Spring in your Step

Now that the clocks have gone forward, and even though as I write this Cambridge is wet and miserable, I really do feel like its springtime. The change of season marks the time for the big annual clean, and while this tends to be a task that starts with high hopes and ends in tears, there can be some fun ways to carry out the tradition. Spring cleaning is good opportunity to think about small ways you can keep your home feeling a little more orgainsed and tidy all year round. If you’re not quite ready to tackle the big jobs yet, take a look at some of these little ways to improve your home.

Sienna Shelf from Anthropologie

If like me you don’t have much surface space in your kitchen, it’s a chance to utilise your walls and even create a feature out of some pretty shelving. These Sienna Shelves from Anthropologie have a great, simple style to them making them adaptable to all kinds of kitchens. Keep the tiered look or use two of the same sizes as a handy storage space for spices, utensils or any cooking items that need to be within reach at all times. By de-cluttering your surfaces, your kitchen space will not only look better but will make every day cleaning a much simpler task; plus with the addition of a little plant or an ornate accessory on the shelf, you can create a beautiful feature in your kitchen.

I’ve never been one for having my spices on display, mainly because the lack room, but also because more often than not, the bottles they come in are rather unsightly. Over the top branding and big font titles can ruin a beautifully thought-out kitchen, so people often opt for hiding the spices away. If you don’t have much storage space, or want to try something different, finding fun replacements for your branded spice jars can be a stylish solution. Something like a range of these adorable little bottles from The Recycled Glassware Company. They are the perfect size for spices, and come in a range of shapes to help you organise (one shape for one cuisine for example), all you need is to add a label and you’ve created a colourful and elegant feature for your shelving.

10cm Glass Bottle from The Recycled Glassware Company

11cm Glass Bottle from The Recycled Glassware Company

If you really can’t avoid using your surfaces, make sure that you put your items into something pretty. You can find a whole range of antique and vintage utensil pots on eBay or Etsy these days, but if you want to go for something more modern, there are some lovely designs out there as well. This marble style utensil holder from J by Jasper Conran is a simple but elegant way to store your pieces.

White Marble Utensil Holder from J by Jasper Conran at Debenhams

An organised hallway can be the key to making sure your morning routine goes smoothly. Making sure everyday essentials like your keys, gloves, shoes, purse and anything else have their own permanent place means never having to look for anything again. For your keys if there are a few members in the household you may want to choose something a little bigger like a tray, but if it’s just one or two of you, a bowl for your keys will do nicely. I love this bowl from Feather & Marble, its uneven shape and little feet give it some great features, making it a stylish place to keep your keys.

Nordic Sand Bowls from Feather & Marble

A good, stylish shoe rack really helps to not only tidy away your shoes, but also set the tone for the rest of the home. If you’ve got the room, a lovely shoe bench will help transform your hallway, but if it’s a bit of tight squeeze a well-made rack can do wonders. This piece from A Place for Everything has interesting angles and shapes, perfect for a contemporarily styled room.

Wooden Ladder Wide from A Place for Everything

An ample set of hooks is of course the best way to make sure that you keep your coats together and organised. If you’re short on wall space, layering the hooks for coats and bags is a good way to save some room, but if you can a few rails can be a great way to create a system for your coats; perhaps one rail per person or one rail per season, whatever works for you. This antique style rail from Grace & Glory is a lovely, decorative way to store your coats.

Iron Hook Rail from Grace & Glory

The bathroom is a space where I’m constantly searching for storage solutions and places to keep things that still remain within suitable in reach. A bath caddy is a great way to take up space in the air and not the floor; with different levels you can easily arrange your own personal system. This wooden caddy with white shelving from Futon Company is an amenable design for all kinds of bathrooms and comes in different sizes to suit your needs.

