Back to the drawing board for homely chic

Step outside the ordinary and embrace the things you love, says Kya deLongchamps, to create some home style charm.

I WAS sitting on the edge of a tense linen sofa and reflecting on the fact that something rather sad has happened to standard Irish interiors.

Somewhere along the way, possibly when we had the money to invest in demented showing off, we lost our confidence. We bowed down to more informed voices telling us that this or that product and scheme, reflects what we feel about ourselves and mirrors that back to an astonished audience.

Put yourself back in your house. Try stepping outside the ordinary, and draw on your own creative and personal resources. It’s cheaper, it’s more rewarding and guess what? - Everyone’s doing it.

Un-decorating

There’s an unpretentious movement deftly woven in word and product by UK and US interior designers back crafting by the fireside and re-telling the beloved domestic tale of the home-spun look. Christiane Lemieux, director and founder of the US home furnishings store DwellStudio, summed it up as ‘undecorating’. It’s a look made popular for centuries in wartime and most interestingly in economic recession.

Un-decorated, is a casually accumulated, modestly confident style, loving things for the sheer sake of cherishing their individual appeal and not caring too much if the cuffs and collar of the room match up at all. Those of us with no money and no aesthetic guile have been unwittingly putting spaces together this same way in a blunder. If you’re a sophisticated minimalist, you may need someone to talk you down from your consumer frenzy.

To find out more about turning old jumpers into cushion covers and enjoying a relaxed free-for-all with abandoned furniture, pick up a Selina Lake’s Homespun Style, published by Rylands Peters & Small (€28.60) to shake off some of the pretentious posing bullying out the comfortable flop.

Kirstie Allsop’s Homemade Home, Hodder & Stoughton, champions a wartime make-do-and-mend blending purchased craftwork and home styled charm. Also €28.60. For a free roam through renovation on a shoestring, look up the community of fearless interior adventurers at websites all over the world including www.apartmenttherapy.com.

Small Spaces and Pale Paint

Just one example, but a top rule most of us would hear tripping off the tongue of any TV decorating hero. In general, I would always recommend white and light neutrals if you don’t have a clue how to shake some imagined extra metres out of a pokey hall or bedroom. Still, there is always another way. Using pigment-rich, sensual colours for the walls can allow a small space take on a soul deep character robbed by neutrals.

Using dark colours in halls and corridors creates a dramatic tension between these backstage areas and entering into larger stage of light filled rooms beyond. Think about throwing necessary light in pools and washes of artificial lighting, mirrors, reflective surfaces and even metallic fabrics against an unapologetically full matt paint in a dark colour. Leave the ceiling white to diffuse illumination.

For catwalk colour Farrow & Ball have some pigment dense shades from a sticky-toffee ‘Brinjal’, to a pool deep ‘Drawing Room Blue’. Crown’s Indulgence palette for 2012 covers a range of teasingly seductive colour including some daring purples panting to be taken to the bedroom and a darkly smudged grey recalling ‘City Life’. www.crown.ie.

Complimentary Boredom

Colour is a choice that paralyses most of us in the DIY aisles. Pick up a piece of busy fabric around the house or out of your wardrobe and notice how many colours are actually in it and how well they seem to balance. You can use your daring textile as a lead into a whole new scheme. It’s all about placement and quantity. A teaspoon of orange can see-saw with a bucketful of blue, the orange being far more intense.

Polite colour harmony and blamange-like tanks of neutral are safe, classic and often so dull you want to collapse to the floor with sheer indifference. We might guffaw about 1970s psychedelic wallpapers and swirly carpets, but how daring these racy new arrivals seem now as we traipse in mindless herds to the beech wood counter at IKEA.

Contrasting colours or taking shades a few clicks further away from each other on the colour wheel is far more interesting. It’s true that some colours don’t work together, but this is only screamingly obvious when they are waged against each other in vast canvases. Restrained amounts of any colour ranged over a room can often make peace no matter how disparate. Compromise your love of off-white by treating it as the backdrop to tints.

Add Water and Stir Interiors

The ‘buy the room’ phenomena of instant domestic gratification began in the US. My Detroit born husband furnished his first three homes by taking home complete chunks of the showroom floor. Rather than spiriting one style, think about layering on your life, experiences, heirlooms, and occasional buys as they occur.

When you think about it, every great country house grew in just this way over generations. So what if you’re grandmother’s dresser stands hands on hips dominating the study. If you like it, leave it and swing the room around it.

I’m making over my kitchen and was all but bouncing on the spot quizzing the cabinet maker measuring the tiny galley which tile he thought would go best with the new laminate counters. “None” he said adding, “don’t choose anything until you’ve been in a week or two.”

He may not be Terence Conran, but having seen the disappointed faces of clients after the purple smoke cleared the room, the man knew. Time to stand and stare costs nothing.

DIYTIPS

Some rules best kept when decorating your interiors

1. Keep the scale of furnishings in a room roughly the same and appropriate to the space. Large stagey pieces in the centre of low slung 50s furniture will tip the scale. Sprinkling a barn size living room with tiny items has the impact of cornflakes scattered on a GAA pitch.

2. Furnish the room before you paint, and then clear out the furniture when you do. One key piece of furniture may lead your colour choice after all.

3. Less is more but that doesn’t have to add up to an all but empty space. Be judicious about what you include.

4. Unedited clutter dribbling off every surface is stifling to the spirit. Neglect storage at your peril.

5. Every room needs a focal point. A fireplace is a gene level draw. Avoid using a TV, as an aesthetic alter in a room.

6. Three colours is a perfect place to start a scheme. You might pull off a complex combination, but be prepared to pare back to simplicity if needs be.

7. Test materials and paints colours in situ’. Ambient light can make texture and tone look very different over the course of one day.

8. Keep walkways open and functions clear in your mind. If you can’t cross the room, comfortably see, and sit at your desk, what’s the point?

Q&A

Do you have a DIY question you would like answered? Send it to [e-mail]

Q: I don’t have a fireplace and my small sitting room seems very uneasy without one.

A: A large piece of artwork, a wall hanging or a view through a well insulated window, will do it. Think about lighting and gathering a seating area including, say, an area rug to create some deliberate theatre.

Q: How can I include old furniture I already own in my new bungalow and still hit a contemporary style?

A: Slow down. Instead of desperately conjuring a finished room, plan it in habitable stages, and take time to live with each element you introduce. Contemporary and older pieces with good clean lines are often married in high style interiors. Think of reupholstering and playing with finishes.

Q: How can I become more daring with colour?

A: Go online and find out more about the colour wheel, then use large pieces of coloured paper and tester pots and fabric remnants, experimenting with a mood board of colours and patterns that sing together before starting the room. Study paint brochure sets put together by specialists in the field.