How To Furnish A Small Living Space

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It's my utmost belief that even the smallest space can be impeccably stylish. You do not need to own a mansion to create a glorious living space - which is lucky as apparently the average size of a family home in the UK has shrunk by two square metres over the past 10 years. If you rent, chances are that you are currently renting or have rented a flat in a converted property that was once a whole house? If you own your own place, let me guess that you shed a little tear when you saw the average cost of 'price per square metre' of a home in your area, and you had to purchase a smaller space than you had origionally intended?

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The New Tom Dixon Collection For Autumn/Winter 2017

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Last week was the press preview for Tom Dixon's new collection for Autumn/Winter 2017. If you follow me on Instagram stories you'll know I attend a ton of press previews for new interior items - so what makes this one so special? The answer to that is that Tom Dixon is THE pioneer in design for the home. You know whatever he does everyone else will follow. What is seen at this collection will filter down to high street home ware a short while later. When he started doing his Oil Slick range, the following season there were oil slick bowls and vases and plates; and lets not even start on 'copper'. His round copper pendant lights indisputably started the trend for copper in interiors.

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How To Put Up Wallpaper: A Simple & Easy Guide

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It was only a short while ago that I was a wallpaper neophyte. Even though I jump into pretty much all DIY with both feet, eager and willing to giving whatever it is a go, with wallpaper it just did not appeal. Mixing the paste, matching the pattern, not covering the light switch - it all seemed so stressful. Yet when I decided that I wanted to wallpaper my bathroom, enough was enough, I needed to bite the bullet and learn how to do it. Turns out it wasn't as bad or as stressful as I had expected after all! Since then I've done a bit more wallpapering and learnt what you have to do and where you can cut corners, so to speak.

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Celebrating #britishflowersweek: How to make hand-tied bouquets and other DIY floral displays for your home

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This week is British Flowers Week - but did you know only 10% of flowers sold in Britain are grown here? To highlight this fact, and to celebrate our home-grown flowers and foliage, New Covent Garden Flower Market launched British Flowers Week in 2013 to promote British flowers, their growers and the independent florists working with them. One of those independent florists is Agent F, whose bouquets are a riot of colour and who I first met just before Xmas when I made a festive table centrepiece with them.

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My Guest Room Make Over Ideas + How To Use Inspirational Interiors To Decide On Decor In Your Own Home

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The guest room in our house has been somewhat neglected compared to the other rooms. The furniture that has been in there the past couple of years since we moved in was furniture from our old house that I didn't really like anymore. The sofa bed had seen better days and was on its last legs. This room has been on the re-do list for ages, but I was really struggling trying to decide what design would suit the room best.

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Business Spotlight On: Sweetpea & Willow

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If you are a regular interior blog reader, you may have come across the name Sweetpea & Willow before. The owner of the furniture and accessories boutique, Jacquie, runs the award-winning Sweetpea & Willow blog 'Willow's Wardrobe,' alongside running the business with her husband Matt. Even though I'd often perused all the beautiful products Sweetpea & Willow sell online, I'd never actually visited their much talked about showroom. When Jacquie invited me down to have a proper look at all their products on display last week, I was so not prepared for what I saw when I visited!

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Save Money And Add Character In Your Bathroom By Using Vintage Furniture As A Basin Stand

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Bathroom design, unless you have a very large budget, can often be uninspiring. It's very easy to fall into the trap of wanting clean lines and muted neutrals, because we tend to want bathrooms as sanitary, bright spaces. Smaller bathrooms can often end up being completely tiled in one plain design; while bathroom fixtures and fittings are often brought matching each other and therefore lead to a dull & flat space. One great and very cheap way to create an interesting and attractive bathroom is to DIY your own basin stand with vintage furniture.

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Clerkenwell Design Week 2017: My Best Bits Round Up!

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This week is Clerkenwell Design Week, a kind of urban festival if you will for lovers of interiors and design in general. The creative part of London that is Clerkenwell is host to CDW, which houses over 200 international brands within 7 exhibition venues, and more than 90 showrooms (generally furniture and design shops within the Clerkenwell grid).