Bath Caddy from Futon Company

I can never speak too highly of trays, they are prefect for when you want to organise things into groups but don’t want them packed away out of sight in a box. I use trays on my bedside table, in the bathroom and at my dresser to give everything a specific location. It stops your surfaces getting cluttered and products being spread out, plus the trays themselves can be a really nice feature to add to a display. You can go for any shape, size or colour to suit your needs, I like this large marble tray from HomeArama for its size and adaptable style.

Rectangular Bahne Marble Tray in White from HomeArama

Keep your cleaning supplies somewhere are a little more tasteful with something like this Utility Bucket from Garden Trading. It’s easy to tuck away in a small spot behind the loo or in the cupboard to help keep up the aesthetic of the room, or if your using the same supplies for different parts of the home it’ll save you from lugging around an armful of products every time you want to clean.

Utility Bucket in Chalk from Garden Trading

Practical solutions made pretty, there are all sorts of ways to give your home that extra touch of organisation and style, that’ll help you keep a tidier, beautiful home.

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Bathe in the Glory

The bathroom is an essential part of any home, and a great place to insert some thoughtful styling. Whether it needs to be a place to relax or to have a sense of organisation, or be a room where you can let your creativity run a little wild, designing a bathroom that works in sync with your personality and needs means making the most out of the functional space. You may have just designed your dream bathroom and are now looking for those finishing touches to make it feel like your own space, or perhaps you’re like me who’s about to move into a house with a less than desirable bathroom and are in desperate need of accessories to improve the situation! There are some interesting ways to utilise your bathroom space and turn it into something of a sanctuary.

Bathroom Decorated in Plants found on Pinterest by user Katy101

For me the bathroom is a great place to keep plants, all that oxygen in the morning has got to be good for you, right? This image gives me all the incentive I need for a beautiful, overflowing plant haven. If you’re fully willing to participate in the plant-bathroom combo but are lacking some much needed space, a little window sill full of foliage can do the job nicely. I love this image below and how the green of the plants brings out the colour in the tiles, giving a warm welcoming feel to the space.

An Array of Pots on a Window Sill by Design Sponge via Pinterest

To recreate some of these looks you’ll need some gorgeous pots and planters (and of course the plants too!) Maison du Monde have a nice selection of hanging planters, an interesting way to display your plants, it’s also great to introduce more plants to your bathroom without taking up a lot of floor or wall space.

Selection of Hanging Pots from Maison du Monde

For a natural feeling to your pots, this earthenware collection by The White Company are a great range of colours and textures, as well as size, making them perfect for filling up with a whole variety of plants and flowers for your bathroom. They’ll sit nicely on a window sill or if you have the floor space, arranging some on the floor, stools and surfaces to create mixture of heights will give a lovely overall look.

Earthenware Collection from The White Company

Storage is a must-have in a bathroom, whether or not you have a lot of room to play with, there are ways to find space even when you thought you had none. If you can’t add any permanent solutions to your bathroom, you’ll be able to find a great range of non-permanent ideas to accommodate your needs. If you live in a rented house, and don’t have the option of changing your bathroom to your own style, you can use your storage to do this. This shelving unit from Ikea is simple and contemporary, and can let your accessories do all the talking. It’s an easy item to adapt to any style that your bathroom may already be designed in.

Molgar Shelving from Ikea via Pinterest

This glass cabinet is a great piece to have if you’ve got some room. It looks more like a display case than an ordinary bathroom cabinet, making a feature in the room, and allowing you show off your ornaments and accessories.

Bathroom Cabinet from Katie Hackworth via Pinterest

If you are really lacking in space, a small trolley with a few shelves is a sweet idea. This little number from Baileys lends itself to the industrial style, and would look great with a few plants hanging over the edge.

‘Work in Progress Trolley’ from Baileys Home and Garden

 

Wire Basket Storage from Decorating Your Small Space via Pinterest

I love the use of these wire baskets in this image, they’re a contemporary version of the woven basket that you so often find in a bathroom. They keep the space feeling light, whilst still being very useful. These copper versions from Habitat have a great shape and will keep your things organised in style.

