Boho-chic

If you want your home to reflect who you are, writes Carol O’Callaghan, you can’t really go wrong with bohemian chic.

BOHEMIAN chic, or boho-chic is the style for you if you want your home to reflect who you are and what you like regardless of fashion trends, and one that you can’t really get wrong.

There’ll be no trendster police getting their tea towels in a twist because you haven’t got the right accessories, furniture shapes or colour combinations.

This is a look where you make it up as you go along, being utterly true to your own taste, and if friends who are slaves to interiors fashion happen to drop by with raised eyebrows, so what.

If anything has changed about this look since its advent in the Sixties it is how it has evolved into a chic style, so no lacy fabrics or chipped paint here.

These features now belong to another trend: shabby chic, while boho-chic takes the hippy lifestyle look, smartens it up and gives it a chic all of its own. It’s fun but it’s also grown up.

So, to get started think back to last year and how you longed to buy into the trend for colour to counter your earlier addiction to minimalism and its less chilly cousin, the neutral.

Maybe you forked out for a red sofa in the after-Christmas sale that might have been enough to fulfil your yen for colour, but an aspiring boho-chic chick might have also craved a scattering of yellow or green cushions on it but played safe with on-trend grey.

Boho-chic gives you permission to clash and even clutter at will. This look can be a mixture of old and new, pattern and plain, colour and neutral, textured and smooth and just about anything else you’d like.

It’s also about the clash of patterns and can be simply about taking a busy patchwork quilt and placing it on your antique bed or on a contemporary metal framed version to give just a flavour of boho-chic.

Even consider using the wooden wine crate with a French label on it that was in the garage when you moved in 10 years ago and keeps catching your eye.

Give it a good scrub, up-end it beside your favourite chair and you’ll have a cool occasional table.

In fact, found objects whether they’re discovered in the attic or acquired from a friend’s intended donation to the charity shop, are one of the basics of the look.

Boho-chic can also provide a backdrop to the clutter gathered by collectors who cannot resist a bargain from the second hand shop, or another floral milk jug spotted at an arts and crafts fair, and little collectible objets d’art brought back from holidays.

Not that there’s anything wrong with collections. If anything, repetition creates an emphasis and can form the basis of an interior design project. And it is this emphasis that is key to carrying off the boho-chic look.

If you’re not a collector, choose a solid theme such as a strong wall colour to act as a backdrop to the furniture and accessories that reflect who you are without your room or home ending up looking like something that sits between the Turkish Bazaar and the jumble sale.

Next week we’re at the London Design Festival.