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Why I Love Simple Plug-In Sconce Wall Lights (And What To Do If You Hate The Cable)

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Wall lights seem to be a bit of a controversial issue - people either love them or hate them. For some, they are a stylish way to add lighting in a room. For others, wall lights are super-dated, and ceiling lights with floor & table lights for atmospheric lighting are preferred. For me personally, I love wall lights. The space-saving properties of them alone make them a winner in my book. By having a wall light as opposed to a lamp on my bedside table, I have more space for magazines / flowers / half-drunk cups of tea and so forth. I think they also can add a real feature to a wall, the same as an artwork or styled shelf can. A beautiful wall light will create a focal point.

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Celebrating Chelsea Flower Show 2017 with pretty pastel paint colours inspired by flowers

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Chelsea Flower Show 2017 begins on the 23rd of May. The annual flower show is always a highlight for me as I find it a huge source of inspiration. I do not visit it every year, but I always absorb myself in the TV coverage to find out what's the new 'it' flower for 2017, and who has designed the best show-garden.

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Get Inspiration For Your Own Home From The Interior Sets At Grand Designs Live

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This week I popped along to the Grand Designs Live exhibition at London's GIGANTIC ExCeL Convention Centre (seriously, I got lost in the building, wandering into another exhibition by mistake). Even though it would be amazing to build my own home, I'm quite happy in the already-built home I live in, so it was interiors rather than architecture that I was after at the show.

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From Country Style To Contemporary - How To Transform A Kitchen

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We all know that kitchens are the area of the home that can suck away all our hard-earned cash. The units, worktops, fixtures and fittings - all these things often cost a lot of money. I know people who have been put off purchasing a home as the kitchen has not been to their taste or style, and they can't afford to also purchase a sleek, shiny new kitchen on top of the property price.

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Celebrating London Craft Week 2017: Upholstery With Shoreditch Design Rooms

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Next week (from May 3rd - 7th, 2017) is London Craft Week. Now in its third year, this annual event is all about celebrating creativity and craftsmanship, with 230 events happening over the space of the week in the city. Last week I attended one of these events, the launch party for Heal's Modern Craft Market, and instantly navigated towards the stand hosted by Shoreditch Design Rooms. Based in East London, Shoreditch Design Rooms are successful upholsterers who offer training classes to the public ranging from leisure classes (where you can work on your own piece of furniture), to accredited courses for a diploma qualification in upholstery.

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Creating Bespoke Interiors On A Budget - Being A Guest Speaker At The Ideal Home Show In London!

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Since starting this blog I've been able to do some seriously cool stuff. It has also opened up a number of opportunities for me career-wise that I would NEVER have been given without it. However, the email that dropped in my inbox on one of the last days of February really had me spluttering out my cup of tea. It was from the PR people behind the Ideal Home Show, asking me to give them a call in regards to doing a couple of presentations on the Interior Styling Stage at the event towards the end of March.

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Before & After: How I Designed The Shared Home Office

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I'm so happy to be able to finally reveal to you the home office revamp that I have been working on since the start of the year! As I've mentioned in previous posts, me and my husband share this work space in our home and it just wasn't working for either of us. It was the only room in the house that remained decorated by the previous owners, and although the statement red chimney breast and biscuit coloured walls were inoffensive, they weren't exactly great either. Our artwork had been randomly hung all over the place just on the hooks left by the old owners; and with me and my husband working daily in this room, storage was a problem. As you can see in the pictures below, there was no-where to put anything and stuff had just started to build up until it was a TOTAL mess.

BEFORE:

Before: biscuit walls and beige curtains, art hung randomly, stuff EVERYWHERE!

Before: biscuit walls and beige curtains, art hung randomly, stuff EVERYWHERE!

Together with my husband we agreed on the below mood-board. The brief was a contemporary, masculine room which was also appealing to me. We already owned the walnut desk, plain rug and Ellie Vandoorne artwork (available from Rise Art - an ace online art marketplace selecting emerging and established artists), so we decided to choose colours that complemented these existing pieces.

The agreed final mood board for the room.

The agreed final mood board for the room.