‘Clissold Wire Baskets’ from Habitat

Another quick way to add some personality, as well as some organisation, is with a few trays, to help keep your products and toiletries at bay. I love this hexagonal wooden tray, it works as a blank canvas to show off any pretty toiletries or perfumes you might have.

Bathroom Tray from Kate Lavie via Pinterest

This metal tray from H&M Home is so sweet and has some lovely detailing in the border. A few of them would look great lined up on a shelf of a window sill with a few vases of flowers between each one or at the end.

Metal Tray by H&M Home

Accessorising your bathroom is a lovely way to give your space that extra added boost of style. It allows you to redecorate your bathroom even if you can’t really redecorate, turning the room into your own, individual space where you can really make your mark.

 

 

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The Downstairs Loo

The downstairs loo is often the smallest room in any given house; tucked away by the front door or under the stairs, it’s all too often a space that goes a little neglected. Due to the general size of downstairs bathrooms, there is sometimes a hesitancy when it comes to decorating, with people believing that a small space cannot take on a heavy design scheme. However, I believe that the downstairs loo is the perfect place get a little creative when decorating it. Since you don’t tend to spend an excessive amount of time in the area, it can afford to be designed in a dramatic and exciting way. Once you have your basics, a toilet and sink, you can really begin to play around with the scheme, creating your own little paradise that you get to visit a few times a day.

To make a big statement in a small space you must first be decisive about which direction you want to take. Big features can look amazing but include too many and the space may become a little claustrophobic; here are a few ideas to get your thinking about how you could best design your downstairs loo.

When you have guests over for an evening, often the cloakroom will be the only bathroom they see, so creating a show stopping space will really make a strong design statement. Adding a patterned wallpaper to your loo can be a great way to give the space its own sense of character. On a recent project we decorated a client’s downstairs bathroom with this fun Manuel Canovas wallpaper, L’envol, which really gave a bland space a bit of impact.

‘Manuel Canovas L’envol Wallpaper’

There are so many styles you can opt for when it comes to choosing a wallpaper with flare for your loo. I’m head over heels for this flamingo print from 17 Patterns in pink. It’s a fantastically designed pattern that will look amazing in a downstairs loo, really giving the space a strong, bold look without being overbearing.

‘Flamingo in Pink Wallpaper’ from 17 Patterns

If you’re general aesthetic is more traditional, but still vibrant and colourful, a charming design like this Secret Garden pattern from Juliet Travers in midnight blue will help create a sweet but dramatic effect in the small space. The enchanting pattern teamed with the perfect lighting will create a fairy-tale like space.

‘Secret Garden Wallpaper’ from Juliet Travers

If you have the advantage of additional floor space on your side, a few plants strategically placed will really transform the place. If you have a few different surface heights, for example the floor a countertop and maybe some shelving, building your own small jungle of plants in different varieties and sizes will give a depth to your space, making a strong statement. When it comes to plants, of course it depends on your preference, but I believe more is more, and an overflow of bohemian style succulents, cacti’s and tropical pieces will really create an impact as opposed to one, lonely plant. If you’re short on sunlight, a quality faux plant can look just a good as the real thing, plus if you’re opting for a plant of the spikey variety there’s no chance of a painful accident! Abigail Ahern does some of the best artificial plants and flowers around, I love this array of cactus; they’ll really help to build up your plant portfolio.

‘Artificial Plant Selection’ from Abigail Ahern

A lack of floor or surface space shouldn’t deter you from adding some foliage to your bathroom. This wall garden from Rockett St George is a great example of how you can really get creative with plants in your home, and in your loo. Vertical gardens are a fantastic and innovative way of using your space selectively but still keeping a fresh and current aesthetic. You can buy a readymade one, real or faux, or if you want a project, creating you own one is the perfect way to include everything you want to and design with you own vision.

