Real Life Design Stories Be Individual With Interior Design

Date Published:

17/06/2008

It's not just colours and textures that form our decisions. Budget plays a huge part. After being rather chuffed with myself for personalising my living room with plenty of nic nacs and photos from my various travels, I found most people commented on the photo frames as they'd bought the same ones (they were on offer at the time).

Also, with the advent of shops such as Ikea, people now have access to cheaper and more disposable furniture, easily satisfying that need to follow fashion and update regularly.

If you're putting your house on the market, for viewings home stagers can advise such radical steps as removing pets from the house, taking washing off the line and pots in the garden must be blooming whatever the season. Functional items should be hidden - rubbish bins out of eyesight, ugly radiators covered up.

But are these not the aspects of your house that make it more homely and display it as a functional, working, real home?

A lot of modern homes lack good storage space. My two-bedroom terrace doesn't have one built-in cupboard aside from in the kitchen, meaning vacuum cleaners, ironing boards etc have to be plonked in the second bedroom. When I wanted to put boxes of DVDs under my TV cabinet in the corner of my lounge, a friend of mine commented that it would 'spoil the clean lines in the house'. The pressure to keep homes super tidy and decluttered is mounting - magazines and programmes often show the ideal, everything has its place and things are always put away after use.

It seems home buyers now have to have everything perfect in front of them and it's getting more difficult to see the potential through the clutter. And for people who aren't moving, their homes seem to be more for show than for living.

For my sale, I've decluttered a bit but I'm not doing much more. Until I move, it's still my home and I want to feel happy and comforted when I return each day and it still needs to be a functional normal house.

As Jo says: 'Some people worry about whether their home is fashionable rather than functional but from my experience the most amazing homes are the ones which express an individual's style and ideas rather than following the crowd.'

Jo Flahey previously worked for John Lewis as an furnishing advisor and has now set up her own business, Inside Design.