Love the house you’re in with some clever improvements
Does anyone remember Stanley Kubrick’s Overreach Hotel in The Shining? Those luridly carpeted corridors making a long queasy reach to some distant spectre. To add to the canyon of misery, corridors tend to be windowless, poked with a feeble beam of light from a staircase. Many architects now work around these grim conduits with a wall of glass on one side displaying a courtyard or adjoining rooms.
Interrupt that length visually and psychologically in a number of pauses. Think about a rhythm of things to look at personalising every two metres or so on the journey — pictures for example, some hung in groups.
With a long hall, chances are the ceiling will feel high. Rather than one orphaned pendant or wall-light, what about two or three hung down into the space (skim the head of your largest inhabitant).
If you come to change doors, add glazed panels to borrow light from other rooms and bounce it around the space with pale walls and a well place mirror.
Halogen spots matched to dimmers can defeat the shadowy, patchy light of a corridor.
Laying flooring, be aware of designs or long plank lengths running down the corridor like a runway. Bring the pattern in a runner or installed flooring across the width instead.
Narrow rooms can be depressing, claustrophobic traps, where your elbows strain to fight the walls away. As a result, they often descend into dumping grounds on the way to roomier pastures.
Bring short lengths of facing wall forward with colour. A dramatic paint choice or an eye-catching paper is perfect for gifting stand alone personality. A horizontal stripe (an easy detail in paint from those left-overs of emulsion in the garage) is a firm assault on stubby walls. The longer walls can wear a receding colour, paler than our squeakier widths, this acts to visually push them back.
If you’re forced to centrifuge furniture along the walls, don’t apologise for it, line them up. Size pieces to the room, use side tables rather than tripping hazards in front of seating and make good use of wall hung decoration and storage to personalise.
On the floor, a single colour in a light shade will bounce all available light around the room.
Lay flooring across, not along the room with a pattern or plank.
If you don’t need the centimetres demanded by intrusive curtains, replace them with blinds or leave well insulated windows bare.
If you’re shoe-horning eight people into a house built for four, the décor and utilities must be creatively carved to the centimetre. Really study the next IKEA television ad. The room-sets are minute — fit for hamsters, but it all works with those white walls, well considered flashes of colour and vertically tending storage.
Assign the largest rooms to your greatest needs. This is easier in a one-storey house. If your child has outgrown their infant boxroom/bedroom and you have a large study, be kind, be logical — swap those rooms out.
Strip the smaller room and take it as close to white as you can stand. If you want a pale colour, such as one of the modern putty greys, bring it over everything from skirting to window-boards and walls to blur the corners and edges making up the room.
Don’t overdose the area with pattern. Edit the pieces returning to the room with discipline and precision.
Take storage off the floor and up the walls with hooks and shelving.
Choose shallow built-ins and cabinets (30cm or less) with sliding doors that won’t advance into the floor space but sit ‘fat’ on the floor with a wider profile to broaden the room’s appearance.
Take standalone storage to the ceiling, entombing those little used items you were too cowardly or sentimental to get rid of. If you do use a large storage piece, make it a character filled beauty.
Could you do without a door? It might sound crazy, but the swing of a door gobbles up space.
The huge period room with its double height ceiling and vast expanses of space seems delightful until you try to live in it. We have a barn-style environment here, and I’ve ghettoised one mean corner from the get-go. Low poky rooms in a modern house tend to be in the attic where a DIY conversion can delivery a Hobbity hole that soon slips back to a sad storage perch. Eaves present particular problems if you’ve left yourself with little real standing room upstairs.
To bring a ceiling comfortably down to earth, paint it, including a metre or so of the walls below, in a shade or two deeper than your wall lower colour. Horizontal dado and/or picture rails will break up the cliff-face.
For low ceilinged rooms, alter the ratio to white overhead and a more characterful colour below or even vertical stripes, teasing the walls up.
When hanging pictures for a standard or high ceiling, set the middle of the picture in the centre of the eye-line of a standing adult. High single pictures are unnerving.
Preserve the gable walls of lofts for standing room only.
Furnish into the eaves with built in shelving and cabinets and set chairs where the rise to your feet won’t crown you with a rafter.
Scale the pieces to the room to let light and traffic flow. Use a short legged, low sideboard or sofa set slightly out from the eave, as oddly touching walls creates a cramped look — add 5 to 10cm. I’ve just discovered DFS has a little known capsule collection of smaller sofas. Who knew!
