed some key elements you need to consider in order to perfect this interior decor trick in your own home.

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Make your home bright & cosy during a British summer

So, summer’s here and we’ve swapped out the cosy woollen blankets for lightweight linens, stashed our candles in a drawer somewhere and rid the entire house of fairy lights… right? Well, actually, not quite…

The problem is, for those of us who live in Britain and Ireland, summer rarely arrives in all its sunshine-y, blisteringly hot glory. Most years it’s a succession of rainy or cloudy days, interspersed with the odd period of warmth. However, just because the heating’s gone back on, it doesn’t necessarily mean we want to curl up and hibernate under a furry throw once again. (Ok, there are possibly exceptions to this rule!)

It’s easy to adopt the Danish concept of hygge all winter long when we can light the fire and wrap up, however on a dreary summer’s day (and yes, we all know how depressingly common those are), how do we create a bright and cosy feeling when it’s not that cold outside, just grey and wet? Here are a few tips you can try at home to help lift the spirits when you’re shut up indoors on a rainy summer weekend…

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Decor tips for a teen girl’s bedroom

I recently took it upon myself to revamp my eldest daughter’s bedroom. We gave her room an express makeover when we first moved house over three years ago, but I recently decided to remove some old wallpaper, meaning it all needed skimmed and repainted again.

This time around, however, my 12 year old wanted a say in her bedroom’s design and I suppose, why not? She’s the one who has to spend most of her time there, so it needs to be a space she can relax and feel comfortable in.

Updating older children’s and teenagers’ bedrooms is a tricky task, as you want the room to ‘grow’ with the child so that you’re not faced with the ongoing expense of redecorating it every couple of years. We all know teen girls can be incredibly fickle in their tastes, so getting it right from the outset is no mean feat! So… if you’re planning a teenage girl’s room, I thought I would share some styling tips with you to help you along the way to bedroom perfection!

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Sustainable home decor ideas

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the current world of ‘fast fashion’ that we live in and its effect on the environment. Clothes and accessories have become cheaper than ever before, both in terms of quality and price, however serious environmental issues such as water pollution, toxic chemical leakage and textile waste have become the inevitable consequence of the instant fashion fix we’re all after.

And it’s not only in the fashion world. The interiors industry looks to be following suit, with unethical furniture manufactured from illegal timber, disposable homeware items and cheaply produced textiles providing us the opportunity to update our homes at a fraction of the price, and therefore, more frequently, too.

We’re all guilty of it. Updating our sofa with a cheap cushion cover picked up at the supermarket or opting for that replica designer chair to save ourselves a few pounds and make an instant, trendy update to our home. It’s very hard not to be tempted by the sheer amount of home accessories on offer on the High Street, in our supermarkets, even the discount stores are replicating designer looks for pennies. The result is a build up of clutter that ends up in our ever growing refuse heap and most of it not biodegradable, either.

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Simple ways to uplift a decor scheme

It’s at this time of year, when the days are long and the light is bright, that we have the energy and motivation to ‘get things done’. Whether it’s getting out into the garden to do a tidy up or putting aside a weekend to repaint the downstairs loo, you can rest assured that homes and gardens across the country are being deep cleaned, refreshed and revived.

Redecorating a room in the home can be a costly affair, especially when we waste money trying (and failing) to get it right. Perhaps the overall effect is lacking in something, but you don’t know what? Often, despite having spent hours trawling through images on Pinterest to try to nail a certain look, you can be left feeling confused and unsure in which direction a decor scheme is going, so I thought I’d give you a few straightforward ideas on how you can successfully complete a decor scheme or add a little personality to it.

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Why you need to embrace ‘hygge’ at home this January

At the turn of the New Year, it can be a struggle to make our homes feel cosy once the twinkly lights and Christmas decorations have been taken down. For many of us, the January home can feel bare, a little empty and uninviting, yet at this deepest stage of midwinter, it’s more important than ever to create a warming, welcoming atmosphere in the home.