‘Faux Vertical Garden’ from Rockett St George

Sometime the downstairs loos is fitted into a rather tight space in the home, which might make you think that there is only room for the bare necessities, but you can always create more space with the use of carefully planned shelving. The trick is, in a small space making sure you put up your shelves somewhere where you won’t be knocking into. Once you have this figured out you can pick a shelf that matches your style and begin to fill it with a mix of ornamental and usual items, creating the perfect design balance. These industrial style shelves from Cox & Cox are sweet; their light design means that they won’t feel like they take up more room than they actually do, and the open nature of them makes them ideal for carrying objects of various heights and sizes.

‘Industrial Wood and Metal Shelves’ from Cox & Cox

Another shelving design I love is from Anthropologie, although these are slightly less functional then your conventional pieces, they are so pretty they’d make the perfect design feature. Often you find downstairs loos located under the stairs, these shelves would look lovely ascending in size order up a sloping wall.

‘Bloomland Shelving’ from Anthropologie

Whenever I think about inspirational bathrooms, I always think back to the beautiful image of the bathroom in Malpalquet House in East London, which I wrote a blog on some time ago. The bathroom wall was covered in pictures, frames and crucifixes, which overall created a beautiful effect.

‘Bathroom in Malpalquet House’

While you may not be able to squeeze all of this into you downstairs loo, you can certainly create something that’ll make an impact. If you have a generous amount of clear wall space, you can start to make you own mural of photo frames, prints, painting, mirrors and anything else you can think of. You may want to go down the nostalgia route and use family photos, or pick out arty prints, or even just create a miscellaneous haven. I love these Kiko frames from Nkuku, they come in a range of sizes so you can mix and match and find the perfect fit for your chosen display pieces. Unlike conventional frames, you can change what you want to go in the Kiko frame with ease and swap out or add in items as you find them. A downstairs loo wall covered in the frames will make a beautiful, comforting statement.

‘Kiko Frame’ from Nkuku

Using mirrors, in varying sizes and styles is also a good way to create an impact, and also provide a functional aspect to your bathroom. These hanging portrait mirrors from Nkuku are great to add to a collection of mirrors; with some being flatter, some more elaborate and some smaller or larger. A wall covered in mirrors or frames will automatically create an eye-catching feature in a small space.

‘Vintage Portrait Mirror’ from Nkuku

The downstairs loo is often a forgotten about space, or somewhere thought as only a functional room, but there are so many ways to great creative in a small space. It’s an area that you can confidently show off your style and really begin to design an area that’s a fun space.

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Cheap Thrills

A rather excruciating part of my job is that I am constantly surrounded by, or looking at beautiful home furnishings and accessories, that unfortunately I just cannot afford. Fortunately, the interior design world is also full of wonderful pieces and products that will only take a pinch out of your wallet, and here are ten gorgeous items all under £50.00 to get you inspired!

‘Metal Pillar Candle Holders’ from Cox & Cox (£9.50)

A quick way to decorate a table area or ledge is with a few decorative candle holders. They instantly add a touch of personality to a room, and will also add a sense of homeliness. You can either follow a theme with your candle holders, or integrate a whole range of styles, from bohemian to luxe to rustic. They will easily dress up a room, and because they are usually cheap you’ll be able to get your hands of a few pairs! I love these pillar style holders from Cox & Cox, they had a hint of rustic glamour to a setting, but if you really want to give a little pizazz to a table or mantelpiece, these leopards from Oka are sure to do the trick!

‘Pair of Lakadema Leopard Candle Holders’ from Oka (£44.00)

If you’ve bought a cheap, plain sofa there is an easy solution to make it feel fancy, and that’s cushions! There are masses of low cost cushions out there from plain, bright and patterned, but I always find that if you want to add a bit of luxury to a sofa a little texture and colour goes a long way. Sometimes you’ll luck out and the cushion pad will be included in the price, but if not you can usually get the pad for just a little extra, or if you take note of the sizing you’ll be able to find a cheaper counterpart online or in a large department store.