My husband really likes blue, so I decided to paint the chimney breast and the opposite wall in 'Railings' by Farrow & Ball. I'd been wanting to use darker colours in the home for a long time, so this was the perfect opportunity to use this dark navy blue hue. The colour on the chimney breast really made the Ellie Vandoorne artwork pop with its yellow background. While on the opposite wall, it was used as a background for a gallery wall to display all the artwork we wanted up in the room in a coherent manner (unlike how they were randomly hung before).

AFTER:

The colour on these walls is 'Railings' by Farrow & Ball. This is the Modular set with ash base from LSA International.

The colour on these walls is 'Railings' by Farrow & Ball. This is the Modular set with ash base from LSA International.

I did not want the room to be completely dark, preferring the chimney breast and gallery wall to be a 'feature', rather than blending in with all one colour. Instead, I painted the far end wall where the desk was placed in 'Clunch' by Farrow & Ball, which is a white that I prefer to others as in our house it always comes across more as a soft grey, rather than a yellow-white.

In the small space that existed on this end wall, I placed a really cheap shelf ladder that I also painted in Railings to blend in. On the shelves I put wire storage baskets for all my paint samples and documents to be tidily contained in one area! To DIY this gold mesh wire notice board click here.

These bowls with beech handles are part of the Disc Collection by LSA International.

These bowls with beech handles are part of the Disc Collection by LSA International.

In the shelving alcove I pasted in this Cole & Son Hicks Hexagon Wallpaper. This created an extra dimension in the room, as well as being a cheaper way to introduce designer wallpaper as this alcove used less than one roll. The black/gold/white colours of the paper tied in with the Railings, Clunch and gold notice board in the room.

With the left over Hicks Hexagon I covered old filing boxes and magazine holders that were going to be used in the room, to keep the room consistent.

Another budget DIY that I carried out to keep costs down was to dye the beige curtains with fabric dye. The existing curtains were in absolutely fine condition, they were just beige and didn't match the new decor. Ideally, I'd have opted for thick, opulent, dark velvet curtains, but I couldn't spend that sort of money when I had perfectly good quality lined curtains in the room. Instead, I brought some navy fabric dye from Hobbycraft and dyed the beige curtains dark blue. The curtains had a polyester stripe in the pattern which did not dye, but the cotton part and the lining dyed perfectly! I was really happy with the outcome.

This is the Axis Vase Trio with Ash Base by LSA International that I am using to store my multitude of gold paperclips!

This is the Axis Vase Trio with Ash Base by LSA International that I am using to store my multitude of gold paperclips!

To keep the room masculine, I used a lot of stationary containers by LSA International made of material such as glass, leather and wood. These LSA pieces not only look beautiful to be on display, but are totally practical! I found that by using 'display-worthy' storage on shelving units, you could fit a lot more in one place and it looked tidy and stylish, not chaotic and cramped!

Amazingly, me and my husband now have a work room which suits both our tastes! Craft items co-exist with music equipment, and thanks to choosing the right pieces it all works.

What do you think of our new he-she office? Leave your comments below!

* Huge thank you to Farrow & Ball, Cole & Son, LSA International, Rise Art and Sainsbury's who gifted items featured in this post. Please note that this post also contains some affiliate links, which basically means if you shop this look via this post I'll get a small commission.

The Top 5 Finishing Touches That My Home Would Not Be Complete Without

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A well designed room really comes down to the finishing touches. Those last pieces that pull the whole look together. If you do not add in finishing touches, a room will lack depth, texture, and that 'cosy' feeling will just be absent. I've therefore listed my top five finishing touches below for you that my home would just not be complete without!

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Make this Decorative DIY Feather Wall Hanging

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The lovely ladies behind MiaFleur recently provided some gorgeous gold champagne flutes for an Instagram competition that I wanted to run in celebration of my blog turning a whole year old! I definitely owed them one, so when they challenged me to a guest post for them on a DIY feather wall hanging, how could I refuse?

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Create A Pretty Easter Display With Painted Branches & Hanging John Lewis Decorations

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The Easter Bank Holiday falls three weeks later than last year for 2017, so its after the school holidays. For those of you with children to entertain, or for those of you with dogs to walk, I thought I'd share with you my 'Easy Easter Tree'. This tree costs virtually nothing to make, but provides a beautiful focal point in your home over the Easter break. All you need is a bit of branch collecting and some left over white paint!

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