Embracing a little ‘hygge’ in our everyday lives does wonders for the soul, whilst encouraging us to huddle down and embrace, rather than fight, these sometimes murky and cold January days. It’s about making time for yourself, savouring something as simple as wrapping your hands around your early morning coffee, a quiet moment with a book, candlelight in the evening, a shared meal with friends and family, a long walk in the woods, wrapping up in a blanket by the fire… these are all feel-good moments, rituals and activities that are in everyone’s everyday, but we often take them for granted, preferring to focus on the bad weather, the cold evenings, the grey skies of January…

Making small changes at home can help ease your path through these long winter weeks, so whilst trying to create a hygge-positive ambience in my own home, I wanted to share with you some simple ways you too can benefit from this Danish way of living. To help me along, I have chosen a selection of pieces from locally-based company Murmur. Designed in-house at their Northern Irish studio, Murmur’s products and patterns are influenced by the simple aesthetics of Scandinavian and Japanese design. The brand’s relaxed, informal style, where every product works in harmony with the next, is built upon a design ethos whereby simple designs and textured finishes translate into beautiful, practical pieces that can be enjoyed and used in the everyday; a key element in the concept of hygge.

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Maximising on the Light in your Home this Winter

December through to February really are the deepest, darkest of winter months, and although December is made bearable by the warming glow of Christmas, January and February can be difficult months to get through, with their dark mornings and long, cold nights making it harder to feel our get up and go.

Light is soothing for our souls and whether we’re staying cosy inside with our twinkly lights all lit or out taking in the crisp, fresh air, we need it to make us feel better during the long winter weeks. It’s also beneficial for our health, as the lack of sunlight means that almost 7% of the UK population reportedly suffer from SAD or Seasonal Affective Disorder during the winter months. However, the one benefit of winter light is that it can be very bright and clear, so the trick is to maximise on that when preparing our homes for these darker months.

Thankfully, there are a few simple changes you can make in your home that will ensure you reap the benefits of the limited natural light at this time of year and ultimately improve your mood and your general happiness. Here are 5 things to start you off.

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The best dark blue paint colours

As a follow up to my last post on ways to use indigo blue in your home, I want to show you what I believe are the best dark blue paint colours on the market. Dark blue is a popular colour choice at the moment, especially now that winter us upon us and we feel the need to turn the lights down low and hibernate. It is such a cosy, cocooning, yet also elegant colour, whether it’s an entire room cloaked in its velvety hues or simply one wall.

With all the different ranges of paint on the market today, it can be difficult to find the right colour for your particular home, so here’s my pick of the best dark blue paints out there and how they can work throughout different lights and times of day.

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How to Solve Interior Decor Dilemmas with Plants

It was when I recently caught myself standing at a garden centre checkout with a Maidenhair Fern proudly packed into my basket, that I realised just how much of a plant ‘obsession’ I have developed in the past year. Even as little as two years ago, I would not have been caught dead purchasing such an old-fashioned plant – the Maidenhair Fern, with its delicate showers of lacework leaves suspended from long, spindly stems, was the plant of choice for my grandmother’s generation, often found sitting on a bathroom window ledge or hall console table. It was not the choice of interior accessory that someone remotely youthful (even as remotely as I) would contemplate as a must-have in their home… and yet, here I am, pleased as punch with this most recent addition to my growing plant family.

Greenery of all shapes and sizes is really in the interior spotlight just now. In fact, no room scheme is complete without a plant tucked in there somewhere, so as someone who is firmly in Team Green, I wanted to show you some ways you can use plants in your own home to solve a common interior decor dilemma or simply to complete a room scheme.

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Win at Sleeping with Ikea: Reaping the Benefits of Better Sleep

If you’ve been following the blog lately, you’ll know that over the past few weeks we’ve had the amazing opportunity of working with IKEA on their ‘Win at Sleeping’ campaign, which runs until the end of March.

The campaign is aimed at improving the nation’s quality of sleep by encouraging us all to make a few small changes to how we prepare for sleep. This can be anything from creating a calm, cosy and restful bedtime environment to adjusting our personal sleeping habits to ensure a full and undisturbed night’s slumber.

I met with IKEA back in February to discuss my own family’s sleep issues and they were able to recommend some strategies and products for us to try, with a view to helping us improve on several sleep-related areas. If you’d like to see the products we chose to try out, you can read up about it here!

Now that we’ve been using the products for a month, I wanted to update you on how we’ve got on, as well as take a quick look at some other IKEA products you might want to consider trying out yourself.

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