‘Mint Cushion’ from Touva (£25.00 with cushion pad)

This little minty cushion is so sweet and so stylish, and for just £25.00 including the pad it’s an absolute bargain! I love the tassels and the contrasting patterns on this Trivandrum cover from Oka, it’s a wonderful solution if your sofa is looking a little bare, and is in need of a revamp.

‘Trivandrum Cushion Cover’ from Oka (£25.00 with cushion pad)

A nice way to dress up your home is with a few flowers or plants, and for that you’ll need somewhere to put them. If you’re into your contemporary interiors, this half-moon planter may be right up your street. It’s full of character, and its copper tones will look perfect against a vibrant green plant.

‘Half Moon Plant Pot’ from Urban Outfitters (£14.00)

If you want something a bit simpler, that follows a more classic style, this glass cloche from Cox & Cox is so elegant, and just waiting for from wildflowers to be put in!

‘Glass Plant Cloche’ from Cox & Cox

When acquiring tableware, because you often need so much of it, it can be hard to find a gorgeous but inexpensive set. Instead, you might want to opt for getting some cheaper plain plates and dishes and then dressing up the table with some one-off extras. This striking jug from Trouva is amazing, and placed in the centre it’ll really stand out and make the whole table feel that extra bit special.

‘Faye Toogood Indigo Storm Jug’ from Touva (£29.95)

You can easily dress up your walls without spending too much money, a nice frame added to cheap print will really increase the overall quality, and some interesting wall lighting is a great way to add some character. I love this candle wall sconce from An Angel at my Table, the mirror panels offer an interesting design, and it’s perfect if you love a bit of bohemian style.

‘Refracting Mirrored Candle Sconce’ from Angel at my Table (£35.00)

Decorating your home with lovely but cheaper pieces don’t just have to be about knick-knacks, you can find some wonderful pieces for a small prices that can also serve a purpose. This suitcase self from Urban Outfitters is rather sweet, and is ideal for storing books and magazines in an attractive way. It’s quirky, retro flair makes it not only useful but stylish too.

‘Palm Pattern Suitcase Shelf’ from Urban Outfitters (£50.00)

When you need to add that finishing touch to a seating area, something like this little table from An Angel at my Table is a great way to insert some decorative magic.

‘Small Brocante Tray Table’ from An Angel at my Table (£45.00)

A smaller budget by no means equals scrimping on the finer things in life, or getting your hands on something that’ll really complete your home. After all, you may find that good things come with small price tags.

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Join up for perfect storage units – as featured in Cambridge News

Thinking about storage for your home? Why not consider  having custom made units designed specifically for you. Before you rule it out as an expensive option have a look at our introduction to joinery below. Sometimes the cost of employing a joiner is equivalent to buying a piece of furniture from the high street, but the results can be even better as you end up with a piece of furniture designed to last and built specifically for your home.

This article first featured in Cambridge News

First things first, ask around to find a good local joiner.  Get recommendations from friends or ask to see examples of work a joiner has previously completed.

Next, have a think about exactly what it is that you want to store. If you measure the content that you need storage for this will give you an idea of the height and depth the shelves should be. This cabinet was designed for a client and it has glass shelves in the centre to display their collection of ornaments, bookshelves either side measured to fit their tall hardback-books and cupboards below for storing larger items and tidying away clutter.

The beauty of employing a joiner means that you can get a bespoke piece of storage perfectly designed to fit into the existing space in your home.  The shelves above for example, make maximum use of the available space.

When you commission a joiner make sure you get a full set of drawings first. A good joiner will visit your home, measure the space then draw up the plans for you to see how it will look.

And finally, consider the kind of finish you want, do you want a dark wood, a light wood or are you going to paint it? This bespoke storage cupboard was designed to display the owner’s collection of ties and has a smart dark wood finish which blends perfectly with the rest of the décor.

All images: Mark Box

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