When we were little my sister and I used to both take a room in my parents house (the dining and living room) and pretend to be housewives. I was Anthea, Gem was Sandra (who knows where those names came from, the Generation Game I think) we would invite each other round for coffee,(really juice) plump cushions, tidy up, move stuff and role-play away! In our naive childlike little world we were I guess coming to grips with furniture placement, layout, scale and so on. Of course we didn’t know or have any understanding of how to balance a room, what we did have though was a love of making each of these rooms our little home for the afternoon for our coffee mornings.
When it comes to placing furniture you can draw a floor plan, sketch the room on paper, cut out of paper scaled pieces of furniture and so on. To hell with all of that I say I simply cannot be bothered. Put me in a room, leave me for a while and I will happily potter away until I’ve got the perfect sense of balance and harmony going on. Its way more fun in my mind than mapping it all out making sure there is x amount of space for traffic lanes, the coffee table is so many centimetres from the sofa, the chairs are so many centimetres from the sofa – ugg cannot stand it. Yes itâs important to have a basic knowledge but really itâs such an old fashioned way of decorating and too formulaic. Follow you heart, try not to shove any sofa’s or chairs against a wall, forget traffic lanes – in my house you can’t even walk in a straight line from one point to another you have to weave (formally trained interior designers will be passing out by now).
Style stems from the heart not a textbook. On that happy note that’s me done – the kids (Mungo and Maud are off to the vets again, one’s got an ear infection the other a skin problem)
This is what I mean – shove a flag on a wall, mismatch bedside tables, layer the bed with a hotch potch of textiles, rumple it all up a tad and way hay you’ve nailed it.